Underthrow

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.

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Pick up your phone. How many apps do you have? Fifty? A hundred? You downloaded every one of them.

Now imagine waking up tomorrow and finding only two. A red app. A blue app. The device insists it can run anything you want—but somehow, only red and blue are available. You can’t uninstall either one. You can’t install a third. Wouldn’t you want to return that phone?

Yet this is how our social operating system works. And people defend it. They vote in it. They’ll argue with their family about it at Thanksgiving, but otherwise can’t imagine things any other way.

This isn’t a video about who should win the next election. If that’s what you came for, there are nine million of those online. (Go nuts.) This is a video about the operating system underneath elections. The thing nobody questions because nobody remembers installing it.

Let’s call it DOS—the Democratic Operating System. It’s the substrate on which our modern political system runs.

Now. Here’s the rule I want you to hold onto for the next ten minutes: almost every political idea you’ve ever heard—every policy proposal, every campaign promise, every viral op-ed—is an app running on DOS. “Pass this law.” “Elect this person.” “Reform this agency.” All of it executes inside the same operating system.

None of it touches the kernel.

In 1947, Winston Churchill stood up in the House of Commons and delivered the line that has functioned ever since as the system’s lock screen:

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time."

It’s a great line. It’s also the most successful piece of resignation propaganda in modern political history, and most of the people quoting it think they’re being wise. But watch what he does. He admits the system is bad—and in the same breath, forecloses the possibility that anything better could ever exist. It’s a shrug dressed up as a conclusion. And we’ve been running on it ever since. Now I’m not here to tell you Churchill was wrong in 1947.

I’m here to tell you we don’t have to keep being stuck inside his answer.

What happens any time smart people get in a room to talk about reforming a country? Someone proposes a policy. Someone else proposes the opposite policy. Someone proposes ranked-choice voting and gets called a wonk. Someone proposes a third party and is called a traitor. Someone proposes structural reform and gets called naive. And anyone who proposes leaving the framework entirely gets called a crank.

Notice how the further one’s idea drifts from the existing operating system, the more his character gets attacked instead of his case. That’s not an accident. That’s the system protecting itself. Or more accurately, the beneficiaries of the system are protecting their goodies.

We talk a lot about the Overton window, the range of policies considered acceptable in mainstream discourse. But the Overton window isn’t actually about policies. The real Overton window is the set of operating systems that are imaginable. And inside that window, in 2026, in the most powerful country in human history—there is exactly one option. DOS. That’s the part the system performs so well, you stopped noticing it was a performance. You were handed a device with two apps on it and told that choosing between them is what freedom looks like.

And if you suggest a different operating system, well, that makes you dangerous.

So the most ambitious people in the country—the ones with the energy and the brains to actually build something—end up pouring their energy into running the red app or the blue app. They optimize within the constraint, but never question it. But look at the trendlines. Look at the institutions you grew up trusting and ask, honestly: are they working better or worse than they were a century ago? Are the people running them sharper or duller? Are the debates deeper or shallower? Is the device running faster or slower? The most advanced civilization in human history is making decisions that would have been better made by chimps. (Maybe the apps aren’t the problem.)

Stay with the smartphone metaphor, because it has more to teach us.

When your phone slows to a crawl, you don’t blame the apps. You don’t write angry emails to the people who made your favorite Doom Scroll. You intuitively understand that the device is degrading, or that the underlying architecture has hit a limit. No amount of optimization at the app layer fixes what’s performing poorly underneath. You wouldn’t tolerate this in a six-hundred-dollar piece of consumer electronics. So you replace your smartphone every two or three years. You demand better. And better arrives.

But the operating system that runs our civilization—the one that decides who lives, who dies, who’s heard, who’s silenced, what gets built, what gets bulldozed—that one, you’ve been trained to accept a version of that hasn’t had a serious upgrade in two and a half centuries.

Think about that for a second. The men who designed DOS did it before electricity. Before germ theory. Before the telephone. Before the airplane. Before the computer, the internet, the genome, the device in your hand right now. They built a magnificent piece of eighteenth-century software—and we’re still running it, acting surprised when it crashes.

In 1992, a political scientist named Francis Fukuyama looked around at the end of the Cold War and made a claim that’s often misremembered. He didn’t say events would stop, or that conflict would disappear. He said the big argument—the fight over what kind of system could claim legitimacy—might be over. That the democratic republic had no serious rival left standing. And to be fair to him, that didn’t sound crazy at the time. The collapse of communism felt like the exhaustion of a bad idea. Fukuyama also wasn’t blind to what might come next. He anticipated backlash. Nationalism. Even dissatisfaction inside liberal societies themselves. But granting all that—and granting that democratic republics are vastly better than what came before—the deeper claim still feels too confident. Not because free societies failed… Because they never got an upgrade.

Better than the past is not the same as the best we can conceive. One who confuses those two perspectives has stopped being a builder and started being a curator.

