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You’ve seen the open letters. “Tax me more,” they say. Billionaires at Davos standing with hands over their hearts, pleading with governments to take more of their money. How noble.

Here’s what you won’t find: extra canceled checks at the US Treasury.

The federal government accepts voluntary donations and has done so for over a century. That means billionaires can pay more any time they want.

But virtually none of them does.

Economists have a name for this gap between words and deeds. They call it revealed preference. The idea is simple: what you actually do reveals what you actually want. Everything else is noise.

We already know this. Our grandmothers used to say, “Actions speak louder than words.” Which brings us to a vital lesson:

Pay more attention to what people do than what they say.

Wait, that’s the easy part. What’s harder is:

Pay more attention to what you do than what you say.

Doing Good

Most of Western ethics is about thinking and talking. Trolley problems. Categorical imperatives. We’re meant to sit in an armchair and reason our way to the right and the good, and somehow we fancy ourselves as moral by having correct moral opinions.

But nobody becomes a musician by having opinions about music. Nobody learns to defend himself by commenting on combat. You have to practice. Whether in music or martial arts, you stink at first, then you stink a little less, and a little less still until you get proficient.

Virtue works the same way.

It’s not a conclusion you reach after stacking premises. It’s what you do, over and over, until it becomes who you are.

Practice over Politics

Now, too many people have forgotten this. So, what happens when we forget? What happens when we fail to practice integrity? Nonviolence? Or compassion? Too many people turn to politics.

Yet politics is just war by other means. And war runs on the logic of domination: If the other side doesn’t vote right, think right, or act right, we’ll force them to when we win the next election. That’s the rationale, at least, and it’s messed up. Sure, ballots are better than bullets, but that’s about all democracy has going for it. Otherwise, we get a lot of activism.

Yet activism is empty. It’s just agitation and outsourcing. Some team has decided how everyone else should live, shipping your values off to some distant capital. The project is to force everyone else to obey so that we all live by the One True Way.

That’s projection, not practice.

The opposite of activism is virtue. And virtue requires insourcing—assuming personal responsibility and then collaboration. Start with the one person whose behavior you actually control, and do something other people can feel.

Now. One approach invites enemies. The other invites collaborators. You can tell which mindset you’re in by asking yourself a single question: Am I hellbent on changing others, or am I trying to be the change?

The World Needs Repair

The old rabbis had a word for the second path. Tikkun. It means repairing what’s broken. The point of tikkun isn’t to win or to dominate. Instead, we set about mending things—ourselves first, then the world around us—bit by bit in whom we help, what we do, and what we leave behind. Repair lies in the harmonization of difference.

The old rabbis taught that the cosmos was shattered into different shards. But each of us preserves a divine spark, and we are tasked with putting together the shards. The goal is not to create a perfect whole, but instead to bring diversity and unity into balance.

E pluribus unum. Ex uno plures. From the many, one. Out of one, many.

Even if the old rabbis were just making myths, living a life of tikkun creates meaning and, hopefully, leaves the world better than we found it.

Making Waves

Here’s something we shouldn’t forget.

Our human default is mimicry. We copy each other unconsciously, whether we want to admit it or not. That means our habits are contagious. But then again, so are our excuses, our complaints, and our victim complexes. That means we have to stay sensitive—both to what we are mimicking in others, and what people might mimic in us.

The change you want to see isn’t something you argue people into. It’s something you become. Others will experience your being and becoming like ripples on the surface of a pond. When you practice virtue, those around you are more likely to practice virtue, too.

So, be the person worth copying. Create waves that others can feel. And be sure to copy the wise and virtuous.

Eventually, we’ll do it together.

Because the more we become the change we want to see, the better the world will get.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

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“Freedom is good for design,” wrote a man who knows what it means to be unfree.

Adrian Bejan grew up in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu—a regime that believed it could plan a society as an engineer bolts together a machine. Every factory, farm, and loaf of bread was dictated from the center.

The plan was total. The plan was correct. The plan was, in Le Corbusier’s chilling phrase, “the despot.”

Bejan got out. A scholarship took him to MIT, where he trained as a mechanical engineer, the discipline of heat and motion and machines.

But he carried something the regime never managed to train out of him: a suspicion that living things are not meant to be planned.

In 1989, the Romanian people brought Ceaușescu down. A few years later, on a flight home from a physics conference in France, the idea that had been circling Bejan’s mind for years finally landed.

He had found a law. And once you see it, you’ll see it everywhere.

The Penny Drops

The conference featured Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel laureate who studied the branching, forking structures that nature seems to display everywhere. Prigogine’s verdict on those patterns was, essentially, this: It’s a coincidence. Just the beautiful shape of randomness.

But that answer gnawed at Adrian Bejan. On his return flight somewhere over the Atlantic, he formulated the alternative—what he would eventually call the constructal law.

It goes like this:

"For a finite-size flow system to persist in time—to live—its configuration must evolve to provide easier access to the currents that flow through it."

Sit with that if you can, because those 26 words do a LOT of work.

Bejan is claiming that life’s configurations are no mere decorations. They’re solutions. Anything in the universe that involves movement—water, blood, heat, goods, people, or ideas—will, if free to change, evolve toward a design that moves that thing more readily.

Its ubiquity makes it look like a physical law. And the tell-tale fingerprint of such a law is a pattern we already recognize. Bejan calls it vascularization. A few large channels, feeding many small ones.

Few large, many small.

Pattern of Patterns

Let’s look through this lens together. What do we see? A river basin is a great body of water, fed by smaller rivers, fed by tributaries, fed by streams, fed by brooks high in the mountains….

Few large, many small.

Likewise, a tree is. One truck, then limbs, then branches, then the fine spray of twigs and vein-laden leaves reaching for light. The tree’s roots stabilize it and help it absorb nutrients and water.

Again: Few large, many small.

Now your body. One pumping heart. Great arteries. Then vessels, then the near-infinite lace of capillaries that touch every single cell that composes you. Your lungs are vascularized. Your brain is a vasculature of neurons. You are, at this moment, a flow system—and every branch exists to give some current easier access.

Okay good. We get it. The Law of Flow shows up in biological systems. But the rest of the world is different, right? Think of a city. Amid the structures are highways, then arterial roads—we literally call them arteries—then streets, then alleys and driveways. The urban vasculature grew because that’s the form that lets people and goods flow. And that’s what makes a city alive.

But here’s the thing: The river, the tree, the human cardiovascular system, and the city… These aren’t metaphors for one another. They are instantiations of the same phenomenon—the Law of Flow.

Now that you’ve peered through this lens, you’ll see myriad flow systems on your next morning walk. Perhaps in the frost on your window, or the cracks spreading across drying mud, or in the lightning that forks across the Summer sky. The living universe has a favorite form, and it is drawing it constantly, before our very eyes.

