Liberty VS Leviathan

July 7, 2025

In our last essay, we turned our attention to the dark enlightenment, or, neoreaction movement. In particular, we focused on what neoreactionaries refer to as the Cathedral, that monstrous association of academics, media, and politicians that collaborate to advance a pernicious and degenerative form of Universalism. We found substantial grounds for sympathy with neoreactionary grievances toward the Cathedral, despite having to admit that we, at the same time, remain committed to our own peculiar form of Universalism. In order to reconcile our simultaneous contempt for the Cathedral and embrace of Universalistic principles, we presented the theoretical political framework we have labeled Tribal Universalism, which we have suggested as a viable candidate to eventually replace the democratic order that predominates today. Throughout our discussion in the last essay we, more or less, took for granted the neoreactionary claim that there is something deeply wrong with the prevailing democratic order that must be addressed in order to prevent further degeneration and disaster. It now comes time to justify our claims that there is a problem with democracy and to demonstrate what, precisely, that problem is. To begin understanding the problem of democracy, we must first consider a broader political problem, namely, the problem of sovereignty. 

So what is sovereignty? Put simply, sovereignty is the power to act according to one’s own will. Thus the notion of sovereignty is intimately linked to the notion of liberty, indeed, it might be said that sovereignty is nothing more than a synonym for a state of perfect liberty. He who has the liberty to do whatever he wills with no authority standing above him as a check is he who is sovereign. That being said, sovereignty is not perfectly without limitations. Though the sovereign, by definition, has no one above him who may correct or redirect his will, this does not mean that his liberty is entirely without limit. Rather, the liberty of the sovereign is limited to a particular region. Though one person may be perfectly sovereign within a given territory, that sovereignty does not extend outside of that territory and it is perfectly coherent that some other person might enjoy sovereignty over some other territory without undermining the first person’s claim to sovereignty. So, sovereignty, put simply, consists in having absolute command, absolute liberty to exercise one’s will over a given territory. (Given the relevance of the current discussion to ideas such as independence and freedom, I had hoped to get this out by the Fourth, but family vacations and cookouts got in the way. But I think the seventh day of the seventh month has potential to be a far more fortuitous date.)

Having established this definition of sovereignty, our attention turns now to the question: Who, in a democracy, is sovereign. Nominally, the answer to this question is simple. It’s all in the name. Democracy, of course, is derived from the Greek, demos, or people, combined with, kratos, or rule. Thus, democracy, if its name is to be believed, is the rule of the people. In a democracy, then, at least in theory, sovereignty lies with the people; not any particular person or people taken individually, but the people, taken as a whole. This, of course, is a high and fine sounding ideal that has managed to entice a great many people to unquestioningly embrace democracy as the most perfectly just form of government imaginable. But reality all too often falls short of such lofty ideals and, as Mencius Moldbug contends, this is just such a case. Moldbug’s reasons for rejecting the notion that in a Democracy, the people are sovereign shall, I hope, become clearer in the course of this essay. For now, it will simply suffice to give Moldbug’s answer to the question of who is sovereign in our contemporary democratic society: the Cathedral. (We should say now, Moldbug gets a bad rap. An honest reading of his work reveals ideas that really are not as radical as his opponents make him out to be. But he does himself no favors, leaning into the controversy and going out of his way to push his opponents buttons by, for example, casually mentioning that he’s been reading a lot of Hitler.)

Perhaps the best way to begin to understand the phenomenon of sovereignty as it exists within modern democratic societies, is to begin with what might on the surface be dismissed as mere pedantism and point out, as many conservatives are often wont to do, that we do not, or, at least, we are not supposed to have a democracy, but a republic. But there is nothing pedantic about this point at all. It is a distinction of the utmost importance. As much as partisans of the current regime love to clutch their pearls in defense of the virtues of democracy, the Founding Fathers of the United States were just as eager to point out the dangers of democracy and express their staunch opposition to it. The Founders would be positively horrified to see the reverence with which modern audiences speak of democracy. Land sums up the situation in the Dark Enlightenment, complete with quotes from the Founders themselves that are well worth repeating, 

To comprehend the emergence of our contemporary predicament, characterized by relentless, totalizing state expansion, the proliferation of spurious positive ‘human rights’ (claims on the resources of others backed by coercive bureaucracies), politicized money, reckless evangelical ‘wars for democracy’, and comprehensive thought control arrayed in defense of universalistic dogma (accompanied by the degradation of science into a government public relations function), it is necessary to ask how Massachusetts came to conquer the world, as Moldbug does. With every year that passes, the international ideal of sound governance finds itself approximating more closely and rigidly to the standards set by the Grievance Studies departments of New England universities. This is the divine providence of the ranters and levelers, elevated to a planetary teleology, and consolidated as the reign of the Cathedral. 

The Cathedral has substituted its gospel for everything we ever knew. Consider just the concerns expressed by America’s founding fathers (compiled by ‘Liberty-clinger’, comment #1, here):

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.
– Thomas Jefferson

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
– Benjamin Franklin

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide. 
– John Adams

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. 
– James Madison

We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy […] it has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny […]
– Alexander Hamilton

We see here that, for America’s Founding Fathers, insisting upon the distinction between a democracy and a republic was anything but pedantic quibbling; it was a crucial point that had to be understood; the very vitality of the nation they had founded depended upon it. And as the Madison and Hamilton quotes suggest, they had very good historical reasons for thinking that. Democracy was not a new concept at the time, but a very old one, with prominent examples in the ancient world from which to learn. Most famous amongst these examples, no doubt, was the ancient Greek city of Athens. It seems only fitting to see what that most distinguished citizen of ancient Athens, Plato, had to say about democracy, in the eighth book of the Republic. Please forgive the length, but it is a remarkable passage that deserves to be cited in its entirety. For brevity’s sake, I have removed most of Adeimantus’ responses, leaving only those crucial to understanding or the flow of the passage.

Socrates: The finest constitution and the finest man remain for us to discuss: tyranny and the tyrant. Come on, then, tell me, my dear comrade, how does tyranny come to exist? That it evolves from democracy, you see, is fairly clear. So, isn’t the way democracy evolves from oligarchy much the same as that in which tyranny evolves from democracy? The good they proposed for themselves, and because of which oligarchy was established was wealth, wasn’t it? And its insatiable desire for wealth and its neglect of other things for the sake of moneymaking was what destroyed it. So, isn’t democracy’s insatiable desire for what it defines as the good also what destroys it? 

Adeimantus: What do you think it does define as the good? 

Socrates: Freedom. For surely, in a democratic city, that is what you would hear described as its finest possession, and as what makes it the only place worth living in for someone who is naturally free. As I was about to say, then, isn’t it the insatiable desire for this good and the neglect of other things that changes this constitution and prepares it to need a dictatorship? 

Adeimantus: How does it do that? 

Socrates: I suppose it is when a democratic city, athirst for freedom, happens to get bad cupbearers for its leaders and gets drunk by drinking more than it should of unmixed wine. Then, if the rulers are not very gentle and do not provide plenty of freedom, it punishes them and accuses them of being filthy oligarchs. It showers with abuse those who obey the rulers as voluntary slaves and nonentities, but both in public and private it praises and honors rulers who are like subjects and subjects who are like rulers. And isn’t it inevitable in such a city that freedom should spread everywhere? Yes, my friend, and so it is bound to make its way into private households until finally it breeds anarchy among the very animals. For instance, a father gets into the habit of behaving like a child and fearing his son, and the son gets into the habit of behaving like his father, feeling neither shame nor fear in front of his parents – all in order to be free. A resident alien feels himself equal to a citizen and a citizen to him, and a foreigner likewise. 

Adeimantus: Yes, those sorts of things do happen. 

Socrates: They do – and so do other little things of the same sort. A teacher in such circumstances is afraid of his students and flatters them, while the students belittle their teachers and do the same to their tutors, too. In general, the young are the spitting images of their elders and compete with them in words and deeds, while the old stoop to the level of the young and are full of wit and indulgence, imitating the young for fear of being thought disagreeable and masterful. The ultimate freedom for the majority, my friend, comes about in such a city, when males and females bought as slaves are no less free than those who bought them. Then there is the case of women in relation to men, and men to women, and the extent of their legal equality and freedom – we almost forgot to mention that!

Adeimantus: Are we not, with Aeschylus, going to “say whatever it was came to our lips just now?”