Look, DOS was an upgrade in 1776. Of course it was. The question is whether DOS is the last upgrade. And if you sit with that question honestly—not defensively, just honestly—the answer is obviously no. Of course it isn’t. The idea that humanity peaked, governance-wise, in the time of powdered wings and muskets is one of the strangest beliefs a modern person can hold, and yet it’s the implicit assumption underneath nearly every political conversation happening on this platform right now.

And here’s where I have to tell you what this video is actually about. It’s not about politics. It never was. It’s about a failure of imagination so total, so ambient, so successfully dressed up as wisdom, that you’ve spent your entire adult life inside it without noticing the walls.

You thought the choice set was: Which app is better, red or blue? But the question is, Why do we only get two apps? Maybe you thought the question was: which candidate, which policy, or which reform is best? The question is: Why can’t each of us subscribe to the systems we think are best?

You thought you were a citizen choosing between options. You’re a user inside a platform whose terms of service you never read, written by people who are no longer alive, running on a substrate nobody maintains—and the platform tells you, every day, in every feed, that the only legitimate form of dissent is to keep using the platform.

That Churchill quote isn’t a description of reality. It’s an end-user license agreement, with no upgrade and no support.

If you’re okay living in DOS with two apps, I won’t persuade you today. But if you think our kids are worth it to inherit something better, keep an open mind.

I’m not going to tell you what comes next. Not in this video, anyway. Though I do have some ideas…. But here’s what I will tell you.

There are people—right now—quietly building the substrate of something else. Not protesting the apps. Not running for office inside DOS. Not writing think-pieces begging the system to reform itself. Building. Networks. Institutions. Practices. Ways of living together that don’t route through the red app or the blue app, and don’t need to.

Many of them will fail. That’s fine. That’s how it works. But few won’t. And the ones that succeed won’t announce themselves as the new operating system—they’ll just gradually become the thing more and more people are running on, until one morning a critical mass of us wakes up and notices the device is faster now, and nobody can quite remember when the upgrade happened.

You don’t need permission to be one of those builders. That’s the part nobody tells you. DOS’s most effective feature is the illusion of permission—the suggestion that legitimate change has to be granted by the very system that change is meant to replace. It doesn’t.

So here’s the one thing I’ll leave you with…

Look at your life—your work, your community, your relationships, the institutions you actually participate in—and ask one question of each: Is this an app, or the operating system? You might surprise yourself with the answer. And once you start looking, you might be surprised to discover just how many people are quietly working on the next operating system. That’s the whole point of this show. And if this is the kind of conversation you want more of—subscribe and share.

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Every day, strangers are in your ears. They come through your phone, your television, your group chats, your feeds. They speak with conviction. They speak with urgency. They talk as if they are telling you the truth. Most of them are not—and not always lying, either. They are performing.

The first step to thinking clearly in this century is learning to tell them all apart. There are ten major voices competing inside your head.

1. The Truth Tracker

The truth tracker is rare. The truth tracker is someone who tries — genuinely, awkwardly, sometimes unsuccessfully — to make sense of the world as it actually is, not as their priors would flatter it to be.

You can recognize them by a specific discomfort they’re willing to endure. They will say things their own tribe punishes them for saying. They will admit when the other side has a point. They will update in public, which looks to everyone else like weakness or betrayal.

But it isn’t either. It is the only intellectual posture that ever gets anywhere. Real understanding only ever comes from someone willing to follow the evidence across the line their community told them not to cross.

Truth trackers are not always right. They are something better than always right — they are correctable. When you find one, hold on to him.

The other nine will wear similar costumes.

2. The Political Authority

Political authority has a formula: they need you to think X so that they can do Y, and you will do Z.

They need you to think there’s a crisis so that emergency powers can be granted, and you will not object when they’re used. They need you to think that a group is dangerous so that they can be controlled or silenced, and you will cheer. They want you to think that the situation is under control—so that nothing has to change and you’ll go back to sleep.

Authorities are not always lying about the facts. They’re engineering a mental state in you that serves their agenda. The claim is downstream of the goal. That is why their stories shift without embarrassment when conditions change. The story was never the point. The state it produced in you was.

Every government, every party, every institution with power does some version of this. It is not unique to your enemies. Even your closest friends and family are vulnerable to it.

3. The Special Interest

Behind every political authority stands a special interest—often many. These are the people who benefit concretely from whatever the authority is doing. The contractor who gets the contract. The industry that gets the subsidy. The guild that gets the license. The firm that gets the regulation written in its favor—which it will then call a “burden” in public.

Special interests aren’t villains in a cartoon. They are usually just ordinary people with strong incentives to pursue special favors. That is exactly what makes them so patient and so organized. They care about a single issue far more than you care about any hundred issues.

When a policy seems inexplicable—when it serves no one you can identify—you are not looking hard enough. Someone always benefits. Follow the money, and you’ll find the special interest.