More Than a Pretty Picture

Now, a pattern is charming. But a law is dangerous. A law lets you explain, predict, and question those in charge.

And Bejan’s constructal law quietly invites three giants of theory to sit at the same table.

First, Darwin. It gives evolution a direction. I know. That sounds like heresy. Standard evolutionary theory says organisms adapt via natural and sexual selection, but it stays silent on where anything is heading. Bejan says: flow systems evolve toward ever-greater flow access.

Second, Mandelbrot. It offers a physical explanation for what had been beautiful geometry. The fractal patterns Mandelbrot mapped—those endlessly branching forms—aren’t random after all. They branch because branching is how you move a current from one point to an entire volume with the least resistance. The math has a motive.

The Invisible Hand That Shapes

For 250 years, defenders of free and open markets have leaned on beautiful but slippery ideas. Smith’s invisible hand is the idea that voluntary exchange allows people pursuing their own ends to coordinate their activities in ways that often benefit society as a whole. Then, Hayek’s spontaneous order is the insight that an economy is a vast decentralized discovery process that no central planner could ever plan or compute.

These insights are important, but they’ve always sounded a little like, trust us, this is how it works.

Bejan adds something. He says that a free economy is a flow system—a vascular network moving goods, capital, labor, and information. And like every flow system, it evolves its own vascular system when it’s free to morph. Large firms, medium firms, a teeming multitude of small ones. Again: Few large, many small. The same pattern as that in the natural world.

That means the invisible hand isn’t mystical so much as metaphorical. Smith’s hand self-organizes vascular networks—just as your body does.

And how does the central planner react? The planner looks at that vasculature—its inequality and its messiness—and tries to “fix” it. Maybe he tries to flatten it or to redirect the flows according to his idea of the well-ordered society.

But Bejan’s Law of Flow comes with a warning: When you clamp a vessel, you don’t improve circulation. When you dam every stream to make the flow “fairer,” you don’t get a fairer river basin. You get a swamp. Economic Interventionists constrict, distort, and strangle the very flows that keep the system alive — because its life depends on that vascularization. Ceaușescu tried to do better. As did the Soviets, the Maoists, and the Peronists.

All failed.

“Freedom,” Bejan writes, “is good for design.” Turns out economic freedom is not a slogan, so much as an engineering requirement. Living systems need freedom to morph, or they die.

The Taoist in the Lab

Writer Ephrat Livni once described Adrian Bejan as “an accidental Taoist.” That’s because two and a half thousand years before Bejan roamed the campus at Duke University, the Tao Te Ching anticipated him: Laozi said to be like water—to flow with the currents, not against them.

Resistance blocks growth. Accommodation is life.

The philosopher said it in poetry. The engineer said it in physics. And they arrived at the same truth: The living thing is the flowing thing. To live is to keep the currents open—whether in a river, a market, a body, or a soul.

So here is your new lens. Walk out into the world and look for the branches. The rivers and the roads. The arteries under the pavement and the arteries under your skin. Ask of every system you meet: Is this design letting the current flow, or is it blocking something vital? Because the moment a system can no longer accommodate the flow—that’s the moment it starts to die.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org

Have you ever been to the doctor’s office and thought they were doing more harm than good?

In 1847, a Viennese doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something that should have been impossible.

At Vienna General Hospital, there were two maternity clinics. One was staffed by midwives. The other by doctors and medical students—the best-trained men in Europe. But in the doctors’ clinic, mothers were dying of childbed fever at nearly ten times the rate of the midwives’ clinic.

The experts were the problem.

Semmelweis figured out why. His students were walking straight from the autopsy room to the maternity ward. They were going from corpses to examining pregnant ladies without washing their hands.

So, as a lead physician, Semmelweis made handwashing mandatory. Mortality collapsed from eighteen percent to under two.

The Greeks have a word for this: iatrogenesis—illness that originates with the healer.

Despite the breakthrough, his colleagues mocked and marginalized Semmelweis, and he died in an asylum—ironically of sepsis. It took the medical establishment decades to admit what he’d proven with a bucket of chlorinated lime: Sometimes the people sworn to heal you are the ones making you sick.

Now, keep that in mind. Because I want to argue that iatrogenesis has escaped the hospital. It has infected our politics, our institutions, and our national character.

Those purporting to help are making us worse off.

Bad Therapy

Start with therapy.

In her book Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier makes an uncomfortable case: a lot of contemporary psychotherapy doesn’t heal people, so much as it recruits them. This is especially true for young people who make perfect repeat customers. They return, become dependent, and are forever “processing” their traumas—or whatever.

The modern therapeutic industry keeps clients dredging up the past, reopening wounds that had scabbed over, and hunting for external villains or systems to blame for everything that makes us feel bad. Session after session. Year after year. (Cha-ching!) On it goes.

And what has this produced? A generation with paper-thin skin, no resilience, and no internal locus of control. Young people are being trained to believe that the source of their suffering is always somewhere out there—and so the solution must be too.

That’s iatrogenesis. The therapist, with unclean hands, probes their psyches.

Too many lack the strength, fortitude, and coping mechanisms that adulthood demands.

But let’s zoom out now. Because what Shrier documents in the clinics and schools, we can see everywhere.

The Therapeutic State

Back in the sixties, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz coined a term: the “Therapeutic State.” Admittedly, I’ve never been Szasz’s biggest fan. But part of his diagnosis holds up. A Therapeutic State is a society where the government manages its people the way a bad therapist manages a client.

In other words, social problems get medicalized. Moral questions become psychological ones. Personal responsibility dissolves into diagnosis. And the state grows its power—not with tanks and Tommy guns, but with clipboards and case files, always in the name of some group’s well-being.

Send in the social workers! The social controllers wear lab coats. Dissent becomes pathology (gaslighting). Struggles become syndromes or systemic this, or structural that. And every syndrome requires a program, a budget, and an agency.

Now extend Szasz through Shrier, and you get what I call the Iatrogenic State.

In other words, just as bad therapy makes patients sicker, the therapeutic approach to governance makes citizens weak and dependent. If every social problem gets treated as a collective trauma, then every trauma requires state intervention. If every state intervention creates more dependence, that condition justifies the next intervention.

Government officials don’t just fail to cure what ails us. The state and its proxies become the disease vector.

Mommy and Daddy Parties

So who runs the Iatrogenic State?

Look at our two parties, and you’ll see two archetypes—each one a natural instinct pushed to a pathological extreme.

The Democrats have become the Mommy Party. The Republicans, the Daddy Party. And in their unhealthy forms, Jungians have names, too: the Devouring Mother and the Tyrannical Father.

The Devouring Mother loves her children so much she consumes them. She can’t let them separate, can’t let them take risks, and can’t let them grow. She seeks to control them through guilt, enmeshment, and the soft smothering of victimhood narrative and savior complex.