Socrates: Certainly. At any rate, I am going to say it. I mean, no one who had not experienced it would believe how much freer domestic animals are here than in any other city. Bitches follow the proverb exactly and become like their mistresses. Horses and donkeys are in the habit of proceeding with complete freedom and dignity, bumping into anyone they meet on the road who does not get out of their way. And everything else is full of freedom, too. Summing up all these things together, then, do you notice how sensitive they make the citizens’ souls, so that if anyone tries to impose the least degree of slavery, they get irritated and cannot bear it? In the end, as I am sure you are aware, they take no notice of the laws – written or unwritten – in order to avoid having any master at all. This, my friend, is the fine and impetuous beginning from which tyranny seems to me to grow. The same disease that developed in oligarchy and destroyed it also develops here – only more widespread and virulent because of the general permissiveness – and eventually enslaves democracy. In fact, excessive action in one direction usually sets up a great reaction in the opposite direction. This happens in seasons, in plants, in bodies, and particularly in constitutions. For extreme freedom probably cannot lead to anything but a change to extreme slavery, whether in a private individual or a city. Tyranny probably does not evolve from any constitution other than democracy; then – the most severe and cruel slavery evolving from what I suppose is the most eminent degree of freedom. But I think you were asking, not that, but rather what sort of disease develops both in oligarchy and democracy alike, and enslaves the latter. Well, then, I meant that class of idle and extravagant men, with the bravest as leaders and the more cowardly as followers. We compared them to drones: The leaders to drones with stings, the followers the stingless ones. These two cause problems in any constitution in which they arise, like phlegm and bile in the body. And it is against them that the good doctor and lawgiver of a city must take no less advance precaution than a wise beekeeper. He should preferably prevent them from arising at all. But if they should happen to arise, he must cut them out, cells and all, as quickly as possible.Then let’s take up the question in this way, in order to see what we want more distinctly. Let’s in our discussion divide a democratic city into three parts – which is also how it is actually divided. One part is surely this class of drones, which, because of the general permissiveness, grows in it no less than in an oligarchy. But it is much fiercer in it than in the others. There, because it is not honored but is excluded from the ranks of the rulers, it does not get any exercise and does not become vigorous. However, in a democracy, with few exceptions, it is surely the dominant class. Its fiercest part does all the talking and acting, while the other one settles near the speaker’s platform. It buzzes and does not tolerate any dissent. As a result, this class is in charge of everything in such a constitution – with a few exceptions. Then, there is a second distinct class that is constantly emerging from the majority. Surely, when everyone is trying to make money, the ones who are by nature most orderly generally become the wealthiest. Then that is where the most plentiful honey for the drones exists, I take it, and the easiest for them to extract. I suppose, then, that these rich people, as they are called, are fodder for the drones. The people – those who work their own land, take no part in politics, and own few possessions – would be the third class. This is the largest and most powerful class in a democracy when it meets in assembly. 

Adeimantus: Yes, it is. But it is not willing to meet often, if it does not get a share of the honey. 

Socrates: So, it always does get a share – one that allows the leaders, in taking the wealth of the rich and distributing it to the people, to keep the greatest share for themselves. Then I suppose that those whose wealth is taken away are compelled to defend themselves by speaking in the popular assembly and doing whatever else they can. At which point – even if they have no appetite for revolution at all – they get accused by the others of plotting against the people and of being oligarchs. Finally, when they see the people – not intentionally, but through misapprehension and being misled by the accusers – trying to do injustice to them, then, whether they wish it or not, they really do become oligarchs – not from choice, though, but because the drone, by stinging them, engenders this evil. Then there are impeachments, judgments, and trials on both sides. And don’t the people always tend to set up one man as their special leader, nurturing him and making him great? And it is clear that when a tyrant arises, the position of popular leader is the sole root from which he springs. What is the beginning, then, of the transformation from popular leader to tyrant? Isn’t it clear that it happens when the popular leader begins to behave like the character in the story told about the temple of the Lycaean Zeus in Arcadia? That whoever tastes the one piece of human innards cut up with those of all the other sacrificial victims inevitably becomes a wolf. Haven’t you heard that story? Isn’t it the same, then, with a popular leader? Once he really takes over a docile mob, he does not restrain himself from shedding a fellow citizen’s blood. But by leveling the usual false charges and bringing people into court, he commits murder. And by blotting out a man’s life, his impious tongue and lips taste kindred blood. Then he banishes and kills and drops hints about the cancellation of debts and the redistribution of land. And after that, isn’t such a man inevitably fated either to be killed by his enemies or to be a tyrant, transformed from a man into a wolf? He is the one, then, who stirs up action against the rich. And if he happens to be exiled but, despite his enemies, manages to return, doesn’t he come back as a full-fledged tyrant? And if they are unable to expel him or put him to death by accusing him before the city, they plot a violent death for him by covert means. And everyone who has reached this stage soon discovers the famous tyrannical request – to ask the people to give him a bodyguard to keep their popular leader safe for them. And the people give it to him, I suppose, fearing for his safety but confident of their own. So, when a wealthy man sees this and is charged with being an enemy of the people because of his wealth, then, comrade, in the words of the oracle to Croesus, he “flees without delay to the banks of the many-pebbled Hermus, and is not ashamed at all of his cowardice. If he is caught, I would imagine he is put to death. As for this popular leader of ours, he clearly does not lie on the ground “mighty in his might”, but having brought down all those others, he stands in the chariot of the city as a complete tyrant instead of a popular leader. 

Adeimantus: That’s for sure. 

I am certain that my fellow contemporary Americans can readily identify a multitude of parallels between what Plato describes here and what they experience in their own lives on a daily basis. Who amongst us cannot see that the very same desire for complete and unrestrained freedom that Plato describes holds incredible sway over the society in which we live? Respect for elders has deteriorated severely. “Boomer” has become a term of abuse, meant to denigrate the older generations whom the youth blame, with broad brush, for all of the world’s problems. Meanwhile, the youth promulgate a violently vapid, vulgar culture that can only be understood as the product of that enlightenment impulse to release every restraint and allow the Will to run radically free. Meanwhile, elders, in a desperate attempt to remain relevant and not to be laughed off as a square, disgracefully infantilize themselves before the youth. Anyone who has spent any time in our schools has surely seen many such unbecoming examples. And, in light of current events, who could fail to see the preference with which the resident alien is treated as compared to the legal citizen? In just the last few weeks we have seen the Supreme Court refuse to take up, first, a case in which a student’s First Amendment rights to wear a shirt proclaiming that there are only two genders, and then, two additional cases in which citizens’ Second Amendment rights to own specific weapons (including the Ar-15, the most popular rifle in the country), while the cases of criminal immigrants illegally residing in the country were expedited and the Judiciary shackled the Executive branch, preventing it from carrying out the law. Worse still, through taxation, rightful citizens are robbed of their hard earned money in order for the state to pay for benefits for illegals. But it does not end there. Who has not heard the drones’ covetous demands for the well earned honey that the workers produce through their labour? And their demands have clearly met with receptive ears, for property is no longer sacred, but is routinely violated as a matter of law. Congress has enacted considerable legislation with the explicit function of removing property from the rightful possession of the workers to be given away to the drones. Remarkably, twenty-four-hundred years later we can hear the drones exclaim precisely the same insult at those who stand in the way of such legislation as the drones of ancient Athens hurled at the workers of their day; “filthy oligarch!” Perhaps the unruliness of animals is the only element of Plato’s description of the degeneration of democracy that we have yet to see in our own society, but, then again, we have a far more urban and less agricultural society than the one that dominated ancient Athens. Anecdotal as it may be, I can’t help but think of several conversations I have had in recent years with longtime dog lovers who have noted more pronounced disobedience in more recent generations of dogs. But whether the animals are growing insolent or not, the overall effect on American society has been the same. Do we not see people condemned as oligarchs for doing nothing more than defending their property from the grubbing hands of others? Have we not seen the impeachment process and the legal system weaponized against anyone who shows any hint of a possibility of making inroads against the prevailing trends and instituting reforms? Do we not hear mobs clamoring for a special leader of their own to be set up over them to deal with the many problems we currently face? Are not some of these mobs even desperate for a leader who will turn all of the tricks that predominate in our politics upon their enemies? How long before some such figure gets a taste for human flesh and becomes a true tyrant? 

But how could we have gotten to this point? If the Founding Fathers were dead set against democracy and purposely established the United States of America as a republic with the intent of suppressing the most perverse democratic tendencies, how could our country have come to suffer so profoundly from the most lethal symptoms of democracy. We might once again look to Plato for the answer, this time by looking to his description of how democracy develops as oligarchy decays.

Let’s go back, then, and say how the democrat develops from the oligarch. It seems to me as if it mostly happens this way. When a young man who is reared in the uneducated and thrifty manner we described just now tastes the honey of the drones and associates with wild and terrible creatures who can  provide multifarious pleasures of every degree of complexity and sort, that probably marks the  beginning of his transformation from having an oligarchic constitution within him to having a democratic one. So, just as the city changed when one party received help from a like-minded alliance outside, doesn’t the young man change in turn when external appetites of the same type and quality as it come to the aid of one of the parties within him? And I suppose if a counter-alliance comes to the aid of the oligarchic party within him – whether from his father or from the rest of his family, who exhort and reproach him – then there is a faction and an opposing faction within him, and he battles against himself. And sometimes I suppose the democratic party yields to the oligarchic, some of its appetites are overcome while others are expelled, and a kind of shame rises in the young man’s soul and order is restored.  Moreover, I suppose, as some appetites are expelled, others akin to them are being nurtured undetected because of the father’s ignorance of upbringing, and become numerous and strong. Then these desires draw him back to his old associates and, in secret intercourse, breed a multitude of others. 