4. The Tribal Partisan

The tribal partisan believes whatever their tribe believes—not because they’ve examined it, but because believing it is what membership demands.

You can test this. Ask a partisan’s position on a specific issue—trade, say, or executive power, or free speech—and then watch it reverse smoothly, without strain, the moment their team comes to power. They will not notice the reversal. If you point it out, they’ll explain why this time is different. The explanation will be fluent, but entirely post hoc.

This is not a character flaw. It’s a human default. We are tribal primates who evolved to sense who is with us and who is not. The partisan isn’t broken—they are operating at factory settings. The work of a wise person is to override those settings, at least sometimes, at least on the things that matter.

5. The Group Thinker

The group thinker is the partisan’s quieter cousin. Where the partisan believes because their tribe believes, the group thinker believes because everyone else seems to. They are not defending a flag—they are riding a current.

You can recognize the group thinker by their certainty on subjects they’ve never examined. They know the approved position on a scientific controversy they can’t explain. They know the approved position on a conflict in a foreign country they couldn’t find on a map. They know which decent people think what—and they are vaguely uneasy around anyone who doesn’t fit the pattern.

Group thinkers aren’t stupid. In fact, credentials are a powerful vector for groupthink. Credential-granting communities have their own consensus and reward fidelity to it.

The group thinker’s mistake is assuming that a cascade of agreement is evidence of truth. It isn’t. A cascade of agreement is evidence of a cascade. A bandwagon.

6. The Clickbait Capitalist

Now we descend into the voices that do not care whether you are informed at all.

The clickbait capitalist makes money when you click. That is the entire model. Your belief, your understanding, your eventual emotional state—none of it matters to them. Only the click does.

Any system that pays for attention will, over time, be optimized by the people inside it to capture attention. And the content that generates attention is not the content that informs. It is the content that outrages, titillates, flatters, or frightens.

The capitalists did not decide to degrade your epistemics. The market selected, from a thousand possible headlines, the one that made your finger stop. Repeat that selection a billion times a day for twenty years, and you get the information environment we now inhabit.

7. The Fact Checker

The fact checker is a relatively modern creature, and a particularly dangerous one—because they wear the truth tracker’s uniform.

A careful, lowercase fact-checker is a fine thing. The Fact Checker, capitalized, is something else: a partisan masquerading as a truth tracker to reinforce a preferred narrative. You can spot them by what they check, but especially by what they don’t. Notice which claims get a magnifying glass and which slide through untouched.

They use elastic definitions: “mostly false” for a technically true statement that cuts the wrong way; “missing context” for something inconvenient; silence for something devastating to the home team.

The fact checker weaponizes the appearance of rigor without its substance. This is worse than open propaganda, because propaganda announces itself. The Fact Checker launders a narrative through the prestige of verification and leaves their audience more confident than correct.

If you ever need to locate the narrative someone wants to project, find what the Fact Checkers refuse to check.

8. The Meme Warrior

The meme warrior has one objective: the narrative must be simple, sticky, and dominant. Not true. Not nuanced. Not fair. Dominant.

The meme warrior understands something most people never do: in a noisy environment, the idea that wins is not the idea that’s most accurate. It is the idea that is most transmissible. A lie that fits on a bumper sticker will beat a truth that requires a book—every time—until the book readers wake up and learn to fight on this terrain.

Memetic warfare is not new. Every successful religion, ideology, and revolution has been, among other things, a triumph of memetics—of compression. What is new is the speed of transmission. A meme can now colonize a hundred million minds in a weekend. By the time the careful people have finished their careful response, three more memes have replaced it.

The meme warrior doesn’t argue. They infect.

9. The Virtue Signaler

The virtue signaler is a cousin of the meme warrior, but with a different engine. The meme warrior wants the narrative to win. The virtue signaler wants to be seen as good.

These two often look identical from the outside—same slogans, same hashtags, same confident public positions. The difference is internal. The meme warrior is willing to lose status for the cause. The virtue signaler is not willing to lose status for anything; the cause is the vehicle.

You can identify virtue signalers by their risk profile. They are loud about positions that are safe inside their social bubbles, and silent about positions that would cost them. They perform courageously on questions already settled in their salon. Ask whether they still believe what they believe when only their own circle is watching, and the answer changes.

Virtue signaling is not hypocrisy, exactly. The virtue signaler may genuinely hold the position. But the position is not what they are optimizing for. The optimization target is to be perceived as good. Everything else is secondary.

10. The Metamonger

We end with the subtlest of the ten, because they are the hardest to see and the most likely to be admired.

The metamonger speaks in abstractions, lofting language to appear intelligent, nuanced, and above the fray. They rarely take a position. They prefer to frame positions. They’ll tell you what kind of thinking is required to approach some more elusive truth.

The metamonger is often educated, well-spoken, and genuinely thoughtful—and this is what makes them so easily mistaken for wisdom. Their refusal to commit reads as maturity. Their inability to be wrong—because they have said nothing specific enough to be wrong about—reads as judgment.