Meanwhile, the Tyrannical Father rules through fear. Rigid. Punitive. He seeks to crush autonomy in the name of keeping order and calls his demands for conformity discipline.

Now translate all this to politics.

The Devouring Mommy Party infantilizes half the country and casts them as perpetual victims. Guilt campaigns. Shame rituals. DARVO. And an endless empire of programs designed to manage and coddle their timid voting herds. They wave their carrots and conceal their sticks. The Mommy Party’s mantra is: Send in the social workers.

The Tyrannical Daddy Party overcorrects. It’s all force and no reflection. Punishment is their first resort. So they prefer to use sticks but use carrots grudgingly. The Daddy Party’s mantra is: Send in the cops.

And We the People?

We’re treated as children in a custody battle between two unfit parents, whiplashed from one shitty administration to the next every four years.

Now, here’s a weird twist: These archetypes borrow each other’s weapons.

The Mommy Party keeps its legion of counselors and civil servants out front as moral cover, then sends armed men to do their dirty work—think entrapment operations, political roundups, and tax agents. And the Daddy Party? For all its contempt for therapy-speak, it’s happy to seize the therapeutic machinery once it’s built—say, by treating pornography as a “public health emergency” or suggesting we institutionalize homeless people. How about the current health secretary suggesting the state “reparent” Americans on wellness farms?

All of which brings us to a warning.

But first, I’ll admit it: I sometimes think this moment calls for more muscular actions to correct years of mollycoddling and managed decline.

I also realize that every lever of emergency power the Daddy Party introduces, it leaves for the Mommy Party. And the Devouring Mothers who pick it up next won’t be gentle nurturers. They’ll be Nurse Ratched with a grudge.

Foolish tyrants and mean mommies build the weapons their enemies will inherit. The pendulum swings back. And tit meets tat.

If muscular government has any excuse to exist right now, its one legitimate target is itself—that is, permanent institutional reform.

The Mirage

At this point, some of you are picturing a solution. Maybe a leader—someone who balances masculine strength with feminine care. Someone who sheds the strongman vulgarity of this administration and the doddering flaccidity of the last. Maybe this someone makes you proud when they walk up to the podium.

But I have five words for you: The presidency is a mirage.

We’ve had the soaring orators, and they turned out to be snakes—servants of the managerial regime surrounded by good speechwriters. The search for the perfect parent-in-chief is a symptom of the Iatrogenic State—that therapeutic mindset aimed at the White House. Someone out there will fix society for us.

Sorry. There is no salvation on a ballot.

As long as we keep outsourcing our agency to Washington, we remain patients in the iatrogenic ward, waiting for a heroic figure to make his or her rounds. But healing starts when we walk past the therapists, right up to the mirror, and then right up to our neighbors.

The Agentic Society

So what replaces the Iatrogenic State?

I call it the Agentic Society. In this society, a healing person restores her internal locus of control. She stops looking around for villains and starts practicing virtues and making stuff happen. A healing people does the same thing at scale.

That means we need new archetypes. Not the Devouring Mother and the Tyrannical Father, but the Samaritan and the Steward. The Caregiver and the Mentor. The Educator and the Entrepreneur. And if you catch a glimpse of Mom and Dad in those figures—healthy this time—so be it.

It means a structural swap: government by imposition gives way to governance by agreement—that is, consent, contract, and community. Neighbors helping neighbors, not because a program mandates it, but because that’s what neighbors do.

Decentralization means the new gravitational center is local. That is, proximate, voluntary institutions replace the wild swings of the national political pendulum.

Tocqueville saw this in Americans two centuries ago. We were a people who formed an association before breakfast to start solving a problem by lunch. Yet those muscles have atrophied. Politics swallowed civil society, and TikTok activism replaced critical thinking.

Still, atrophy is not amputation.

Even as the sociopaths in Washington are sure to keep draining us through debt and taxation—engineering our dependence; billing us for our own sedation—we can start to work those communitarian muscles again.

Semmelweis couldn’t get the doctors in Vienna to wash their hands because doing so would mean admitting they were the disease vectors. The medical establishment chose its pride over its people, so all Semmelweis’s gains were lost. Our political establishment faces the same choice, and it too will choose pride over the people. The Iatrogenic State will never diagnose itself, which means we have to wash our hands of it.

So, what does that mean to you and me?

Every minute we pull out of politics and pour into our block, our congregation, our kids, and our craft—is an improvement that will add up. And every dollar redirected from the architecture of oppression to the contours of agreement? That’s how we heal society.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org

Here’s an important question to sit with: When government power and corporate power fuse into a single control structure, what’s left for the rest of us?

Most people try to answer with politics: Vote harder. Protest louder. Or wait for that “constitutional moment” that never comes.

I want to offer you a different answer. It’s called subversive innovation, and it might be the most underrated force for human freedom on the planet.

Subversive innovation runs on a simple, three-part formula:

One: Lower transaction costs. In other words, make it cheaper for people to cooperate directly with each other.

Two: Raise predation costs. That means, make it expensive for anyone to prey on us, whether governments or criminals.

Three: Reduce switching costs. That is, make it easier to walk away from systems that fail you.

That’s it. Three approaches. But the devil, of course, is in the details.

So let’s make this a little more concrete.

One Big Example

Ever heard of Bitcoin? It’s a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. It’s not perfect. But it’s a good example of subversive innovation. Set all that aside for a moment, though, because that’s not the only interesting bit.

What’s interesting is that Bitcoin is a moral teacher.

Think about what actually happened. Thousands of people collaborated to build and defend a global monetary network with no CEO, no president, and no master. Nobody gave them permission, because nobody could. It was developed peacefully in freedom.

Now, run Bitcoin through the subversive innovation formula… Transaction costs? Bitcoin cut out the parasitic gatekeepers who have put a toll on every financial transaction for centuries. Predation costs? It uses cryptography to raise the price of theft and manipulation to prohibitive levels. Switching costs? For the first time in living memory, ordinary people have a real exit from fiat money.

Bitcoin also planted a flag on the battlefield against unjust authority. It took a phrase we recite but rarely practice—“the consent of the governed”—and turned it into running code.

The Ecosystem

And it inspired thousands of successors, an entire ecosystem in constant churn. The ecosystem now includes self-sovereign identity, so you become the steward of your own data instead of a product harvested by rentiers. Or what about mesh networks, which decentralize the very architecture of the internet, liberating information from ISP conglomerates and authoritarian overseers?

Each of these is a subversive innovation. Each shifts power away from the tower and toward the tapestry—that is, away from power hierarchies toward lateral relationships among sovereign individuals.

I’ve said elsewhere that if underthrow is the end, subversive innovation is the means. Here’s the Aesop image I keep returning to: We’re in the transition from fearing the bear to empowering the bees.