Finally, I suppose, they seize the citadel of the young man’s soul, since they realize that it is empty of the fine studies and practices and the true arguments that are the best watchmen and guardians in the minds of men loved by the gods. Then, I suppose, beliefs and arguments that are lying imposters rush up and occupy this same part of him in place of the others. Won’t he then return to those Lotus-eaters and live with them openly? And if any help should come to the thrifty part of his soul from his relatives, don’t those imposter arguments, having barred the gates of the royal wall within him, prevent the allied force itself from entering and even refusing to admit arguments of older, private individuals as ambassadors? Proving stronger in the battle, won’t they call reverence foolishness and drive it out as a dishonored fugitive? And calling temperance cowardliness, won’t they shower it with abuse and banish it? As for moderate and orderly expenditure, won’t they persuade him that it is boorish and illiberal, and join with a multitude of useless appetites to drive it over the border? And when they have somehow emptied and purged these from the soul of the one they are seizing hold of and initiating with solemn rites, they then immediately proceed to return arrogance, anarchy, extravagance, and shamelessness from exile in a blaze of torchlight, accompanied with a vast chorus of followers and crowned with garlands. They praise them and given them fine names, calling arrogance “good breeding,” anarchy “freedom,” extravagance “magnificence,” and shamelessness “courage.” Isn’t it in some such way as this that a young person exchanges an upbringing among necessary appetites for the freeing and release of useless and unnecessary pleasures? 

Then in his subsequent life, I suppose, someone like that spends no less money, effort, and time on the necessary pleasures than on the unnecessary pleasures. But if he is lucky and does not go beyond the limits in his bacchic frenzy, and if, as a result of his growing somewhat older, the great tumult within him passes, he welcomes back some of the exiles and ceases to surrender himself completely to the newcomers. Then, putting all his pleasures on an equal footing, he lives, always surrendering rule over himself to whichever desire comes along, as if it were chosen by lot, until it is satisfied; and after that to another, dishonoring none but satisfying all equally. And he does not accept or admit true arguments into the guardhouse if someone tells him that some pleasures belong ot fine and good appetites and others to bad ones, and that he must practice and honor the former and restrain and enslave the latter. On the contrary, he denies all this and declares that they are all alike and must be honored on an equal basis. And so he lives from day to day, gratifying the appetite of the moment. Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute, while at others he drinks only water and is on a diet. Sometimes he goes in for physical training, while there are others when he is idle and neglects everything. Sometimes he spends time in what he takes to be philosophy. Often, though, he takes part in politics, leaping to his feet and saying and doing whatever happens to come into his mind. If he admires some military men, that is the direction in which he is carried; if some military men, that is the direction in which he is carried; if some moneymakers, then in that different one. There is neither order nor necessity in his life, yet he calls it pleasant, free, and blessedly happy, and follows it throughout his entire life. I certainly think he is a multifarious man and full of all sorts of characters, beautiful and complex, like the democratic city. Many men and women would envy his life because of the great number of examples of constitutions and characters it contains within it. 

(All this gets me thinking of the Dead. The silver lining of democracy most certainly has a touch of grey.)

So, according to Plato, the democratic soul emerges when the sons of the money-loving oligarchs, themselves degenerated from the earlier, virtue-loving aristocracy, begin to associate with the masses, acquiring a taste for the pleasures of that class, they, at last, shed any last claim that they might have had to superiority over their fellow men, joining the masses in dismantling all of the traditions their forebears established, lest they find themselves torn apart. It is not difficult to find evidence in support of Plato’s model in American history. Indeed, it might be said that the stage was set for America’s decline into pure democracy from the very beginning. Perhaps the most glaring difference between American and European society since the earliest day of settlement in America, was the distinct lack of a true landed aristocracy in America such as was so commonplace and central to politics in European societies. Though there were, to be sure, divisions between rich and poor, the propertied and unpropertied, these were hardly as formal or permanent as the class distinctions that prevailed in the Old World. Titles were not bestowed by law or heredity, nor were there the strict codes of conduct imposed on the masses in their interactions with the upper classes. Most importantly, these stations were not necessarily permanent and could vary wildly with shifting fortunes and circumstances. Thus, from the very beginning, America provided an environment that facilitated the free interaction and mixing of people of diverse social backgrounds, laying the ground for the sons of oligarchs to be held captive by Lotus-eaters. It was this environment that allowed the Founding Fathers to rally around that great founding dogma that all men are created equal. 

But there was another, more pernicious dogma around which the Founders rallied that would plant the seeds of the final deterioration of oligarchy into democracy, that famous cry that, perhaps more than any other, united the Revolutionaries against British rule, “No taxation without representation!” In the earliest days of the Republic vestiges of oligarchy were still discernible, perhaps most notably expressed in laws that limited suffrage only to those who owned property. This, however, was not to last long, as states quickly began abandoning such qualifications shortly after the adoption of the Constitution. By the mid-nineteenth century all such laws had been abolished. Now, in spite of all the moral indignation such an observation is liable to raise in the current climate, it must be admitted that limiting voting to property holders has a certain sensibility about it. Ostensibly, the principal purpose of government, as the Founders understood it, is to defend people and their property. That being the case, it is those with property who have the greatest stake in the operation of government, so it makes sense that influence over the operation of government should rest in the hands of property holders, lest they lose control over that source of security and, instead, have it turned against them. But America had been founded on the promise that no one be taxed without being afforded adequate representation in government. To deny suffrage to all those whom the government claimed authority to tax would be an intolerably hypocritical violation of the very rallying call that gave birth to the Revolution. No doubt, the already blurred lines between social classes served as a sort of lubricant that helped to accelerate and make the process smoother. But such a brutally logically consistent commitment to this founding principle was to ultimately prove fatal, giving rise to a degenerative process that would slowly unravel the very fabric of American society. It did not take long for politicians to realize that they could buy the votes of the drones by promising them a share of the worker’s honey. As the shares of honey the drones demanded increased, the political class was forced to devise ever more excuses to help themselves to the honey, eventually giving rise to entire ideologies centered around justifying such efforts. These ideologies transformed the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality before the law, first, into a promise of material equality, then into a promise of equality in every conceivable dimension, leading to ever more absurdities.  As Land explains in The Dark Enlightenment, 

Because grievance status is awarded as political compensation for economic incompetence, it constructs an automatic cultural mechanism that advocates for dysfunction. The Universalist creed, with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative to the proposition that the lower one’s situation or status, the more compelling is one’s claim upon society, the purer and nobler one’s cause. Temporal failure is the sign of spiritual election (Marxo-Calvinism), and to dispute any of this is clearly ‘hate’. This does not compel even the most hard-hearted neo-reactionary to suggest, in a caricature of the high Victorian cultural style, that social disadvantage, as manifested in political violence, criminality, homelessness, insolvency, and welfare dependency, is a simple index of moral culpability. In large part – perhaps overwhelmingly large pate – it reflects sheer misfortune. Dim, impulsive, unhealthy, and unattractive people, reared chaotically in abusive families, and stranded in broken, crime-wracked communities, have every reason to curse the gods before themselves. Besides, disaster can strike anyone. 

In regards to effective incentive structures, however, none of this is of the slightest importance. Behavioral reality knows only one iron law: Whatever is subsidized is promoted. With a necessity no weaker than that of entropy itself, insofar as social democracy seeks to soften bad consequences – for major corporations no less than for struggling individuals or hapless cultures – things get worse. There is no way around, or beyond this formula, only wishful thinking, and complicity with degeneration. Of course, this defining reactionary insight is doomed to inconsequence, since it amounts to the supremely unpalatable conclusion that every attempt at ‘progressive’ improvement is fated to reverse itself, ‘perversely’, into horrible failure. No democracy could accept this, which means that every democracy will fail. 

In another passage, Land describes the situation in more dramatic detail, which I cannot help but to quote at length, as it can, in many ways be read as a rewriting of Plato’s account of democracy with modern flavours, 

The empirical credibility of democratic advancement is far more perplexing, and also genuinely complex (which is to say controversial, or more precisely, worthy of a data-based, rigorously argued controversy). In part, that is because the modern configuration of democracy emerges within the sweep of a far broader modernistic trend, whose techno-scientific, economic, social and political strands are obscurely interrelated, knitted together by misleading correlations, and subsequent false causalities. If, as Schumpeter argues, industrial capitalism tends to engender a democratic-bureaucratic culture that concludes in stagnation, it might nevertheless seem as though democracy was ‘associated’ with material progress. It is easy to misconstrued the lagging indicator as a positive, causal factor, especially when ideological zeal lends its bias to the misapprehension. In similar vein, since cancer only afflicts living beings, it might – with apparent reason – be associated with vitality. 

Robin Hanson (gently) notes: 

Yes many trends have been positive for a century or so, and yes this suggests they will continue to rise for a century or so. But no this does not mean that students are empirically or morally wrong for thinking it “utopian fantasy? That one could “end poverty, disease, tyranny, and war” by joining a modern-day Kennedy’s political quest. Why? Because positive recent trends in these areas were not much caused by such political movements! They were mostly caused by our getting rich from the industrial revolution, an event that political movements tended, if anything, to try to hold back on average. 

Simple historical chronology suggests that industrialization supports progressive democratization , rather than being derived from it. This observation has even given rise to a widely accepted school of pop social science theorizing, according to which the ‘maturation’ of societies in a democratic direction is determined by thresholds of affluence, or middle-class formation. The strict logical correlate of such ideas, that democracy is fundamentally non-productive in relation to material progress, is typically under-emphasized. Democracy consumes progress. When perceived from the perspective of the dark enlightenment, the appropriate mode of analysis for studying the democratic phenomenon is general parasitology. 

Quasi-libertarian responses to the outbreak accept this implicitly. Given a population deeply infected by the zombie virus and shambling into cannibalistic  social collapse, the preferred option is quarantine. It is not communicative isolation that is essential, but a functional dis-solidarization of society that tightens feedback loops and exposes people with maximum intensity to the consequences of their own actions. Social solidarity, in precise contrast, is the parasite’s friend.  By cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with sluggish infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies.  