But watch carefully. A metamonger will leave you dizzy. You will have learned no fact. You will have updated no belief. You will have been told, in a hundred elegant ways, that s**t’s complicated. Things usually are. But that’s not a substitute for saying something conclusive—even if it’s wrong.

The punchline…

The Hall of Mirrors

Ten types of voices are in our heads every day, and only one of them is trying to help you see clearly. The other nine are not necessarily evil. Most of them are just ordinary people responding to ordinary incentives.

* The authority wants compliance.

* The interest wants the favor.

* The partisan wants the win.

* The group thinker wants to be on the bandwagon.

* The capitalist wants the click.

* The fact checker wants to protect the team.

* The meme warrior wants the meme to spread.

* The signaler wants to be seen as good.

* The metamonger wants to seem wise.

Only the truth tracker wants the true, the beautiful, and the good.

It’s a strange hall of mirrors we create for each other. But we can learn to tell the voices apart—in others, certainly, but also in ourselves. Because the uncomfortable fact is that all ten of these voices are probably in your head every single day. You put them there.

The question is: which one do you let speak the loudest?

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

Support and subscribe at Underthrow.org.

H.L. Mencken said it best: “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” The old satirist wasn’t just being clever. He was being precise.

Here’s the thing: We elect representatives. But those representatives have a giant credit card. They have maxed it out and sent us the bill. We pay through taxation and inflation, but get almost no say in how the money gets spent. “Our democracy” is just theater—the illusion that we’re in control.

Sure, a handful of congressmen talk tough about fiscal responsibility. But their actions say otherwise. The incentives are too great. To stay in power, politicians have to auction power off to special interests. To stay in power, they have to horse-trade. And to horse-trade, they spend money we don’t have. They keep spending and spending—as the national credit card smokes.

Then the central bank prints more money. And for every dollar printed, your purchasing power shrinks. That’s inflation. And inflation is just taxation by other means. While politicians wheel and deal to keep their seats, the rest of us work harder for the same gallon of milk. A small circle of insiders gets richer. Then activists fight over the scraps.

Most people don’t see it. So, for relief, voters turn to the people causing the pain. The politicians offer programs, subsidies, stimulus—short-term painkillers that deepen the debt. Voters want goodies! Special interests want goodies! But nobody wants to admit we’re broke. The interest we have to pay on the debt is bigger than our military budget–and spiraling fast.

Our celebrated democracy quietly becomes a vast debtor’s prison attached to a giant treadmill. We’re all running on it. Taxes go up, or inflation goes up. We run faster and faster, going nowhere fast. Everyone screams to tax the billionaires. Yet economist Antony Davies ran the numbers: if you confiscated every dollar from every American billionaire, you could fund the federal government for only 9 months. Nine months. Then what?

Getting tired yet? More pain is coming. The only question is what form it takes—a slow bleed of rising prices, or a sudden collapse. Reality doesn’t negotiate. So we’re left with a choice. Do we stay in a system where everyone has their hands in someone else’s pockets? Or do we build something different—a system where you keep more of what you earn, where technology drives prices down, where money is worth saving again?

The incentives are powerful. The debtor’s prison is entrenched. Honestly, only a crisis will force real reform. Unless, that is, we can finish building the exit before the walls close in. A parallel system. Outside the debtor’s prison. Off the treadmill. Some of us are tired of running just to stay in place.

So what do we do?

Here’s a strange thing about people who actually change the world: they mostly didn’t fight the old system. They just quietly built a better one until the old one became irrelevant.

We’ve been trained to think that change requires permission—a vote, a regulation, a movement with enough mass to matter. But the real disruptions in history came from tinkerers, innovators, and bold communities doing something novel but modest—until suddenly it wasn’t.

What if we’re in one of those moments right now?

That’s the moment Underthrow is built for. Where every innovation is an act of subversion—where building something better is the argument, and the alternative to broken systems isn’t activism, it’s action.

This is what we were born for. Thomas Jefferson made freedom a dangerous idea. It still is. Not because it’s violent or extreme—but because we have to trust one another to build our future together without waiting for anyone’s permission. He called this the “consent of the governed.”

Once inside that frame, something shifts. Those who sign up to Underthrow aren’t signing up for content—they’re choosing the world they want to live in. If that resonates—you already think this way and looking for a home—give yourself permission to go all in.

Subscribe to Underthrow.org, where we criticize by creating.

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When it comes to generating content, the producer usually has to make a tradeoff. Staying on top of trends in the news cycle is good for clicks, but the cost is the loss of opportunities to deliver more timeless messages. Produce something evergreen, and you might offer a message humanity needs, but they’re not interested in hearing. Society’s profound need to rediscover morality can come across as moralism. So content like this is always risky. Still, I hope you agree that the West was built on the practice of virtue and the eschewal of vice.