The bear is big, singular, and dominant. The bees are small, numerous, and coordinated by something the bear can’t comprehend. The bear can raid one hive, but he can’t fight the swarm forever. Subversive innovators ask: How can We the Remnant start to function more like a swarm?

The Dark Twin

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before we get carried away, a warning… Every technology that opens a path to self-sovereignty has a shadow. Call it oppressive innovation. It might be the same technological substrate, but different innovators behind the scenes.

Oppressive innovation inverts the formula. It raises the cost of cooperation and lowers the cost of predation. Think surveillance architectures. Or programmable money like a CBDC that answers to the issuer rather than the holder. What about digital chokepoints—like this—on speech and commerce?

Make no mistake: state and corporate actors are building these systems right now—not to lighten your subjugation but to deepen it. So we can be neither naive nor complacent. The race is real, and it is running right now. Will we be caught flat-footed while the powerful build a digital cage for us right here on the starting line?

Betting on the Bees

Here’s why I remain cautiously optimistic: Steven Pinker’s research in The Better Angels of Our Nature points to something remarkable—Violence and predation as strategies for acquiring resources have trended downward over the centuries. That’s no accident. Better political organization and more widely distributed productive means make war less attractive. They also make political shenanigans—war by other means—less attractive, too.

Picture humanity as a bell curve, with SOCIOPATHIC at one tail, COLLABORATIVE at the other. Most of us are clustered in the peaceable middle. If Pinker is right, that whole curve has been drifting—with occasional lurches, fits and starts—away from the SOCIOPATHIC tail.

Subversive innovation is how we keep that improvement going. But notice, it’s not just about technology. It includes institutional innovations—that is, new ways to enshrine individual rights, to protect property, and apply common law so that people bear more of the costs they would rather impose on others.

In any case, markets and moral practice—applied over and over—mute the lesser angels of our natures.

This is also why the old theoretical debates about ideal end states amount to dormroom debates. We want to keep our north star, but stay nimble. The world changes too fast for academic arguments that persuade too few, and the perfect constitutional moment never seems to come. While theorists debate ideal endpoints, builders are busy shifting the curve.

Swarm Order

So here’s the charge.

If we cherish self-sovereignty, self-organization, and self-government—we have a duty. Not to win the next election, nor to settle the next debate. Our duty is to build systems that move the human curve toward free collaboration, away from centralized sociopathy.

Our duty is to move directionally toward ways of making peace more profitable and predation more expensive.

Every crypto wallet, every mesh node, every self-sovereign identity whose reputation we hold in our hands is a kind of vote that gets counted whether or not any authority tallies it.

So, let’s arm the bees, bring down the bear, and build the post-political world. Indeed, let’s think harder about what kind of world our kids should inherit. And then go make it.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Greetings, young Socialists. I realize you probably racked up a lot of student loan debt getting to the point you wanna support the DSA. And who doesn’t like getting free stuff? Trouble is, free stuff starts running out. For example, on New Year’s Eve 1988, I got to visit East Berlin. It wasn’t pretty. And in 1989, I saw the wall come down on the evening news. So—at no charge to you—let me offer you some information you probably weren’t given in college.

Start with this: The average American is likely to be wealthier than 95 percent of people on earth, and America is a mixed economy. And this prosperity didn’t arrive by chance. It arrived thanks to millions of strangers coordinating without ever meeting—through firms, corporations, investors, supply chains, workers, and the price system. We eat because a network of people we’ll never meet, or get to thank, has organized complex industries around feeding us. A mature economic philosophy starts with the recognition of such dynamics—not with grievances, not with envy, and certainly not with just-so stories.

No, that’d be Marxism.

It starts with entitlement dressed up as analysis. Marx thought that the whole market system was based on theft, but turned right around and used his theory to justify institutionalized stealing. Just so you know, if that’s your starting point, it ain’t gonna work. You need more net producers than net consumers.

The Central Claim

Marxists are fond of saying true socialism has never been tried. Even less doctrinaire folks are fond of saying that Marxism sounds great in theory, but fails in practice. The truth is, Marxism fails in both theory and practice. It fails in theory, because its core doctrines rest on mistaken premises about economics and human nature. It fails in practice, because every attempt to implement it produces the opposite of what it promises. It fails on both counts because if your economy is going to have more Makers than Takers, either the Makers get rewarded for their effort and risk-taking, or you’ll have to enslave people. (That’s right: slavery.) Any system that requires slavery sucks.

Eight Failures of Marxism

Remember, Marx taught that socialism is the stage before communism. So, here are eight failures of Marxism that matter.

1. The Labor Theory of Value

Marx claimed a good’s value comes from the labor used to produce it. But value isn’t poured into a good. It’s assigned by the person who wants the thing. For example, two shirts might have the exact same labor inputs, but one shirt has a picture of Che Guevara and another a picture of Milton Friedman. Ironically, more people are willing to pay more money for Che Guevara shirts than Milton Friedman shirts. That’s because value is subjective. Marx thought value is objective, so thought wrong.

Market Entrepreneurship is the discipline of guessing what people will want. Profit is what happens when that guess is right, and one sells a unit for more than what it cost to produce. Profit is a reward for that correct anticipation, not the confiscation of somebody’s labor.

2. Alienation

Marx watched factory workers repeat the same motion all day and thought it dehumanizing. He wasn’t wrong about the boredom and the hard labor. He was wrong about the tradeoff. Pre-industrial labor was just as boring and backbreaking for the most part.

Specialization is the reason a single farmer today feeds hundreds of people instead of four. Every economic arrangement trades one thing for another. For example, entrepreneurs risk time and capital that workers don’t. But if workers genuinely prefer cooperative ownership, nothing stops them from forming one—since worker co-ops are legal and already exist. But they have to compete for customers like anyone else. So America doesn’t ban Marx’s alternative. It just refuses to mandate it.

3. Exploitation

Strip away the labor theory of value, and the charge of exploitation collapses with it. An employer offering a wage and a worker accepting it is not a hostage situation. It’s a trade both sides prefer to the alternative of no trade at all.

Labor markets are thus no conspiracy against the working class. They’re what happens when millions of individual decisions about time, skill, and payment are made in an economy with many alternatives, where prices are set mainly by labor supply and demand.

4. Abolition of Private Property

If you take away ownership, you take away the reason—and the incentive—to be a good steward of property. Nobody repaints a rental they’re about to abandon. No one invests in building a new apartment building if the city is going to freeze rents. Multiply that logic across an entire economy, and you get exactly what history delivered with socialism: collectivized farms that starved, state factories that rotted out, common land that nobody protected because everybody owned it, so nobody did.

5. Abolition of Market Prices

Prices aren’t a symptom of capitalism. They’re a decentralized information service—the only one humanity has ever built that tells millions of strangers, simultaneously, what’s scarce, what’s abundant, and whether the incentive is strong enough for any given person to buy.