Gnaw off other people’s body parts and it might be hard to get a job – That’s the kind of lesson a tight-feedback, cybernetically intense, laissez faire order would allow to be learned. IT’s also exactly the kind of insensitive zombiephobic discrimination that any compassionate democracy would denounce as thought crime, whilst boosting the public budget  for the vitally-challenged, undertaking consciousness raising campaigns on behalf of those suffering from involuntary cannibalistic impulse syndrome, affirming the dignity of the zombie lifestyle in higher-education curriculums, and rigorously regulating workspaces to ensure that the shuffling undead are not victimied by profit-obsessed performance-centric, or even unreconstructed animations employers. 

As enlightened zombie-tolerance flourishes in the shelter of the democratic mega-parasite, a small remnant of reactionaries, attentive to the effects of real incentives, raise the formulaic question: “You do realize that these policies lead inevitably to a massive expansion of the zombie population?” The dominant vector of history presupposes that such nuisance objections are marginalized, ignored, and – wherever possible – silenced through social ostracism. The remnant either fortifies the basement, whilst stocking up on dried food, ammunition, and silver coins, or accelerates the application process for a second passport, and starts packing its bag. 

It is worth pointing out how both Plato and neoreactionaries liken the mechanism behind the degeneration of constitutions to a progressively degenerative illness that presents increasingly morbid symptoms over time. Perhaps the Universalist mind virus is far more ancient than it at first appeared. Those strains the neoreactionaries have focused on may even be descended from the very ones that Plato observed in ancient times. Perhaps, had Jefferson been unterrified and left the rallying cry of the Revolution at “No taxation!”, America would have been inoculated against the more degenerative aspects of the virus. 

Now that we can see how the spirit of pure democracy first entered into and infected the American political system, the manner in which it spread and took root, and the processes that caused the most morbid symptoms of democracy to develop, we can begin to understand the phenomenon of sovereignty as it exists in the contemporary system of American politics. We must begin by exploring the manner in which the Founders initially intended for sovereignty to be exercised in the nation they were founding. It should be said that, despite their passionate rejection of pure democracy, the Founders were democratic in one important sense; namely, they held that the sovereignty and legitimacy of the government they established was ultimately derived from the people. This is most clearly evidenced in the opening lines of the Constitution, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union… do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” That being said, ever fearful of the passions of the mob carefully devised a plan to diffuse the people’s sovereignty throughout the institutions of government in order to temper their best impulses while allowing the best to rise to the top. However the Constitution might have failed to live up to the intention, it is hard to deny the great genius and beauty on display there. Rather than leave complete, undiluted sovereignty directly in the hands of the masses, they, like master craftsmen, designed an intricate governmental architecture, intended to carefully break up that sovereignty and distribute it into a number of concentrated centers that would be responsible for exercising different aspects of that sovereignty. We could spend an entire essay admiring the sheer political brilliance on display in the Constitution, but it will suffice to highlight a few key points here. Drawing on classical political philosophy, the founders attempted to combine the three pure forms of government into a single system that would amplify each forms’ strengths, while limiting its weaknesses. The Executive Branch, then, can be understood to correspond to monarchy, with a single, king-like leader, capable of carrying out functions that require urgency and decisiveness. Next, the Judicial Branch can be understood to correspond to aristocracy, the rule of the best, comprised of a small group of highly trained legal scholars to serve as philosopher kings. Finally, the Legislative Branch, with its representative and deliberative functions, corresponds to democracy. On top of this, the Founders carefully limited the power of the Federal Government to a number of essential functions, while reserving all other powers to State and, ultimately, local authorities, with the fragmenting of power that occurred at the Federal level recurring at these other levels. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, they recognized a set of essential rights to be afforded to individual citizens. Thus, though sovereignty was not to be directly in the hands of the people, they were to serve as the ultimate foundation, grounding the exercise of sovereignty in each and every facet of government. 

This, of course, is only how the Founders intended the government to function. It is not, however, necessarily how it functions in practice and, as Moldbug would have us believe, it is not how it functions at all. To understand his position, I must apologize for presenting yet another lengthy quote from his Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century. (On second thought, I don’t apologize. I quite like long quotes. The philosophical tradition is often characterized as the longest running conversation in human history, so, it is only fitting that we should give space to our interlocutors to present their case and not let it be a one sided conversation. This is especially helpful for the case of newcomers to the conversation who might need help getting up to speed. Moreover, I think that it helps to reduce the chance of claims being taken out of context and of uncharitability. So, with that being said, please allow me to shamelessly present yet another long quote.)

Being a completely uneducated person, I do not know Latin or Greek. But I do have a favorite Latin word: imperium. As in “imperialist,” of course, and other such Maoist terms of abuse. As I am already on record as a reactionary, I will cheerfully confess to being an imperialist as well. 

Imperium is a cognate of the English word empire. But the two are not synonyms: empire in English has shifted to imply the international relationship also known as suzerainty, i.e., the relationship between Washington and its puppet states. Which is pretty cool, but which is at best a special case of imperium, which is better translated as command or authority. Similarly, the Roman title of Imperator, which became our Emperor, is best translated as Commander, and originally just meant “general.” 

To hold imperium is to command, to hold sovereignty. Sovereignty, as we saw in Chapter 2, is not sovereignty unless it is above the law. In any organization we can identify the summum imperium, or power of final decision. At least at a civilian level, this is generally held by either an individual or a small committee. For example, in the United States, this committee is called the “Supreme Court.” In the Soviet Union it was called the “Politburo.” Of course these two institutions had very little else in common, but they both held the summum imperium. 

If you doubt this analysis, note that only the justices’ own consciences, which have oft proved fickle, force them to obey any code of conduct whatsoever. They could order Barack Obama to stand on his head and snap a polaroid of his own rectum in order to be inaugurated. He would have to comply, and I am quite confident that he is capable of doing so. 

Despite all protests to the contrary, constitutional democracy has neither squared the circle nor solved the old Roman problem of ipsos custodes. Whatever the names and rituals, real power in the state can always be tracked. Let’s look in more detail at the power structure of constitutional democracy, using our old friend USG as the example. (Its clones around the world differ little.)

Imperium always comes in layers of delegation, in which one power relinquishes decisions to another. At the top level – level zero, as it were – is always the military. The US military is of course a large and diverse entity, but imagine it could find some way to agree unanimously that sovereignty, the summum imperium, would revert to some specific office in the Pentagon. SOCOM is a good candidate. 

What would people do? What could they do? They would say: “Duh, okay. We welcome our new green-beret overlords. Sure. Frankly we were a little election-out, anyway. And Professor Bernanke no longer enjoys our complete confidence. So, yeah, whatever. Could we resume normal programming now? I was watching VH-1, here.” 

Ergo, the military in all countries and at all times enjoys the summum imperium. In a state in which normal civil-military relations pertain, the military is completely passive, and delegates its authority completely. In a few less-developed states, such as modern Turker, it still exercises genuine reserve power, and may have some influence on civil decisions. (Sadly, the fabled deep state may be on the decline since the Ergenekon purge.) 

I am sorry to report to critics of the American right, such as Naomi Wolf, that the United States does not in fact have a “deep state.” However, if the American right wanted to actually get off its butt and do something, it could find many worse manuals than her latest. Of course it will execute no such coup, at least no time soon. Ever since Defoe wrote the Shortest-Way the conspiracy theories of leftists have been the best guide to what the right should do, but won’t.

The next layer of imperium in a democratic state – layer one – is, of course, the electorate. I.e., the people who vote. My belief that the electorate holds a high degree of imperium is not at all inconsistent with my belief that the influence of elections on public policy is generally small. The same after all can be said of the military, whose vote is final but at present unexercised.

The electorate and the military are layers one and zero, because the military can resist anyone in the contest for sovereignty, and the electorate can resist everyone but the military. For example, control of 51 senators and the Presidency is sufficient to defeat all other institutions in USG, because it is sufficient to pack the Supreme Court. Obviously, the electorate can achieve this. 

It may not even need the senators. Consider the case of a Presidential candidate whose platform is plain about her plans: if elected, she will suspend all other institutions and rule as a dictator. Suppose Sarah Palin, for example, ran on this platform in 2012. Suppose she won. Does anyone doubt that Washington would obey her every personal whim – exactly as it obeyed, say, FDR’s? I suppose it would depend on whether Governor Palin has the natural knack of imperium, and we can’t know this unless we actually see her in action. But I actually suspect she might. 

We move to the next stage: level two, ultimate civil authority. The summum imperium here rests, as mentioned, in the Supreme Court, and more generally the judicial system. Judges try to avoid actually formulating public policy, however, typically delegating this task to executive agencies. Domestic and (rarely) foreign policy is sometimes altered, in broad strokes, by Congress. There are also various difference depending on whether the President is a Democrat or a Republican, but we are down to minutiae at this point. 

When we look at the remarkable stability of Washington, even in pursuing paths which to the outside eye are plainly, even comically, counterproductive, we have to focus our attention first on level one: the electorate. The opinion of the electorate is exactly what it is supposed to be: the hinge of power in the United States today. Level zero is passive. Level two cannot resist level one. 

Therefore, to understand the forces directing the actions of Washington today, we have to understand one thing: the relationship between levels one and two, the electorate and the (mostly) permanent government. 