Virtue is disappearing. Recently, we talked about seven virtues that are desperately needed today—and I’d go as far as to say that if everyone practiced them, we’d see an overwhelmingly positive transformation of society. Those seven virtues are: Nonviolence, Integrity, Compassion, Toleration, Stewardship, and Rationality.

But we didn’t talk about their ugly mirrors: the vices.

It’s not just that we lack virtue. It’s that too many people are actively practicing its opposite. And in the world of politics and activism, we’re witnessing a genuine moral inversion—young people are being raised to think that vices are virtues, and that evil is good. To see why civilization is rotting from within, we need to look each of these vices in the face.

Vice One: Violence

Violence always deprives people of happiness or causes suffering. Entrepreneur Chris Rufer put it simply: violence is like gravity—you cannot escape its consequences. The more violence exists in society, the less people can pursue happiness.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: governments are monopolies on violence. We tell ourselves that lawmakers and law enforcers are in the business of protecting us—but they’re fundamentally in the business of threatening us. If Rufer is right, suffering scales with the expansion of the state. The more it demands of us, and the more it takes from us, the worse off we become.

Vice Two: Corruption

Corruption isn’t just the absence of integrity. It’s the active practice of deception, fraud, and breaking promises.

And it appears to be contagious. We used to think of corruption as a sickness of the developing world—desperate people using whatever authority they have to extract from innocent people. But corruption has come to the wealthy West. It shows up in minor ways: ghosting a commitment, missing an appointment without a word. But it eats through civilization in catastrophic ways: mass Medicaid fraud, partisan money laundering, money printing, and institutional betrayal dressed up as policy.

Vice Three: Callousness

Callousness is not a failure to be compassionate—we all fall short of that sometimes. Callousness is the cultivation of an inhumane disposition. It is cruelty worn as a badge of honor.

It’s one thing to look away from suffering. It’s another thing entirely to cheer for it—to make cruelty fashionable. No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, the person who cultivates cruel thoughts, cruel words, and cruel deeds becomes malevolent. And when malevolence becomes contagious, cruelty gets normalized.

Vice Four: Monomania

Toleration is a healthy respect for peaceful differences. Monomania is its opposite: the way of the ideologue.

The ideologue believes everyone should conform to her vision of the good—that all the world’s problems can be solved by forcing that conformity on everyone else. How many people do you know whose first instinct, for any problem, is that there ought to be a law? A policy? A universal program?

Monomania is the vice of the activist class. It short-circuits experimentation. It forecloses other ways of living. And it trades genuine bottom-up solutions for the satisfaction of total control.

Vice Five: Negligence

Negligence is the abdication of stewardship—sometimes adolescent indifference, sometimes a serious failure of duty.

It tends to emerge in two predictable conditions: when there’s no real incentive to care, or when no one is watching. That’s why the political class thrives on failure. Programs that don’t work don’t get cut—they “need more resources.” Rental property deteriorates in ways owned property rarely does. City-scale negligence means more graffiti, more trash, more decay. And professional negligence almost always means either no accountability or no consequences. But it always starts within the person holding the office.

Vice Six: Casuistry

If rationality is the active pursuit of truth, casuistry is its perversion: the art of arguing away from truth—constructing clever-sounding justifications for conclusions you’ve already decided to reach.

Social media has turned casuistry into an arms race. Instead of reasoning together toward what is true or good, people trade talking points and narratives like weapons. Sophistry replaces inquiry. And politics? Politics is the natural habitat of casuistry. These are people who, in many cases, lie for a living. We shouldn’t be surprised when their reasoning reflects it.

Vice Seven: Injustice

Justice is fair dealing—equal treatment before shared standards, rules, and laws. Injustice is the deliberate subversion of that. And people practice it, often enthusiastically.

Whether through policies that explicitly privilege certain groups over others, or through punishment meted out on grounds unrelated to the actual rules, injustice erodes the foundational promise that everyone stands equally before the law. Politicians have come to believe that whatever law gets passed IS the rule of law. And so-called social justice offers no justice at all—it trades individual rights for group privileges, and calls that progress.

I stand by the belief that everyone practicing those seven virtues would have a profound and positive effect on society. But we cannot get there without first confronting something harder: the spreading belief that vice is virtuous.

And a recurring pattern runs through all seven of these vices—politics is where they get normalized. Where they get celebrated. Where they get institutionalized.

If that’s true, then we’d better start thinking seriously about what a post-political world can look like. We need to overcome our failures of imagination and get busy building something better.

But before any of that, we have to practice what we preach.

We have to be the example.

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When we put together this week’s video, I had the next generation in mind. The message fits nicely with the launch of The Chrysalis Project, a community and course for men under 30. You see, all the evidence says young men are struggling, whether drowning in digital currents or falling behind in their lives and careers. Thanks to my co-founder James Harrigan's inspiration, we decided to do something about it. If you know a promising man under 30 who is ready to become a gentleman of the twenty-first century—committed to virtue, excellence, and freedom—share The Chrysalis Project with him. And if you’re a man over 30, you can sponsor a man under 30 and join for free.