Kill the price system, and you don’t get equality. You get commissars guessing how much of some good a nation needs, or guessing wrong in both directions at once: shortages of what people want, like Soviet bread, or mountains of what they don’t, like Soviet shoes.

6. Historical Materialism

Marx reduced history to a single metanarrative: class conflict. But geography carved the trade routes. Culture shaped what people were willing to sacrifice for. Technology rewrote what was possible. Marx’s predictions about capitalism’s inevitable collapse have been repeatedly postponed for over a century, which is what happens when a theory is meant to explain everything but is unfalsifiable.

7. Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Every promised “temporary” dictatorship in the Marxist tradition became a permanent bureaucracy. Why? Because authorities with the power to seize resources never develop a desire to give power back. Communism doesn’t run on consent, after all. It runs on compulsion—indefinitely. That’s because the moment the compulsion stops, people either leave or start producing and trading. And as we suggested, private property rights are preconditions of widespread production and trade.

8. Human Nature

Marx believed man could be remade—so under different conditions, self-interest would dissolve into solidarity. Every regime that tried to accelerate that transformation ended up sending good people off to the Gulags. If you need force to make the Socialist Man and Woman, your system ain’t gonna work for very long.

Lasting institutions are the ones built for humans as they are—not how we wish them to be. Regimes that assume they can remake human beings tend to stack up bodies. The Black Book of Communism estimates 100 million people died under communist regimes. If your response to that is that real communism hasn’t been tried, I think we’d want to know how many more deaths are acceptable to figure it out.

Evolution Over Revolution

Here’s the alternative to the warmed-over Marxism that is animating the Democratic Socialists: Let ideas compete in niches. Markets already run on this principle: constant feedback through profit and loss, a verdict rendered daily instead of promised for some future decade. Undistorted markets are the ultimate accountability loops.

If communal ownership, worker cooperatives, or any alternative to various corporate forms in most markets actually deliver on their promises, you don’t need a revolution to prove it. People will just migrate to the better system. The new system needs a chance to compete at a smaller scale. Different people need the freedom to try it or something else—on their own terms.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

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I would like to thank you, dedicated readers, for the feedback on Accountability Loops. Given your encouragement, I think Underthrow show listeners could use a dose. -MB

My deddy used to say that the 11th Commandment is “Thou shalt have air conditioning.”

When your thermostat is in good order, it reads the room, checks the target, and acts to close the temperature gap. Output bends back into input. The system corrects itself because the news of how it’s doing reaches the part that can do something about it.

That’s a feedback loop.

Hold on to the idea, because the most important versions of it are almost as important as air conditioning.

Call it an accountability loop. The defining feature is this: a person responsible for an outcome should feel consequences of that outcome. Do well, good things follow. Fail, and the failure lands on you. The signal returns to its source.

Now let’s flip that rationale. An accountability void is a seat where someone wields real power over other people’s lives but stays insulated from consequences. So, decisions flow outward, but consequences never flow back to the decider.

So here’s my thesis:

Too many of our positions and offices sit in accountability voids. Far too few live inside accountability loops. And almost everything that is broken about our society traces back to that glaring asymmetry.

The Declaration

This year, America marks 250 years since a handful of learned colonists put the same complaint on paper. I mean, Jefferson didn’t refer to accountability loops, but the idea is there.

We remember the Declaration as a birth announcement, but it was closer to a performance review. You can go back and read the middle bit—the long list of grievances—and you will find a catalog of accountability voids. A tyrant has erected a multitude of new offices. He has sent swarms of officers to harass the people. A distant power has wielded too much authority over lives it never really had to answer to.

The Declaration’s remedy includes the most basic accountability loop there is. When a government becomes destructive of the people’s rights, the people have the right to alter or abolish it. When the government becomes destructive of people’s safety and happiness, the people have a right to alter or abolish it. That’s not purple prose. That’s a people declaring they have the power to walk away from a governance services provider who has stopped delivering the goods.

Two and a half centuries on, the question is whether we rebuilt the very thing the Founders revolted against—only worse—without accountability loops.

The Unaccountable Class

Look at who runs things now. Bureaucrats, managers, academics, media figures, institutional elites. They set the rules, steer the discourse, direct enormous resources. And when they’re catastrophically wrong, they’re usually still in the room a year later. Sometimes they get promoted!

Now look at who actually meets reality. The entrepreneur. The tradesman. The owner of the restaurant down the street. A bad menu or nasty meal can empty a dining room. A bad build loses the next contract. A founder who misreads the market eventually runs out of money. The feedback is direct, quick, and it has his name on it.

Nassim Taleb called it skin in the game. The Roman engineer slept under his own arch, but the economist who designs a healthcare policy pays nothing when it fails.

The great gap between performance and reward infects our centers of power. Trust collapses. An aloof technocracy sits atop a parade of policy disasters for which no one is ever to blame. We built a managerial regime by handing problem after problem to new agencies, new experts, new networks—until governance failures were out of our reach. And the swarms of officers returned under a different label.

Economists call this a principal-agent problem, which just means it’s really hard to get someone to act in your interest when betraying that interest costs him nothing. What we call incompetence is often just an unclosed loop.

Anatomy of a Loop

So if we want to fix it, we have to know exactly what an intact loop looks like.

An agent commits to a mission and to the objectives that serve that mission. The agent enters into a binding agreement: I will do X in exchange for Y.

If he delivers X, he will receive Y. Fail at X, and he will receive less, or he may be asked to vacate the position. The seat was conditioned on X from the very start.

That last part is what we routinely forget about in politics. In fact, politicians are in the business of punishing those who succeed at closing accountability loops and rewarding those who fail, over and over again.

So this is worth carving into every column and above every office door in Washington:

If failure cannot cost you your seat, you are not accountable. You are merely employed.

The Simplest Loop

The oldest way to ensure accountability is also the most reliable. A client and a vendor. One party judges by their own satisfaction—and keeps the power to walk away.

Hirschman saw it: exit is sharper than voice. Complaining to your provider is weak next to the credible threat of taking your business elsewhere. The vendor who stops delivering loses you, the client. Simple. Honest. And brutal.

The American Founders reached for a similar instrument. The people would tolerate governance providers if there were real consent—a real path for dissatisfaction to reach the people responsible, change their behavior, or send them packing.

Renewal

Okay, so here’s the punchline:

If I had to identify one way to renew an entire civilization, it would be tighter accountability loops.

Look at everything. Every office. Every institution. Every seat of power. And ask one question:

When this fails—who feels it?

If the answer is no one who decided, you’ve found a void.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a few rabble-rousers found some accountability voids, listed them, and signed their names to it.

For our anniversary, the question we should really be asking is whether this generation has the courage to insist on accountability loops in everything.