From here, Moldbug proceeds to describe the electorate and the three major factions he sees as comprising it. He identifies these three factions as tribalists, populists, and institutionalists. We touched on the institutionalists already in our last essay. These are the voters who are faithful parishioners of the Cathedral who walk in lockstep with its dogmas and who expect democratic processes to produce results conducive to the Cathedral’s agenda. In addition to the institutionalists, there are the tribalists, voters who identify with one group or another and who vote solely for the benefit of their group. This in group loyalty makes them easy targets of politicians looking to buy votes who need only promise programs and projects that will benefit the group in question. Institutionalists are ever ready to exploit this feature, thus feeding into the degenerative ratchets of liberal democracy as the Cathedral must constantly adapt its doctrine to justify ever more taxation, spending, and reshuffling of the deck. The final group of voters Moldbug identifies are the populists. These cling to a romantic notion that government functions as it is supposed to in theory, not as it does in practice. They faithfully go to the polls believing they can actually affect change and promote their own interests. At times, when those interests are in line with those of the Cathedral, this illusion can be maintained. However, when those interests actively oppose those of the Cathedral, there are mechanisms in place, particularly in the form of institutionalists within the permanent bureaucracy, as well as elected office, who stand in the way of the populists actually gaining any real ground. As the interests of the populists and the Cathedral have increasingly diverged, the Cathedral has taken steps to stifle populism, perhaps most notably, as Moldbug points out, by instituting an educational system that actively opposes populists principles and dilutes the civic principles on which the populists rely. 

What we have here is a complex and jumbled mess of competing claims of sovereignty which simply serves to conceal sovereignty rather than to actually break it up. As things stand now, reverence for the doctrine of judicial review (a doctrine invented by the Court itself in Marbury V. Madison, not to be found in the text of the Constitution) leaves practical and visible sovereignty in the hands of the Supreme Court, whose word on matters of law, in the eyes of the public, is final. This, however, is only possible because the public is willing to accept this authority of the court and, because the Cathedral, through its appendages in media, education, and permanent government, has such a powerful influence on public opinion, ultimately sovereignty rests with the Cathedral, which must prey on the worst instincts of the electorate in order to preserve its power. Clearly this is neither a desirable or sustainable situation, but what can be done to remedy it? 

Moldbug believes that the solution to this problem lies in revising our understanding of sovereignty, specifically by reverting to an older, more traditional conception of sovereignty. But he does not think that simply reverting to the understanding of sovereignty held by the Founders. It was precisely their conception of sovereignty that allowed the Cathedral to rise in the first place and give way to the chaos we see now. Moldbug sees any attempt to divide sovereignty as the Founders aimed to do as futile and a waste of time. No, as Moldbug sees it, the Founders’ understanding of sovereignty simply will not do. Instead, he contends, we must set our gaze even further back in our history to a conception of sovereignty that is completely at odds with that held by proponents of democracy. What Moldbug has in mind is the conception of sovereignty promoted by the absolute monarchs of the British Stuart Dynasty, particularly as elaborated by the court political theorist Robert Filmer. Let us, without apology, allow Moldbug, backed by ample quotation from Filmer, to explain himself through yet another long quotation from the already mentioned text, 

Filmer was the baddest-ass reactionary who ever lived. Frankly, he makes Carlyle look like a liberal. Just the title of Patriarcha is cooler than Jesus Christ himself, and the contents don’t even begin to disappoint: we launch almost immediately into hardcore Anglican theology. If Filmer isn’t winter beach reading, I don’t know who is. 

I mean, seriously, how do you justify divine-right monarchy to an atheist? Is it anything like selling refrigerators to Eskimos? Since I am both an atheist and a believer in divine-right monarchy, I’d better be able to square the circle.

One of the major doctrinal thrusts of European Christianity, in all ages and phases of its career, and certainly even in the thinly-disguised, crypto-Christian Unitarianism that has become the religion of the world’s ruling class (e.g., if ever you meet a “moderate Muslim,” he is really a Unitarian), is the quest to justify the political structure of the world.

What makes a king a king? Why should the king be the king? Why can’t I be the king, or at least my cousin Ricky? Do we even need a king? And so on. People have strong emotional feeling about these questions to this day – at least, they have a strong emotional feeling about the last one. Not answering them is certainly not acceptable.

But Filmer, and the divine-right monarchist in general, comes as close as possible to not answering. Moreover, his reasoning is impeccable for the orthodox: 

If it please god, for the correction of the prince or punishment of the people, to suffer princes to be removed and others to be placed in their rooms, either by the factions of the nobility or rebellion of the people, in all such cases the judgment of God, who hath power to give and to take away kingdoms, is most just; yet the ministry of men who execute God’s judgments without commission is sinful and damnable. God doth but use and turn men’s unrighteous acts to the performance of His righteous decrees. 

Note that this is basically the 17th-century way of saying: “Shit happens.” God being omnipotent, etc., if Dickweed over there is King, it is obviously because God wanted Dickweed to be King. And who are you to disagree with God? 

But an atheist, such as myself, has a simpler way of getting to the same result. Really, what Filmer is saying, is: if you want stable government, accept the status quo as the verdict of history. There is not reason at all to inquire as to why the Bourbons are the Kings of France. The rule is arbitrary. Nonetheless, it is to the benefit of all that this arbitrary rule exists, because obedience to the rightful king is a Schelling point of nonviolent agreement. And better yet, there is no way for a political force to steer the outcome of succession – at least, nothing comparable to the role of the educational authorities in a democracy. 

In other words, to put it in Patchwork terms, the relationship between the realm and patch is no more, and no less, than a property right. A patch is a sovereign property, that is, one whose proprietor has no defender but itself. Nonetheless, in moral terms, we may ask: why does this realm hold that patch? And the answer, as it always is within any system of strong property rights, will be not “because it deserves to,” but “because it does.” Note that whatever the theology, Filmer’s model of government captures the property-right approach perfectly. 

(Also, one must admire Filmer’s wicked gall in starting out by describing the “right of rebellion” as a Catholic heresy. Catholicism being admitted, at least by all fair historians, to be the creed of your average divine-right monarchist, as protestantism is of vile democracy. So Filmer’s mover here is wildly misleading, but pure fun – not unlike comparing liberals to Mussolini. Nothing to do with anything, but it sure gets a rise out of ‘em, and moves SKUs like no one’s business.) 

The invention of this spurious right was perhaps the first tiny crack in the philosophical girders of the classical European monarchies. Filmer deftly points out that this is an engineering error, the ancient political solecism of imperium in imperio – which is now, in a typical democratic propaganda maneuver, lauded as that bogus political panacea, “separation of powers”: 

Thirdly, [Bellarmine} concludes that, if there be a lawful cause, the multitude may change the kingdom. Here I would fain know who shall judge of this lawful cause? If the multitude – for I see nobody else can – then this is a pestilent and dangerous conclusion. 

Filmer, writing for an educated audience, does not bother to remind them of the basic premise of Roman law: nemo iudex in causa sua. Meaning: “no man can be a judge in his own case.” And no multitude, either. Pestilent indeed!

These political three-card monte tricks, in which sovereign authority is in some way divided, “limited” (obviously, no sovereign can limit himself), or otherwise weakened, in all cases for the purported purpose of securing liberty, have no more place in a Patchwork realm than they do at, say, Apple. They are spurious artifacts of the Interregnum. Their effect on both a realm and its residents is purely counterproductive. Begone with them. 

In reality, no sovereign can be subject to law. This is a political perpetual motion machine. Law is not law unless it is judged and enforced. And by whom? For example, if think a supreme court with judicial review can make government subject to law, you are obviously unfamiliar with the sordid history of American constitutional jurisprudence. All your design has achieved is to make your supreme court sovereign. Indeed if the court had only one justice, a proper title for that justice would be “King.” Sorry, kid, you haven’t violated the conservation of anything. 

Indeed, as Filmer points out, the unity of chief executive, chief lawmaker, and chief justice is simple, natural and elegant: 

There can be no laws without a supreme power to command or make them. In all aristocracies the nobles are above the laws, and in all democracies the people. By the like reason, in a monarchy the king must of necessity be above the laws; there can be no sovereign majesty in him that is under them; that which giveth the very being to a king is the power to give laws; without this power he is but an equivocal king. It skills not which way kings come by their power, whether by election, donation, succession, or by any other means; for it is still the manner of the government by supreme power that makes them properly kings, and not the means of obtaining their crowns. Neither doth the diversity of laws nor contrary customs, whereby each kingdom differs from another, make the forms of commonweal different unless the power of making laws be in several subjects. 

For confirmation of this point, Aristotle saith that a perfect kingdom is that wherein the king rules all things according to his own will, for he that is called a king according to the law makes no kind of kingdom at all. This, it seems, also the Romans well understood to be most necessary in a monarchy; for though they were a people most greedy of liberty, yet the senate did free Augustus from all necessity of laws, that he might be free of his own authority and of absolute power over himself and over the laws, to do what he pleased and leave undone what he listed; and this decree was made while Augustus was yet absent. Accordingly we find the Ulpian, the great lawyer, delivers it for a rule of the civil law: Princeps legibus solutus est (“The prince is not bound by the laws”). […]

Besides, all laws are themselves dumb, and some or other must be trusted with the application of them to particulars, by examining all circumstances, to pronounce when they are broken, or by whom. This work of right application of laws is not a thing easy or obvious for ordinary capacities, but requires profound abilities of nature for the beating out of the truth – witness the diversity and sometimes the contrariety of opinions of the learned judges in some difficult points. Since this is the common condition of laws, it is also most reasonable that the lawmaker should be trusted with the application or interpretation of the laws, and for this cause anciently the kings of this land have sitten personally in courts of judicature, and are still representatively present in all courts; the judges are but substituted, and called the king’s justices, and their power ceaseth when the king is in place. 