A lot of people are saying, “It feels like society is coming apart.” Or, “something’s definitely wrong.” When you press them on why, they’ll say we’re more politically polarized, that gas and eggs cost more, that social media is scrambling our brains, or that the politically powerful are taking advantage of us.

They’re not wrong.

But I want to argue that we’ve lost something deeper—something that great civilizations depend on: Virtue. Specifically, the practice of virtue.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that ‘there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents.’ With all this change, we’re going to need each other. So, we’d better become more virtuous.

Here are the seven virtues we should all start practicing right now.

I. NON-VIOLENCE. First, never threaten or do harm to innocent people, whether in their bodies or property. I mean, this is pretty basic. Most of the world’s wisdom traditions include some variation on this, such as the Golden Rule. But a virtue is not JUST a rule. It’s a practice, which means we have to keep doing it until we get good at it, like music or martial arts. And that means we have to practice it every day in thought, word, and deed. (And that means no violent protests or political assassinations.)

II. INTEGRITY. Start with the idea of structural integrity. We know that the more weak joints or foundation cracks there are in a building, the more likely it is to collapse. Society is no different. The more people in society lack integrity, the more likely society will come apart. Of course, practicing integrity means being completely honest with yourself and others, honoring your commitments, and keeping your promises. In short, do what you know is right. Seek the truth. And live in truth. And practice integrity even if you think no one is watching. (Yeah, I know. It seems like politicians are disqualified.)

III. COMPASSION. The practice of compassion isn’t throwing some group a pity party. Nor is it voting for more government programs. It means actively looking out for the people around you. Are they suffering? Can you reasonably help? And what is the right way to help? Some people confuse compassion with throwing money at someone’s problems, with taxpayer money or their own. But compassionate community members know that, sometimes, the best help comes from connecting people with opportunities or sharing wisdom they can use. (You know, like: Teach a man to fish or Quit drinking like a fish.)

IV. TOLERATION. Look, we have to acknowledge that people are different from one to the next. If we were all exactly the same, life would be boring, and we wouldn’t get much of anything done. (I mean, I can write a decent sentence, but you don’t want me fixing your car.) We also want to live different lives in different kinds of communities. Call this the fact of pluralism. When we practice toleration, we orient ourselves respectfully towards others, even if they’re different. That doesn’t mean we have to tolerate threats, calls for violence, or lies and deception. But we have to find the right boundaries and respect others within those boundaries, whether they practice a different religion or associate with different people. As long as we don’t threaten each other, mutual toleration makes for social coherence. (And no, that does not mean we have to put up with Sharia Law in the West.)

V. STEWARDSHIP. This one’s easy. Stewardship is just the practice of leaving any property or offices you have better than you found them. In other words, take care of your stuff. Take care of your employees. Take care of your responsibilities. People will know whether you’re a good steward by what you leave for the next person. Members of Congress are not good stewards because they are leaving $39 trillion in debt for our kids to pay for with higher taxes and inflation.

VI. RATIONALITY. Rationality is the steady method of truth-seeking. It means training your mind to follow evidence wherever it leads, rather than feelings, tribal loyalties, or convenient narratives. A rational person questions her own assumptions, updates her beliefs with better data, and admits logical errors or fallacies when they’re exposed. This virtue is essential because without it, everybody just engages in deception or narrative arms races. In an age of media spin and echo chambers, rationality acts as civilization’s intellectual immune system—disciplining thought, word, and deed toward what is actually true.

VII. JUSTICE. Real justice requires protecting individual rights, honoring contracts, and applying impartial rules and standards under the law. Lady Justice is blind because she doesn’t see color, creed, or group favoritism. So, justice includes fairness as proportionality, not fairness as equal outcomes. Rewards or punishments should align with actions, merit, and responsibility. Forcing equal outcomes means treating people unequally and unfairly. And that breeds resentment. Practicing justice means holding ourselves and others accountable within a framework of equal freedom and the rule of law. “Social justice,” as commonly used, is no justice at all, because it substitutes group-rights for equal treatment. Imagine a game where the best players had to hop on one leg, and the worst players got free points and played by different rules. Yeah. That’s why social justice is no justice at all.

Now, there are more virtues out there to practice. But if every person could master these seven, society would improve by leaps and bounds. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if everyone lived according to these seven, positive transformations would flow. The civilization of tomorrow could be built on foundational practices that start within each of us.

E pluribus unum. Ex uno plures.

Be good, and thanks for listening.

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You love freedom. You respect the rule of law. But over the years, the political class has eroded your freedom and enacted laws that are at odds with these. Political elites have also set the conditions under which freedom and the rule of law will continue to erode. They pass laws that serve their interests and those of their favor-seeking donors. That means power goes on the auction block.