Because remember:

Where there is no accountability, there is power. The power to act with impunity.

I’m Max Borders.

Let’s criticize by creating.

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--

Imagine. A group of explorers finds an island no one has ever settled.

They share a peculiar passion. They love a certain kind of game. They call it Cooperation—the art of working together, as effectively as possible, for mutual gain. So they plant a flag on the island. They name the place Coopertopia. And they send out a call: Come build with us.

Others like them answer.

Thirty years pass. A million souls now call the island home. The civilization hums. The people are happy. By every measure that matters, it works.

Then the world notices.

And the world starts moving in, arriving on boats.

Who’s arriving? Migrants from the developing world—places poorer, harsher, less free. And they bring a different game. It’s not Cooperation. It’s Domination.

So, call them the Dominators. But understand—they aren’t all the same. Some are Economic Dominators. To them, private property is unjust. Every resource should be seized and divided equally, by force if necessary.

Others are Religious Dominators. To them, peace arrives only when every human submits to the One True Faith. Theirs. Without exception.

So, different dominator doctrines, but the same instinct: Rule, or be ruled.

Now, the Cooperators are a liberal people. Tolerant. Open-minded and willing to extend a hand. But here’s the bitter irony: the Dominators are fleeing the very lands their own cultures built. Destitute lands. Failed lands. It’s why they left.

And far too many of them didn’t leave their culture or values behind. They packed their domination games and brought them on board.

The Cooperators could have said no, but they didn’t. They wanted to be tolerant and accepting, after all. “Let them settle. Let them stay. Surely they’ll see what we built. Surely they’ll want to play our game, too,” they thought.

Fast forward.

The Dominators have more babies. And more arrive—through trafficking syndicates, through chain migration, families sent for, then their families’ families.

Until one day the arithmetic flips. The Dominators outnumber the Cooperators.

Coopertopia never guarded its border. So, Coopertopia got dominated.

The civilization they dreamed of—then labored a lifetime to raise—falls. Crime increased. Prosperity cratered. The political system got subverted from within by a coalition of Economic Dominators and Religious Dominators. Today, the cooperation games are over.

The Economic Dominators want the Cooperators’ stuff. The Religious Dominators want their souls.

And the Cooperators?

They sit in the detritus and ask the only question left: “Where did we go wrong? How could anyone not see it? Didn’t they understand that peaceful cooperation was the whole point—the thing that made this place worth coming to in the first place?”

Apparently not.

A Dominator sees the world as a fixed pie—a zero-sum game. The only way up is to push someone else down. And from the hour they stepped ashore, that was the game they played—patiently, quietly, all the way to the top. The Cooperators kept waiting for them to come around.

They never did.

Now the Cooperators stare out at the horizon and wonder: “Is there another island out there? Undiscovered. Unsettled. A place to begin again?”

Maybe there is. And maybe, this time, they’ll put something important first. Because they’ll finally understand what it was for.

In any case… It’s too late for Coopertopia.

But it doesn’t have to be too late for us.

So what about now? What about the West?

Western countries are not exactly Coopertopia. They’re mixed, and so pretty mixed up. And currently, they are culturally and politically divided along fault lines that promise to fracture us even more.

Too many Americans are oikophobic, which means they hate their country and its story. Couple that fact with the deep, deep debts, and we have to consider the real possibility that we are in the process of breaking up.

Of course, we should endeavor to preserve our free polities. But if we were to divide into more separate and independent states, we would have to consider just what that would mean.

For example, if some US states were to organize into free polities while others organized into socialist societies, we would have to rethink and clarify our notions of borders, allegiances, and shared values.

We might even want to revive the idea of a social contract—only this time, it couldn’t be theoretical. It would be something you would sign or not. And each of us would have to adopt or reject the rights and responsibilities not just of citizenship, but of membership. Because you see, the Zohran Mamdanis of the world should never be permitted to hold that much power inside a free polity.

Indeed, if a polity is truly free, no one should be permitted to hold that much power.

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For human beings, there are only two means of getting others to do what we want: persuasion and compulsion. Persuasion is peaceful. Compulsion is not.

So, a principle surfaces:

Given that compulsion deprives others of happiness, we shall endeavor to use persuasion in all of our human relationships.

This is part of a philosophy developed by an entrepreneur named Chris Rufer. He calls it the Philosophy of Human Respect. And the really interesting thing is, he built a successful enterprise on that very philosophy.

In other words, Rufer understands that a thriving business, like a flourishing civilization, is ultimately built on cooperative relationships. Given that reality, he wanted to know: How can we reorganize society to better facilitate cooperative relationships?

A World Without Bosses

Compulsion, whether in threatening violence or holding someone’s job over his head, diminishes his agency, his sense of personal efficacy, and ultimately his happiness.

So, Rufer decided to build his business on three fundamental principles:

* First, don’t threaten;

* Then, honor your commitments.

* And finally, the mission—not the man—is the boss…

Sounds impossible, right? Well, consider that the Morning Star Packing Company produces the majority of tomato paste products in the United States. The facilities are massive, and Morning Star employs thousands of people.

Yet many businesses are NOT built that way. In fact, many businesses are built on command-and-control hierarchies that run counter to these principles. That is, most businesses run on different assumptions, namely: Threatening employees frightens them into compliance with the boss’s orders; The boss’s commands are far more important than the employee’s commitments to serve the mission, and the boss is the boss—the mission is just feel-good fluff they talk about at the company picnic.

Yet Rufer has proven his happiness hypothesis over and over again at Morning Star Packing Company. So, he wants to take it further. Rufer wants to know: Can we banish the threat to compel or coerce the innocent from all social life? Can we take free cooperation to a societal scale?

Okay, so I want to answer that question, not just by answering in the affirmative. I also want to talk about how such a crazy idea might work for society.

Subscription Government

For a lot of people, this crazy idea will sound crazier than the modern republic must have sounded to King George III. But bear with me. This podcast is dedicated to overcoming failures of imagination. In this case, the idea is called “panarchy,” which sounds weird. You won’t find that term in a Super Bowl ad. Instead, let’s call it “subscription government.”

In other words, what if, instead of registering with a political party, each adult subscribed to a governance association? Imagine also that there weren’t just two governance associations, but two hundred. All would be competing for your membership. This array of options would give Americans far more choices about how they live their lives, with whom they conduct their business, and what kind of contribution they want to make to their communities and to society.

It would also create tighter accountability loops for everything. Instead of fighting against those who would shove their way down yours and everyone else’s throats, you would join up with people who share your life philosophy. Then, any conflicts between governance associations would be settled in court.

Examples

Okay, this is still pretty abstract at this point. So let’s look at some examples. To keep things simple, let’s imagine the menu for bundled subscription services had only three items: Welfare, Justice, and Education.