So much, in other words, for Montesquieu.

So, according to Moldbug and Filmer, the very idea of divided sovereignty is oxymoronic; ultimate sovereignty will always tend to settle in one corner or another of the governmental apparatus; and futile attempts to divide sovereignty only serve to obfuscate and undermine that sovereignty. For sovereignty to be what it is and for it to be of any use in bringing stability to society, sovereignty must be absolute and unambiguous. He who holds sovereignty must have absolute authority, rising above even the law itself. (I’m getting a real Motorhead vibe at this point.)

Now, in the first place, it is necessary to admit sympathy for Moldbug and Filmer’s conception of sovereignty, as there is a great deal of sense in it. Sovereignty is the right of absolute dominion over all one has. For sovereignty to be what it is, it must be absolute. Moreover, their scepticism over the possibility of truly divided sovereignty is prudent, well placed, and well supported by historical examples. In practical terms, the decision to choose one course of action or another must be made by someone or other. Whether or not the buck actually stops with Truman, it must stop somewhere.

Still, it has to be said that, whatever faults American republicanism might have, absolute monarchism leaves much to be desired as well.  Though we may readily admit that a just, competent, and benevolent ruler endowed with absolute sovereignty may very well be a benefit to the society over which he presides, on the other hand, a ruler falling short of these virtues endowed with absolute sovereignty could easily prove to be his nation’s worst nightmare. Moreover, who truly holds sovereignty is not always as clear in practice. There are ample historical examples of ministers essentially sequestering weak or inept monarchs in order to wield power for themselves. And if it is security and stability that we desire, it certainly should not be lost on us that the monarchs whom Filmer was writing in defense of did not reign long before being deposed and sparking a bloody civil war. (Forget that Motorhead, here’s some Megadeth!)

We might also add that, though Filmer’s condemnation of revolution is understandable, as revolutions all too often plunge nations into a state of chaos far more intolerable than whatever wrongs they were initiated to wrong, we can, at the same time admit that there are some circumstances so desperate and dire that the risks of revolution become acceptable. Though revolution must always be a last solution entered into with great reservation and careful calculation, we must admit that such a right does indeed exist. 

Of course, Moldbug doesn’t mean to dig up some long lost heir to restore the House of Stuart and he has modified Filmer’s suggestions to a certain degree in order to make it more compatible with our modern mode. Moldbug advocates for a view he calls neocameralism. Rather than a traditional monarchy, Moldbug envisions nations run like joint-stock companies, with a CEO, elected by shareholders, endowed with absolute authority to oversee the policies and operations of the government.  Let us once again allow Moldbug to explain himself at length. He begins by attempting to properly frame the problem, no doubt one of his great talents. 

Most people, when they take a whack at designing a government (an engineering task at which all God’s chilluns just naturally excel), tend to ask themselves: what should the government do? Of course this is the wrong question. The right question is: what will the government do? 

He continues a few pages later, 

The key is that word should. When you say your government “Should do X,” or “should not do Y,” you are speaking in the hieratic language of democracy. You are postulatiing some ethereal and benign higher sovereign, which can enforce promises made by the mere government to whose whims you would otherwise be subject. In reality, while your government can certainly promise to do X, or not to do Y, there is no power that can hold it to this promise. Or if there is, it is that power which is your real government. Your whining should be addressed to it. 

The neocameralist structure of Patchwork realms, which are sovereign joint-stock companies, creates a different kind of should. This is the profitable should. We can say that a realm should do X rather than Y, because X is more profitable than Y. Since sovereign means sovereign, nothing can compel the realm to do X and not Y. But with an anonymous capital structure, we can expect administrators to be generally responsible and not make obvious stupid mistakes. 

Another way to say this is that a realm is financially responsible. The general observation here is that, to paraphrase Tolstoy, financially responsible organizations are all alike. By definition, they do not waste money. By definition, their irresponsible counterparts do, and by definition there are an infinite number of ways to waste money. Think of a rope: a financially responsible organization is a tight rope. It only has one shape. But if there is slack in the rope, it can flap around in all kinds of crazy ways. 

It is immediately clear that the neocameralist should, the tight rope, is far inferior to the ethereal should, the magic leash of God. (Typically these days arriving in the form of vox populi, vox Dei. Or, as as cynic might put it: vox populi, vox praeceptoris.)

Given the choice between financial responsibility and moral responsibility, I will take the latter every time. If it were possible to write a set of rules on paper and require one’s children to comply with this bible, all sorts of eternal principles for good government nd healthy living could be set out. 

But we cannot construct a political structure that will enforce moral responsibility. We can construct a political structure that will enforce financial responsibility. Thus neocameralism. We might say that financial responsibility is the raw material of moral responsibility. The two are not by any means identical, but they are surprisingly similar, and the gap seems bridgeable. 

When we use the profitable should, therefore, we are in the corporate strategy department. We ask how should a Patchwork realm, or any financially responsible government, be designed to maximize the return on its capital? 

For our overall realm design, let’s simplify the Anglo-American corporate model slightly. We’ll have direct shareholder sovereignty, with no board of directors. The board layer strikes me as a bit of an anachronism, and it is certainly one place stuff can go wrong. Deleted. And I also dislike the term CEO, which seems a bit vainvglorious for a sovereign organization. A softer word with a pleasant Quaker feel is delegate, although we will compromise on a capital. And we can call the logical holder of each share its proprietor. 

Therefore: a Patchwork realm is governed by a Delegate, who is the proxy of the proprietors, and can be replaced by a majority of them at any time and for any reason. The Delegate exercises undivided sovereign authority, as in divine-right monarchy. I.e., in English: total power. (The Delegate is always Jewish.)

This fragile-looking design can succeed at the sovereign layer because, and only because, modern encryption technology makes it feasible. The proprietors use a secret-sharing scheme to control a root key that must regularly reauthorize the Delegate, and thus in turn the command hierarchy of the security forces, in a pyramid leading down to cryptographic locks on individual weapons. If the Delegate turns on the proprietors, they may have to wait a day to authorize the replacement, and another day or two before the new Delegate can organize the forces needed to have her predecessor captured and shot. Fiduciary responsibility has its price. 

To be sure, Modlbug’s vision is ambitious, creative, and worthy of consideration. In particular, he deserves credit for recognizing that in designing an efficient government, resistant to abuse, we cannot simply rely on moral or theological principles on which people are almost certain to disagree and that we instead must promote good governance through economic incentives which cannot be practically ignored. And (though we will spare Moldbug any further criticism on the much derided idea that shareholders can maintain power over the CEO through encryption technology with which they would be able to control the functionality of weapons), we must at the very least admit that the proposal is interesting, if not even promising. But let us examine this proposal in more detail before rushing to judgment. Moldbug continues, 

Fo simplicity, our realm will do its books in gold. The spectacle of a sovereign corporation that maintains accounts in its own scrip is a fascinating one, at least from a financial perspective, and we cannot write it off quite so casually as yet another 20th-century monstrosity. It is not impossible that fiat currency can be made to turn a buck. It is unlikely that the proprietors will want their dividends in it, however. 

And who are the proprietors? Anyone. They are anonymous shareholders. It may be desirable, though, for a realm to enjoin its residents from holding its shares. It is not normally necessary for a company to refrain from serving its shareholders as customers, but a sovereign realm is not a normal company. A resident shareholder has a conflict of interest, because he may have an opportunity to use the power of his share to promote policies that reward him directly but are not in the interests of his non-resident fellows. The effect is small, but better to rule it out. 

We’ll also assume- assumption to be justified below – that realms exist in a competitive market in which residents can easily take their business elsewhere if they don’t like the service. 

Given this setup, let’s say you’re the Delegate. Your patch is the city of San Francisco, and your realm is a new corporate overlord – Friscorp. Friscorp is yours. Not that you own it, of course, just that the owners have hired you to run it. 

First, let’s enumerate the basic principles of sovereign corporate management.

Principle one: the proprietors’ sovereignty is absolute. Securing it against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is the primary fiduciary responsibility of the Delegate. Lose the patch and the realm is worthless, and so are the shares. Everything else, even profit, comes after security. 

Principle two: a realm is a business, not a charity. Its goal is to maximize its discounted return on investment. If Delegate and proprietors alike somehow manage to forget this, in the long run their realm will deteriorate, develop red-giant syndrome, and become gigantic, corrupt and foul. It may even turn into a democracy. 

Principle three: except in cases where it conflicts with the first or second principles, “Don’t be evil” is always good business. Think of your realm as a hotel. As Mark Twain once put it: “All saints can do miracles, but few of them can keep hotel.” And while many hotelkeepers can do miracles, few indeed are saints. But all are nice to the customers – at least, the 99.999% of customers who feel no need to start torching the drapery. 

Moldbug had already elaborated on the second principle in the previous chapter where he says, 

A Patchwork realm, or any modern corporate sovereign, is no more bound by the laws it imposes on its residents than Linden Lab is bound by the terms-of-use policy it enforces in Second Life. (In fact, it is probably less so bound because a terms-of-use policy creates at least the vague suggestion of liability. Whereas suing a sovereign is yet another of these political solecisms.) 