This is the rule of cronies.

We tell ourselves that elections are the means by which we oblige the political class to make necessary changes for the good of all. But this means we have no choice but to appeal to a corrupt political class that promises not to be corrupt. And that’s silly. Yet we try to vote harder every couple of years, then wonder why things never improve. So, our free republic has mutated into something else—an extractive managerial empire.

No matter which party is in power, the political class has every incentive to continue attacking freedom and the rule of law. Each claims they’re going to protect “our democracy” or hold power accountable. Both are deceitful. Neither respects our founding ideals. Neither seeks to restore institutions of lawful freedom. Combine perverse incentives with perverted ideologies, and you get a country run by sociopaths.

Therefore, we can no longer count on democratic elections to oblige the political class. We must turn to other means… What are the available means?

It would seem as if patriots are on the horns of a dilemma: a Second Revolution or a Patriotic Caesar.

A Second Revolution is costly, dangerous, and unlikely. It’s not just that revolutionaries would have to risk everything to restore a free republic. It’s that there are probably not enough virtuous revolutionaries to pull it off. At least not enough with balls. Even if you could pull together a hundred thousand people with guns and good ideas, it would be exceedingly difficult to organize them in such a way that would work to some positive effect. The media would howl about the “insurrectionists” as sure as night follows day. Men flying drones and Apache helicopters would jail them, mow them down, or send them into the hills…

So what about a Patriotic Caesar? This would have to be a president—someone with the strength and power to do what needs to be done to restore freedom and the rule of law. Yet this president would indeed be a threat to “our democracy,” because this is just doublespeak for the managerial state—you know, the status quo. Paradoxically, the Patriotic Caesar would have to circumvent the law to restore the rule of law.

So a Patriotic Caesar is risky and nigh impossible. The political class is too strong. A change in presidents is a change in caesars. We can’t count on a Patriotic Caesar to be patriotic enough never to get drunk on the power that working with the political class affords. The Patriotic Caesar, like the Members of Congress, would have to sell his soul piece by piece to get anything done. Yet anything he might get done by such means would never be enough. If there is an ideal mix of Patriot and Caesar, our current President is wildly out of balance.

But there might be a third way—a way out of the Patriots’ dilemma. It’s called underthrow.

If overthrow is a violent revolution, underthrow is a nonviolent one. Ever heard the saying “Ask for forgiveness, not permission”? Underthrow means creating permissionless networks that quietly build transparency, track the truth, attack unjust power, and build parallel systems of our own. We’ll not ask for forgiveness.

We are living in an era where it’s easier to adopt our own currencies, join our own communications networks, and avoid the inflation, taxes, and tyrants of the political class. We must migrate to new jurisdictions, develop our own mutual aid associations, and build our own startup societies outside the auspices of the political class.

If freedom lovers leave with one lofty idea, it’s this: Ideology is impossible because change happens within the adjacent possible. What’s that, you may wonder? Imagine you’re in a room with four doors. You can’t see what’s behind them yet, but opening any one reveals a new room—with new doors you could not have reached before. That’s the adjacent possible. It is the set of next steps available to you right now, based on where you already are. You can’t skip rooms.

You can’t skip to utopia.

Just as a world without the internet couldn’t have invented social media, a world without parallel institutions doesn’t get us any closer to our ideals. But once you’re in a new room, entirely new doors appear. Progress—whether in ideas or in your own life—moves by opening one door at a time. Underthrow is the only way through.

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I don’t care for the term ‘futurist,’ but whatever minor fame I have enjoyed in my life has been due primarily to being a forward-looking optimist. But in recent years, I’ve had a drearier outlook. The pace of liberatory change has been slower than I hoped, and I’m coming around to the view that we have lost our unifying creed, our basic principles, our civic religion. Whatever one thinks about the promise of technology or trends in decentralization, there will be no splendid renaissance if we shear away our roots.

For Americans, the two most important sentences in the English language were published 250 years ago. That is why we are all supposed to be celebrating. But this year shouldn’t be your typical party of fireworks and potato salad. If we are going to move forward together as a people, this must be an intellectual and spiritual awakening.

So what are those two most important sentences in English? Let’s dive in.

The first one gets the most attention. It goes like this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Believe it or not, Americans are divided about this, just when we need to be united.

Indeed, some argue that without a Creator, there can be no Rights, that is, that rights come from God.

Others say that appeals to God do no earthly good if we’re living under the yoke of a political class that treats us like herd animals to be milked for their power and pet projects.

Yet a third group splits the difference, saying, while it’s true that tyrants don’t care about theological justifications for equal freedom, we respected rights more when more people believed they came from God. Therefore, maybe we should believe in God-given rights, even if they’re a myth.

I’m gonna put on my Old Testament hat and offer to split the baby—with all respect to Solomon and Thomas Jefferson. We can either encourage people to sacralize the original formulation of God-given rights, or we can flip the justification on its head. Like this:

Those of us who want life, liberty, and the freedom to pursue happiness had better find those who agree and come together in solidarity to form a compact to respect and defend such rights.

Respecting those rights, of course, means pledging to refrain from harming the innocent and then endeavor to protect the innocent from harm. With or without God talk, we are looking out for each other’s rights. This way, Believers and Agnostics alike can share the same creed and form a compact.

Now, the very idea of that compact brings me to the other most important sentence in the English language to Americans. It’s a long one, but equally vital.

...to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This long, compound sentence can be broken down into important highlights.

First, start with the idea that government officials derive their JUST powers from our consent. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t granted my consent to all this crap since I was old enough to know better. And if you agree, we need to find each other.

Second, based on that first important sentence about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have a right to alter or abolish any government that no longer serves us or respects our other rights.

Some people think we have to contrive some near-unanimous election or stage a violent rebellion. And that’s not crazy if we’re being honest. But that doesn’t mean we can’t underthrow power. We who still believe in Jefferson’s project can form our own distinctly American compact and begin to “institute new Government” while this one collapses under its own weight.

It starts with something as simple as joining a club.

Okay, that brings us to the third bit of this very long but important sentence. We can and should institute new Government based on principles of good governance. The federal government has obviously abandoned such principles–despite the noble efforts of the Framers.

It’s time to fork the code.

Once we fork the code, we can start by coming together in solidarity as people who value freedom. We can then refine our principles, and therefore our laws, to prepare for an American Renaissance. It won’t be easy, but we’ve got to do it. It’s not for us, after all. It’s for our kids. They are worth inheriting lives of liberty as they pursue happiness.

Instead of arguing about the finer points – let’s get started.

America is 250 years old. Share this with somebody who wants to start over with a significant set of upgrades.

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Humans Reorganize: A to B

Game A vs. Game B is the conceptual heart of the second half. Game A is our current operating system — 10,000 years of agriculture, science, democracy, and financial markets, with profit as the sole pruning rule for what gets built next. Game B proposes replacing that pruning rule with two rules focused on human flourishing and ecological health.

Membranes

The practical pathway, Jim explains, runs through membranes—small, self-governing communities and organizations that experiment with different rules, share learnings through a “horizontal information bus,” and grow (or don’t) based on whether people actually want to live in them. It’s libertarian communitarianism: strong sauce inside the membrane, zero imposition on other membranes.

Minimum Viable Metaphysics

Jim’s framework rests on four pillars: the reality principle (the universe is real, even if we can’t prove it), built-in asymmetry (something had to cause clumpiness after the Big Bang), lawfulness (causality runs all the way back), and emergence (the real magic—traffic jams, stars, life, consciousness—none of which violate causality, but none of which are reducible to it either). His nearest thing to a religion: treat complex systems as sacred, approach them with epistemic humility, and experiment modestly.

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This week’s guest is Jim Rutt — technology veteran, former CEO of Network Solutions, longtime board chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, and chairman emeritus of the California Institute of Machine Consciousness. Jim is also the host of the Jim Rutt Show, one of the sharpest long-form podcasts for serious thinkers.

Our conversation today ranges from the hard problem of consciousness to existential AI risk to his vision for redesigning human civilization from the ground up.

Consciousness and Conscious Machines

What would it mean for an AI to be conscious? Jim offers a functional definition centered on the sensorium—an integrated presentation of multimodal sensory information coupled to memory. He sidesteps the “hard problem” (the philosophical puzzle of how physical processes give rise to subjective experience, like the redness of red) not by dismissing it, but by suggesting that a sufficiently well-executed sensorium with memory might simply dissolve the problem rather than solve it.

We may not know until we’ve built one.

Hierarchy of Risk

Jim gives a thorough airing to the AI risk hierarchy by walking us through the full stack: from near-term threats like AI-assisted cyberattacks and bioweapons design, all the way up to artificial superintelligence (ASI).

Imagine systems potentially a million times more capable than Isaac Newton — that could render humanity irrelevant or worse. He discusses the geopolitical multipolar trap (the “if we don’t do it, China will” problem), the difficulty of collective action, and his provocative proposal for a priesthood of electricity — human monitors stationed at power facilities who can literally pull the plug if AI systems go rogue.

Brains + AI

The brain-computer interface (BCI) path (à la Neuralink) comes up as a possible middle road—creating human-AI chimeras that preserve human lineage in the next generation of superintelligence — but Jim is clear-eyed about the race dynamics: if the pure server-robotics path to ASI takes 8 years and the BCI path takes 30, the former wins by default unless we choose to slow down.

Whether humanity can make that choice, given competitive and geopolitical pressures, is very much an open question.

Enjoy a rich conversation with one of the most genuinely original thinkers working today. Next week: Jim Rutt returns to talk humane self-organization, a minimum viable metaphysics, and sacralizing complexity.

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