Alan Watts, describing the process ancient Zen students went through to seek truth:

“Now, in a very natural way—supposing a person is question; you are a seeker. You’re not a phony seeker, but a real seeker—that is to say, you have within you a burning desire to find out what it’s all about. Who you are, what life is, what reality is, or what’s the way out of the mess. … So those monks used to wander, and wander, and wander in search of a man who would answer the question.

In other words, if you became a Zen monk, you did a great deal of traveling. And instead of sitting on your fanny most of the day, you trudged. You were walking along through prairies, mountain paths, rugged country; you were visiting master after master after master, to find one who would answer your question.”

I come back to this story a lot, because it’s the perfect description of what it really takes to find the capital-t Truth:

• first, you must feel that “burning desire to find out what it’s all about” and commit yourself to satisfying it;

• then, you go wandering;

• you discover in your solitude that, though no one can walk your path for you, you also cannot do it alone (“Good friends, companions, and associates are the whole of the spiritual life,” says the Buddha);

• so you find a guru, who may be too advanced or not advanced enough, who may be a charlatan, or who may simply lack the answers you seek;

• then, you walk back down the mountain, and up another, find another teacher, learn what you can, walk back down the mountain, over and over again;

• until maybe, finally, the Truth falls out of your pocket and tells you it’s been there the whole time.

But it won’t fall out unless you go wandering.

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I have always been a free speech maximalist, and though my zealotry has softened, my commitment hasn’t. Because, well, it’s such an obviously true position: obviously speech should be free, we should encourage people to speak their truth, we should foster and protect a culture of free speech, and our government should have no power to restrict or regulate speech, no one should ever have or feel any external coercive force inhibiting their words, no matter how much an electoral majority demands it.

What’s evolved in my thinking is why.

I was wandering a bookstore in Santa Monica when something strange caught my eye, an anachronism from an earlier time, a book I thought must have been 50 or 100 years old but was published just last month. It’s called Training the Tongue: And Growing Beyond the Sins of Speech. Sins of speech?! Ridiculous, surely wrong, yet another regressive attempt to subordinate free inquiry to dogma, I thought. So I did what every ill-mannered bookshopper does, I pulled up the book on Amazon, and was greeted by this picture of the book with its author:

A younger, more atheistic me was allergic to books so opposed to my free speech values written by Dominican friars, but I am almost five years into a meditation practice now, and my recent exploration of Father Thomas Keating’s centering prayer has made me more receptive to what Catholic monks have to say.

So, I bought the book, begrudgingly, because it made me feel something, though I haven’t yet read it (so this isn’t a book review).

I flipped through Father Gregory Pine’s book, the sins at issue seem to be gossip, lying, flattery, crassness, disparagement, mockery, and so forth. He grounds his work in the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, as Keating’s work is, and teaches that speech has a purpose, and that purpose is communion. We speak so as to seek truth, share our understanding, voice our conscience. We correct one another in charity, pass on wisdom, and ultimately, if we do it right, lend our tongue to God himself.

He writes that speech must be true, charitable, and ordered toward communion between human and divinity.

Sounds very Buddhist, that friar does.

The third factor on the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path is Right Speech, which is framed first as the abstinence from certain kinds of wrong speech: false, malicious, harsh, idle. Fr. Pine might recognize these as some of his sins of speech. The second frame is in the positive: Right Speech is true, concordant, courteous, timely and beneficial.

We forget it now, in a world where Evangelical Christians and fundamentalist Islam have made religiosity in politics distasteful and dangerous, but the Founders believed that the spiritual, even religious, quest for virtue was a pre-condition to the success of our democratic republic. John Adams, famously: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

James Madison, who architected America’s First Amendment to its Constitution, wrote in his earliest drafts that “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments.” (Madison used sentiments in the 18th century sense, like Adam Smith used it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, to mean moral judgments, actively discerning right from wrong, not as we use it today to mean simply opinions or preferences.) Jefferson, too, understood the Free Speech Clause in spiritual terms: “Almighty God hath created the mind free,” he wrote, and that “all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.”

The Founders’ logic on the importance of free speech and free souls to the political health of the republic runs like this:

• the human mind is, and by right ought to be, completely free in matters of judgement and belief;

• to develop sound judgment and right belief, our conscience must be free of coercion;

• the freedoms of speech, press, and free inquiry protect the means by which our conscience searches, tests, and refines its judgment;

• a republic of free men succeeds only in so far as its citizens develop the capacity of forming and communicating such judgments about their government.

Madison, Adams, and Jefferson of course knew that free speech does not automatically produce virtue, and that a society of free thinkers would necessarily create a lot of untruth as a waste product. But they understood that virtue cannot be authentically embodied if produced by coercion of belief or suppression of inquiry.

But over a century ago, the American right to free speech abandoned as its motivating purpose the conscience or virtue of the individual, and replaced it with a concern for “political truth” and democratic optimization. Free speech had always been a right of speakers, obviously, but thanks to the dominance of a peculiar metaphor, our law now concerns itself primarily with the rights of hearers as consumers of speech.

Justice Neil Gorsuch did us the favor of summarizing the modern ideal of free speech. He writes, in 303 Creative v. Elenis (2023):

The framers designed the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to protect the “freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think.” They did so because they saw the freedom of speech “both as an end and as a means.” An end because the freedom to think and speak is among our inalienable human rights. A means because the freedom of thought and speech is “indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.” By allowing all views to flourish, the framers understood, we may test and improve our own thinking both as individuals and as a Nation. For all these reasons, “[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” it is the principle that the government may not interfere with “an uninhibited marketplace of ideas.” (internal citations omitted)

That metaphor—the marketplace of ideas—was popularized in the 1969 case Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC. “It is the purpose of the First Amendment,” writes Justice Byron White, “to preserve an uninhibited market-place of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail.” Ironically, the phrase entered constitutional law not as a shield against restrictions on free speech but as a justification for it. In the Red Lion case, a radio preacher in Pennsylvania insulted a journalist by name in a broadcast, and the journalist demanded air time under the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine to respond. The station refused, and the government forced it to comply. Justice White wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court that, because broadcast frequencies are scarce, radio stations who license those frequencies from the government have to comply by its rules, which under the Fairness Doctrine included a ban on one-sided political speech on public airwaves.

The preceding sentence, often omitted when the famous metaphor is recited, makes the point clear: “It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.” Hearers, not speakers.

Ever since Red Lion, restrictions on speakers are justified if, in the government’s view, it leads to a diversity of viewpoints for the benefit of hearers. Opinions like Gorsuch’s might recite the spiritual ends of the Free Speech Clause, but the past hundred-odd years of First Amendment cases shows that it is the means, and not the ends, that have the force of law.

The problem with the “marketplace of ideas” is that it presumes we engage with knowledge like consumers in a market rather than as seekers of truth. A free market in goods and services does, in fact, deliver the largest diversity of goods at the best quality and the lowest price. A free market in ideas does the same—it gives the people what they want. The metaphor would be a sound one, if what the people wanted was truth.

But they don’t. What they want is utility, whether or not its true. So in our uninhibited marketplace of ideas, in addition to useful truths, we should expect to find a whole lot of useful untruths as well. Which we do, in spades. And so, if the purpose of the First Amendment is to ensure that competitive forces allow “truth to ultimately prevail”, the government can inhibit the gurus who profess untruths (whatever the government defines that to be) under the guise of preserving competition in the “uninhibited marketplace.” They’re just doing what governments do and correcting a market failure, after all.

That’s a big problem. Not only does the “marketplace of ideas” clearly not result in better or truer ideas winning out, the metaphor has since its inception served to justify restrictions on speech in the name of that demonstrably false premise.

So, we might want to tweak the metaphor.

I propose the bizarre bazaar.

Imagine endless rows of stalls, with hawkers of ideas desperately competing for your attention. Every single possible idea is there for you to find. As an idea becomes more useful, more vendors compete to offer the idea, but that doesn’t mean those ideas are more true or that they somehow “win”—ideas have a marginal cost of zero, after all, and their supply is infinite—they just appear in more varieties of expressions, to satisfy consumer demand. The aggregate buying and selling, though interesting, is not the important level to focus on. It’s the individual experiences of every human soul in the bazaar.

There are no new ideas in the bizarre bazaar. They’re all here, they’ve always been here. Like Watts’s gurus, not every stall will have the answers you seek, and some may even lead you astray. But that’s ok, those answers may be for someone else, not for you. Or, it may be that holding onto a wrong idea, or living a false life, is precisely what you need to find your way to truth. The government censors can’t know what is true or not in the sense that matters to your particular journey.

Those censors may have good intentions, no doubt. Their rules may ensure the seekers avoid encounters with wrong ideas, save them from the experience of arguing with charlatans, and spare them the educational indignity of holding a falsehood long enough to recognize it as false. But to regulate away all those market failures is to remove the training by which the seeker becomes a master.

To entertain you with even more metaphors, the difference between the bizarre bazaar and the marketplace of ideas is the difference between a farmers’ market and a commodities trading floor. On the trading floor, no one touches the wheat; the wheat is an abstraction. The goods are fungible, the participants interchangeable, the system is optimized for a single output: the generation of information through the process of price discovery.

The marketplace of ideas treats speech like a commodities floor. Ideas are fungible units. What matters is that the market offers sufficient diversity and that no single supplier corners it. The government’s role is, of course, to regulate the floor—ensure liquidity, punish market manipulation, keep the market “uninhibited” so price discovery can occur. That crucial signal that emerges from the system is all that matters, because it tells us which idea is “best.” The participant is irrelevant, the system is the thing.

The bizarre bazaar is a different marketplace entirely, messy and disorganized and prone to the type of failures that make it human. Every seeker who enters walks a different path, encounters different stalls, and finds themselves making different deals and assembling different baskets of truths and untruths. The seeking is the process, as Watts showed. The haggling with vendors develops in the seeker what Madison meant by conscience, moral discernment, the ability to weigh true value.

That is, I think, why the Buddha emphasized Right Speech, and why Fr. Pine wrote a whole book on the trained tongue. Right Speech is what the wandering produces in the speaker who takes it seriously. It is a practice cultivated from within by a conscience that has been free to search, to err, and to search again. That wandering, that discipline, is only possible within a culture and polity of truly, maximally free speech. Only within freedom do we discover the need to discipline ourself, to self-regulate, if we truly want to find the “best” ideas; regulation from without makes that discovery impossible.

We shouldn’t care if the “best” ideas emerge from the marketplace as a price signal emerges from a trading floor. That’s not how it works. The ideas are already there, they’ve always been there, but they cannot be handed to us, we have to find them for ourselves. What matters is that the bazaar remains open to one and all, sellers in their infinite stalls and buyers wandering between them, looking for God, or at least the parts to assemble Him.

Anyway, the friar’s book is now on my shelf, waiting to be read when I’m a bit further along in my wandering. Maybe I’ll write a review after I climb up and come down from that particular mountain.

Without SPAM, the Allies would have fallen to Hitler. Therefore, SPAM is one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century.

This is a defense of the entrepreneurs and food scientists who brought ultraprocessed foods to market, in a time when lawmakers are moving to ban them.

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Jay Hormel was, according to lore, the first Minnesotan to report for duty at Camp Dodge, Iowa, to fight in World War I. The son of a first-generation German immigrant who founded a pork-packing operation in 1891, Jay was assigned to Ice Plant Company 301, a refrigeration logistics unit in France. He noticed that the American forces had a supply chain bottleneck: shipping space across the Atlantic was severely constrained. His solution was to bone meat before freezing it, saving 40% of cargo space and dramatically increasing the volume of protein that could reach the Western Front.