This is not at all to say that a Patchwork realm does not enforce the rule of law. (Except, of course, under conditions of martial law that involve a general security threat. A state of siege is an option anywhere, any time, for any reason.) To enforce a law is not to be bound by a law. These are two completely different things. I don’t feel I can repeat this too often. 

Patchwork realms can be expected to enforce a fair and consistent code of laws not for moral or theological reasons, not because they are compelled to do so by a superior sovereign or some other force real or imaginary, but for the same economic reasons that compel them to provide excellent customer service in general. Real estate on which the rule of law prevails is much, much more valuable than real estate on which it doesn’t, and the value of a realm is the value of its real estate. 

(I suspect that in a well-run realm this is almost literally the case, because I suspect that a well-run realm makes its take via the world’s fairest, least-intrusive tax: property tax. In fact, while I don’t know that this has ever been tried, it is easy to design a perfectly fair and perfectly non-intrusive property tax regime. Require real estate owners to assess their own property, offering it for sale at the assessed price, and set the tax at a percentage of that price. No muss, no fuss, no IRS. Since no one can live or work without real estate, it should be straightforward to tune this self-assessed property tax (SAPT) to extract the Laffer maximum.)

To live on a Patchwork patch, you have to sign a bilateral contract with the realm. You promise to be a good boy and behave yourself. The realm promises to treat you fairly. There is an inherent asymmetry in this agreement, because you have no enforcement mechanism against the realm (just as you have no enforcement mechanism against the United States). However, a realm’s compliance with its customer-service agreements is sure to be a matter of rather intense attention among residents and prospective residents. And thus among shareholders as well. 

For example, I suspect that every customer-service agreement will include the right to remove oneself and one’s assets from the realm, at any time, no questions asked, to any other realm that will accept the emigrant. Possibly with an exception for those involved in the criminal-justice process – but this may not even be needed. Who wants a criminal? Not another realm, surely.

Suppose a realm unilaterally abrogates this right of emigration? It has just converted its residents into what are, in a sense, slaves. It is no longer Disneyland. It is a plantation. If it’s any good with cinderblocks, barbed-wire and minefields, there is no escape. What do you say if you’re stuck on this farm? You say: “Yes, Massa.” A slave you are and a slave you will be forever. This is terrible, of course. But again, the mechanism we rely on to prevent it in no implausible deus ex machina, no Indian rope-trick from the age of Voltaire, but the sound engineering principle of the profit motive. A realm that pulls this kind of crap cannot be trusted by anyone ever again. It is not even safe to visit. Tourism disappears. The potential real-estate bid from immigrants disappears. And, while your residents are indeed stuck, they are also remarkably sullen and display no great interest in slaving for you. Which is a more valuable patch of real estate, today: South Korea, or North Korea? Yet before the war, the North was more industrialized and the South was more rural. Such are the profits of converting an entire country into a giant Gulag. 

So according to Moldbug, the patchwork realm would be incentivized to respect the rights of its residents because doing otherwise would incentivise residents to leave and potential tourists or new residents to stay away, thus hurting the joint-stock company that runs the country by depriving it of its sources of revenue. It is, at the very least, plausible that this might prove an efficient incentive system for promoting responsible government, though, as with any system we can also certainly imagine some scenarios in which things might go wrong. For one, this incentive structure depends largely on the shareholders’ practical ability to remove the Delegate from his post should he begin to act in financially disadvantageous ways and it isn’t entirely clear that there are any viable means of guaranteeing this power. But even if we set aside such concerns and assume for the sake of argument that the shareholders are capable of exercising complete control over the Delegate, it is still not necessarily guaranteed that shareholders would always remove abusive delegates. At times they might even desire such a delegate. After all, as Moldbug points out, it isn’t particularly profitable to do such things under current conditions either, yet we still have examples like North Korea to point to. So it isn’t entirely inconceivable that shareholders in a patchwork realm wouldn’t advocate similarly unprofitable policies. For instance, we could envision a situation in which shareholders from one or a number of other realms invest in yet another realm in order to enslave its people and harvest its resources for use in bettering their own homelands. Though, perhaps, such schemes might sort themselves within the Patchwork in the form of swift retribution from other patches that find such hostile actions threatening. It remains to be seen how these matters would ultimately work themselves out and we probably cannot know until patchwork realms are a reality, however, I am willing to suppose that the incentive structure Moldbug outlines is probably just as good at achieving just, efficient, and benevolent government as any other in operation today. Whatever the results, Moldbug deserves credit for at least attempting to apply market dynamics to the business of statehood and using financial incentives to promote good government. 

Though Moldbug’s vision for government may well be able to achieve peace and stability, it fails at a third and even more essential duty of government, namely the preservation of liberty, in particular the right to property, which, because it is only through property ownership that individuals may be truly free and under the dominion of no other individual than themselves, is perhaps, the most important of all rights to the overall possibility of freedom. We may go so far as to say that the right to own property is synonymous with freedom itself. But Moldbug’s model attacks property ownership at every turn. His plan to force all residents to list their property on the market and, if they do not actually sell it, pay a tax on the listed price, guarantees that residents can never truly own their homes and that all people are in perpetual danger of being uprooted. It’s not hard to imagine, say, retirees being priced out of the homes they have lived in for the majority of their lives. Moreover, because the joint-stock company that runs the realm lays the final claim to all of the land within the realm, and the joint-stock company is to be owned by foreign shareholders, that means that, not only can residents own no property, all land within the realm is ultimately the property of foreigners. This is certainly a proposition no true America first type nationalist could ever tolerate and nor can we here. This is a point on which I can see no reason to compromise. We are to be fanatical advocates of the rights of individuals to own landed property outright. To that end we stand steadfastly opposed to any sort of tax on landed property. 

Indeed, our commitment to this point is so crucial, so essential, to our project that it shall serve as the catalyst to finally formally distinguish our position on sovereignty from the absolute sovereignty of monarchism and the popular sovereignty of democracy. Between these two positions is a third, perhaps even more radical position which we might refer to as individual sovereignty. Some, hearing this name, might assume that we are simply attempting to rebrand popular sovereignty, but this could not be further from the case.  Individual sovereignty occupies a sort of middle, hybridized, place between the extremes of monarchical absolute sovereignty and democratic popular sovereignty. Like the monarchists, we hold that all sovereignty must necessarily be absolute and undivided, however, like the democrats, we wish to extend the benefits and privileges that come along with wielding sovereignty as widely as possible, ideally, in time, to each and every living human. Now, at this point, it might sound like we’re attempting to square the circle. How could we possibly extend sovereignty to vast populations of people without dividing and diluting it and undermining its absolute nature? But we are trying to do no such thing. Remember, sovereignty is simply absolute authority over a specific domain. Whereas the ultimate end of popular sovereignty is for all people within a relatively large domain to somehow share sovereignty over that domain, the end of individual sovereignty is for all people to have absolute, unshared sovereignty over a substantially limited domain. Under such a model each and every individual is to be afforded absolute sovereignty, beginning with their bodies and to be extended over any property they might legitimately acquire (what exactly counts as a legitimate acquisition and how such acquisitions are to be secured are no doubt difficult questions with multiple facets that deserve to be considered in depth. But now is not the time for such questions. For now it will suffice to wave our hands in a vaguely Lockean direction). Thus, any individual in possession of land would, in effect, have the authority of an absolutely sovereign monarch over that land and all upon it, turning the world into a patchwork of microsized kingdoms (as Eddy Arnold put it, in his home a man is as a king on his throne, though it may be a shack down by the track)

It is important to note, however, that individual sovereignty is not so much a program to be implemented as it is a goal to strive for. The ultimate end of individual sovereignty, then, is to make every man a king over his own castle, and falling short of that, to make as many men kings as possible. Of course, this is a rather mundane and unambitious goal; any man can be a king, it takes a special man to be worthy of the title. A truly lofty and inspired goal would be to make every man a good king, a philosopher king, if you will. And, given that messiah is a Hebrew term for king, we might even call such a world populated entirely by good kings overseeing their kingdoms the Messianic Age (Perhaps we might understand the second coming as the Law, embodied by Christ, becoming active in the wills of all men). But let us bring ourselves back down to earth and not get too carried away with such heavenly goals quite yet. There are currently many obstacles that must be surmounted in order for such a vision to come to fruition and, short of a miracle on the order of Christ’s physical descent from the Heavens, it will be necessary to pass through many intermediary steps in the process. 

(It strikes me that all of this talk about kingship and absolute, undivided sovereignty might be raising alarms with any readers who might harbor feminist sensibilities. After all, can a man and woman not jointly own a piece of land? But how could this be possible if ownership is sovereignty and sovereignty cannot be divided? To sketch a brief answer, we might attempt to solve this problem by positing a distinction between internal and external sovereignty, with the former presiding over the management and utilization of resources within the realm and the latter presiding over the realm’s associations with other realms. Following a traditional division we might imagine a model in which the wife is to be regarded as a queen with absolute internal sovereignty, and the husband a king with absolute external sovereignty. (It thus becomes possible to restore the term oekonomikos to its original meaning of household management.) Of course, in trying to appease any potential feminist critics, I have just opened a whole new can of worms with my suggestion that female empowerment lies in ruling over the internal affairs of the home, but men and women are fundamentally different, it should not come as any surprise that their empowerment is to be realized in fundamentally different domains. Though we can admit that many feminist grievances are legitimate, ignoring the differences between men and women is not likely to lead to viable solutions. Finding a proper, truly harmonious balance between man and woman is absolutely essential to creating an environment in which individuals can be completely free. And successful universalist tribes will, no doubt, need to develop traditions that reliably establish harmonious and mutually dignified relationships between men and women in order to ensure a suitable environment in which to mold children into upstanding citizens worthy of freedom. Indeed, any universalist tribe worth associating with must put the task of securing a fertile environment for families to flourish second only to the task of securing liberty. We will have to develop this suggestion, no doubt, in greater depth in the future. For some indication of the direction of my thinking on this matter, see my discussions of the Church of Peter, the House of Mary, and the Doctrine of the Middle in my book, available here.)

With this in mind, perhaps it will be possible to reconcile Moldbug’s vision of a patchwork of competing realms with our ultimate goal of realizing complete individual sovereignty. Perhaps Moldbug’s vision could even be reworked in such a way as to make it possible for individual sovereignty to blossom out of patchwork realms, so that a patchwork phase might have the potential to be a crucial stepping stone toward the realization of universal kinghood. And, indeed, this would not be difficult to do. All it will take is a few tweaks. In the first place, we must stand firmly against any and all forms of property tax, which we understand as effectively placing all land in the hands of government, rather than the rightful sovereign proprietor of that land (i.e. the citizen), as absolutely objectionable and an unfit policy for any patchwork realm we might endorse. Patchwork realms must recognize each property under its jurisdiction to be a completely sovereign realm whose owner is endowed with complete authority to do what he wants with it. The patchwork realm’s sole role is to be the ensurance order and tranquility in the interactions between these realms, for instance, by resolving disputes through the application of civil law, and in organizing the mutual defense of the various sovereign realms that are party to the particular patchwork. It is even possible to envision how the sovereignty of the patchwork realm itself could flow directly from the sovereignty of individual property holders, rendering such property holders the foundation of the patchwork realm’s sovereignty. For instance, we might imagine patchwork realms coming about as a result of mutual, voluntary associations entered into between various sovereign property holders who would outline the basic values the realm would seek to uphold and how sovereignty is to be exercised within the realm, without infringing on the sovereignty enjoyed by members of the realm over their own property. As such associations multiply and grow we can expect a web of agreements and affiliations intended to facilitate order to arise. Sovereign property holders would have the ability to associate, or not associate, with whatever associations they see fit, and as different associations develop different reputations for their ability to administer justice and secure order, they would be able to compete with one another for members, allowing the best associations to rise to the top and the worst to fall. This process could theoretically begin while governmental apparatuses are still in place, with associations preparing to take the reins as the state is gradually dismantled, or, should this process prove too slow or impossible, taking actions to accelerate the process and install themselves in its place. These associations might even start out as mere tribal organizations such as we described in the last essay. Universalist tribes could add to there merely educational and spiritual roles and begin to organize mutual defense strategies, as well as to set up courts that strive to resolve disputes and dissipate tensions (this may necessitate exploring new strategies for exit, for instance, space travel, where disputes cannot be resolved) as impartially as possible, thus establishing universalist realms that would position themselves to gain the trust of other tribes and expand their ideology, with the hope that, in time, we might reach a time at which people are capable of largely governing themselves, with no need for any realms, or at least not on large scales.) In this way, tribal universalism and individual sovereignty could even be the vehicles through which patchwork realms could be brought into existence, while patchwork could, at the same time act as a vehicle for realizing universal individual sovereignty. This is patchwork taken to the extreme, with each property claim, in essence, amounting to a small patchwork kingdom. We are sewing with exceptionally fine thread. 

We must be perfectly clear, however, this vision we have just described, aside from our hopeful conclusion, is not completely identical with a state of individual sovereignty. It is not the case that all people own property, thus, though a system that extends sovereignty to all those who own property might recognize the sovereignty of a great many people, it is not capable of recognizing the sovereignty of all people. A more appropriate term for such a system might be propertarian sovereignty and this may be as good as we can get until such a time as all people are able to own property of their own. In the meantime, in order to inoculate patchwork realms against degenerative parasitism, we must insist that only those who hold property be afforded any political influence within patchwork realms. In the mean time, we must largely concur with the place they have in Moldbug’s vision. As he explains using his example of a patchwork realm centered on the modern American city of San Francisco, 

To live in or even just visit San Francisco, a hominid must either sign the covenant, or be a dependent of some guardian who has signed the covenant. I.e., your hominid must either be responsible, or have someone who is responsible for it. San Francisco is a city, not a zoo. The signer of the covenant, the responsible party, is the subject. 

In the covenant, the realm promises to protect the subject’s person, property and dependents. It indemnifies the subject against crime, and pays unrecoverable torto claims. There is no such thing a perfect security, and bad things can happen to anyone anywhere, but Friscorp considers all disturbances of the peace to be its problem and its fault. 

And most important, Friscorp guarantees your right to depart from the city with person, property, and dependents, unless of course you are fleeing legal proceedings. (and maybe even if you are – of course, you would have to find another patch willing to take you.)

In return, the subject promises not to disturb the peace of San Francisco, or permit his or her dependents to do so. (I favor the ancient Roman design, in which the guardian is responsible for the actions of his dependents, and holds the authority of patria potestas over them. Authority and responsibility, as usual, being unified. Not quite a fractal or hierarchical sovereignty, but close. Friscorps has no business case for interfering in its subjects’ family lives.) 

Though Moldbug retreats from this fractal/hierarchical conception of sovereignty, we embrace it wholeheartedly. Property holders are to have absolute sovereignty over any dependent that might come to reside on their land, with the property holders accepting responsibility for the actions of their dependents within the realm. (Such an approach might prove a viable approach to solving the current illegal immigration crisis. Any immigrant who is able to find property holders able and willing to accept them as dependents, with the full realization that they will be held responsible for the actions of their dependent, can be allowed to stay, while all others must leave.) To prevent abuse, it is essential that the right of exit be extended also to dependents, who should be free to leave their current patrons so long as they are able to secure new patrons or property of their own. In the case of children, such policies might also help to solve the discipline problem that we saw Fisher lament a few essays back. And, indeed, it may be that it is impossible to ever completely move past propertarian sovereignty as children, being incapable of owning their own property, must always remain the subjects of their parents until such a time as they are capable of taking on the responsibility of property ownership for themselves.

At this point, I recognize that I am at risk of being accused of elitism or of advocating that mysterious and nebulous boogeyman that has been termed neo-feudalism. I will not deny that the picture I am painting has certain parallels with the traditional picture of feudalism, but so long as the model I am outlining has the potential of increasing the overall liberty of all people, I am not particularly concerned about such criticisms. As for the charge of elitism, I must admit my relationship with that term is complicated. In one sense, I am a radical populist, in that I genuinely want to realize a world in which all people are perfectly free and sovereign over their own lives. However, I am an elitist in that I believe that, in order for people to be entrusted with the full absolute liberty without it resulting in disaster, it is necessary that they have an appropriate character so as to exercise that liberty wisely. Thus, though our goal is to, in the long run, recognize absolute freedom in all people, we must take appropriate steps to prepare ourselves for such an eventuality. We will begin by focusing on three key areas that are crucial to making our vision a reality. One, that we will save for last, but which we will most certainly return to at an appropriate time is the subject of education reform. Though we can argue until we’re blue in the face over just how much influence nature has in comparison to nurture, it seems unlikely that nurture has no influence whatsoever and it would seem that we should do as much as we possibly can to help as many people as possible to acquire a nature fit for the exercise of sovereign freedom. For that reason, we must consider how best to educate people in such a way to prepare them to be fit to exercise their liberty responsibly. A second crucial area is technology. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence and robot technology seem increasingly poised to revolutionize nearly every aspect of our lives in the near future. The landscape is changing rapidly and my own understanding and thought on the matter has evolved nearly as rapidly since I first considered writing this series of essays. There is no telling how things will change once we finally tackle the problem. For now, we will be satisfied with cliche; this technology could make things far better or profoundly worse, but it carries with it tremendous potential to help along the vision we have pointed to and we will try to explore the various ways in which this might be achieved, as well as various ways it could go wrong. 

Finally, perhaps the most pressing area of concern, the one that we shall turn our attention to first is the issue of debt. If the recent falling out between the President of the United States and the richest man in the world is any indication, the matter of debt is one of the defining issues of our time. We, at present, face not only a public debt crisis, but a private one which jeopardizes the very prospect of home ownership on which our vision of individual sovereignty is to be built. These circumstances are the fruits of a financial system corrupt and rotten to its core, built on irresponsibility and deceit, that, over the last century, has defrauded and deceived the people for its own profit time and again. It is a somewhat dry and complicated story, requiring at least a basic economic sense to understand, but once the average person understands what has been done to them, they are almost certain to be furious. They are also almost certain to get on board with a solution that serves to improve their own standing. Land and Moldbug are both, with good reason, sceptical of populist currents and careful to distance themselves from them. But no one can deny that there is immense, raw power in populist movements. If only that power could be directed at the correct targets in the correct ways, it could do amazing, otherwise unthinkable things. For that reason, I think it is well worth trying to tell this story of financial malfeasance in a way that the average person will be able to comprehend as well as to suggest an appropriate resolution to this situation that will be agreeable to all, especially the average person. And this is precisely what we will do in our next essay.