Association A offers comprehensive social Welfare benefits, such as health coverage, unemployment insurance, and retirement. A’s Justice package covers legal protection in the event you are arrested or sued. And A’s Education component covers all member-children’s education benefits through college. Association A charges each member 10 percent of income, up to $150,000, then 15 percent for those earning more.

Association B emphasizes self-responsibility, personal ownership, and freedom of choice. B’s Welfare package provides catastrophic health coverage, health savings accounts, individual retirement funds, and unemployment savings plans supplemented by a voluntary mutual-aid network. B’s Justice package focuses on legal defense, property-rights protection, contract enforcement, and private arbitration services. And B’s Education component funds students rather than institutions. B charges based on an à la carte arrangement, but ends up being between 8-10 percent of income, with exceptions for low-income subscribers.

Monopolies Suck

Getting the idea?

In school, we learned that monopolies are bad for consumers. Higher costs, lower quality, and no alternatives. Governments are just monopolies with guns and jails. But competition, which includes the option to leave the association, creates tighter accountability loops.

Read more about accountability loops at Underthrow.org.

You also wouldn’t have to move out of state to avail of such services. Most of the federal government would become obsolete. States and local governments might continue to cover infrastructure, policing, and emergency services. Or, various region-specific governance associations would pop up to compete for your membership at the local level. Different associations offer different service bundles.

Skeptical?

If you’re still skeptical that entrepreneurship in governance services is possible, or think that government must be some monolithic ‘all things to all people,’ then why not just legalize Subscription Governance and see what happens? All it would take is making it easy for individuals to opt out of one system and into another.

Look, maybe I am crazy. Maybe the wildly successful Chris Rufer is, too. But at least Rufer has demonstrated that uncompelled cooperation based on colleagues’ commitments and accountabilities can scale beyond what anyone ever thought possible. If we agree that you threatening innocent people with violence to get your way is wrong, we have to consider that politicians threatening people to get their way are probably wrong, too. But if humanity had an opportunity to try subscription governance services, it might just work.

And it might just be the right thing to do.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

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Did you know that in developed countries, we have built the most educated, most liberated generation of women in human history? Yet women report being profoundly unhappy. Birth rates are collapsing.

Most educated men say they want equal partners, yet feel a crushing pressure to out-earn them. Most women hold high standards for a potential partner even as they support more gender parity in elite positions.

Nobody planned this. Nobody asked for it.

It is what happens when two forces pull in opposite directions, and we insist on pretending only one of them is real.

The Biological Substrate

Let’s start with what the data keeps showing, no matter how uncomfortable it makes anyone. Women tend toward hypergamy, meaning they tend to select partners of equal or higher social status. This is not a stereotype about modern women on TikTok. It is one of the most replicated findings in evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics.

Prof. David Buss’s cross-cultural research spanning dozens of societies has found that women consistently weigh a partner’s resources and social standing far more heavily than men do. Subsequent studies using speed dating, online matching platforms, and revealed-preference data have confirmed that the pattern holds even when women explicitly report otherwise.

The evolutionary logic is not hard to reconstruct.

For most of human history, a woman’s reproductive investment was asymmetrical, including gestation, nursing, and years of intensive care. A preference that weighed a partner’s provisioning and status was not cultural conditioning; it was a condition of survival. A preference built up over hundreds of thousands of years does not dissolve in a few decades of cultural or policy change. Let’s call this ‘the biological substrate.’ It doesn’t strictly determine behavior, but it shapes the gravitational field within which choices get made.

The Cultural Imperative

Now, let’s layer in the second force. Over the past fifty years, women have flooded into higher education and elite professions. In the United States, women now earn more bachelor’s and master’s degrees than men. Female median earnings have risen sharply relative to male earnings, and today, women occupy the majority of managerial positions in several industries.

This is not merely cultural change. It is a demographic transformation, and it has real downstream effects on how people meet and mate.

The Arithmetic

If hypergamy is a real and powerful tendency, and women are now the majority of the educated class, then mathematically, a growing number of highly educated women are looking for an even more accomplished partner, and finding a shrinking pool.

Sociologists and economists studying educational assortative mating have found that rising female educational attainment does not simply change labor markets. It also reshapes the dating and marriage market. Because people tend to partner with others of similar education levels, the growing number of highly educated women relative to highly educated men has reduced the prevalence of traditional hypergamous pairings and altered the set of available matches at the top of the education distribution.

Note, again, that this is a structural observation.

The sociocultural influence of gender equality and elite participation by women is real. So is its friction with the biological substrate.

The Paradox

The collision between the biological substrate, on the one hand, and the cultural imperative, on the other, produces a paradox with demographic consequences. The countries with the highest gender-equality indices—including Nordic nations, South Korea, and Japan's urban centers—tend to have among the lowest birth rates on Earth. Causation is complex, and no one should reduce the matter to a single mechanism, but the pattern is there: as women gain the freedom to select partners on their own terms and to participate fully in elite professional culture, fertility tends to fall.

This is not because women are broken or selfish. It is because the conditions that make partnership and parenthood feel viable have narrowed. There is also a subtler personal cost. A woman who genuinely wants both a serious career and a serious partnership may find herself at thirty-eight having achieved one and mourning the absence of the other, not through bad choices, but through the quiet accumulation of mismatched incentives no one has clearly articulated.

This paradox does not mean modernity is somehow bad. It means we have accepted unprecedented freedom and gender equality without being honest about the tensions they generate with the biological substrate.

The Male Bind

Men are not outside this paradox; they are simply in it differently. Most men, surveyed honestly, say they support gender equality, and they mean it. But when pressed, they also report intense pressure to out-earn their partner, to have succeeded as a provider before pursuing a serious relationship, and to be visibly high-status in a world where the old markers of status are simultaneously derided.

This creates a bind.

Men get the message that the old status hierarchies are obsolete, yet they are still being judged against those hierarchies by potential partners, by the culture, and by their own lights. A man who earns less than his partner is not guaranteed to feel diminished, but the data on male psychological outcomes relative to breadwinner status suggests that many do. The modern script says one thing, while the biological gravity pulls in the opposite direction. Dismantling a hierarchy does not mean anyone will remain unaffected by its structural rearrangement.

The Resolution

So what do we do about all this? We cannot just pretend either force away. People who insist that hypergamy is purely patriarchal conditioning are fighting the replication record of evolutionary psychology. Yet those who insist that women’s ambitions are the problem refuse to see two generations of data on human flourishing.

The actual work before us is hard. We have to thread the needle: to build a culture that honors both the biological imperative and contemporary values without demanding that people suppress either. Concretely, that means treating family formation, culturally and institutionally, as an elite and venerated aspiration. It means that men who are present fathers and women who build careers are both honored, rather than being arranged into zero-sum frames in which one achievement diminishes the other.