Twenty-five years later, in another world war, Hormel Foods again was tasked with solving a logistics problem, this one ancient: rancid meat. The disease botulism takes its name from botulus, the Latin word for sausage, because improperly cured sausages were responsible for outbreaks throughout early modern Europe. Hormel discovered that, if you treat pork shoulder with sodium nitrite and cook it within the sealed can (a method now named retort canning), it kills all the harmful bacteria and prevents any botulinum spores from germinating. This made SPAM the most efficient shelf-stable protein product ever invented.

By 1944, over 90% of Hormel’s canned output was purchased by the U.S. government. Over fifteen million cans per week were shipped to Allied forces overseas.

Hormel’s breakthrough built on a lineage of food scientists who had spent a century solving this problem. Nicolas Appert had discovered thermal sterilization in the 1790s, though it’s not clear he understood why it worked. Louis Pasteur identified the microbial mechanism in 1864. The USDA authorized sodium nitrite for use in meat products in 1925, once researchers understood that it was sodium nitrite, not nitrate, that prevented botulism. Finally, the innovation of retort canning destroys any vegetative bacteria.

Starvation is one of humanity’s ancient plagues, and food scarcity and spoilage its twin heralds. We have been trying to solve these problems for millennia, and with what we now call ultraprocessed foods, we finally did.

The ancient techniques of salting, smoking, drying, and pickling were helpful, of course, but not sufficient. Hundreds of millions of people still died from famine. Scarcity and spoilage reflect the fact that growing food and delivering food are two separate problems. We could not solve starvation unless we tackled both.

Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution are largely credited with saving billions of lives from starvation by solving the “growing food” problem. Subsistence farmers the world over became more successful and efficient because of technologies he popularized.

But it was inventors and entrepreneurs like Appert, Pasteur, and Hormel that solved the “distribution” problem with ultraprocessed foods.

However unsympathetic industrialized food manufacturers may be, the founders and scientists who built those companies were solving real problems. They were not poisonmongers. The specific innovations we now demonize under the label ultraprocessed were engineered to feed the armies that saved Europe, and further developed to essentially defeat starvation. To the extent it still exists anywhere in the world, its almost always caused, as economist Amartya Sen famously demonstrated, by political problems—failures of government, not failures of crops or private businesses.

Yes, we now have a new health crisis, obesity, and it’s a genuine crisis that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans per year. But this is a crisis of abundance, not scarcity. And simply banning ultraprocessed foods won’t solve the problems of our food economy; it may make them worse.

Every ingredient and process now targeted as a driver of the obesity epidemic was originally developed to solve a problem of food access or safety. Sodium nitrite prevents botulism. Corn syrups prevent crystallization and spoilage. Maltodextrin controls moisture and extends shelf life. Extrusion makes raw grains edible without cooking. Emulsifiers prevent separation. Modified starches bind water to prevent mold growth.

It’s not like simply banning ultraprocessed foods would suddenly make poor people substitute real foods in their place. People look at places like Italy or France and assume that Americans would suddenly eat like that if not for those evil food conglomerates stuffing us with fake food. But the cultural and economic systems that would make that transition possible were eroded not by those businesses, and not by consumers making poor choices, but by government policy that distorted business decisions and encourages poor health choices.

The substitution fallacy assumes that real, whole foods already exist at comparable price points and convenience levels that Americans can simply swap into their lives. Anyone, even those with means, who has tried to eat well knows this isn’t the case. But the reasons have almost nothing to do with food industry malice or consumer ignorance.

America once had, like many places in Europe that still do, dense networks of local food producers, regional food traditions, multi-generational cooking knowledge transfer, and walkable market infrastructure. In other words, the food economy was arranged around smaller institutions and local networks of food preparation and shared eating.

This model was undermined and replaced by government policy over the course of about forty years. The New Deal’s agricultural subsidy regime started the process in the 1930s, and the 1970s Farm Bills under Nixon’s USDA completed the transition.

Those policies deliberately restructured American agriculture around commodity monocultures like corn, soy, wheat, and rice. Farmers were encouraged to industrialize and conglomerate. As Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture described it, the official policy directive was “get big or get out.” They listened. Farmland consolidated and shifted to the commodity products that made the raw inputs for ultraprocessed foods absurdly cheap compared to fruits, vegetable, and animal products.

A genuine market in agriculture would price corn and soy at levels reflecting actual demand. Instead, the subsidy structure created a permanent oversupply problem, which in turn created a permanent incentive for food manufacturers to find novel uses for cheap corn and soy derivatives. This is why we put ethanol into our gasoline and sweeten our Coke with high-fructose corn syrup. In a freer market, neither of those things would exist. Very likely the same market logic would apply to artificially cheap products like hydrogenated soybean oil, soy lecithin, and maltodextrin.

The food industry didn’t conjure up demand for these inputs. Government policy effectively dictates what to grow.

Meanwhile, the crops necessary for the “real food” diet receive comparatively negligible subsidies and, worse, they face disproportionate regulatory burden. A small diversified vegetable operation or pastured livestock farm faces many of the same USDA compliance requirements that were designed for industrial-scale processors. The regulatory architecture rewards scale in ways that make small production economically marginal. “Get big or get out” is still the law of the land, all these years later.

The same policy failures on the “growing food” side apply on the “distributing food” side. Municipal zoning regimes since the mid-twentieth century have favored large-format retail, auto-dependent commercial strips, and separation of residential from commercial use. This systematically disadvantaged the kind of small, walkable neighborhood grocers and butchers that still define food retail in much of Europe. When those businesses disappeared, they took with them the local supply chains that connected regional producers to urban consumers. The only ones that remain are supported by immigrant networks that operate outside the regulatory architecture that makes small-scale food production uneconomical (this is why Chinese food in New York and taco trucks in LA can be so good and so cheap).

It’s well-known that industry lobbying and questionable industry-funded nutritional science was responsible for the original Food Pyramid and other ridiculous USDA dietary guidelines. But remember: they were being heavily incentivized to grow what the government policy told them to grow. They had to find a market for them. So the government obliged with policy positions that happened to align with the economic interests created by the subsidy regime. Eat more grain. Use more soy oil. Avoid the butter and eggs from the small farms we’re already pushing out of business.

The result was a food industry reorganized by government policy and a population that was told by that same government that eating ultraprocessed food was healthy. Industry was following the incentives laid out for it to produce it, and consumers were following official guidance when they replaced butter with margarine, cooked with vegetable oil instead of lard, ate cereal instead of eggs, and snacked on “low-fat” products loaded with sugar.

Simply banning ultraprocessed foods is just another distortionary policy that risks making meat and dairy products effectively unaffordable for the poor.

Strip away the processed food and you don’t suddenly get Italy’s cucina povera. You get poor people with no time, no local food infrastructure, no cooking tradition, no affordable alternatives, and no accurate nutritional information—now also with no access to the cheap calories they were depending on.

The problem is not, and never was, the miracles of food science. It is, as it always is, distortionary government policy and over-eager bureaucrats.

The answer is not to ban the tech that solved starvation. It is to dismantle regulations that made them the only option. Reform the subsidy regime so that commodity monocultures no longer crowd out diversified agriculture. Apply regulatory parity so that a pastured livestock operation isn’t buried under compliance costs designed for industrial processors. Let food prices reflect actual supply and demand rather than political allocation.

Food scientists are not the villains of this story. They’re not incentivizing Americans to eat poorly, they’re making sure they don’t starve.

Shortly before Christmas, an article was published titled “AI Will Kill All The Lawyers.” A few days ago, Matt Shumer’s viral article on X repeated the claim that the job-apocalypse hitting software developers is coming for the lawyers next.

Later that same day, the humans struck back using tools that AI was supposed to make obsolete: paperwork and bureaucracy. The tools in question were a lawsuit and a ruling from the bench by Judge Jed Rakoff. If this ruling holds, the bureaucracy that is the legal profession will protect lawyers against the AI threat to their jobs, discouraging clients from using AI to replace workers without disrupting our ability as lawyers to use those same tools.

Before we get to the ruling, first the facts of the case: Bradley Heppner was arrested and charged with securities and wire fraud late last year. His mansion was searched and his devices were seized. On those devices, federal agents found approximately thirty-one documents generated by Claude. It turns out that, after Heppner found out he was going to get busted and hired a lawyer, he used Claude to prepare research reports evaluating his legal defenses.

The prosecutors moved to admit those thirty-one documents into evidence. Heppner’s lawyers objecting, claiming attorney-client privilege over the documents. They argued that the documents Claude generated were protected because they included information Heppner got from his lawyers and that he created them specifically for organizing his thoughts to communicate with counsel. They also invoked the attorney work product doctrine, arguing that a report prepared by a client in anticipation of litigation should be protected even if not done at counsel’s direction.

The government’s motion attacked both claims. On attorney-client privilege, the prosecutors argued, first, that Claude is not an attorney, that Anthropic’s terms of service expressly disclaim any attorney-client relationship, and that the documents were not confidential because Anthropic’s privacy policy permits use of prompts for model training and disclosure to governmental authorities. On work product, the government pointed out that Heppner’s own counsel conceded they were not the ones prompting Claude. Heppner, their client, did it on his own initiative and then shared the outputs with his laywers after the fact. So Claude’s generated outputs cannot be the attorneys’ work product.

Judge Rakoff agreed with the prosecutors and held that the generated documents are not protected. On attorney-client privilege, he held that Heppner had disclosed the information to a third party, Claude, which had an express provision that submissions were not confidential. On work product, he held that Claude’s reports did not reflect the legal strategy of Heppner’s counsel. Since neither Heppner nor Claude are licensed attorneys, and Heppner was not working at his counsel’s direction, the materials were unprotected.

(Rakoff has not yet issued a written opinion, but the government’s motion, which he granted, can be found here.)

Now step back and consider what this means for all the doom-saying about professional work. Claude may have been able to pass the bar exam back in 2023, but as of today, Claude cannot be a registered attorney. It doesn’t have a bar number, it isn’t an officer of the court, it isn’t bound by duties of confidentiality.

Anything you say to Claude can and will be used against you in a court of law.

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There’s an irony in the fact that the very paperwork and bureaucracy that Claude was supposed to render obsolete is what makes the attorney-client relationship legally special in the first place. The credential, the license, the oath, the regulatory apparatus, is what creates the privilege.

And this isn’t unique to law. Every licensed profession has the same structural defenses baked in. Your accountant’s work papers are protected under Section 7525. Your therapist’s notes are shielded by psychotherapist-patient privilege. Your doctor’s communications with you are covered by HIPAA and state evidentiary rules. Try replacing any of them with an AI chatbot and then asserting those same protections in court. See how that goes. The protections attach not to the information being generated but to the relationship within which it is generated, that between a client and a licensed human professional. AI can generate the information, but not the relationship, and so, not the privilege.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that Claude won’t transform these professions. It will. Lawyers who use AI will outperform lawyers who don’t, and the same is true for doctors, accountants, and every other knowledge worker. But there’s a difference between a professional using a power tool and a client trying to do the job themselves with that same tool. When the professional uses it, the licensing regime wraps the output in legal protections like privilege, confidentiality, malpractice insurance, and fiduciary duty. When the client uses it alone, none of that applies. Heppner just learned this the hard way.

So AI kill all the lawyers? Maybe, but not today. Turns out the lawyers have a secret weapon in this fight that software engineers don’t: a centuries-old regulatory moat, enforced by the courts themselves, that makes the human professional legally necessary for the protections that clients actually need. AI can write the memo, but only a lawyer can make it privileged. And if Judge Rakoff’s ruling is any indication, the lawyers are in no rush to change that.

If you could believe it, not too long ago, Americans used to complain that America was not polarized enough.

The notorious segregationist Governor George Wallace said in 1968 that there was “not a dime’s worth of difference between the two majority parties.” In 2000, consumer advocate and hero to the American left, Ralph Nader, repeated the same line—that there was not a dime’s worth of difference between Bush and Gore. The far left and the far right shared a frustration with their exclusion from American politics as the so-called “uniparty” squabbled over details but broadly agreed on all the major questions.

And they had a point. The parties really were more alike, and it was once common for people to change their party affiliation as their views evolved. Hillary Clinton campaigned for “Mr. Conservative” as a Goldwater Girl in 1964. Strom Thurmond, the most famous of the now-extinct Dixiecrats, switched parties around the same time. Elizabeth Warren was a registered Republican until 1996. And most notoriously, President Ronald Reagan was an FDR booster and union leader before pronouncing that “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” These were not treated as ideological betrayals because party affiliation was not a fixed identity.

As recently as 2010—the midterms of the so-called Tea Party wave—political scientist Alan Abramowitz wrote “Why Political Polarization Might Be Good For America”, arguing that “It’s healthier to have parties that actually stand for something than to have the situation that we had 50 or 40 years ago, when you really didn’t know what the parties stood for because there was so much overlap between them.”

Well, he got his wish. And nobody is happy about it.

So what changed? The story is familiar to every educated American who has paid any attention to politics over the last two decades.

Barack Obama wins the 2008 election, becoming the first African-American President of the United States. This provoked a backlash among white conservatives, those Obama described during the campaign as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” After Obama won again in 2012, the disaffected whites became more bitter, as the Tea Party movement hardened into opposing everything he did. Pundit after pundit confirmed what seemed obvious at the time: a “whitelash,” mirroring Reconstruction-era opposition to Black progress, was repeating itself. Economic frustration and racial grievance culminated in a worry that America has changed for the worse, “triggered by Obama’s election.” When Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, he tapped directly into that reactionary fear, further radicalizing the right-wing, sending them into a negative feedback loop for the past decade, making the right ever more extreme, shocking decent people into protest and resistance.

This story was most memorably articulated in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2017 essay, “The First White President.” For Coates, Trump’s entire political existence can be explained as a negation of his Black predecessor. Economic anxiety alone couldn’t explain it, because Trump’s voters were more affluent than Clinton’s. Policy positions alone couldn’t explain it, because Trump had no coherent ideology. What remained was racial grievance. “Trump moved racism from the euphemism and plausible deniability of ‘dog-whistle’ politics to the overt and explicit.” The birther conspiracy. The Mexican “rapists” crossing the border. The “shithole countries” robbing Americans blind. These were signals to a white electorate that someone was finally saying what they were all thinking.

Adam Serwer extended the analysis in his piece, “The Cruelty Is the Point.” He argued that the defining characteristic of Trump, as compared to the kinder, but defeated, GOP nominees like McCain and Romney, was that his coalition was united not by any positive program but by a shared desire to punish outgroups. The laughter at rallies when Trump mocked a disabled reporter, the chants of “send her back,” the family separations at the border—these weren’t means to an end but ends in themselves, rituals of communal bonding through cruelty.

In the award-winning 2013 book, “Change They Can’t Believe In,” the authors traced a direct lineage from the Know-Nothing Party through the Ku Klux Klan to the John Birch Society to the Tea Party to MAGA, each a reactionary spasm triggered by perceived threats to white Protestant dominance. By the time Trump took office, the academic consensus and the journalistic consensus had converged: the American right had radicalized around racial grievance, lurching ever further to the extreme right as centrists and leftists stood still.

It’s a familiar, coherent story. It explains the vitriol, the norm violations, the sense that something broke.

There’s only one problem: when researchers actually measured what Americans believe—not how they feel about the other party, not what their party identification is or which candidate they support, but their positions on actual policy issues over time—they found something else entirely.

In a study published just a few days ago, on February 4, 2026, scientists in Cambridge University’s Political Psychology Lab used a novel approach to measure political polarization. Using a machine-learning technique that clustered Americans by their actual positions on issues rather than party affiliation or self-reported ideology, they found a 64% increase in polarization among Americans between 1988 and 2024, with almost all of that increase occurring after 2008. Interestingly, polarization over the 1990s and 2000s was essentially flat (validating the “uniparty” frame).

Their most provocative finding? The average policy preferences of the American Right have remained remarkably consistent since 1988, becoming only 2.8% more conservative over the past ~40 years. In contrast, the American Left has become 31.5% more progressive over those same decades.

The polarization of the American electorate, in other words, is driven almost entirely by progressives moving significantly further to the left.

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This holds across issues, though the pattern varies: on issues like abortion and traditionalism, the clusters have moved in opposite directions, but on issues like equal opportunities, both groups shifted left—though the progressive group moved much faster, stretching the distance between them.

To measure this, the scientists used a new measurement technique for issue polarization, as distinct from affective polarization (the delta between positive affect for one party and negative for the other) or perceived polarization (exactly what it sounds like—the polarization we subjectively perceive). They used a machine learning algorithm typically applied in fields like computational psychiatry called k-means clustering to divide survey respondents into two groups based on their actual policy positions across multiple dimensions simultaneously. This approach doesn’t rely on party identification, self-reported ideology, or single issues—each of which can be tainted by any number of confounding factors. Instead, k-means clustering allows us to divide the American electorate into the two most internally coherent, externally distinct clusters across multiple issues—the Left and the Right.

They then measured polarization along three dimensions: separation (distance between cluster centers), cohesion (internal agreement within each cluster), and size parity (whether the clusters are roughly equal, which intensifies political conflict). This led them to find a significant increase in “sorting”, the alignment of issues with partisan identification. By 2024, 20% more people in the Left cluster identified as Democrats and 51% more identified as liberals than in 1988; similarly, 30% more people on the Right identified as Republicans and 39% more as conservatives. The scientists point out that cross-cutting views have become much rarer, meaning there are far fewer “real” centrists who hold Left positions on some issues and Right on others.

This study confirms earlier findings that were criticized because of methodological problems the Cambridge study was designed to correct. Pew Research Center’s landmark 2014 study of political polarization tracked ideological consistency rather than position—it could tell you that Democrats were becoming more uniformly liberal, but not necessarily that they had moved further from center. The Cambridge study, by clustering Americans based on actual policy positions rather than party identification or self-reported ideology, addresses that limitation directly: it measures where people stand, not how neatly their views align with a party label.

Separately, an analysis in the FT pulling on data from the U.S. General Social Survey documented a related phenomenon. Drawing on research by political economist Laurenz Guenther, Burn-Murdoch showed that while voters and mainstream politicians remain broadly aligned on economic questions like taxation and public spending, a widening “representation gap” has opened on sociocultural issues—immigration, criminal justice, cultural integration—where the voting publics have long favored greater emphasis on order and control, while their political class has tilted toward more permissive and inclusive approaches. The populist right, in country after country, has expanded into that gap. The American version of this story maps onto the Cambridge data: the leftward shift is concentrated on cultural and social issues, and the political space vacated by that shift is where Trump’s coalition now lives.

Multiple methods, same results: the Left became more, much more, progressive and leftist, while the Right largely stood still.

(Immigration is the most vivid illustration (and the one we will explore the most below) but the Cambridge data shows the same asymmetric pattern across issues — from criminal justice to abortion and sexual rights to entitlement reform to the role of government.)

One of the Cambridge researchers speculates: “Part of the recent success of the US right may be their ability to tap into outgroup animosity for a perceived ‘woke’ left, rather than a firm belief in some of the more extreme right-wing positions adopted by the Republican leadership.” This rhymes with the accepted narrative—that MAGA is motivated not by any positive, coherent policy program, but by outgroup hatred—except it’s not a “whitelash”, it’s a backlash against progressive or “woke” excesses.

The obvious next question is: if the Left became more ideologically pure, and people with cross-cutting views disappeared, then where did those people in the center go? We know that, as of 1984 and 1988, both parties competed for the center, and Democrats used to vote for Republicans in droves, as when Reagan won 49 states in ‘84 and George H.W. Bush won 40 in ‘88. It’s impossible to imagine such landslides in today’s polarized environment, where elections are decided by a shrinking number of swing states.

One theory relies on the fact that those in the Left cluster see Trump’s GOP as full of hypocrites, taking contradictory policy stances that make no sense. That theory holds that the center migrated into the GOP, and that is why they seem so self-contradictory. As the Left became more pure and tightened its control over the Democratic Party, the only place for everyone excluded was in the other party. The Democratic Party’s leftward migration on cultural issues created a negative space, and that space filled with everyone who found themselves on the wrong side of the new progressive consensus.

Look at the composition of the current GOP and you find an alliance of outcasts that makes no sense on a traditional left-right spectrum: libertarians who want the government out of the bedroom and the boardroom; populists who want tariffs, industrial policy, and entitlement expansion; religious conservatives focused on abortion and marriage; tech executives who voted for Obama twice; union members whose fathers voted for FDR. Peter Thiel and the Teamsters. Elon Musk and rural evangelicals. RFK Jr. and the remaining country-club Republicans. What unites them is not a shared ideology—they disagree on economics, foreign policy, and the role of government.

What unites them is what they’re against: a progressive cultural project they find alien, censorious, and increasingly hostile to their values or interests.

A fascinating study from 2024 supports this theory, and corroborates the Cambridge study’s findings on sorting as well. It found something many of us sense intuitively: that individual attitudes on hot-button issues form two structurally distinct networks that map cleanly onto partisan identity (i.e., knowing someone's position on one issue (say, gun control) lets you predict their position on seemingly unrelated issues (say, climate change)). It’s the shape of those clusters that jumps out:

The shape of these clusters strongly suggests that the centrist cross-cutters are now in the Republican tent. This theory makes sense with what we see happening, in no small part because Trump’s coalition includes many disaffected Democrats.

In 2008, Donald Trump himself was a prolific Democratic donor, giving money to Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, even Kamala Harris. Elon Musk voted for Obama twice and still supported Dems until 2022. Tulsi Gabbard was once the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. RFK Jr. is, obviously, a Kennedy. All are now prominent figures in a Republican White House. The standard narrative is that they radicalized rightward, but it may be that the ground moved under their feet.

In contrast, the neoconservative movement that brought the Bush-Cheney ticket to power lost control of their party to this bunch of centrist former Democrats. They now call themselves Never Trumpers and are politically exiled. Conservatives who stayed in Trump’s GOP are often brought to heel and are forced to moderate—consider how Trump locked Republican delegates in a room and took their phones, and would not let them out until they approved a party platform that removed anti-LGBTQ language and any reference to a federal abortion ban, angering many conservative allies.

So, what do we make of this? It’s clear that the racial backlash thesis isn’t wrong—it describes something very real about rhetoric, behavior, and norm violations (and this analysis says nothing about concerns over democratic backsliding)—but it doesn’t explain the diversity of the current Republican coalition, because it doesn’t describe issue positions. A president who executes Clinton’s immigration policy goals by expanding Obama’s immigration enforcement programs is doing something different than his predecessors when he does it with cruelty and spectacle. Rhetoric matters—it shapes who feels safe, who feels targeted, and what becomes politically thinkable next.

Intentionally hostile rhetoric feels like a policy shift, even when the underlying policy hasn’t changed, even when the personnel in charge haven’t changed (remember, Border Czar Tom Homan was awarded by President Obama for his service in 2015). Clinton's bureaucratic tough talk is positively meek compared to Trump's bellicosity. But Trump's rhetorical escalation didn't happen in a vacuum. It is in part a deliberate enforcement strategy to deter border crossings and encourage self-deportation, as hawks openly argue, and a self-conscious corrective against Biden-era policies that departed from prior Democratic administrations in a major way.

Obama himself, in a 2010 speech, warned against the permissive approach his party would later adopt under Biden—easy legal status for illegal immigrants through a mobile app, robust funding for social services for migrants, and removal of border fences—and predicted the consequences:

“There are those in the immigrants’ rights community who have argued passionately that we should simply provide those who are [here] illegally with legal status, or at least ignore the laws on the books and put an end to deportation until we have better laws. …

I recognize the sense of compassion that drives this argument, but I believe such an indiscriminate approach would be both unwise and unfair. It would suggest to those thinking about coming here illegally that there will be no repercussions for such a decision. And this could lead to a surge in more illegal immigration. …

And no matter how decent they are, no matter their reasons, the 11 million who broke these laws should be held accountable.”

Trump’s rhetoric is a direct response to a Democratic Party that moved from Clinton's “we cannot tolerate illegal immigration” to a base that chants “no human is illegal on stolen land.” That's not a justification; it's a description of the dynamic. Consider what it means that Bill Clinton’s own positions on immigration and crime now sound Trumpian. When the Left shifted, positions that were once centrist began to register as extreme. Trump’s actual cruelty is real and shouldn’t be dismissed, but the perception that his policies represent a radical departure is itself a product of the asymmetric polarization the data reveals.

The Right did radicalize, but not in pursuit of an extreme ideology of its own. It radicalized in reaction to the Left’s rapid, asymmetric movement away from the center.

What we lack is a clear answer as to why the left polarized so much compared to the right, but we know it predated Trump. Obama famously clashed with the growing progressive/socialist flank of the Democratic Party for his entire presidency. The 2016 challenge of Berne Sanders to Obama’s anointed successor, Hillary Clinton, did not come out of nowhere. Sanders is a self-identified socialist, and polls have shown that, since 2012, a majority of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism (51% in 2012, climbing to 66% today). That all reflects a profound leftward shift that began before Trump arrived on the scene.

There are a few interesting theories as to why this happened. One comes from Ezra Klein’s former co-founder at Vox, Matthew Yglesias, who coined “The Great Awokening” in 2019. Yglesias argues that white liberals underwent a rapid, top-down shift on racial attitudes starting around 2012, driven not by their own voters but by elite signaling and social media dynamics—a shift that moved the Democratic Party’s cultural center of gravity faster than its base could follow.

Political scientist Yascha Mounk traces the intellectual genealogy in “The Identity Trap”, arguing that the modern progressive social agenda—post-colonialism, critical race theory, intersectionality—was incubated in academic departments, taught to a generation of Millennials not as theory but as fact, and then escaped containment when they graduated and became politically active. The new progressivism replaced the older universalist liberalism that had defined the center-left since the Civil Rights era. Journalist Wesley Yang calls the result “the Successor Ideology” and focuses on the mechanism of its spread—how a set of academic commitments became the operating system of universities, newsrooms, HR departments, and nonprofits with startling speed, such that dissent from the new consensus became professionally risky.

Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira in his book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” makes the electoral case with polling data: the party’s leftward shift on immigration, crime, race, and gender alienated precisely the working-class voters who ended up in Trump’s coalition.

There are other arguments, too, but nothing as cohesive and accepted as the familiar story of the right’s radicalization—a story that rings true with respect to the crass, hostile rhetoric and political style of MAGA, but is contradicted by data on actual policy positions.

But perhaps that makes sense. The modern Left is, after all, defined by its ideological coherence and built around its shared narratives. And the modern Right is defined simply as “not Left.” That asymmetry—one side defined by what it believes, the other by what it rejects—may be the deepest source of mutual incomprehension in American politics. The Left looks at the Right and sees incoherence, because no single ideology unites the coalition. The Right looks at the Left and sees intolerance, because the coalition demands conformity on an ever-expanding set of cultural commitments. Both perceptions contain truth. But neither side can fix what it can’t accurately describe, and right now the dominant description—that the Right radicalized while the Left stood still—is the opposite of what the evidence shows. A better politics starts with a better diagnosis.

The uncomfortable implication is this: if the Left is the side that moved, then the Left is the side that has to reckon with what it left behind. That doesn’t absolve Trump of his cruelty, or his coalition of its worst impulses. But it does mean that the path back to a functional, de-polarized politics must begin within the Democratic Party. The evidence suggests that the voters it lost didn’t become right-wing. They became homeless, and someone came along and offered them a roof.

No one argues anymore.

Oh, sure, we fight, we debate, we lecture and scold (“hold accountable”). We don’t argue. Maybe, if we’re savvy, we use argument to fight (debate, lecture, scold) the way one uses a bludgeon. We inflict violence on each other, slapping each other with sense, hoping we go cross-eyed from the impact so maybe we can finally see our own stupidity.

When we do argue, it’s not to resolve a dispute, but to advance a conflict. We battle, and give no thought to the war, much less to winning it. We are street fighters, always ready to fight again another day. No one duels anymore, a sportsman’s fight to end the hostility—or, hope beyond hope, resolve it for good. Now there are only turf wars, bloody turf wars, where we wrestle over the same sliver of intellectual real estate, back and forth, back and forth.

No one argues anymore, perhaps because no one knows how, perhaps because no one cares to learn, perhaps because no one sees the point.

Argument, we are told, is about persuasion, so that’s probably our first mistake. That is too simplistic, too reduced. Argument is about persuasion as sex is about procreation. Persuasion may be its designed purpose, the logic at the foundation of the act, but to simplify and reduce it to that and only that is to dehumanize and anti-socialize a profoundly creative, generative, and beautiful art.

Art is argument. There is an art to argument. All artists make arguments, claims about the world that are expressed through and embodied in their art. The artist says to the world, “this story will fill you with righteous fury” and, through their artistic choices and mastery of their medium, they make their argument through character, plot, and dialog that you should feel that righteous fury. The proof of their argument, the way they show you that what they claim is true, is in the undeniable persuasive power of that burning, that righteous burning, deep within your chest. (—if, that is, they successfully argued their case.)

Through argument, we express ourselves—who we are, what we believe, the world as we experience it, the world as we believe it should (or shouldn’t) be.

Argument is an art form, like storytelling. It crosses mediums. Novelists are obviously not the only storytellers, nor are film makers or documentarians or cartoonists. Musicians write entire instrumental epics that follow the arc of the Hero’s Journey. Visual artists abstractly illustrate the birth and death of a young love. So, too, do musicians skilled in argument make claims like “this song will make you have fun, and I’ll prove it—that beat is so infectious you can’t help but dance, and, what? —are you going to tell me you can dance and not have fun?”

Like any art form, there is a craft to it. Mastery of the medium is necessary, but not sufficient, to making good art. So, too, with argument. There is a structure, there are rules. One must be skilled with the tools: vocabulary, evidence, logic, authenticity, veracity, charm.

But, remember: the world’s greatest instrumentalist can play the world’s most beautiful song, but that doesn’t mean he can compose it.

Composing a beautiful argument is different than finding a winning argument. A beautiful argument is right, it is true. When you argue with an individual and your goal is only to win, it’s perfectly reasonable to sacrifice the truth to persuade. You might lie, you might manipulate, you might bully or frighten or coerce, all of which can be far more persuasive than argument. When you argue to the world with the same goal, you might propagandize or preach, playing the game of power. But when you argue to posterity, when you argue in the name of beauty and truth, you are playing a different, bigger, infinite game.

To argue beautifully, to aspire to truth in every argument you make, is an act of love and self-love. You are giving the respect to us and to yourself that your beliefs are worthy of explanation, that what you say is worthy of the time and effort to say it, to create a shared reality. We argue to share. To argue, artfully, cannot be done selfishly or hatefully. By definition, then, we don’t (we can’t) argue with people we see as unworthy. We only put in the effort for people we care about sharing our world with, those fellow travelers and truth-seekers we trust with our perspective.

One argues with their equals, not their lessers. One might use argument, though even when done lovingly it is like the argument of a parent to a child (which, of course, is no argument at all).

That, I believe, is why no one argues anymore. We see our neighbors, at best, as misguided fools in need of our advice. At worst, we are completely disinterested in giving them that respect, that love, because we stopped believing they deserve it. Arguing with such people seems pointless, so we never care to do it, so we forget how to do it.

This means we have it backwards: we antagonize, coerce, and fight because we don’t argue.

But we can learn to argue again. I believe more of us can learn to argue with authenticity and passion, to argue by true evidence and self-evident truths. We can stop worrying so much about persuasion, or about power, or about being less wrong. We can learn, instead, to argue like artists, taking this reality as either inspiration or cautionary tale, and inviting each other to imagine a new one.

I intend to learn how and, if you’ll let me, share it with you.

Thanks to Sasha Chapin for encouraging me to publish this piece.

1.

You are valuable.

More specifically, you create value, for yourself and those around you.

Even if you do nothing more than simply exist, you create value. If your parents are proud of you, you create value for them. If you walk down the street and someone is inspired by your outfit, you create value for them. If you discover a new way to exhale weed smoke so that your neighbors cannot smell it, you created value for yourself and for them.

Of course, if you deliberately do, say, or make something with the explicit intention of creating value, this is obvious. If you design new notetaking software, you create value. If you post sexy pictures of your travels on Instagram, you create value. And if you write essays to share your thoughts with the world, you definitely, unquestionably create value for yourself and all your readers (right, guys?!).

For now, let’s set aside the costs of generating that value—materials, time, labor, negative externalities, downstream consequences, social dilemmas. Much has been, and will be, said about the costs we impose on ourselves and others.

Let’s stay focused for the moment on a less popular topic: what we’re getting in return.

We create value everyday in thousands of ways, big and small. We’re comparative creatures, constantly measuring ourselves against one another, so next we might ask: how much value do we create?

This is a tricky question, because so much of that value is simply not quantifiable. How do you measure the value of a mother’s love? How do you measure the impact of life-changing inspiration? How do you measure the satisfaction of buying your first Ferrari?

The popular answer: we measure them comparatively.

Would you trade your mother’s love for your first Ferrari? If so, then you value the Ferrari (or, more accurately, the object plus all your feelings wrapped up in it) more than your mother’s love.

But how much more?

An economist would tell you that’s what money is for, to solve exactly that question. It’s a medium of exchange between things of different values that cannot be easily compared. The amount of money we’d give to acquire something, or accept to surrender it, is its price.

In theory, price equals value. In practice, price almost always fails to map to value, because there’s a second component of any exchange besides the agreement on price: the actual transfer of that value. And in order to transfer something of value, you need to capture it first.

How do you capture a mother’s love, such that it can be transferred? Is there a switch a mother can flip, if her son sells her love to someone else? Or, if her son wishes to liquidate his mother’s love—to turn it into cash, so he can buy that Ferrari—how exactly might they go about doing that?

They can’t, obviously. At best, they can agree to certain actionable terms that might look an awful lot like the liquidation of love, but not fully. They might agree to cut off contact, to disown one another, to sell off any shared assets and end any joint projects, to change their names, to burn any items attached to memories. They might promise to try hard not to think about each other ever again. Add all that together, though, and you haven’t fully captured a mother’s love—you’ve captured quite a few things associated with it, but not the whole thing.

Price does not measure value. Price measures the amount someone is willing to pay for value that can be captured and exchanged—which is not the same thing.

2.

Value radiates, like light. If I am reading by candlelight, and you sit close enough to me, you can read by that light, too. If I physically prevent you from getting close enough to the light unless you pay me a certain amount, I am capturing some of that value, and making you an offer in exchange. I don’t have to do this, of course. But I can.

Why would I want to? Why would anyone want to capture value? Seems selfish and antisocial. Let the guy read, you might insist. It’s not costing me anything.

For many interactions, that’s absolutely true, and you’d be absolutely right. It’s not costing me anything to allow you to read this essay. What’s more, I gain tremendous value by writing it—it clarifies my thoughts, it builds my brand, it brings like-minded thinkers into my life, it satisfies my expressive urges. In fact, I get so much value from it, I’d like to do this more often. I’d like this to be a central part of my life. So, if I never charge you anything for it, I’ve still created value. Isn’t that enough?

But clarified thoughts are not self-sustaining. Everything needs to sustain itself, otherwise it’s a tree that one day stops giving. In order to keep doing the things I want to do, I need to secure the means to keep doing them. The best way to do that is to capture back some of the value I’m already creating.

Capturing can come in many forms. It doesn’t need to be charging access. Musicians can sell concert tickets, collect streaming royalties, sell merchandise, sell physical recordings, shout out sponsors in songs, tokenize their offerings, and dozens more. Capturing value exists in a delicate balance with value creation; some attempts to capture value can end up destroying it. Nevertheless, to capture value and bring it to market is the most direct and efficient means for people to continue making the value they want to share with the world. Though, like anything, it can be perverted or self-destructive, capturing value is at core a good thing. Without it, people who are not independently wealthy couldn’t dedicate themselves to value creation.

Capturing back the value created is the best way to enable people to sustain the passions to which they devote themselves, that give purpose and bring happiness to their lives. That’s true for the model who wants nothing more but to travel the world and eat acai bowls in beautiful outfits. That’s true for bedroom music producers, and world-class video gamers, and dancers, comedians, chefs, personal trainers. It’s true for protein bar makers and toothbrush inventors and productivity gurus. The same is true for the sculptor of dick snails.

Each of them, like each one of us, is faced with a choice: (1) do we pursue a life that allows us to create the most value? Or, (2) do we pursue a life that allows us to capture the most value?

For most of us most of the time, the answer was always (2). If you wanted to be a glamorous travel influencer, you’d need to convince one of the handful of magazines or newspapers employing travel editors to hire you. More likely, you’d make that your hobby, and work a “real job” to pay for it. You’d pick whatever allowed you to capture and sell the maximum value—a middle manager, a nurse, an accountant—and you’d enjoy your one-week vacation once a year to live your dream.

The sculptor of dick snails would need to set up a roadside storefront and hope enough connoisseurs of obscene tchotchkes find themselves driving down that road. More likely, he’d sculpt for himself in his free time, maybe give his “art” as gifts to reluctant friends and family, spending most of his hours working in, say, a factory operating plastic molds that make souvenirs for the Walt Disney Corporation.

They can make different choices now.

Social media makes different choices, for the first time, possible and accessible. Social media connects people who want to be connected. It helps them find each other. It points those obscenity connoisseurs down the roads they were looking for, but didn’t yet realize.

It allows many of us—and more of us every year—to find those people who capture previously uncapturable value, so we no longer have to choose between the life that creates the most value and the life that captures the most, because the function of social media is to collapse those into the same life.

It might be simplistic to call the former “hobbies” and the latter “jobs”, just as the whole notion of a “work-life balance” is too simplistic to capture people who love their work and hate their lives, or those who don’t see a difference between work and life at all. But we’ll go with it, because social media fundamentally alters the balance between “hobbies” and “jobs”. And by doing that, it makes possible the pursuit of passion for more people than ever before.

That balance was never really about the activities involved. What distinguishes a hobby from a job is the perception of the people, and about the nature of their connections with each other. A “hobby” is done either alone, or in a community, but (usually) not in a market. A “job” is done in a community and in a market, but never alone. Social media makes it astonishingly easy to find (or build) your community, and for communities to find markets.

Another way of saying “pursue your passion” is “pursue the life that creates the most value for yourself.” If you believe that our society should promote human flourishing, if you believe that a life of passion should be available to as many people as possible, then you must support people’s ability to create—and, just as importantly, capture—as much value as possible.

Maybe there are positive social effects to having people work jobs they hate, but that create a lot of value for others. Some capitalists would make that claim, that happiness is not as important as doing whatever commands the highest market price for your time and labor, so that the overall wealth of the society is as high as possible (and, so, you gain from that, too). Some extreme collectivists—fascists, communists—might also make that argument, but their measure is not market price, but whatever they tell you your highest value is to the collective.

But, what if we could sidestep that tradeoff? What if we could live in a world where people pursuing their passions generates meaningful value and they can capture enough of that value to support themselves and their communities? What if they could spend most of their time on the things that bring them the most purpose and happiness?

A common objection here is that someone has to do the shitty jobs. Having met enough lawyers, accountants, and middle managers who authentically and earnestly enjoy their jobs, I’m not worried about there not being enough people to do jobs most other people hate. People choose to be morticians and coroners, after all. If there’s demand for work no one wants to do, the people who want that work done will find a way to get it done: delivery drones, customer service chat bots, and Roombas will replace postal, call center, and domestic workers. People who want the human touch of a courier, a concierge, or a housekeeper will have to pay the wages those who remain in those fields (because they want to!) can now command.

Social media is the most recent in a long-line of decentralizing and empowering social technologies, from the printing press to free trade to public transportation to the Internet. The history of these technologies is that, at each successive step, people are better able to develop and bring to market their unique talents. Said another way, they’re better able to maximize the value they create, and capture the value created.

3.

But wait: how, exactly, does social media do that?

By creating communities, by creating markets, and by encouraging the creation of technologies that bridge the two.

Social media, at its core, is about connecting people. It defines the technology: platforms where people can friend, follow, subscribe, or otherwise engage with one another as social beings. The platforms enable us to share things with each other: words, pictures, videos, sounds, products, services, thoughts, feelings, ideas. Through these connections our social graph sprawls, we follow the people our friends follow.

When we share and engage, the platforms collect data and learn about us, algorithmically pointing us towards more people, pictures, and products that we might like, because we like people who liked those things, too. Connected people who engage with each other over shared interests are a community. Bonds form.

People within communities like to engage with each other, to strengthen the community. They like to do things for each other. They make content for each other. They create value for one another, value that other members are eager to encourage and reward. As they create value, their community becomes more valuable, radiating like a beacon to attract more people eager to join the club.

As a community strengthens, the incentives align for those within to participate, and to encourage others to participate. For example, let’s say you are the most talented reggae musician in your community of stoners (err, cannabis enthusiasts). They don’t want you to spend ten hours a day practicing law, they want you to make music that moves them. But, just as passionately, your partners at the law firm want you to spend more hours billing your clients, not recording music.

How do you choose which way to go? That, as the Cheshire Cat would say, depends a good deal on where you want to go.

The law firm, too, is a community. But it formed itself the way guilds and firms have for centuries in capitalistic societies. Your cannabis enthusiasts, though, would never have been able to form a community in the same way. And without that community —a community that could not be that large, or that engaged, without social media—the choice would be made for you, because you would only have one path to choose.

In this way, social media allows us to find our audience, our customers, the people who would love to receive some of the value we create. And, it allows us to find value in the world we never would have known existed, by encouraging us to share and connect and learn more about what and who we might like, and then bringing it—and the people who make it—to us.

Captured value alone is not enough to sustain a person. There must be a market for that value—that is, there must be people willing to buy and people willing to sell the captured value. The most important, most difficult, and most underappreciated part of markets is the market maker, the one who introduces the buyer to the seller and makes the exchange possible.

A social media platform’s targeting algorithm does exactly that.

The algorithms are designed to predict what and who you might like and connect you to them. This is incredibly valuable to marketers who don’t want to plaster their products on billboards or TV commercials that reach millions of random people. They want to find the specific individuals most likely to appreciate their products. Thousands of creators, startups, and small businesses can use the same technology to find their customers as those same customers use to find like-minded people and build communities. It’s the same tech.

Therefore, social media platforms, by connecting people, are market makers. You, that talented reggae musician, now have an audience of thousands of potential fans and customers, where before you had the handful of fans in your hometown and maybe, just maybe, by the grace of a record producer to whom you mailed a burnt CD, some exposure to larger pools of people who might or might not like reggae when they hear it on the radio. In that world, it’s probably more comfortable, if far less satisfying, to keep working at that law firm.

In that world, there’s one fewer talented musician enriching people’s lives, and one more disgruntled, mediocre lawyer overbilling an investment bank.

The social giants—Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube Snapchat, TikTok—enabled us to build communities. They gave us tools for connection. What was less well-developed, but is now being built at a rapid pace, was the infrastructure to capture and exchange the value being created in those communities. What we lacked were tools for capture. The giants supported influencers and creators who brought attention, and therefore value, to their platforms by allowing them to capture some of that back in the form of ad support. But they didn’t really allow them the tools to capture the value themselves.

We are now entering a new era, where we can all leverage the platforms of the social giants to find our people, and leverage a new suite of social technologies to capture an even greater share of the value we create for those people.

For example, I can build a brand and a following on Twitter, a community around my ideas. But Substack allows me to capture more of the value I’m generating for that community (and for Twitter), through subscriptions. People find me on Twitter, people buy me on Substack.

Models (and others) can now capture the value of their bodies and performance on OnlyFans. Personal trainers can capture the value of their knowledge and enthusiasm on Salut. Even dick sculptors can peddle their wares on Etsy or even their own Shopify stores.

Where before, a big Twitter following might be leveraged to get a job at Vice or Vox (where they capture most of the value you create, in exchange for your salary), now you can capture that value directly in a myriad ways—instead of this Substack, I could put together an ebook and sell it on Gumroad, or an online course and sell it on Skillshare, or some digital representation of my political theories and sell the NFT on Nifty Gateway.

The barriers to entry are lowered, the gatekeepers are no longer needed. We now have tools for connection and tools for capture that are accessible to all.

4.

I recognize that my claim—”social media is good, actually”—is no longer a popular one. Social media, we’re often told, is the cause of all of society’s ills—from polarization, to misinformation, to racism, to terrorism, to vanity, to eating disorders, to depression, to stupidity, to bad parenting, to atrophied libidos.

Not too long ago, we could imagine how social media could—and did—improve the world. We were excited about social media’s potential in the first half of the last decade. The election of Barack Obama, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party—depending on your geography and your politics, each one represented the organizing potential of social media to empower popular causes that were muzzled by existing gatekeepers, real or perceived. Even if the media didn’t quite understand the business models at play, they fawned over the social opportunity. It was the wonderful, educated, connected future we were all promised.

Then, as the immutable truth of the Innovation Adoption Curve tells us, more and more people joined in on the fun. Mom and Dad got Facebook accounts. Middle America got on Twitter. Suddenly, social media wasn’t just an exclusive, separate online space for cool kids and tastemakers that existed parallel to the real one, unbeknownst to anyone but the IYKYK crowd. Once the laggards got online, the worlds merged.

Everyone was eating at the same table, and we became disgusted with each other. The table manners, the food, the smells, the conversations. Oh, god, the conversations—if you could even call them that. We’d ask ourselves, why do they talk like that? Why do they talk about that? They think that is important? Why do they want to spend so much time talking about that… to them?!

The table became an asynchronous, perpetual, international Thanksgiving Dinner from Hell, and everyone’s spoiled siblings, annoying cousins, and racists uncles were invited.

I get it: it’s all so messy, and most of us don’t like what we see when we look at each other as we truly are. Before social media, we didn’t really have a clear look at each other. Our views into each other’s lives and minds were limited. We lived within our geographic communities, we controlled our interactions with one another, we kept things private that today we publicize. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of people ever became household names, and together with their handlers and promoters they ensured that those names remained sanitized—though, of course, our demand to peek behind the curtain encouraged the press to find the dirt we craved, the same dirt we now freely share… and complain about.

Many of us miss the cleaner, sanitized world. We got a good look at each other, and most of us really, really don’t like what we see.

But, no one is forcing us to use these platforms. Billions of people live fruitful lives, building and serving happy communities of geographically proximate people without any help from social media. Many of my friends deleted Facebook years ago, never made an Instagram, and live productive lives in blissful ignorance of what’s happening on Twitter.

And, no one is forcing you to hate the people you meet on social media You don’t even have to interact with them. You have that power. We all know the truth, that people can be crass, lazy, ignorant, cruel, especially to people outside their group. We are all those things ourselves, at times, though we try to be better. It is an entirely human experience, both offline and on, to share something with those who pay attention to us, and to be misunderstood or, worse, embarrassed, exposed in a way we hadn’t anticipated, our illusions of ourselves shattered. That’s what’s happening every day on Twitter. We’re all learning and living on the same timeline.

When someone we care about, within our community, misunderstands us, we feel shame. When some random from outside our community wanders into our comments and misunderstands us, we get hostile. Of course we get hostile. My thoughts were not for you, random guy! They’re for my customers, my audience, my community!

It’ll take some time to get used to all this, for social customs to evolve.

We don’t all have to like each other to get along. We don’t all have to like the same things, or care about the same causes, or associate with the same people. We’ve lived next door to these people before social media, and they were exactly the same then. They’re not any more brainwashed, or mind-controlled, or screen-addicted than they were with asses glued to the couch and eyes glued to the TV. It just wasn’t in our faces, but we all knew it then, too, on some level. Homer Simpson was a caricature, sure, but not exaggeratedly so. He was every other guy in the suburbs, and that was fine.

We can curate our feeds and our friends with finer controls than we ever could before, and call me crazy, but that’s a good thing.

Social media empowers us to find our people and to create value for them, and to support ourselves and our communities by doing so.

We’ve faced problems from empowered people in tight-knit communities before, whether they be apocalyptic cults or violent political movements or hostile foreign powers. Social media enables them to organize and create value for each other just as surely as they do for anyone else.

Many are worried that this time is different, that social media makes them too powerful, that the costs of allowing “bad” groups to organize outweighs the human flourishing enabled by allowing “good” groups to do the same. In this way, the discourse around social media echoes the moral panics of all other decentralizing, empowering technologies, from the printing press to the bicycle to the telephone. Democratization is scary, especially for those who were comfortable and happy in the old world. It can be scary to let new, different people into our world. It can be scary to see what people do with freedom and power, especially if they do things we don’t like.

Justice Brandeis famously said, where we are concerned with the bad things people say, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” I believe we can expand this, from free speech to freedom of association: where we are concerned with the communities people build and the value they create for each other, the remedy to be applied is more value creation, not enforced disconnection.

Make more things for each other. Build healthier, happier, more desirable communities. Shine a beacon so others can see you, and so that they can find you, and join you.

This essay forms Part 2 of this newsletter from January 28, 2021, though it is not necessary context, you can just read the first paragraph below and you’re all caught up.

In The Redditors Send Their Regards, I wrote about how retail investors loosely organized on a Reddit forum called Wall Street Bets tried to execute a market maneuver previously performed only by billionaire institutional investors. In the time since, it’s become clear that financial regulations designed to protect retail investors were responsible for shutting down their participation in the market. This gave their opponents, the hedge funds, enough room to stabilize their positions. A week later, hundreds (if not thousands) of retail investors lost hundreds (if not tens of thousands) of dollars.

Some protection.

From a top-down (let’s call it technocratic) perspective, there are great reasons for regulations like capital requirements, which ensure that brokers like Robinhood have enough cash on hand to allow retail investors to access their money and to protect the brokers from collapse during volatile market swings (like, say, those caused by exuberant internet trolls).

But in practice, these regulations protected a brokerage that gets 40% of its revenue from two hedge funds—Citadel and Two Sigma—by selling them data about their users’ trades. They protected the hedge funds from the Redditors’ short squeeze. And they justified Robinhood’s removal of retail investors from the market at a critical time.

In other words, the rules designed to protect them were leveraged to ruin them. The message sent by Robinhood, the hedge funds, and—most critically—the financial regulators, was clear:

From the technocratic perspective, though, everything worked out exactly as it was supposed to. At the time of this writing, GameStop’s share price has settled at $60 (down from an all-time high of $483 last week). There was no great market collapse. The storm passed. Rationality and sober analysis won. The retail investors were successfully protected. Mission accomplished.

“Technocracy” is a fuzzy concept, but here’s a definition from economist Glen Weyl:

“By technocracy, I mean the view that most of governance and policy should be left to some type of “experts”, distinguished by meritocratically-evaluated training in formal methods used to “optimize” social outcomes. Many technocrats are at least open to a degree of ultimate popular sovereignty over government, but believe that such democratic checks should operate at a quite high level, evaluating government performance on “final outcomes” rather than the means of achieving these.”

A lot of ink has been shed the past week arguing about the merits of technocracy. Curtis Yarvin, in response to Glen, helpfully points out that “this so-called ‘technocracy’ is exactly how all modern governments work.” Scott Alexander, while not explicitly defining the term himself, provides the following justification of technocratic decision-making:

“We don't trust any individual human to make an unbiased decision. So we design some mechanism that's as unbiased as possible, and give it to lots of people so they can check that it's unbiased (in a way that you can never check whether someone's intuition is unbiased). Then we make decisions via the mechanism.”

In the case of capital requirements, that would mean that we create a mechanism—the SEC—that has a strict mandate of market stability and investor protection against fraud. They then pass regulations to advance that goal by relying on the latest and greatest empirical findings from economists. They establish these capital requirements based on their understanding of risk and volatility, as shown in the academic literature. The SEC, though, is an independent agency, because—in true technocratic style—we believe that market regulation should be insulated from everyday politics. This mirror’s Weyl: we’re open to some tweaks from Congress, as we saw after 2008, but democracy is too fickle and irrational to trust with decisions like this. Best to leave it to the experts, and to shield them from the rubes.

The SEC is not the only “independent” agency of the United States government that we keep protected from political influence (that is, from democratic accountability). Other examples include the Consumer Product Safety Commission (responsible for developing product safety standards), the Federal Communications Commission (responsible for regulating the internet and the airwaves), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Interestingly, the Administrative Conference of the United States (itself an independent federal agency that is “dedicated to improving the fairness, efficiency, and effectiveness of federal agency processes and practices through consensus-driven applied research”) admits that “there is no authoritative list of government agencies” but concludes that there are “at least” 61 independent agencies (along with eight “quasi-official agencies” and sixteen “international organizations”).

Each of these is surely run by technocratic principles. We should hope so, anyway, because they’re clearly not run by democratic ones.

Per Scott Alexander, technocratic decision-making is mechanistic:

“Why would anyone ever want mechanism? Why would we want to use formalisms? Human decision-making is so versatile and so good at taking account of outside-the-system problems that limiting ourselves to mechanical models would pointlessly cripple us, right?

I'm a fan of doing things formally. My answer to the above challenge is: mechanism is constraining on purpose. It's constraining in the same sense that tying yourself to the mast so that Sirens don't lure you to a watery doom is constraining. Mathematical formalism is a trick for securing a system against bias and corruption.”

Technocracy, in other words, is preferable to crude democracy because it protects crucial policy questions (like, say, capital requirements) from bias and corruption.

Huh.

Sarcasm aside, is that what we’re after, here? A system free of bias and corruption? Sure, I can agree those are negative drags on society (at least in the abstract), but what are we willing to sacrifice to avoid them? Equality? Fairness? Freedom?

I want to look at this problem from a different view. To get there, we first need to eject ourselves from the technocratic one. This is not easy for those with rationalist or meritocratic ideals (so, most of us), but we can borrow some tools from other disciplines. A well-known feminist critique of media is that so much of it is presented through the “male gaze”, and it’s become a useful tool for analyzing the potentially misogynist construction of a creative work. In the same vein, we can repackage the Seeing Like a State analysis and consider the “technocratic gaze” as a useful tool for analyzing the potentially dehumanizing implications of the rationalist value system.

Where the Seeing Like a State critique explains how technocracy can lead to horrible outcomes, the technocratic gaze critique explains how technocracy can undermine the legitimacy of the solutions it proposes.

We see that clearly with financial regulations, and it’s even more clear with the pandemic response.

“Trust the science” and “trust the experts” are the mantras of the technocrat. In the context of a pandemic, this seems obvious. Epidemiologists have spent their whole lives studying how viruses spread and how to contain them. Their expertise is exactly on point and, if the scientific method means anything at all, they have beliefs and methodologies that are free of bias and corruption and ready to be deployed to save the world.

During the summer of 2020 and still to this day, the science and the experts are clear: lock it all down. All of it. Sure, the science may not be conclusive—these are complex systems and unprecedented times, after all—but, regardless, in science we trust.

Different jurisdictions trusted the science to differing degrees, creating a real world science experiment regarding the efficacy of lockdowns. It was inconclusive. In San Francisco, which had one of the stricter lockdowns in the country, more people died of overdose than COVID. In Japan, which didn’t formally lockdown (though many Japanese, like people everywhere, voluntarily sheltered in place and curtailed economic activity), suicides outpaced COVID deaths.

Governments around the world, looking at the pandemic through the technocratic looking glass, relied on epidemiologists and public health experts to devise binding policy for their people. Science must be kept separate from politics, right? One is objective and unbiased, the other is subjective and emotional. The subjective must be subordinate to the objective, right?

Let’s reconsider pandemic policy, slowly zooming out from the technocratic gaze.

Imagine an alternate world, one where COVID is just as deadly, but we also have definitive, technocratically-satisfying evidence that lockdowns result in loss of five years of quality life per person in America. The epidemiologists, concerned as they are about the spread of the virus and preventable death from COVID, advocate for the full lock down. Workers, concerned instead with the collective loss across society of five years of economically productive life, advocate for no lockdowns.

How do we consider this problem?

We could view this through the technocratic gaze, and do the math. With lockdowns, we lose five years of life multiplied by 300 million Americans. Without lockdowns, we lose 1 million lives, which we can translate into X number of lost years of life. We solve for X, and if that’s less than 1.5 billion (300 million multiplied by five), then the decision is made for us.

That’s one way to solve the problem, but is it a satisfying one?

We’re trading lives against lives, but we have many more things to consider that sit outside easy quantification—whose lives? How do we value lost years of quality life? How about unevenly distributed impoverishment and lowered quality of life? What if it disproportionately impacts some communities? And on and on.

I have some friends who are nurses, doctors, and public health officials. They’re great people. Fair, reasonable. Are they more qualified than anyone else to make these tradeoffs? I’m not sure they are. Does a medical doctorate or a masters in public health qualify you to make moral decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions of people?

Because that’s what we’re dealing with here: moral decisions. Not a scientific one. Not a math problem, not a decision that is more or less informed by one person’s expertise in epidemiology, or medicine, or Bayesian statistics, or anything else. Those things give you frameworks for problem-solving, but it’s another thing entirely to impose your problem-solving frameworks on the people who will live or die by your decision, especially if they disagree with you.

There’s no hard and fast law of the universe that allows us to scientifically determine the answer to those questions. We can make arguments and try our best to persuade each other, but we can’t conclusively “prove” whether equality is more important than freedom, whether happiness is more important than security, and by what metric and to whose benefit. We each may have well-reasoned, well-supported, persuasive and justified reasons for answering those questions in entirely different ways.

So, who can we trust to make these decisions? Ethicists might raise their hands, but they’d be wrong, because “ethicist” is a made-up job. Ethicists are just people who are particularly good at coming up with well-reasoned, well-supported, persuasive and justified reasons to answer those questions in a particular way. But that just proves that they’re good at that, not that they’re “right”—and what happens when I find someone else who is just as persuasive?

By now, you’ve hopefully seen these questions through a different looking glass. As we exit the technocratic gaze, and adopt a bottoms-up rather than top-down view, we can see technocracy for what it is: a value system, like any other. They put the elimination of bias and corruption ahead of messy democratic principles. They put a scientifically ascertainable “truth” ahead of human desire. And (at least as it’s played out during the pandemic) they put certain lives (whole, elderly) ahead of other lives (quality years, young). These are not “objectively correct” choices. They are moral claims.

As with the pandemic, so too with financial regulations. The technocratic gaze we apply to markets—that they should serve the interests of efficient capital allocation, and elevate those expert elites that uphold those interests—blinds us to the bottoms-up view of the market participants, those who care not about efficient capital allocation but about maximizing the resources they have so they can maximize the one, singular life they have to live.

When we see social and economic lives as something to be regulated by expertise, our primary problem solving tool is to find experts and ask them to help us. We identify the experts with the most direct scientific subject matter expertise, we look through their eyes, and we let them call the shots. In a pandemic, that means letting epidemiologists and public health experts make moral decisions for us all—which blinds us to the bottoms-up view of people whose businesses are ruined, whose mental health suffers, whose futures darken.

All this begs the question: if not technocracy, then what? Am I proposing we simply ignore the experts? Is democracy—messy, subjective, emotional, biased, corrupt democracy—really the solution here? Sure, one-person-one-vote is a deeply cherished principle, but shouldn’t the vote of sophisticated investors count more when we consider financial regulations? Shouldn’t the vote of epidemiologists count more during a pandemic?

Yes and no. Technocrats, like democrats, are making a claim to authority and power. They are saying to the rest of us non-experts, “by the power I hold by virtue of my position, I decree that this is what we should all do, and your role is to do what I say, and if you disagree, you are putting the rest of us at risk and must be sanctioned.” In a democracy, that authority and power is legitimized through free and fair elections. In a technocracy, that authority and power is legitimized by credentials and demonstrations of expertise.

But expertise is not self-justifying. As any seasoned trial lawyer knows, you can find expert testimony to support almost anything you want. You have your experts, I have mine. Sure, yours might have better science and so a tighter relationship to the “truth” than mine, but mine are famous and loud and jurors love them. Which expert would you rather have on your side?

Because expertise is not self-justifying, experts need to do a much, much better job of justifying themselves to the rest of us if they want political power in a free society. Like any other claimant to political power, they must earn the trust of their subjects.

We’re busy people with busy lives. Not all of us can stay on top of every last bit of research coming out regarding the coronavirus. Not all of us can look into every last financial regulation and evaluate whether it makes our investments more or less risky. We want to trust the science, to trust the experts, to trust the technocrats.

From the top-down view, technocrats are simply ordering society according to the wisdom of their expertise. From the bottoms-up view, though, technocrats are asking their fellow citizens, with their own wants and needs and desires, to trust them. They are making tremendous, costly changes to our lives—telling us who we can visit, what holidays we can celebrate, what jobs we can hold, what markets we can participate in, whether or not we get access to a life-saving vaccine.

That’s a pretty big ask.

Trust in the technocrats is lost, though, when expert financial regulators adopt rules like accredited investor laws, which “protect” investors by barring them from some of the most lucrative, highest upside investments.

Trust is lost when national security experts lie to the UN that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or that Iran has been “weeks away” from a nuclear bomb since at least 2010.

Trust is lost when over 1,000 public health experts—the same people who want us to “trust the science” and their prestigious credentials—sign an open letter saying “we do not condemn these gatherings [the summer Black Lives Matters protests] as risky for COVID-19 transmission” and then, a mere two sentences later, “This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly against stay-home orders.” Does the science really say that the virus cares about the motivating cause of large outdoor gatherings, that the human intention behind a behavior is really relevant to how risky that behavior is for COVID-19 transmission?

Technocracy relies on trust as its source of legitimacy. Trust, that the institutions that educate these people only issue credentials to those who meet exacting academic standards. Trust, that they earn their unelected positions based on their merit and good judgment. Trust, that their decrees to the rest of us are free of bias and corruption. When none of those things are true, it doesn’t matter if the technocrats “have science on their side”—they are illegitimate rulers.

A core responsibility of any government, of any ruling class, is to maintain the trust of its subjects. Everything is easier in a high-trust society. A democratic government must maintain trust in its democratic institutions and processes. A technocratic government must maintain trust in the expertise and judgment of its experts.

Unfortunately, there’s no special expertise, no fancy degree, no special mathematical formula for making yourself more trustworthy as a ruler. They have to earn our trust, just like everyone else.

Thanks to Eli McNutt for helping me think through these ideas.

We all — as individuals, as a people — have a history, a thread of logic and rationale that connects us to the arguments of our ancestors about what *all this* is, and what it should be. For the lawyers in the audience, you know this is what legal argument in the Anglo-American tradition is all about: making the case that these particular facts, in light of our shared history of resolving these types of conflicts, morally demands this particular result.

These threads of logic and rationale weave together in unexpected and beautiful ways. It’s hard to see that, sometimes, especially when blood is spilled inside the United States Capitol.

But it’s there, if you know where to look.

My friend’s father has taken up carpentry during his retirement. Their cars now permanently parked on the driveway, the garage has been repurposed into a high-end woodworking studio.

I’ve seen people rediscover art in retirement, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone rediscover engineering. Many become artists, he’s become an artisan. The man is simply obsessed with structural design. Words like “miter joint” and “load-bearing” drift into casual conversation. He’s become judgmental of shoddy construction, which he can apparently identify with a quick and dismissive glance as he drives by. And he becomes as giddy as a child when he comes across elegant, sturdy craftsmanship.

I’ve noticed something familiar in the way he talks about his craft: its the same geeky way I talk about the legal documents I draft, about the regulations and laws and legal opinions I read.

There’s an art and a craft to the law. Legal text is more than mere words — it’s code, for meatspace instead of cyberspace. Well-written code works in harmony with the machine it runs on and the people that use it, and well-crafted law does the same with the culture and relationships in which it operates.

So, when it became clear after the tragic and horrifying events of January 6th that Congress would resume its business and certify that Joe Biden received the majority of the votes of the Electoral College, I was giddy. That Constitution of ours, that’s some damn fine craftsmanship.

We need to do a bit more than drive by to see it, though. We need to clearly understand tremendous forces were applied to the Constitution with the explicit goal of trying to break it, and how they failed.

So let’s be clear:

On January 6th, 2021, the sitting President of the United States — the most powerful human being on the planet, with access to more power and more resources than any other single person in history — incited several thousand followers to march on the Capitol to “fight like hell” in an attempt to violently intimidate an opposing branch of government, the Congress of the United States, and coerce them into surrendering their power to him. His followers then did what they were told, overwhelming police and spilling blood within the same building where his political opponents cowered in fear.

And he failed.

He didn’t even come close to succeeding. All that, and absolutely nothing changed.

I repeat: a man with all the powers of his office, and the popular support of over 70 million people, attempted to assert his authority over that of the old rulebook we call the Constitution, and all he was able to do was delay regularly scheduled proceedings by a few hours. The day ended exactly as it would have had the President been golfing.

Consider for a moment, in the scheme of human history and violent power struggles, how fucking wild that is.

We might be able to imagine other, simpler systems that might prevent an autocrat from ever taking power. But one that prevents a popular autocrat, legitimately elected, still with the powers of his office, that literally orders an attack on his political rivals in order to seize their power? Can you imagine a system that can handle that?

Our system did. It handled that without requiring any extra-Constitutional actions, without anyone needing to break any laws, without compromising democratic norms or civil liberties.

Every Constitutional officer involved (besides the President) simply acted as the rulebook commanded, and the legal machinery hummed along as though nothing even happened. Four years after Trump legitimately won his election, We the People changed our minds and decided we didn’t want him in power anymore, and he insisted that he stay. He tried, he failed. He was constrained not by physical force but by words on a page, by normal operation of law, by officers empowered to completely ignore him.

Wild.

The history of our species is one of long and violent power struggles, of might-makes-right, of would-be monarchs like Trump dispensing with all the norms and niceties demanded by the meat-space code and insisting that the only laws that count are physics and biology. “I’m bigger and stronger than you, so you will do what I say and give me what I want.”

In much of the world, this is still exactly how this works, with extra steps. In Russia or in China, such an insurrection would be put down with tremendous force, as in Tiananmen Square. Thousands would be disappeared and murdered. In America, by contrast, thousands retired to their hotel rooms as the press and the police began identifying them for their eventual arrest and trial in accordance with that well-crafted rulebook.

Consider why Russia and China would treat this differently. They would treat it differently because they have to, because of course they would have to. Insurrection like that is a fundamental threat to all other systems of government, to the powers that govern a society, as it has been to every single human society before ours. An insurrection like that actually has a chance of succeeding, of breaking the spell on the populace that holds them in obedience to the those in power. If they want to keep and hold power, history is clear: they have to put it down by force.

We don’t have to do that.

That’s remarkable.

Most of us understand “federalism” or the “separation of powers” as abstract concepts, but yesterday they became very real. They showed that by separating and stratifying power, we’ve successfully decentralized power. There’s no one building, no one body, no one government, no One Ring to Rule Them All that anyone can seize. You’d need to seize at least thirty of them, including the federal one that an incredibly popular and singularly motivated man just tried and failed to seize. This makes us unique not just from China or Russia, but from other non-federal parliamentary democracies as well. We’ve developed an incredibly powerful civil immune system, one that can endure tremendous abuse from a monster inside the house.

Remember when we were worried that Trump would simply stay put and not leave the White House? It’s obvious now that that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need to leave the office — the office will leave him, not by edict of some other person more powerful, but by simple function of a set of sacred, old rules. Power will transfer on January 20th, as it always has.

We’ve done a lot of work since 1860. It turns out, a house divided against itself can stand.

For whatever else it is — however successfully (or not) it upholds its stated values, however limited it is in solving social problems, however imperfect the Union it holds together — one thing is inescapably true:

That is some elegant, sturdy craftsmanship.

I hope you enjoyed this inaugural newsletter! I look forward to sending one of these into your mailbox every week, sometimes with one long piece (like this one) and sometimes with several smaller blurbs.

I’ll also resume writing 1-2 essays per month on more timeless topics, but still with the same themes of moral philosophy and legal argumentation.

Thanks again for reading, and see you next week!

LOVE,
MIKE

Content Warning: sweet old lady gets badly scalded by hot coffee; resulting corporate apathy.

“I tried being reasonable. I didn’t like it.”

-Clint Eastwood

1.

Are you a reasonable person?

How would you know?

It’s probably important to find out. In practically every state, you can be dragged before a court and held liable to your coworkers, house guests, customers, lovers, or even strangers, just for being unreasonable. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a huge chunk of the laws governing our behavior in America boil down to “be reasonable, or else.”

If a cop kicks in your door and kills you, they get to go back to work the next day if they had a reasonable suspicion you might be violent. If you get sexually harassed at work and your employer does nothing, it’s not enough that you were offended, it only matters if a reasonable person would also agree that the harassment was severe. If you commit a crime because someone threatened you, you’re probably going to jail, unless “a person of reasonable firmness in his situation would have been unable to resist” the threats. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were all so reasonably firm?

Someone can kill you, if they were reasonably provoked. Someone can rape you, if they make a reasonable mistake. Someone can con you out of your life savings, unless your reliance on their lies was reasonable. The state can take away your child, if you’re not a reasonable parent. 

It would be nice, then, if a concept so central to our lives was an objective one, right? But we’ve tried that: the alternative to fuzzy, ill-defined reasonableness is a bunch of bright line rules. Those are plenty objective, but they over-correct in the other direction. They are incredibly strict to most modern sensibilities, and they often result in manifestly unfair outcomes. Drug possession is a clear example of a bright line rule: it doesn’t matter why you have that kilo of cocaine, or what the context was, or who you are (well, almost). Hell, the entire War on Drugs is a nation-wide experiment in bright line rules. That experiment is a lot of things, but it’s definitely not a shining example of fair outcomes.

Objective standards are pretty damn seductive, though. They’re simple. They prioritize clear definitions of good and bad, right and wrong. It’s no surprise, then, that we’ve tried really hard over the past couple hundred years to come up with an objective definition of “reasonable.” (For those interested, some arguments by people smarter than me as to why this has been so hard, and why we keep trying: 1, 2, 3. My argument in this essay is that it would do us a lot of good to stop trying, but we’ll get there.)

Here’s the best our legal system has come up with so far: to be reasonable, act like a reasonable person would. Simple!

Who’s this “reasonable person”? Well, he (and it’s usually a “he”) is a completely hypothetical, ostensibly-if-not-statistically average person who takes the kind of precautions an ordinary person would take, cares about the kind of things an ordinary person would care about, and generally maps to the center of public opinion. That’s the theory. From The Many Faces of the Reasonable Person:

“The reasonable person (once known as the ‘reasonable man’) is the longest-established of ‘the select group of personalities who inhabit our legal village and are available to be called upon when a problem arises that needs to be solved objectively.’ These days, partly because of his runaway success as the common law’s helpmate, he has neighbours as diverse as the ordinary prudent man of business, the officious bystander, the reasonable juror properly directed, and the fair-minded and informed observer.”

Cute.

A gentle reminder, though: you can have police officers take your stuff, throw you in prison, or even kill you, if you don’t behave as one of these “reasonable people” should.

So what does it mean in practice? If you were dragged before a court and all that mattered to whether you went free or went to prison was whether your conduct was reasonable, what would you do? We can’t exactly put this hypothetical cast of characters on the stand and ask them what they think. We don’t have some kind of objective measure or formula to look at (although judges have definitely tried, even pretending to do it algebraically). And we won’t correct in the other direction, either, by asking for a subjective opinion about whether you (or the police, or the judge) thought you were a reasonable person.

Instead, we ask twelve random people what they think, and whatever they decide, that’s law. “Reasonableness” in our system is considered a question of fact, and juries in most cases decide whether something is a fact or not. The consensus opinion of the jury stands in for our “reasonable person” and, through that, we find the objective standard of reasonableness we’ve been seeking. Objectivity through consensus.

Or, at least that’s what we say we’re doing. I think we’re doing something else, something beyond subjectivity or objectivity (or, at least, something that doesn’t require us to think about the difference between the two).

It’s a bit hard to explain, so let’s get at it sideways. To do that, let’s consider what it means for coffee to be unreasonably hot.

2.

When a 79-year-old Stella Liebeck had her grandson drive her to McDonald’s for some coffee, only to have the flimsy 90’s era Styrofoam cup detach from its lid to spill scalding, 180-degree coffee all over her lap, did McDonald’s serve her coffee that was “unreasonably” hot? The answer to that single question would decide whether McDonald’s would pay almost $3 million as compensation for third-degree burns on the most sensitive parts of her body, eight days in the hospital, and an experimental skin graft. 

McDonald’s argued that the National Coffee Association recommended serving coffee at 180-185 degrees (and still does today), and it’s objectively reasonable to make decisions based on expert guidance, so the coffee was not unreasonably hot. But, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of burns (and, turns out, one of the doctors who tried to save President Kennedy’s life in Dallas) testified that 180 degrees is way too hot to safely drink, and it was objectively unreasonable of McDonald’s to rely on the expert opinion of coffee brewers as opposed to burn treatment specialists. So, is “reasonableness” defined by deference to authority? Is there an objective way to decide ahead of time which expert is the better authority? What measure do we use to weigh opinions on coffee temperature between coffee brewers and medical doctors?

McDonald’s was in a great position to answer all of these questions, well before Stella ever bought her cup of coffee, because what McDonald’s cares about is selling as much coffee as possible. That’s hard to do when their coffee is unreasonably dangerous, so it’s probably safe to say they’re not actively trying to kill people with their breakfast menu (counterpoint: the Big Breakfast with Hotcakes). To strike the right balance between maimed grandmothers and satisfied coffee drinkers, they’d probably hire some experts, probably from the National Coffee Association, to help them figure out the best (not safest) temperature for making the most popular coffee. They’d probably have a meeting (or twelve; they are a public company, after all) where they weighed the right balance between maximizing sales and paying the medical bills of injured grandmas, pick whatever coffee temperature lands in the sweet spot, and then they’d go for it.

It’s not that they don’t care about the grandmothers, it’s that they only care about those grandmothers as customers. Their customers are in the best position to tell them if the coffee is too hot. If the customers stop buying their coffee because it’s too hot, McDonald’s will listen. But if they keep buying hot coffee, McDonald’s will listen then, too. And if they don’t, Starbucks will.

Is that reasonable? It depends on what we care about. Under McDonald’s values, the answer is obviously yes, that’s completely reasonable. Those values prioritize the cheap, easy delivery of delicious coffee to as many people as possible, and deprioritize the pain and suffering of grandmothers. If we believe that businesses responding to their customers (that is, the market) are best positioned to decide how to give people what they want, even if it’s dangerous sometimes, then we might think that a system that breaks some grandmas to make some lattes is entirely reasonable (especially if it’s just a few grandmas per billion cups of coffee). 

Or, after some thought, we might think the entire analysis above reflects a twisted, corrosive capitalistic worldview that poisons the souls of everyone exposed to it. We might think that, in a humane society, its unreasonable to leave decisions about safety to the person creating the danger. In other words, if we care about different things, we are going to think different things are reasonable.

Stella was in a great position to answer those questions, too, because what Stella cares about is her physical safety and comfort. McDonald’s doesn’t provide some essential service, without which we would all be less safe and less comfortable. Coffee is a luxury, not a need, and so the correct balance of satisfied coffee drinkers to maimed grandmothers is no maimed grandmothers. To figure out that balance, we should ask medical doctors to give their neutral opinion on whether coffee is unreasonably hot, because they don’t care about maximizing profits (well, maybe), they care about minimizing harm. It’s not that they don’t care about McDonald’s, it’s that they only care about McDonald’s as a service provider — a fungible one. If they get shut down for being unreasonable, then Starbucks will get the hint, fall in line, and take all their customers.

Is that reasonable? Again, depends what we care about. Under those grandmotherly values, the answer is obviously yes. Those values prioritize the safety of those most vulnerable in our society, and deprioritize the freedom to buy and sell anything that could threaten that safety. Here, we might believe that a watchful and inquisitive government is best positioned to decide how to protect grandmothers from the dangers of the world, so a system that makes coffee above a certain temperature illegal is entirely reasonable (even if it means the quality of coffee will be, on average, shit).

But, aren’t those both subjective? What’s the objective standard? To find it, we do what we always do in these situations — we kick it over to the jury and let them decide. Both sides are allowed to help them with that decision, by presenting arguments and evidence. What kind of evidence? Courts limit what we can present. I can’t bring scalding coffee to court, slap an exhibit marker in, and pour it on the laps of the jurors; so, the evidence of visceral experience is out of bounds. Courts will accept the testimony of experts, though — consultants from the National Coffee Association, or doctors from the burn ward. Jurors, as non-experts, are then asked a simple question: who do you believe?

Is that reasonable? Well, at least one thing is clear: the court values experts with knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education relevant to the question, and the ability of the jury to judge the credibility of those experts. Those values prioritize credentials and a meritocratic (or, at least, technocratic) hierarchy, and deprioritize other values like the efficient distribution of coffee, or the pain and suffering of Stella Liebeck, or the safety of other grandmothers not before the court, or economic freedom. The court might believe that an open debate between well-credentialed experts to a jury of normies (that is, the marketplace of ideas) is best positioned to decide the truth of whether a cup of coffee is unreasonably hot.

But is that “objectively” reasonable? It seems that all the court is doing is setting aside the values of McDonald’s and Stella Liebeck and imposing its own. It didn’t do that after some kind of neutral evaluation of those values. The court hasn’t weighed whether a society with access to cheap, easy, delicious coffee is happier, or stronger, or wealthier or more cohesive, or more loving, or more intelligent, or otherwise better than the alternative. The court didn’t analyze whether Stella Liebeck and people like her feel more safe, secure, and protected in a world where twelve random people decide the right temperature for coffee. The founders and keepers of the constitutional republic, the one that provides the court with the values it’s upholding, didn’t weigh those specific values, either. No one did. Is that reasonable?

What it seems we’re saying here, is that a system that gets it wrong sometimes, or that discounts the values of the parties before the court (or the community in which the court sits), is entirely reasonable as long as everyone gets a chance to pit their experts against everyone else’s experts.

You might agree with that system — for the record, I do (mostly). I believe the American civil justice system is one of the greatest wonders of the world (the criminal justice system, not so much). That it was not only conceived, but put into practice successfully (mostly), is a daily miracle. That system is a lot of things — a lot of good things — but it’s not objective. It might not even be reasonable. 

Unless, of course, you share its values.

3.

What is reasonable is hopelessly tied to what we adopt as our preferences and our values, the things we like and the things we care about. I’m not sure we can escape that, and I’m not sure there’s some higher measure we can use to definitively say, “but these preferences and values are superior to those ones.” 

How might I convince you that a preference for blue is better than one for red? Or a preference for a rave is better than one for an opera? How would I definitively show that happiness is more important than success? Or that equality is more important than freedom? How would I prove to you that safety is more important than plenty? Or that life is more fulfilling with a little more risk, even if it means a little more suffering? Maybe I could convince you all those are better for me, more important to me. 

I’d probably try to point to some shared values, or to other values I believe you care about more than the ones you’re applying to operas or success or freedom or the color red. At best, I think, this really just amounts to me trying to convince you that you should see the world as I do. But I’m not sure I could do that “objectively” — maybe, hopefully, you could convince me otherwise.

But, as I sit here sipping my unreasonably lukewarm coffee, I’m not sure it’s worth your effort, because I think it might be nice to be free of the burden of trying to find an objective standard. Let’s rid ourselves of the legal fictions and the mind-reading, too. Instead, let’s try to do the hard internal and interpersonal work of stating clearly and honestly what we want, and what we care about. That’s a big ask, and maybe a ridiculous one for those who can’t, or won’t, do that kind of work (if so, it’s the fatal flaw in this framework, I suppose). What about our multitudes, our contradictions? What if we don’t know? What if it’s too painful?

I think our obsession with “objective” standards gives us permission to avoid engaging with those contradictions, those questions, those hard conversations with each other about what matters and where we might disagree. The stakes are never clearly defined, the tradeoffs never fully negotiated. Instead, we insist that other people should like and care about the same things we do because our preferences and values are “objectively” better; or, more charitably, we try our best to neutrally enforce a set of preferences and values that we have adopted from those around us. Less charitably again, we try to indoctrinate other people so they can see the world as we do.

Not that there’s anything wrong with moral indoctrination, in theory. People are busy, they’re trying to focus on their lives, and there’s a real cost to constantly questioning whether everything you do is right or wrong, good or bad. Professors and preachers, journalists and comedians, scientists and philosophers, they all serve an important role by teaching us (or, at least, exposing us to) what we should care about and what we should value. Some conformity helps grease social grooves, and keep the peace.

But, it’s important to be aware of what’s happening. Our moral teachers shouldn’t pretend they’re doing something else. There’s nothing wrong with individuals trying to persuade their neighbors as to what they think their preferences and values should be, or trying to persuade each other which tradeoffs between competing wants and cares are best. Let’s just be clear about what we’re doing.

You might say this sounds like an exhausting way to try to run a social circle, much less a society. I agree. Maintaining a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-ideological, democratic society is hard. But the alternative is disrespect for the ability of others to decide for themselves what matters. The alternative is a coercive hierarchy not clearly defined. The alternative, in other words, is what we’re dealing with today.

But we don’t have to build a new world order quite yet. Start with yourself. State your own preferences and values, out loud. What matters to you? What do you like? What do you care about? For most of us, this is actually a lot harder than it seems, because we don’t know. But it’s worth figuring that out.

It would be unreasonable not to.

Thanks to Vineeth Narayanan for helping me think through these ideas.