It means acknowledging that, deep down, most women want partners of competence and status and eventually to be mothers. Most men want eventually to be fathers, protectors, and providers. It means being more honest with young people about the timing pressures that biology imposes, not as a guilt trip, but as information they can use to navigate all this. And it means letting couples build asymmetrical, flexible arrangements, one partner more career-focused for a time, without status penalties attached to either choice.

Respecting that grain does not mean imposing cultural imperatives that run roughshod over either sex’s biology. The tension between the biological substrate and cultural change is less a problem to solve than a condition to navigate, with honesty, support, and the courage to stop pretending either force of gravity isn’t real. That may mean women learn to indulge the hypergamous instinct in ways other than a partner’s income, and men learn to demonstrate competence in ways other than their salary.

The developed world’s demographic winter is here in part because we elevated egalitarian careerism over the biological imperatives that were always there, and refused to discuss the tension openly. Articulating the paradox clearly, the pull of evolution, the gains of liberation, and the friction between them, is not a reactionary position. It is the start of actually thinking about what it means to be free as men and women while sustaining our population into the future.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.orgThe more we learn about the universe, the stranger things get. That’s because, when physicists follow their best theories all the way down—refusing to flinch or wave their hands—they arrive at two radically different pictures of reality.

The first says there may be multiple universes, which means you could be one of uncountably many versions of yourself, branching every moment into realities you will never see.

The second suggests that the world beneath your feet may not possess fully definite properties until physical interactions force them into definite states. Reality, in that sense, can begin to look strangely game-like or computational.

With possibilities this bizarre, physics and metaphysics start to blur. And if either picture is even approximately true, we live in a universe far stranger than common sense ever imagined.

The Branching World

Let’s start with David Deutsch. The Oxford physicist is one of the founding minds behind quantum computing, and probably the most committed defender of what’s called the many-worlds interpretation.

His argument is simple, but unsettling. Quantum mechanics is the most successful theory in the history of science. It predicts experimental results to astonishing precision. It helped build the transistor, the laser, and the chip in your phone. And the mathematics of that theory describes particles as existing in multiple possible states at once—in superposition—until a measurement or interaction yields a definite outcome.

For a hundred years, physicists have debated what exactly that outcome means. Does the wave function collapse? Does measurement play a special role? What are the implications?

Deutsch’s response is: stop avoiding the absurdity. Take the equations literally. If the mathematics says every possible outcome continues to evolve, then every possible outcome continues to evolve. The universe doesn’t pick just one branch. Reality branches. Every quantum event, every subatomic interaction with multiple possible outcomes, generates a vast branching structure—and each branch contains a version of events that is, under this interpretation, just as real as the one you experience.

The elegance of this theory is breathtaking. We need neither special rules for collapse nor a mysterious role for consciousness. In the many-worlds view, there is no collapse at all. Just the equations, evolving continuously in every direction at once.

The scale is also breathtaking. Somewhere in that branching structure, there may be a you who failed the test. A you who died at seven. A you doing something other than listening to me right now. Under this view, those possibilities are not erased. They persist in other branches—in parallel universes.

The Rendered World

Now consider a very different picture of reality. On close inspection, the universe seems to come with limits: limits to resolution, limits to measurement, limits to what our current theories can describe. The Planck length—about a hundred-millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter—may mark the scale where our existing models of spacetime cease to work cleanly. Time appears to have a similar boundary. Energy comes in discrete packets. And some physicists suspect that information itself may be more fundamental than matter or energy.

For a certain kind of thinker, this begins to look suspiciously computational.

Discrete quantities. Resolution limits. A universe that, at extreme scales, behaves almost as if it were coded rather than continuous.

The simulation hypothesis takes that intuition and pushes it further. What if the reason physics keeps running into these apparent limits is that reality is, in some sense, computational? What if the universe resembles a rendered environment, the way a video game renders only the region your character currently occupies, leaving the rest compressed or ungenerated until needed? Or what if, as in procedurally generated games like No Man’s Sky, parts of the world are generated dynamically as you approach them?

From this perspective, quantum weirdness begins to look less mysterious. A particle may lack a definite position prior to measurement, not because consciousness creates reality, but because physical systems do not always settle into definite states until interactions occur. To simulation theorists, that can resemble a render trigger.

It’s a startlingly intuitive picture for a game designer. It offers a way of thinking about measurement, apparent fine-tuning of reality, and the deep mathematical structure of physics.

But it raises a question physics has historically tried to avoid asking: if reality is computational rendering, what is the computation running on?

The Dilemma

So here is the choice, stripped of jargon.

Behind Door Number One, we have an immense proliferation of realities, branching without end, almost all of them forever inaccessible to you. The cost is ontological extravagance on a scale the human mind can barely comprehend. But the payoff is that the equations evolve smoothly, without requiring a special collapse mechanism or a privileged observer.

Behind Door Number Two, we get a single apparent reality, but perhaps one emerging from some deeper informational or computational substrate we cannot access directly. The cost is that you must posit that deeper layer—and perhaps even a world beyond our own. Something, after all, would have to instantiate the computation. Yet the payoff is a potentially elegant way to think about the apparent fine-tuning and mathematical structure of THIS universe.

Each picture makes the other look absurd. The many-worlds advocate looks at the simulation hypothesis and says: “You’ve hidden another universe beyond the one you’re in, and smuggled in something suspiciously close to Descartes’s Demon or Berkeley’s Creator to explain it.” The simulation theorist looks at Many-Worlds and says: “You’ve replaced one universe with an unimaginable multiplicity, just to avoid admitting reality may be stranger at its foundation than we thought.”

And neither side is entirely wrong. That’s the absurdity. That’s the dilemma

Both, it turns out, attempt to answer real problems. Many-worlds attempts to resolve the measurement problem in quantum mechanics—the longest-standing interpretive puzzle in the field. The simulation hypothesis, meanwhile, offers one speculative way of thinking about fine-tuning: the curious fact that the constants of nature appear to fall within the narrow range that permits stars, chemistry, complexity, and minds to emerge.

Neither picture currently has decisive experimental confirmation. Maybe neither ever will. But neither is entirely empty either. Each horn of the dilemma represents a serious attempt to grapple with serious questions. And the discomfort they produce is not necessarily a sign that either is wrong. It may simply mean we’ve followed physics to a place our inherited intuitions can no longer comfortably follow.

So I leave you with questions I can’t shake: Which absurdity are you more willing to live with? The endless branching, or the rendered reality? Infinite worlds, or something like Descartes’s Demon?

Then there’s the harder question: What would actually count as evidence for either? What experiment, what observation, what crack in the facade would tell us which picture—if either—is closer to the truth?

Because right now, the honest answer is that we still don’t know. So here we sit, perched on the horns of a very strange dilemma.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe