On “Christian Nationalism”

Anti-Communism holds the wartime coalition together, but a negative vision is a bridge, not a destination. The transcendent ethic is the only firm foundation on which a lasting order can be built—anti-Communism merely unites the democratic factions (a necessary evil) long enough to get us there. There are many people who want you to fear the idea that America’s founding metaphysics are Christian. They promote the dialectical political warfare operation known as “Christian Nationalism.”

The term “Christian Nationalism” is generally undefined and utilized as a “floating signifier.” This is a political warfare concept where a label with a nebulous definition is slandered and coded as evil—placed outside the Overton Window as taboo—in order to apply it to any variety of political opponents at opportune times to negate their political will. They have done the same thing with the word “racist,” where they changed the understood, reasonable definition of color-based hatreds into something only definable, and therefore only operational, by and for Leftist “experts.” The mechanism is identical: create a term sufficiently vague that it can be affixed to anyone who threatens the revolution, sufficiently terrifying that the accusation alone produces social death, and sufficiently undefined that no defense against it is possible because the goalposts are never fixed. This operation is being run by the Democratic Party and their media apparatchiks. It is joined by some combination of opportunistic Christian Rightists (wisely or not) seizing the moment to build support behind their particular ideas, and also by bad-actor controlled opposition players bolstering the Leftist operation from inside the Right. Make no mistake: the origin and purpose of the “Christian Nationalism” label is a Leftist operation, and the sheer volume of Left-aligned media coverage invoking the term in recent years tells you everything you need to know about where it comes from.

This is the same dialectical weapon we have traced throughout this book—the aufheben of language. “Christian Nationalism” is not a description of a coherent political movement. It is a spell—and we know what spells are. Those who propagate it are wizards. Those paralyzed by the accusation are spellbound. And those who see through it are based. It is designed to make the articulation of the positive vision we just discussed—a return to Constitutional principles grounded in the transcendent ethic on which America was actually founded—unspeakable. It is designed to ensure that the only permissible coalition glue on the Right remains the negative vision of anti-Communism, because the moment anyone attempts to articulate what we are for rather than merely what we are against, the floating signifier descends and the speaker is cast out.

These political warfare operators want you to believe that the future will be some sort of dystopia of forcible conversions, slave-wives in weird robes, wars of fire-and-maneuver between sects, and on and on towards tyranny. Nonsense.

Some have voluntarily adopted the term “Christian Nationalism.” Among them are those who are simply both Christians and nationalists, some are Theonomists, Postmillennialists, and other flavors of theologically informed political activists, some are would-be oligarchs themselves hoping to ride a revival wave to power, and others have adopted the term as enemies of the Right in order to assist the Left in making the term toxic. There is not, at present, anything approaching consensus within Christian America to transform American government into a Christian theocracy of the hard-establishment, State-Church type, and most Christians (including this one) would fight tooth and claw against any effort at State-Church sectarian establishment. After all, that is what the Puritans were running away from. What the vast majority want is simply a return to Constitutional principles and public—read: government—respect for their religion, traditions, and ethics – and a government responsive to the things that Christians believe the government ought to do, such as wielding the sword against evil, and leaving parents to raise up their children. In other words, Christians generally just want government to stay in its lane.

The Myth of Neutrality

The deeper problem is the assumption of neutrality that the “Christian Nationalism” smear exploits. Those most susceptible to the smear—often the liberal contingent within the Right coalition—operate from a presupposition that the public square can and should be religiously neutral. This belief in neutrality causes them to have something akin to an allergic reaction to any assertion of Christian metaphysics in public life, sensitized by the political warfare operation, and because they fundamentally do not view Christianity as neutral. So, the ideas of faithful Christians, even though entirely unrelated to the caricature of theocratic tyranny in pop culture, must be vigorously opposed according to this ideology of secular neutrality.

But neutrality has never existed in America, and it cannot truly exist anywhere. It has been taken for granted that American metaphysics are a human universal when in truth they are absolutely not. The Trojans killed their disabled infants in a eugenics program by tossing them from cliffs. Romans fed people to lions for entertainment. Communists murdered tens of millions for being “enemies of the people,” largely through purposeful starvation. All these things could be classified under the “free exercise of religion” when placed in their broader context, as they follow from religious convictions of those societies, but they are not to be practiced in America under penalty of law. There is no right to practice, within America, those foreign religious practices so antithetical and subversive to the American metaphysic that they present a threat to it.

America was never neutral in the application of its presuppositions and law. It is not neutral now that the foundational metaphysics of America have become Marxian. The current regime punishes its enemies. It always has. The question has never been whether metaphysical presuppositions will govern public life—they always do. The question is which presuppositions.

A nation grounded in Christian metaphysics can withstand nonbelievers who, nonetheless, carry on with compliance to the basic laws rooted in that metaphysic: though shall not murder; thou shall not steal. But a nation adrift on the sea of relativism that has achieved the critical mass necessary to delegitimize the whole of the law will never find any option but submission to the zeitgeist – the world spirit. There is no way forward without, once more, recognizing the Christian basis of the American founding, and there is no reason to fear tyranny in so doing rightly—but there is every reason to fear tyranny if we do not.

Why Freedom Requires the Transcendent

It is only under the paradigm of the Christian metaphysic that freedom is even possible. This is the case because it is only this particular set of metaphysical presuppositions that affirmatively lays out the good, transcendent ethic on which America was founded while simultaneously placing many elements of authority outside of the authority of the civil government. This is liberty.... [continued in the book, Counterspell: Field Manual for the Counter-Revolution, coming May Day 2026]

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Michael Belcher lives in New Hampshire where he serves as an elected Representative to the NH House, leads the Counterspell Group, and operates a modest homestead in the mountains. He can be found on X @MikeBelcher14 or at his website:

https://counterspellgroup.com/

Epigraphs

“The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions… but by blood and iron.”
— Otto von Bismarck

“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

I. The Puzzle

Why do the most powerful states in the modern international system often behave in ways that appear strategically cautious rather than aggressively expansionist?

During the nineteenth century, Britain became the most powerful state in the world without conquering large new territories or dramatically expanding its population. Instead, its power grew from transformations occurring inside its economy.

A series of technological breakthroughs—steam engines, mechanized textile production, modern metallurgy, and rail transport—multiplied the productivity of British industry and reshaped global trade.

These innovations did not merely redistribute wealth within the international system. They expanded the frontier of productive capability itself. British factories produced goods more efficiently than those of any rival, British shipyards built the world’s most advanced naval vessels, and British financial institutions organized global trade networks on an unprecedented scale.

Other powers quickly recognized the implications. Governments across Europe began attempting to replicate Britain’s industrial capabilities in order to compete militarily and economically with the new industrial power.

The transformation revealed something fundamental about the nature of modern geopolitical strength. Power was no longer determined primarily by territory or population. It increasingly depended on the ability of societies to generate continuous technological discovery.

Why, then, have the most powerful states of the modern era often behaved in ways that appear inconsistent with the predictions of offensive realism?

The theory developed by John Mearsheimer argues that prudent great powers behave like predators. Because the international system lacks a central authority capable of guaranteeing security, states must compete for power in order to survive. Rational actors therefore seek opportunities to expand their capabilities, weaken rivals, and prevent potential competitors from achieving regional dominance.

Yet the historical behavior of several system-leading powers appears to diverge from this prediction. Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth frequently emphasized open trade, alliance networks, and system leadership rather than territorial conquest. This behavior has long posed a puzzle for realist theory. If great powers must behave like predators in order to survive, why did the leading powers of the modern era often support open economic systems that appeared to benefit potential rivals? The answer suggested here is that discovery powers can tolerate such openness because their institutional ecosystems continually regenerate the sources of their strength.

From the perspective of offensive realism, such behavior appears puzzling—perhaps even imprudent.

Traditional schools of international relations theory tend to explain geopolitical behavior through the distribution of capabilities, the operation of institutions, or the influence of ideas and norms. This essay approaches the problem from a different angle by examining how power is generated in the first place.

Offensive realism assumes that great powers compete primarily to capture existing power. The argument developed here suggests that modern geopolitics is better understood as competition over the production of power.

In the modern world, national power increasingly depends on institutional environments capable of generating continuous technological discovery and productivity growth.

II. The Logic of Offensive Realism

Offensive realism begins from a structural premise: the international system is anarchic. Because no central authority exists to guarantee security, states must rely on their own capabilities to survive.

Under these conditions the intentions of other states can never be known with certainty. Even states that appear benign today may become threats tomorrow. Survival therefore requires maintaining sufficient power to deter or defeat potential rivals.

Within this framework prudent great powers behave like predators. They seek opportunities to increase their relative power, weaken rivals, and prevent the emergence of competing regional hegemons.

Expansion becomes a rational strategy in a dangerous world.

Offensive realism therefore predicts that rising powers will frequently pursue aggressive strategies to maximize their share of power within the international system.

III. The Organic State and the Fixed-Power Assumption

The intellectual roots of modern realism extend back to nineteenth-century European theories of the state.

Earlier political thought often treated the state as a legal or institutional arrangement created through social contracts. Romantic and German idealist traditions introduced a different conception. Influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, many thinkers began describing the state as an organic entity embedded within historical development.

Later writers such as Heinrich von Treitschke emphasized the struggle among states as a central feature of political life. States appeared as living organisms competing for survival in a hostile environment.

This tradition is sometimes described as “Social Darwinism,” though the label is historically misleading. The metaphor of states as organisms struggling for survival developed largely within Romantic and Hegelian traditions before the biological theories of Charles Darwin were widely applied to political thought.

What this intellectual lineage did produce was a particular assumption about power.

If states are organisms competing for survival, power appears largely finite. One state’s gain must come at another’s expense.

Modern realist theories largely inherit this fixed-power assumption, even when the philosophical language of organic state theory disappears.

IV. The Industrialization Problem

This assumption worked reasonably well in a pre-industrial world where wealth depended primarily on land, labor, and agricultural production. Under those conditions expansion directly increased power by incorporating territory and population into the state.

Industrialization fundamentally altered this relationship.

Technological innovation and productivity growth began to expand the frontier of economic capability itself. Power no longer depended solely on controlling existing resources but on generating new forms of production.

In this sense, the shift resembles the transformation in economic thought that followed the decline of mercantilism. Mercantilist thinkers believed wealth consisted primarily of finite stocks of precious metals. Modern economics eventually demonstrated that wealth could be created through innovation and productivity growth.

A similar insight applies to geopolitical power.

Once technological discovery becomes the primary driver of economic and military capability, power can be generated rather than merely redistributed.

In the modern world, power follows discovery.

V. Discovery Powers and Secondary Industrializers

A discovery power is a state whose long-run strength derives from institutional systems that generate continuous innovation. Universities, firms, financial markets, and scientific communities form decentralized environments that produce technological and organizational breakthroughs.

This relationship between economic productivity and geopolitical power was emphasized by historian Paul Kennedy, who argued that long-run shifts in the balance of power often follow changes in the productive capacity of competing states.

Other states industrialize later by adopting technologies developed elsewhere. These secondary industrializers may achieve rapid economic growth but often face incentives to close the technological gap through alternative strategies.

Historically, secondary industrializers have followed two major paths.

The first wave pursued import-substitution industrialization, developing domestic heavy industry in order to achieve military autonomy. Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union all followed this strategy.

A second wave after the Second World War pursued export-stimulated industrialization. West Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan integrated into global markets while developing advanced manufacturing sectors.

A crucial difference distinguished this second wave: these states industrialized within an American-led security and trade system.

China represents a historically unusual case. It is the first major power attempting export-driven industrialization while simultaneously positioning itself as a strategic rival of the state that created the global economic system within which that industrialization occurred.

VI. Strategic Adaptation in Wartime

Discovery powers sometimes adopt mobilization strategies when confronting adversaries organized around centralized power.

During major conflicts democratic societies have expanded state authority, coordinated industrial production, and mobilized national resources on a massive scale. As the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky once observed, democracies at war often imitate non-democracies to some extent for the duration of the conflict.

Yet these adaptations are usually temporary.

After major wars Britain and the United States both returned to decentralized economic systems that continued generating innovation.

Mobilization may win wars.

Discovery sustains long-run power.

VII. The Asymmetry Theorem

An important asymmetry distinguishes discovery powers from mobilization powers.

Discovery systems are flexible. They can adopt centralized mobilization strategies when confronted by hostile rivals.

Mobilization systems, however, struggle to reproduce the decentralized institutional environments that sustain discovery.

Scientific experimentation, entrepreneurial initiative, and open information flows are difficult to generate within highly centralized political structures.

Discovery powers can temporarily adopt mobilization strategies when necessary.

Mobilization powers rarely reproduce the institutional environments that sustain discovery.

VIII. Imprudent Predators

Offensive realism assumes prudent great powers behave like predators.

Yet many of the most aggressive expansionist states of the modern era were not the strongest powers in the system. They were rising secondary industrializers attempting to close technological and productivity gaps.

Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union all exhibited this pattern.

The experience of the First World War illustrates this dynamic clearly. Imperial Germany mobilized industrial power with remarkable efficiency. Yet the broader discovery ecosystems of Britain — and eventually the United States — proved more adaptable over the long run.

Expansionist strategies were not irrational. They represented attempts to compensate for institutional disadvantages.

But territorial expansion rarely eliminated the productivity gap separating these states from discovery powers.

The result was a recurring historical pattern: rising powers often behaved like predators precisely when their structural position was weakest.

They were not prudent predators.

They were imprudent predators.

IX. Conclusion

Offensive realism captures an important feature of international politics: states operating in competitive environments often seek opportunities to increase their relative power.

But the theory rests on an assumption that becomes increasingly problematic in the modern world.

It treats power as largely fixed.

Industrialization revealed that power can be generated through technological discovery and productivity growth. Societies capable of sustaining institutions that accelerate innovation continually expand the frontier of economic and military capability.

Power in such systems is not merely redistributed.

It is created.

The strategic asymmetry between these systems can therefore be summarized simply.

Discovery powers can temporarily adopt the mobilization strategies of their rivals. Mobilization powers rarely reproduce the institutional environments that sustain discovery.

This relationship can be summarized as a simple principle: states that sustain institutional environments conducive to decentralized discovery will accumulate greater long-run power than states organized primarily around centralized mobilization.

The most powerful societies of the modern era have therefore not been those most willing to seize power through expansion, but those most capable of generating it through discovery.

Rising powers that rely primarily on territorial expansion to compensate for institutional disadvantages may therefore appear aggressive, but their behavior often reflects structural weakness rather than strength. In this sense, many of the most expansionist states of the modern era were not prudent predators. They were imprudent predators.

In the modern world, power follows discovery.

Recommended Reading

Readers interested in the theoretical traditions discussed in this essay may wish to consult the following works.

John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches.

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.

Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity.

Tim Starr is an autodidact writer and independent thinker exploring the deep interplay between economic liberty and military defense. Through his Substack, , he examines how free markets generate prosperity while credible firepower secures the conditions for liberty to thrive—rejecting both naive pacifism and unchecked statism.

His essays blend rigorous historical analysis, counterfactual reasoning, and libertarian principles, tackling topics like the true drivers of the Industrial Revolution, WWII logistics and American power, the role of public goods in a free society, critiques of influential libertarian theorists, and the necessity of strategic strength in an imperfect world.

On X (https://x.com/timstarr2001) Tim delivers sharp, no-holds-barred commentary on foreign policy, individual rights, historical myths, and current events—always grounded in incentives, evidence, and a clear-eyed defense of freedom against ideological capture or folly.

A long-time observer of ideas and power, he values systems that align incentives with reality: markets for creation, resolve for protection. Follow him for thoughtful takes that treat liberty as a practical achievement, not a slogan.

In this Podcast only Episode, Correspondence Theory editor Russell tries to make the case for why LinkedIn is a tool for online monitoring and that people should really consider if they want to have that information available for public consumption.

In this Audio only Episode, Correspondence Theory Editor Russell gives some personal anecdotes that attempts to highlight how the older generation may be one of the greediest generations to ever live. Apply your not-all’s as needed.

Game theory is a formal tool for analyzing strategic interaction under conditions of interdependence. It studies situations in which the outcome for each agent depends in part on the choices of others. Properly understood, it belongs downstream of moral ontology and political teleology. It does not determine the good, supply a complete anthropology, or replace prudence. Its narrower role is to clarify how incentives, reputation, repeated interaction, and institutional structure affect conduct among morally responsible yet fallible agents.

That narrower role matters. Many people readily accept that republics require laws, sanctions, checks and balances, and other counterweights. Yet some recoil when those same realities are described in systematic terms such as incentives, strategic interdependence, payoffs, or credible enforcement. They fear that the language itself imports a defective view of man, one that treats persons as manipulable utility calculators rather than moral beings ordered to truth and the good. That concern deserves a serious answer. The right answer, however, is not to reject strategic analysis, but to place it in the proper order. Game theory is not an upstream metaphysics. It is a downstream analytic instrument. Used within that limit, it can serve rather than subvert the classical tradition.

What Game Theory Is

Game theory examines situations in which each person’s best move depends on what others are likely to do. Its basic concepts are simple.

First, there is strategic interdependence. My choice depends not only on my own aims, but on what I expect from you, and your choice depends on what you expect from me.

Second, there are payoffs or preferences. These do not tell us what people ought to value. They simply represent how agents rank possible outcomes within a model. Those rankings may reflect money, safety, honor, duty, loyalty, guilt, fear, prestige, or charity. The model does not decide which of these is noble or base. It only asks what follows once they are in play.

Third, there is equilibrium. The most familiar case is a Nash equilibrium, where each party’s strategy is stable given the strategies of the others. In plain language, no one can improve his position by changing course alone while everyone else holds steady.

Fourth, there is the structure of the interaction itself. A one-shot encounter differs sharply from a repeated relationship. So do situations with full information versus partial information, public monitoring versus secrecy, and credible sanctions versus empty threats. These differences often determine whether cooperation holds or collapses.

That is the proper scope of the tool. It shows how different rules and incentive structures shape likely patterns of cooperation, conflict, restraint, betrayal, reciprocity, and deterrence. It is a diagnostic map of strategic interaction, not a moral compass.

What Game Theory Is Not

Because many objections arise from category confusion, it is just as important to say what game theory is not.

It is not a moral theory. It does not tell us what justice is, what man is for, or what ends political life ought to serve.

It is not a complete anthropology. It does not settle whether man is naturally political, fallen, rational, sinful, altruistic, or ordered to beatitude. Those are prior questions.

It is not reductive behaviorism. To observe patterned responses under conditions of incentive and constraint is not to deny conscience, habituation, character, free will, or moral agency.

It is not a substitute for prudence. Prudence still judges ends, circumstances, means, timing, and proportion. Strategic analysis can inform prudence, but it cannot replace it.

The key point is simple: to isolate strategic rationality for analytic purposes is not to claim that man is nothing but strategic rationality. A road map does not deny mountains, rivers, churches, cemeteries, or homes. It foregrounds one dimension of reality for a limited purpose. Formal models of interdependent choice do the same. They abstract one dimension of action without pretending to exhaust the whole of man. Abstraction is not metaphysical denial.

Why Strategic Analysis Exists at All

A simple example shows why this kind of analysis matters.

Take the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two suspects are questioned separately. Each may cooperate with the other by staying silent, or defect by testifying. The payoff structure, with higher numbers representing better outcomes, can be stated plainly like this:

If both cooperate, the outcome is (3,3).
If Player 1 cooperates and Player 2 defects, the outcome is (0,5).
If Player 1 defects and Player 2 cooperates, the outcome is (5,0).
If both defect, the outcome is (1,1).

Both players would rather end up at mutual cooperation than mutual defection. Yet each also has a strong incentive to defect if he doubts the other’s loyalty. In the one-shot case, mutual defection is the stable outcome, even though it is worse for both than mutual cooperation.

Now change the structure. Suppose the same two parties deal with each other repeatedly, and each knows future interaction is likely. Reputation now matters. Betrayal today may destroy tomorrow’s gains. Under those conditions, reciprocal strategies can sustain cooperation that would collapse in a one-shot encounter.

The lesson is not that morality is fake or that justice is reducible to incentives. The lesson is that structure matters. Rules, repetition, monitoring, and credible enforcement alter the conditions under which cooperation can endure. Strategic analysis exists because good intentions alone do not settle that problem.

Classical Prudence Already Works in This Territory

Nothing in this is foreign to the classical tradition. The tradition did not oppose moral teleology to institutional realism. It joined them.

Aristotle’s account of phronesis, or practical wisdom, concerns right deliberation about contingent particulars in light of the good. Prudence is not the denial of moral truth, but the disciplined application of it amid circumstance, uncertainty, temptation, and limitation.

Aquinas is more explicit still. Human law, he argues, must govern not only the virtuous but the imperfect multitude. Because many are not easily moved by reason alone, law restrains through penalties, fear, and habituation. This is not because force creates the good, but because the good must be secured among creatures who do not reliably act in accordance with it. Aquinas therefore distinguishes the moral order from the prudential measures required to sustain order in political life.

Madison stands in the same line of realism. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. Since they are not, ambition must counteract ambition. Parchment barriers alone do not suffice. Institutions must be arranged so that offices, interests, and powers check one another. That is not a departure from moral realism. It is political prudence under conditions of human fallibility.

Madison’s design also presupposes the very moral faculties Wilson and Reid defended: men possess conscience and can know the natural law, yet frailty and self-interest remain. Institutions are therefore auxiliary precautions, not the source of the good itself.

James Wilson and Thomas Reid help identify the upstream layer. Both assume that moral reality is objective and that conscience is not a fiction of the state. Yet neither treats that truth as an argument against law, structure, or institutions. The classical view is not moral idealism floating above politics. It is moral realism joined to sober judgment about how men actually behave.

Game theory did not invent that terrain. It formalized part of it.

The Three Levels That Clarify the Dispute

The cleanest way to state the argument is to distinguish three levels.

Level 1: moral ontology and teleology. What is man? What is the good? Are there objective duties rooted in nature, reason, or divine law? This is the level of first principles.

Level 2: practical prudence and institutional order. Given those truths, how should a society be structured so as to secure justice, peace, and the common good amid vice, temptation, ignorance, and conflicting interests? This is the level of law, habituation, offices, constitutions, sanctions, and political judgment.

Level 3: formal analysis of strategic interaction. Once aims, motives, incentives, and rules are specified, what patterns of conduct are likely to follow? This is the level at which game theory operates.

Most confusion comes from sliding across these levels. Critics hear Level 3 language such as payoffs, incentives, best responses, or equilibrium, and treat it as though it were a Level 1 claim about what man ultimately is. But that inference does not follow. A formal model can describe one aspect of action without settling the whole ontology of action.

The Strongest Objection

The strongest objection is not that game theory is a full metaphysics. That claim is too easy to dismiss. The sharper objection is that even if game theory is only a model, it still privileges a thin grammar of action. It foregrounds instrumental rationality, stable preference ordering, and strategic calculation. In doing so, it may background conscience, love, worship, sacrifice, honor, and other dimensions of human life that do not sit comfortably inside formal representation. So the objection runs: the model may not explicitly deny richer moral reality, but it still trains the mind to see politics through a narrowed lens.

That is a serious objection, and it deserves a direct answer.

Why the Objection Does Not Defeat the Tool

The answer is that selective representation is not the same as ontological reduction.

Every analytic discipline foregrounds some features and backgrounds others. A legal brief does not capture the whole life of the parties. A battlefield map does not capture the poetry of the land. An engineering diagram does not capture the beauty of a bridge. Yet none of these is therefore false or subversive simply because it abstracts. The question is whether the abstraction is ordered to a legitimate task and whether the user mistakes the abstraction for the whole. Representation is not reduction.

The same is true here. Strategic analysis foregrounds interdependent choice under conditions of incentive and constraint. It does so because that aspect of action matters in politics, law, markets, war, bargaining, and constitutional order. But to say that it matters is not to say that it is all that matters. The model can represent agents moved by self-interest, duty, honor, loyalty, charity, fear, or guilt within the same formal structure. It does not generate those motives. It receives them as inputs and traces their strategic consequences.

Nor does such representation explain moral motives away. To model the action-guiding force of conscience is not to deny conscience. Conscience itself remains a prior moral reality, independent of the model; the framework merely traces how that prior reality influences observable choices under given conditions. It asks what follows in a world where conscience is present but not universal, where temptation is real, and where institutions must govern both the upright and the corrupt.

This is why the slogan “justice is conditional on incentives” misses the point. Justice is not conditioned on incentives in its truth. Its truth is upstream. But the practical securing of justice among morally responsible yet fallible agents does require attention to incentives, institutions, and strategic interaction. Moral realism supplies the why. Strategic analysis helps illuminate the how.

That same point answers the AI or sociopath worry. A cold optimizer may use game-theoretic reasoning to mimic stable cooperation or manipulate incentives, but that does not make the model morally authoritative. The model supplies no worthy end on its own. It cannot tell us what justice is for, what man is ordered to, or which outcomes deserve to be pursued. Those judgments must come from outside the model. An optimizer can exploit the tool. It cannot derive the good from it.

Once that is clear, the constructive point comes into focus: strategic analysis is not a rival to prudence. It is one limited way prudence can better understand the conditions under which justice holds or fails.

Why Moral Realism Needs Institutional Realism

A society cannot live on exhortation alone. People may know the good and still fail to do it. They may know the law and still violate it. They may sincerely love justice and still succumb to fear, greed, passion, faction, or ambition.

That is why moral realism without institutional realism becomes politically fragile. It risks assuming that because the norm is true, compliance will somehow follow. But classical political thought does not make that mistake. It insists that law, office, custom, sanctions, and constitutional structure are needed precisely because truth does not automatically govern conduct.

Well-designed institutions help align interest with duty. Clear property rights, impartial courts, stable rules, transparent processes, and credible penalties shift the strategic environment so that peaceful cooperation becomes more sustainable and predation less attractive. In repeated settings, reputation strengthens this effect by raising the long-term cost of betrayal. Checks and balances turn private ambition into a partial defense against public abuse. These arrangements do not create justice. They help sustain it.

The alternative is not a purer politics. Often it is merely a weaker one, more exposed to faction, corruption, arbitrary power, and moralistic rhetoric unsupported by enforceable order.

Constitutional Application

This is why the American constitutional order fits the argument so well. Separation of powers, federalism, bicameralism, veto points, staggered elections, and divided jurisdictions do not assume that rulers will be saints. They assume mixed motives and arrange institutions accordingly. They do not deny virtue. They refuse to rely on it alone.

The same is true of the rule of law more broadly. Stable rules create predictability. Predictability supports trust. Trust supports cooperation. In a world of interdependent actors, that matters enormously. Constitutional design does not replace the moral life of a people, but it does help create conditions in which justice is more likely to endure and domination is harder to consolidate.

Strategic analysis does not tell us that those are the highest ends. It clarifies why such structures matter once we already know that ordered liberty and justice are worth preserving.

Conclusion

Game theory is a formal tool for analyzing strategic interaction, not an upstream metaphysics. It does not determine the good, replace prudence, or supply a complete account of man. Properly understood, it can serve the classical tradition by clarifying how institutions, incentives, reputation, repetition, and credible enforcement affect conduct among morally responsible yet fallible agents.

The real error is not using such analysis, but mistaking it for more than it is, or refusing it because it abstracts. Classical political thought does not ask us to choose between eternal truths and prudent institutional design. It asks us to hold them together. Moral realism supplies the standard. Prudence judges how to secure it in history. Strategic analysis, used modestly and correctly, helps illuminate part of that prudential task.

In a world of non-angels, that is not a betrayal of the tradition. It is one expression of it.

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In this audio only episode Correspondence Theory Editor Russell explores the symbolism of the new NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) trend and its connections to quiet quitting. We may be moving from the Promethean Worker to the Monastic Figure as our trust in Institutions collapses in the Post WW2 Consensus, Post Neoliberalism Economic Model and the Post Covid Era.

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In this podcast only episode, Correspondence Theory Editor Russell attempts to explain the symbolic connection between the modern conceptualization of work and the mythological foundations of Saturn. It’s esoteric and symbolic but the ancient is represented in the modern. What it means, is for the listener to discern.

For those who prefer the author has recorded an audio version

I. Emotional Damage

Last time, I told you that we would discuss what comes next.

But first - housekeeping.

I need to break some things to disabuse you of assumptions you may or may not be aware that you hold as part of being formed by the current Western institutions. Not flippantly, because what I’m breaking is the thing that keeps people in a cycle of repetition that I’ve seen across the country that ends up producing nothing.

To disclose a bit about myself, I was formed outside the public school system - never sat under the strongest installation vector for the mythology I’m about to demolish for more than six months. I’ve retained the naturally inquisitive nature that humans are born with, but in the way that gets you dis-invited from Thanksgiving dinner (thankfully, I’m the cook in my family). I’m an infantryman veteran - trained to close with and destroy the enemies of these United States (which is what I seek to do metaphysically). I’ve spent decades reading philosophy and history, the kind that requires that you hold your beliefs at arm’s length and examine without flinching.

These are advantages of mine, and though they come at cost, I still struggle due to what I’ve absorbed via cultural osmosis.

I held every one of these myths. Every single one. Even after all the research, reading, and years of pulling threads, poking at FOIA files that caused me to be physically unable to look at another word for days while everyone else was celebrating Christmas with their family (true story lol) there are mornings I sit with what I’ve found and check and double check and nothing changes about the assessment. So I keep writing.

If that’s where I am - with every formational advantage stacked in my favour - then I know what this is. You were likely taught these myths as history, as civics, as the way things are (you may even think that you have a Constitutional right to protest). The roots go deeper in you than they ever went in me.

But that’s the first step of standing on terra firma. That said, let’s jaunt.

II. The Myths

Here is the story we were told:

America is self-governance embodied if nothing else. The people are sovereign. Your voice matters equally to mine, to the billionaire’s, to the senator’s, to the President. When We the People stand up, justice prevails, We the People being a statement about how power actually moves through the Republic. The social contract is real: free citizens agreed to mutual governance, and that agreement binds. Merit earns ascent. Work hard, think clearly, build something excellent, and the system elevates you into its leadership class. Your vote is meaningful input into the machinery of governance. Elections hold the powerful accountable, and when they fail us, we remove them. And should all of that fail, the rugged individual - armed, provisioned, self-reliant - stands as the final backstop against tyranny, ready to water the Tree of Liberty.

Unfortunately, this is mythology.

I don’t mean mythology the way a campus postmodernist means it - “your truth is just a narrative, man.” I mean mythology in the way that it is a crafted narrative with an intended effect.

Let’s walk through it all.

**Self-governance.** We laid the foundation for this in the previous article. The American founding was an elite project executed through mass mobilization. Planters, merchants, lawyers, international financiers - they built the infrastructure, cultivated the alliances, and deployed the population as resource-weapons in an elite-versus-elite contest with the British crown. Masses didn’t rise up spontaneously and create America. Elites used masses to create America. I use the word “used” intentionally, because we (the lower and middle classes) aren’t on the same playing field as they (the upper class) and I’m trying to drive that point home. There are memes about with George Washington as the image and the text that says something to the effect of “me and my homies would have been stacking bodies by now” in response to some political injustice. That may be true, but the farmer down the road wouldn’t have had the same impact upon crossing the Delaware river on Christmas. This mythology reverses the arrow of causation because reversed arrows produce compliant resources (us). If you believe the order in which we operate was built by We the People, and if you believe that there were no breaks between the inception and today, then you will (incorrectly) assume that your opinion matters to its current operators.

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2018/02/americans-dont-think-ear-elected-officials

**The social contract.** As Lysander Spooner observed - and I’m paraphrasing for the family-friendly crowd - he didn’t sign anything. And he was right. A contract binds signatories. A contract is renegotiable. A contract holds only as long as both parties find it useful. And whatever America was built on, it wasn’t a contract.

It was a covenant.

Read the language. Rights endowed by their Creator. Truths held self-evident - apprehended, not constructed. The appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world. The Mayflower Compact before it; the very same structure. This is the language of men standing under God and pledging themselves to an order they did not invent and cannot renegotiate. The covenant is vertical - God and men - with obligations that transcend the parties’ convenience, their moods, their changing circumstances. You don’t renegotiate a covenant. You keep it or you violate it.

Rousseau and Locke told us it was a social contract - horizontal, man-to-man, renegotiable by consensus. Your rights as an ever-changing terms of service. That substitution is the seed of everything that followed. If the foundation is covenant, then the rights are real, the obligations are permanent, the metaphysical architecture is load-bearing and cannot be edited without structural failure. If the foundation is contract, then everything is negotiable, nothing is permanent, and the governing class can amend the terms whenever the masses become less useful to them.

Look around you. Sure looks like they are renegotiating to me (Perot was correct).

Locke provided the crack - grounding natural rights in reason accessible without revelation. Compatible with the covenant, but no longer dependent on it. Later thinkers could keep the rights language, discard the Creator, and ground the whole edifice in human consensus (shadow metaphysics coming to light). The arch of unalienable rights lost its keystone. What you’re watching now, what you feel now - that ambient-turned-explicit wrongness (as made evident by recent file releases as key example) - is the arch completing its collapse. The keystone has been missing for generations. The structure may be exhausting whatever load-bearing capacity remained.

So as the masses become less useful - as automation replaces labour, financial arbitrage replaces production, and migrants replace voting blocks - the elite side of the bargain degrades further. The protection thins. The leadership reorients elsewhere. The metaphysical instantiation shifts toward frameworks amenable to the new useful population, whoever that turns out to be. We’re watching the covenant violated in real time, and they weren’t even polite enough to invite us to witness the violation. We were simply meant not to notice.

All of this is clarified by the following insight that I had a while ago: government is applied metaphysics. The Constitution doesn’t merely reflect metaphysical premises - the Constitution instantiates them into our daily life. Same document, same words, radically different operative government depending on which metaphysics the operators bring to the text. Originalism versus “living constitutionalism”? That’s a metaphysical dispute by another name. One says the text corresponds to a reality that preceded it. The other says the text means whatever the current consensus declares it to mean. Here’s a question to gnaw upon: what operating metaphysics does our current government hold? That reality is subjective (such as with gender) or objective? And no, you don’t get to choose “both.” A thing can’t be a thing and the opposite at the same time. Aristotle knew that.

**Meritocracy.** Merit exists. It matters. And it is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. You can build the most brilliant enterprise in your county, your state, your industry - and an elite who controls regulatory infrastructure, capital access, and media framing can erase it before lunch. Merit can get you to the table. Patronage pulls a chair out for you. Every self-made man in the American story, when you trace the actual genealogy, had a patron. Had access. Had a door held open by someone already inside. The myth of the purely self-made man serves the same function as the myth of self-governance: it makes you blame yourself when the system doesn’t deliver, instead of examining the system.

**The informed voter.** Informed about what? About the performed framework - the one presented for your consumption? In earlier articles, we discussed Declaration Reality and performed-versus-operative premises. Your vote is input into a system whose actual operation bears minimal resemblance to its advertised operation. You operate under two Constitutions and you only see one because the other is Unwritten. I shan’t discuss the nudging campaigns, but they exist to push you together or pull you apart.

**Accountability through elections.** The Tea Party was a case study of sorts from the previous article. It had massive grassroots mobilization. Historic electoral victories. The institutional machinery metabolized every victory and continued operating as before. The faces changed. The advisory structure didn’t. The policy outputs didn’t. You can replace every elected official in Washington and the permanent bureaucracy, the advisory networks, the donor infrastructure, the institutional momentum all continues. The operative machinery runs beneath, unelected, unaccountable, largely invisible and used to conduct operations that run for longer than a single election cycle. Carroll Quigley (Bill Clinton’s history professor) knew this and wrote about it.

**The rugged individual.** This is the one that costs the most to release, because it feels true in your bones, and the feeling is partly right. The impulse - self-reliance, preparation, strength, readiness - the impulse is American, through and through. But the application is catastrophically miscalibrated. More on this in a moment.

**The myth that you can opt out.** You cannot choose to serve no elite. You will be used. You are being used now. Your labour is taxed. Your attention is harvested. Your consumption patterns are monetized. Your political energy is channeled. The question has never been whether you serve an elite. The question is which. And whether you chose them, or they chose you while you weren’t looking. And you can’t opt out of the systems they will bring with them.

**The myth that all elites are equally predatory.** They aren’t. Some are better than others, but DTA (Stone Cold fans know). This is something you can build on.

**The myth that you’ll lead the revolution.** You won’t. I won’t. Neither will the guy with the podcast, the guy with the compound, or the guy with the mailing list. It’s not because of cowardice (the common refrain) but lack of backing. The revolution (if that word even applies to what’s coming) will be led by elites, backed by elites, financed by elites, and organized by elites. Like every revolution.

III. Guns, Ammo, and MREs

The reader who senses something is wrong (you) tends toward three responses. Three preparations. Three activities that feel like progress.

Guns. Militia. Prepping.

The impulse underneath all three is correct. Something IS wrong. Preparation IS rational. The instinct that drove you to arm yourself, to stockpile, to find others who see what you see - that instinct is solid, but encapsulates an incomplete understanding of the full spectrum of the battlespace in which we live.

In my professional life, I work with an IT framework called the Cloud Adoption Framework. (Yeah, yeah. Nerd shit. Bear with me. This matters.) The CAF teaches a four-phase sequence: Strategy, Plan, Ready, Adopt. Strategy first - what’s the objective? Plan - what resources and structures do we need? Ready - what conditions must exist before action? Adopt - then and only then, execute.

Every gun purchase, every militia meeting, every case of MREs - that’s Adopt. That’s the execution phase. Deployed without Strategy, without Plan, without Ready.

You’ve launched production workloads without a prepared cloud environment (IT people: you understand exactly what I mean. Everyone else: imagine building the seventh floor of a building before pouring the foundation.)

**Guns.** Individual armament assumes the fight is kinetic and individual-scale. In the previous article, we discussed the actual battlespace: institutional, metaphysical, operating through advisory capture, narrative control, framework installation (NATO is discussing Cognitive Warfare for a reason). You brought a rifle to a perception war. And here’s the biggest affront; every gun you own is a lawfare target. If the governing class decides to prosecute, each weapon becomes an exhibit (”he had an arsenal of three rifles and 500 rounds!”). For you non-gun people, that is a leisure day at the range, not an arsenal.

Let’s talk case study. Remember the couple in St. Louis? The McCloskey’s? Husband in a pink polo with an AR at low ready, wife stylish with Bryco 38? Wealthy attorneys, both of them - who stood on their own property with an AR-15 and a pistol when protesters entered their gated neighborhood in 2020 (allegedly). They didn’t fire. Nobody was hurt. They stood on their own lawn and held weapons.

The circuit attorney (a progressive prosecutor bankrolled into office by outside political money) charged them both with felonies. The prosecution was so transparently political that the judge disqualified the prosecutor for using the case in campaign fundraising emails. The couple pled guilty to misdemeanors: fourth-degree assault and harassment. Fined. Weapons surrendered. Law licenses temporarily suspended by the state Supreme Court.

They survived. They got the convictions expunged. They eventually got the AR-15 back and Bryco. It took lawsuits, two trips to the court of appeals, a gubernatorial pardon, and about 4 years.

And they survived because they were wealthy attorneys (not elite, but not too shabby) with national media coverage, institutional political support, and a sympathetic governor (there they are) willing to pardon them. They had elite cover and the lawfare still cost them five years and enormous expense. A working-class couple in the same situation, one with no connections, no media platform, no governor who knows their name, takes the felony plea. Guns are taken permanently. Job is gone. The lawfare machine processes them and moves on. They get nothing. They lose. Good day, sir.

The guns created a legal target. The elite patron provided a partial shield. Without the patron, the target is all that remains.

**Militia.** Bottom-up force projection without elite sponsorship. The founding correction demolishes this: the Revolution required elite leadership, French financing, Prussian training, international supply chains. A militia without elite patrons is a group of armed men waiting to be arrested.

And here’s the history that should haunt you: the constitutional militia had elite patronage. The state militias were state-sponsored formations - officers appointed by governors, funded through state budgets, operating under state legal authority. We the People were the militia (still are, a la 10 U.S.C. § 246 and State Defense Forces, a significantly weakened version of a militia), and the states were the institutional patron that gave the militia its legitimacy, its legal cover, its supply chain, its political protection. The Second Amendment presupposes this architecture. Armed citizens organized under sovereign state authority, serving as the military counterweight to federal overreach. The whole structure depended on state political sovereignty.

That sovereignty has been hollowed out. The federal consolidation - accelerating after 1865, cemented through the Progressive Era and the New Deal - subordinated the states to a federal authority that has no interest in sponsoring armed citizen formations that could challenge its dominance.

So now: the federal state holds monopoly on legitimate violence and the legal infrastructure to define any unauthorized challenge as criminal conspiracy. Without elite cover - lawyers, funding, political protection, supply lines - the militia is a target. Brave. Operational for about six minutes.

And if you want to see what a militia with elite patronage looks like in the current year, look at Minnesota. In January 2026, tens of thousands of citizens mobilized against federal immigration enforcement in subzero temperatures. Hundreds of businesses shut down. Workers walked off the job. Crowds confronted federal agents in the streets. Within six weeks, the federal government announced a drawdown.

That mobilization had every element the constitutional militia had: a governor providing political cover, an attorney general filing federal lawsuits, a judiciary issuing rulings against the federal operation, unions organizing and funding participation, religious institutions supplying moral authority and bodies for civil disobedience. Elite patronage. Legal infrastructure. Organizational structure. Political protection. Media support. Supply lines.

The political valence is irrelevant. It matters not whether you agree with the cause, but pray, brother, look at the architecture. The same population, with the same courage, without the governor, without the AG, without the judiciary, without the unions - every one of those protesters is individually arrested for obstruction of federal law enforcement. Lawfare picks them off one by one. The movement dies in arraignment courts.

The architecture is the architecture. Elite patronage makes mass action viable. Without it, mass action is a target. The left understands this. Whatever else you think of them, they have mastered the vertical integration of elite sponsorship with mass mobilization. The right has guns and a few boxes of ammo from Academy Sports.

**Prepping.** The individualist fantasy at its purest. Six months of food, water purification, medical supplies, a generator, maybe some solar panels. Admirable foresight. Useful in times of natural disaster. One problem: without rule of law (Joe Dolio), unless you hide these things, a larger organized force simply takes what you’ve stored. Your six months of provisions become a resupply depot for whoever has the organizational capacity to collect it. Prepping without community is hoarding. Prepping with community but without elite protection is a slightly larger, slightly more valuable target.

The common failure across all three: activity mistaken for progress. Deployment mistaken for transformation. The tangibility of the rifle, the cans, the bunker - it feels like readiness. That feeling is expensive anxiety management. You’re spending money to feel less afraid without changing your position in the actual conflict.

Here’s the CAF sequence translated to your situation:

**Strategy.** What is the actual objective? “Survive” is not a strategy. Survive what? For how long? To what end? What does the post-crisis landscape look like? What does victory mean at your level of the hierarchy?

**Plan.** What resources, alliances, organizational structures do you need? Who are the elites operating in your area? What are their operative frameworks - not what they say, what they do? Which are Lions? Which are Foxes performing Lion behavior?

**Ready.** What conditions must exist before action is effective? You need diagnostic capacity - the ability to see who’s who. You need community organized with vertical connections to elite patronage. Legal infrastructure. Supply relationships that scale beyond individual stockpiling.

**Adopt.** Then - and only then - act. In concert with elite direction, under elite protection, with organizational structure that can absorb and survive the inevitable counterpressure.

Strategy, Plan, Ready, Adopt. In that order. What you’ve been doing is Adopt, Adopt, Adopt, and Adopt; and losing ground in the process.

The good news: everything you’ve already done still has value. The guns aren’t wasted. The supplies aren’t wasted. The community you’ve built isn’t wasted. They’re assets waiting for a strategy.

Which brings us to the question that matters.

IV. Three Men, Three Lessons

I want to tell you about three men. Their stories are the complete taxonomy of what I’m trying to show you; every combination of the two things that matter, and what happens when you get the combination wrong.

**Napoleon Bonaparte** had authority. Emperor of France. Commander of the greatest military machine in Europe. Every institution answered to him. Resources, armies, territory, the full machinery of state. A Lion holding the world by the throat.

What Napoleon lacked was awareness.

Talleyrand, his chief diplomat (his Fox) managed the diplomatic channels, maintained the relationships, and sold Napoleon’s position to his enemies while smiling at his dinner table. Napoleon had the institution but couldn’t see which advisors served him and which served themselves through him. He conquered a continent and died on an island, because the man who held all the authority in the world couldn’t distinguish loyalty from performance.

Authority without awareness. Metabolized from within.

**William Wallace** had awareness. Formed through deliberate education beyond his station - Latin, law, political structure - under the tutelage of clerical relatives who ensured he grasped the institutional machinery he lived inside. Wallace could see. He understood what English occupation meant. He understood the architecture arrayed against Scotland. He had what I’ve been calling Condition Two; metaphysical awareness, the ability to perceive the operative framework beneath the performed one.

What Wallace lacked was authority. He was never elite. A Steward with a Lion’s temperament; willing to fight, willing to lead, willing to die. But a Steward.

And here’s the failure that cost him everything: he acted FIRST. Killed the English sheriff at Lanark before securing elite backing. Every negotiation with Scottish nobles afterward came from weakness costumed as strength. He won battles. He had popular support. He had moral authority. He had everything except the one thing that would have kept him alive: elite commitment of resources, logistics, legal protection, and diplomatic cover.

Robert the Bruce (the actual Lion, the man with elite position and resources) committed to the cause AFTER Wallace was dead. The elite moved when cost-benefit shifted. Wallace operated on personal time. Elites operate on institutional time. The clocks never synchronized.

**George Washington** had both.

Authority: wealthy Virginia planter, international connections, network of colonial elites, the social infrastructure of the planter class at his back. He was elite before the first shot fired.

Awareness: an autodidactically formed mind. The ability to see the operative framework of British colonial governance for what it was, and the ability to see which of his fellow elites were Lions and which were Foxes.

And then the thing that separated him from every brave, aware, well-positioned man who failed anyway: patience.

His men were trained before Concord. The militia companies that became the backbone of the Revolution were already drilling, already organized, already equipped under colonial institutional authority. The minutemen weren’t spontaneous - they were the product of existing institutional infrastructure, the same state-as-patron architecture the Second Amendment would later presuppose. The colonial militia was the constitutional militia before the Constitution existed.

The Declaration of Independence came AFTER the Continental Congress was organized. AFTER French support was being cultivated. AFTER institutional infrastructure was in place. AFTER the strategy existed, the plan was formed, the readiness conditions were met. Washington didn’t act first. Washington readied first. Strategy, Plan, Ready - then Adopt.

He died in his bed. At Mount Vernon. An old man, in his own home, with his boots off.

The taxonomy is complete. Authority without awareness: eaten alive by your own advisors. Awareness without authority: destroyed by the system you can see but can’t fight. Both together, with patience: Mount Vernon.

Now - which one are you?

If you’re honest, we’re Wallace. Aware. Brave. Resourceful. And utterly without the institutional position to change anything alone.

So the question changes, doesn’t it? The question is no longer “how do I lead the revolution?” The question is: how do I find my Washington (if there is one to find)?

V. The Hunting Party

Here’s your mission. Here’s the thing you can actually do, starting tomorrow, that changes your position in the real conflict.

Hunt.

Not for a fight. Not for a bunker. Not for a candidate who says the right words on a stage - you already know what performed frameworks look like, and you know the gap between performed and operative. Hunt for a Lion.

A Lion worth his salt that you can throw your weight behind. All you need is the answer to one question; everything else is nth order effects that emanate from the response.

**”What would this person have to believe for their behavior to make sense?”**

Don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do. Study them. Then ask: what would someone have to believe for those actions to be rational?

The school board member who says she’s fighting for parental rights but consistently votes to expand administrative authority - what would she have to believe for that behavior to make sense? She’d have to believe parents can’t actually be trusted, that expertise supersedes consent, that the administrative state is the appropriate locus of decision-making. Her performed framework says “parental empowerment.” Her operative framework says “institutional management.” The gap is the signal.

The pastor who preaches community and builds a personal brand - what would he have to believe? He’d have to believe the institution exists to serve him rather than the other way around. His performed framework says “shepherd.” His operative framework says “platform.” The gap is the signal.

The political figure who channels your outrage and produces no structural change - what would he have to believe? He’d have to believe your energy is a resource to be harvested, your attention a commodity to be monetized, your loyalty a renewable fuel source. His performed framework says “champion of the people” yet his operative framework says “farmer of the tax cattle.” The gap. The gap. Always the gap.

Now flip it. The leader whose private behavior matches his public commitments - small gap. The patron who builds institutions that outlast his tenure - small gap. The elite who absorbs personal cost to protect the people and structures beneath him - small gap. That’s your Lion.

A word of caution: Lion describes a governance style (direct, authority-bearing, willing to exercise power) and nothing more. History is full of Lions who were tyrants (looking at you, Oliver Cromwell). The question and the Fork are what separate a Lion worth serving from a Lion worth fleeing.

And here’s the connection to the Fork that we addressed in the previous article. Identifying a Lion requires understanding what a Lion stands on. The elite who operates from correspondence - whose words match reality, whose actions track truth, whose institutions are built on what is rather than what’s declared - that’s the elite worth serving. The elite who operates from declaration - whose words manufacture reality, whose actions serve the performance, whose institutions exist to manage perception? That’s Fox territory.

And here’s the performed-versus-operative test in its simplest form: Does what he does match what he says? Small gap: potential Lion. Large gap: Fox. That’s it. That’s the whole tool. You can carry it out of this article in a single sentence and use it before dinner.

VI. Your Role

So you’ve found a Lion candidate. Now what?

Here’s where the last myth falls - the myth that finding the right leader means you passively follow. The Steward role is not passive. The Steward role is the most critical role in the entire structure, because the Steward solves the problem that killed Napoleon.

Napoleon died because he couldn’t see which advisors were loyal and which were Talleyrand. He had authority. He lacked awareness. And nobody in his orbit had both the diagnostic capacity to see the Foxes AND the loyalty to tell him.

That’s you. That’s the role. The man who can see - because I’ve been handing you diagnostic instruments for six articles - and who offers that sight to a Lion who has the authority to act on it.

The fire team analogy: the soldier serves the Captain. Both are essential. Neither is diminished by the relationship. And the soldier who serves the right Captain comes home alive.

The advisor who walks into a Lion’s office and says, “I can show you which of your people are loyal and which are performing loyalty” - that advisor fills the gap that has destroyed every Lion in recorded history. That’s the gap Napoleon couldn’t fill. That’s the awareness Wallace had but couldn’t pair with authority. That’s what you bring to the table.

If you’re a Ghost (someone who’s been unwittingly possessed by the thoughts of dead men) your first task is to define your metaphysic. Start to grapple with what you think reality is - objective or subjective (hint: it’s objective). Move from vibes to specifics by building the capacity to see and articulate your thoughts and find out who came up with the ideas you hold true, because I guarantee it isn’t you.

If you’re a Steward (already metaphysically aware of where your ideas came from) your task is the hunt. Find the Lion and act as the advisor Talleyrand should have been and wasn’t.

VII. Here Comes The Sun (Rammstein, not Beatles)

Here is where we stand.

We can see Declaration Reality - the infrastructure of manufactured correspondence between what institutions say and what they do. We can see the Fork - the split between those who operate from objective reality and those who operate from declared reality. We know Lions and Foxes. We know performed-versus-operative. We know elite theory.

What we have yet to establish is doctrine that takes a Lion (or perhaps you in an institutional role? A school board, perhaps? Hmmmm?) with authority and awareness and patience and gives him a system for building power that Foxes cannot capture.

Ruthless Sunshine and Shadow Metaphysics.

Then we will continue building upon the concepts that you may find to be useful in the less-than-immediate for the sake of fleshing out the realms of war, so to speak.

Brutus is the founder of the American Epistemology Institute (AEI), an educational nonprofit dedicated to restoring the metaphysical foundations of American life. He is the creator of Metadiagnostics — a diagnostic theory that identifies how metaphysical premises shape institutional behavior and civilizational trajectories. Twenty years of autodidactic philosophical study. A professional background in systems design. A conviction that the real crisis is upstream of politics. He is the lead author of AEI's white papers and the author of this publication. Read more at

Metadiagnostics: Why your organization is at war with itself

Weekly diagnosis of institutions at war with themselves—and the framework to see what others can't.

By Grinning Brutus

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For those who prefer the author has read out the article.

“Man lives in three dimensions: the somatic, the mental, and the spiritual. The spiritual dimension cannot be ignored, for it is what makes us human” - Viktor Frankly, The Doctor and the Soul

In a world increasingly prone to inhuman and dehumanizing movements in politics and pop culture, those of us who demand to live as individuals must come to a painful realization about the type of conflict we are truly engaged in.

I don’t care if you are a ‘believer’ or subscribe to any particular religion or faith, but if you don’t properly recognize that we are deep in a spiritual battle, there is simply NO WAY you are going to win for the individual and their dignity.

Here’s my proposal and argument, in order to win the larger spiritual battle OUT THERE you first need to turn inward and take on the spiritual battle INSIDE. You must fight to realize a sense of personal sovereignty in yourself, and that can ONLY happen if you commit to developing your physical health as a key component of the spiritual strength you will need to win that outside battle so many of us realize is necessary.

First, I’m going to dive deep into the personal story of my spiritual based fitness coaching when the creator of this fine publication reached out to me in 2024 to help with precisely this type of spiritual fortitude generated through consistent physical activity.

I’ll detail my approach, what we did together, how our coaching evolves over time, the importance of the physical in providing courage, grace, and perspective and how that is setting us up to continue to win even harder in the future.

Then I’ll take aim at you and give you the tools necessary to start your own path along this spiritual aimed fitness journey.

Finally, I’ll end with a way we can all take the best of ourselves to the general battle out there, to empower the lovers of liberty, freedom, independent thinking, and a zest for truth seeking and telling in the oncoming spiritual battle.

‘Butt Jokes’

When an avatar of a human butt, wearing a hat of another human butt wearing a hat of a human butt (hello fractals!) sends you a DM like this you pay attention. I was just a year into my foray as an online life and fitness coach after ditching life as a university professor in the fall of 2022.

I did not want to just coach fitness, because as a professor of sport history and philosophy I knew that fitness coaching could go deep, affecting a person’s spirit. I knew that the genesis of athletic training came from the Ancient Greek ideal of character development through the training. In essence, they believed that individual potential was BEST recognized, developed, and displayed through rigorous athletic training and competition.

“In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together.” Plato

In order for Correspondence Theory to be brought to life, the first thing that needed to happen was for the founder to come to grips with inconsistency in day-to-day life.

Rather than jump directly into the mind, my process had us first establishing consistency in the body as a kind of trap door into the spirit. Then with these two parts on board, it’s time to take on the mind.

Let’s quickly go through our fitness timeline working together and then we can mine the spiritual and mental breakthroughs that accompanied them.

I see this too many times in coaching, you have an ‘eager to start’ client matched with a ‘not quite getting the real challenge’ fitness trainer. For most, it’s not about the body at all, but more about the DISCIPLINE needed to keep showing up when excuses, adversity, and the desire to quit emerge. Just like that initial message indicated.

So we started small, like almost so small you’d think ‘why even bother.’ It was to get into a habit of moving his body consistently and to start thinking about the ways he loved moving your body and how we could figure out how he can do that MORE.

The answer was daily walks, either before leaving for work or first thing upon getting home afterwards. That was an easy enough ask. In the first month I remember my guy getting SO PISSED he missed one day of walking in the entire month.

Once walks became non-negotiable, we began to dream bigger. We started crafting custom lifting programs based on enjoyment and desire to get stronger while finding space to vision cast about longboarding, crazy endurance adventures in nature, and even some winter activities like skating. These are things related to the spirit, enjoyment, fun, adventure, creativity, passion, imagination, and curiosity.

When the body moves, the spirit has the chance to follow, and the mind is shut out of the equation. No more excuses that seem justified to take, instead it’s to figure out a way to get the work in or else feel guilty for quitting on yourself. That’s the powerful formula physical activity forces into your being when you stick with it consistently. It’s really SPIRITUAL training.

From this small platform, we then created small iterations and modifications over months and months. This led us to establishing a 4 month winter lifting protocol and a desire to train in running to conquer a half marathon. Slow and steady, done by his own style, and without tremendous pressure on the results saw us hit the target time and time again.

Now here’s where things get really interesting.

At the exact same time we were establishing physical consistency as the basis of personal development, we engaged in the creation of Correspondence Theory. Remember, creativity, passion, and the truth and all connected directly to the SPIRIT.

This is why the Ancient Greeks believed that rigorous and consistent physical training oriented the mind and spirit towards self-actualization. One of the key concepts from that time, Askesis, gives us a clue as to why this works. Askesis is the rigorous self-discipline that leads to spiritual growth and fulfillment. By disciplining the body through training, one learns how to properly apply discipline to the mind and spirit as well. And then you can begin to apply that discipline in those other areas.

Thinking about the half marathon our founder took down, even though it didn’t result from a disciplined block of training, the discipline learned from creating consistency in walking helped orient him to achieve what he needed to be successful and complete the race. It works exactly the same for creative work and taking on big risks in life.

Early discipline in creating Correspondence Theory looked like getting the proper backend items in order before diving into the creation of articles. A website, a list of contributors, a sense of the types of articles, the intended audience, how to distribute, and a whole host of other questions needed to be sorted.

It’s often during these organizing phases that initial dreams go to die. The enthusiasm of starting something new and big turns into seeing ALL THE OBSTACLES in the way and then momentum stalls. I remember battling together in the first six months after going live to stay consistent with articles, staying on top of editing projects, reaching out to new contributors, and most importantly managing the roller coaster of emotions that comes with creating a project like this.

But we simply doubled down on the same types of processes that worked in the gym to stay consistent.

• Ease into it and let enjoyment guide towards the next step

• Give grace to yourself when mistakes happen but do not let them build

• Embrace difficulty and work through messiness with an open heart

• Remember the ‘WHY’ and don’t let negative noise drown out the true signal

So instead of another ambitious project going down the drain because things got too hard too quickly, this one was able to emerge out of that early chaos.

Our guy learned to trust others, to delegate, to focus on his own strengths and let others pick up the slack.

He learned how to coach other contributors through their fears of sharing all while holding them accountable to due dates required in the publishing business

And by opening up space for others he quickly found that his little dream began to grow and grow. More subscribers, bigger name contributors, larger audience reach, more impact on the conversation at large, and with that comes bigger and better opportunities.

Now I’m certainly biased as the coach, I’m willing to admit that, but I also don’t tell lies and respect the truth above all. I believe that without physical consistency, and an aim to learn how to solve discipline and motivation issues in life through establishing that elusive physical consistency, the success of Correspondence Theory would be more precarious, and the publication might have died out in the first year.

It’s a testament not to me, but to our butt-faced hero, the one who puts in the work on himself. The one who dared to see the truth of his internal world and resolved himself to fix it on the way to helping others search for, find, and share the truth as they see it in the world. Because without that internal repair, the courage and fortitude to stick with it through adversity may never have materialized to affect the external world.

Now it’s YOUR TURN

What’s incredible about this story is that I’ve seen similar breakthroughs occur in so many other domains that all started with the same aim at the physical. In three years of coaching I’ve seen people quit jobs with golden handcuffs to start their own business, move out of terrible living situations to create new space for themselves and their families, move cross country to start new adventures, repair old relationships that they believed were ‘too far gone,’ refused to continue giving all of themselves to work and reclaim control in the home, and countless other types of life breakthroughs.

So it’s not so much about what you’re currently doing but more about where you dream you can be, if only you started to let the better parts of yourself consistently beat out the lesser parts.

And that’s the place to start.

I want you to pause, take a minute, close your eyes, and dream-cast.

What would you be doing if you could do what you wanted, to make a contribution to the world and in serving others, that would be a direct outcome of the passion in your heart and the truth you feel obligated to share?

Now open your eyes, the dream shouldn’t be something you can achieve tomorrow, but big enough to DEMAND a change inside of yourself. Remember, if you want to affect change in the external world, you must first resolve yourself to change your inner world.

So that big dream will alert you to the areas you need to step up your game. Now there’s an aim and an emerging road map. You have character growth to engage in, and you can tailor physical training to help you embody and learn those lessons.

The example of our CT founder needing discipline and finding it through showing up with a day-to-day habit is a great example.

I can’t possibly give all the examples possible for all the virtues sports and physical training can help you gain, but I’ll give one more common one that all of us truth seekers need. Especially if we are to engage in the spiritual battles we hope to win.

That virtue is courage. And this is how we’ll end today, with a tying of your heart through courage to how we can all, as truth-seekers, endeavor to keep fighting with our hearts open while the hearts and minds of those around us close up for good.

He is courageous who endures and fears the right thing, for the right motive, in the right way and at the right times.” Aristotle

“Some kinds of courage are learned. But there is surely also an instinct of courage, a wish to be brave, to overcome fear.” - John Holt, “How Children Learn”

These two quotes should help you become a courage respecter. That you have it inside of you already, but need the right qualities, conditions, and situations to bring it out of yourself.

Here’s where the role of the physical shines through. In almost all elements, physical training requires courage.

You need courage to take on the physical pain and exertion needed to complete the work.

You need courage to face the truth of the results; there is no lying to the iron or the track.

You need courage to remain committed when others try to weaken your resolve.

You need courage to fight through internal doubt and to show up for yourself when you feel like you can’t anymore.

You need courage to open yourself up to public scrutiny in a competition or big challenge

Now the best part, you can start small and stack courage. Just like establishing a walking habit before getting into weightlifting and running, the path our founder took.

Get into the Act

Let’s end with some practical action and advice you can start living out right now. Philosophy is cool, but if you can’t live it to better ends, then it’s not a philosophy worthy of your time.

You have that big dream in your mind still? The one I asked you to imagine a little earlier in the article. Good.

Here’s how we can start aiming towards it by using the physical to grow courage and character.

Step 1: Select a physical activity you love

Step 2: Find the as many 20–30-minute open time block in your schedule

Step 3: Start filling them in with the activity (walking, running, lifting, etc…)

Step 4: Make showing up and completing the work the only result that matters

Step 5: Repeat for six weeks MINIMUM

Why will this work?

First, by showing up consistently you will become a believer in yourself.

Second, by engaging in an activity you love you will be activating your spirit through enjoyment.

Third, you will recognize that even for things you enjoy there are many moments of discomfort, doubt, and a wanting to quit and you’ll gain experience overcoming them

Fourth, you will have an objective record of accomplishment your mind can’t steal away from you (you showed up and did the work right!)

Fifth, you have momentum on your side that you can harness and aim towards other places you are stalled and blocked

Finally, you find the deep resolve to bring your spirit to bear against yourself, because over the six weeks, you’ll have many internal battles faced and bested

In these ways, a simple action showing up consistently for yourself in the physical world will have outsized positive impact on your spiritual and mental worlds.

If you desire to win the battle outside, recognize that it will always change, shift, and appear different, but at the core it’s the same battle; truth against lies.

The magic of the physical is that you become comfortable fighting the seemingly same battle over and over again. The internal doubts, excuses, and limits do not go away, they simply change form, gather strength, and come back with a vengeance.

When you consistently win the battle against yourself, you realize that all the external opponents require that same internal resolve.

That why you CANNOT skip out on physical training.

Plus, you’ll have more energy, be more positive, have better mental health, and a willingness to fight that will aid your battles and wars against the external enemies.

There are no downsides.

So, start training from your heart. It’s our secret weapon.

Let’s fight together!

Jordan B. Goldstein | The Athletic Philosopher

On X @JB_Goldstein

Former Prof | Fitness and Life Coach | Tribal Training Endurance and Mindset Coach | Family Man | Trail Runner | Podcaster | Teach Sport’s Beauty | Dream BIG

linktr.ee/jgoldstein

The author has recorded an audio version for those who prefer.

If you want to learn something new, read an old book; you’ll learn things about matters older than yourself. “The Great Divorce” By C.S Lewis is one of those books. It is for humanity. He delves into human character flaws and their ability to hold people back if not eradicated. His setting is purgatory. One last chance for the sinner to repent. In the opening lines of the book, Lewis compels the reader forward with the following preface:

Perennial is a great word choice. Defined in philosophy and literature as: something eternal or constantly occurring. The Great Divorce is philosophical fiction. The book deals with human flaws and the building of character through struggle. These are eternal and constantly occurring. Lewis reminds the reader that not everyone is ready and willing to let go of such flaws. In many cases, people simply refuse to change. Often, grave consequences are the result of our choices and Lewis is serving up a warning.

The story begins with a narrator standing close to a bus stop where people have formed a line. The sky is grey and it’s raining. The weather here is always this way. The narrator has been wandering this land for some time and has come to learn a good many things about the place and its residents. This is a world where the people have whatever they want simply by wishing it to be. There is no struggle required for any material item desired. They’ve grown cranky and pessimistic as a result. They are lazy. They are bored from never having to work for anything.

Displeased and unsatisfied with everything around them, they have bickered and fought with neighbours to the point many want as much distance from others as possible. People are disconnected from one another. They don’t have any significant problems yet, complain about everything. It’s a bleak world of materialism and selfishness. A place where deeper meaning and enlightenment are not on the menu. The following observations made by the narrator sum up the state of this grey world:

The Great Divorce has a dream-like quality to it. The bus arrives and the people all climb aboard. It then takes off vertically, travelling through the dreary grey into a sky of, “a bright blueness that stung the eyes.” On the bus, the narrator has a series of interesting interactions with the travellers who are nervously anticipating the arrival at their destination.

The depictions of humanity and how people react to life’s unpredictability and chaos in the stories of the travellers is fascinating. These are useful snippets of human flaws on full display. Lewis brilliantly spotlights his motivations for writing this book in the telling of these individual accounts. When the bus finally comes to a stop, the passengers disembark into a place of stunning beauty. Everywhere they look there are images that out-do the previous one in terms of splendor.

However wonderous the visual beauty of the place, it soon becomes apparent that all of the objects of this place are brutal in their physicality. Fallen leaves and other small objects are too heavy to lift. The narrator tries to pluck a petal off of a flower and finds, “The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond.” Objects that are normally malleable or easily manipulated in the grey world are unforgiving and unmoveable here. The grass is described as being, “hard as diamonds to my unsubstantial feet, made me feel as though I were walking on wrinkled rock.” Nothing is usable here without an enormous amount of effort. Lewis further describes this world then informs us who these travellers really are:

The bus travellers, as well as the narrator, are deceased. They are ghosts who have not properly repented for their sins. This place is only accessible to those who are willing to repent by working to expel their flaws. The unyielding difficulty of this place forced many to retreat back to the bus. They are not accustomed to any kind of struggle so they quit at the first signs of anything challenging. They would rather go back to the grey world they complain so much about. They prefer their miserable lives. They refuse to change.

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The instant gratification from readily available goods and services in the hellish grey world is inextricably linked to the INABILITY to access these same things in the heavenly world. The beast of their selfish materialism cannot be fed in this place. Heaven’s bounty is off limits to the ghosts. They have not endured the trials required to “walk on the grass” in Heaven. They are unwilling to let go of the traits and behaviours that keep them out. They cherish their poor qualities. Lewis attributes this to a spiritual illness. A Nietzschean “Death of God” vibe, where their selfish desires have become the driver.

In this Heavenly world, the ghosts encounter ‘Spirits’. These nearly transparent beings act as guides. They are working to convince the ghosts to shed their earthly ways and enter heaven proper. One such encounter sees the “Episcopal Ghost” interact with a “Bright Spirit” who were once friends when they were living. The ghost, a former theologian, attempted to re-imagine the meaning in certain Christian doctrine. He did this not because he questioned the original stories himself, but rather for the notoriety and fame he knew it would bring. His dishonesty to himself is his greatest wrong. His Spirit guide attempts to help him admit his pride and selfishness. The ‘Episcopal Ghost’ refuses. He is too enamoured by the dark fruits of his sins. The “Bright Spirit” tries in vain to effect change in his former friend with a final plea:

Most of the ghosts from the bus avoid personal responsibility as though it were a plague. The attitude is, nothing can be their fault if they don’t take responsibility for anything. However, they do expect every desire they have to be fulfilled on their terms without question or qualm. How characteristically human. Unfortunately many of the ghosts remain stubborn and narrow-minded. Even after plenty of encouragement from the Spirit guides, many ghosts refuse to change. They prefer their own self-indulgent vices. The Spirits grow more concerned for their ghostly charges,

Lewis is cautioning the reader here. One cannot enter Heaven when fixated on selfish pursuits. Heaven is not available to the unworthy. Lewis kills any ambiguity between Heaven and Hell he may have been maintaining by stating, “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” The ghosts are in love with their grievances about the ‘grey’ world so much they want to bring them into Heaven with them. This is precisely why Lewis is calling for the ‘divorce’.

The writing of characters is a philosophical endeavor. For what is philosophy if not the study of characters? There is a deeper exploration of humanity in The Great Divorce. Lewis outlines the human desire to “extend hell, to bring it bodily, if they could, into Heaven.” Lewis writes of a particular breed of ghost that, “all seemed incurious about the country in which they had arrived.” These same ghosts “repelled any effort to teach them, and when they found that nobody listened to them, they went back, one by one, to the bus.”

People become addicted to their suffering. Some feel they have earned the right to carry it with them and wield it as a weapon when needed. This weapon presents itself when the person is called upon to do anything helpful for anyone, or for the overall good of the community. Some play the ‘struggle card’ to remain a perpetual victim. Lewis’s ability to evoke the absurd when illuminating some of these human traits is on full display in the tale of The Dwarf and the Tragedian. He serves up a brilliant lesson in the destructive nature of vulnerable narcissism in this scene:

Lewis wraps up his story with a moment of clarity. It’s appropriate here to use perennial again. In terms of humans imprisoning themselves, their own bad habits and the resulting self-loathing and resentment, the word is perfect. Eternal realities, constantly occurring. The Great Divorce reminds us we always have a choice between Heaven and Hell and that these two ought to be “divorced” from one another and remain that way. There should be no letting into Heaven the qualities that belong in Hell. C.S. Lewis was warning humanity to change while we still can:

Choose wisely.

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Mike Lyons is a Carpenter who posts about humanity, horses and classic books. He is a Correspondence Theory team member. You can follow him on X at https://x.com/MikeLyonsofHere

For those who prefer, a volunteer has recorded an audio version.

In the fractious landscape of the contemporary right, few figures command as much attention and controversy as Carl Benjamin (better known as Sargon of Akkad), Nick J. Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson. They differ sharply in style: Sargon’s raw, YouTube-fueled polemics; Fuentes’s unapologetic ethno-nationalism; Carlson’s suave, prime-time dissections of elite folly. Yet beneath these aesthetic variances lies a shared intellectual current, one that binds them as unlikely but logical confrères. Each, in his way, diagnoses the West’s ailments as the fruit of “liberalism” and prescribes a robust state as the remedy. This is no mere coincidence of phrasing; it is the hallmark of postliberalism, a movement that mirrors the woke left’s own sleight of hand: identify a genuine cultural pathology, pin it on an ideological scapegoat, then summon Leviathan to enforce the cure.

Postliberalism has electrified the right-wing intelligentsia, intentionally converting conservatives, with thinkers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule in the United States, and Philip Blond and Nick Timothy in the United Kingdom, leading the charge. They argue that liberalism (broadly conceived) bears responsibility for the West’s unraveling: the erosion of community, the commodification of intimacy, the triumph of atomized desire over shared purpose. As the abstract of a recent critique aptly summarizes, “Postliberalism has emerged as an influential ideology, especially on the political right. Its leading figures include Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule in the U.S. and Philip Blond and Nick Timothy in the U.K. Postliberals claim that liberalism has caused the woes of the contemporary West.”

This rhetoric has ignited timelines and symposiums alike, turning debates into skirmishes over a single, overloaded term.

The sleight of hand is subtle but devastating. “Liberalism” serves as a capacious junk drawer, conflating two antithetical traditions: classical liberalism, with its emphasis on ordered liberty under law, and modern progressivism, which deploys the state as an instrument of moral engineering. The former champions individuals as moral agents, accountable to God, neighbor, and tradition within a framework of rights and duties. The latter views citizens as malleable clay, to be reshaped by bureaucratic fiat for their own supposed benefit. By lumping these together, postliberals can indict the American Founders for the depredations of TikTok-fueled distraction and corporate rainbow capitalism. As the same critique observes, “They use ‘liberalism’ to cover both classical liberals and liberals in the modern American sense: that is, left-wing progressives.”

The result? A timeline aflame with civil war, where interlocutors quarrel not over realities but over a word’s emotional freight.

This conflation is no accident; it is essential to the postliberal project. Classical liberalism, contra its detractors, does not equate to “remove every impediment to desire” (a straw man erected by adversaries and echoed by false allies eager to supplant it). Instead, it presumes human virtue, granting individuals the dignity of self-governance while binding them to communal norms through common law and moral suasion. “Alas, they mistake individualism for the view that the state should remove all impediments to the satisfaction of individuals’ desires when, in fact, it is the view that individuals should make decisions for themselves,” the critique notes.

“They are wrong to conflate classical liberalism and progressivism.”

Progressivism, by contrast, is the true antithesis: a regime that treats persons as raw material for state-sponsored redemption, complete with reeducation camps disguised as sensitivity training. Postliberals blur this line because clarity would expose their prescription, a state no longer neutral on the good life, but actively enlisted to impose a “Christian and communitarian conception” of it. If the pathology stems from unchecked liberty, the antidote is coerced virtue. If it arises from progressive overreach, the solution is restraint: chaining the administrative behemoth that has ballooned since the World War I era.

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Consider the maladies postliberals decry, which they attribute to an excess of freedom rather than an excess of state power. The family’s decline? Not the Founders’ gift of free speech, but the capture of economic and educational institutions by a managerial elite, for whom marriage and childrearing are mere impediments to workforce fungibility and ideological conformity. This is no libertarian idyll; it is soft despotism, spritzed with the eau de toilette of human resources. Local communities? They withered not from the liberty to peruse contraband volumes at booksellers, but from the centralization of authority in corporate and governmental nodes, which drown civic initiative in regulatory quicksand. “You cannot start a business, build a house, or teach your kid without wading through a swamp of permissions,” as one might put it; that is progressive control, not individualism.

Even the pornographic inferno consuming public life owes less to unfettered markets than to the unholy wedlock of tech monopolies and a culture of unaccountable predation. Yet postliberals insist that classical liberal or conservate individualism inexorably births this leviathan, redefining selfhood from moral agency (”I am a person, not livestock; I must answer for my choices”) to sovereign hedonism. Within the former frame, duty, tradition, and moral thickness flourish organically; in the latter caricature, they wither into farce. As the critique charges, “Postliberals fail to make their case that liberalism has harmed Western populations because they do not take proper account of the gains due to liberalism. And much of what they lament is caused not by individual liberty but by the growth of the state since WWI. Postliberals claim, however, that the individualism of classical liberalism inevitably leads to the growth of the state.”

This diagnostic sleight brings us to our trio. Sargon of Akkad has veered toward pronouncements that liberalism is a spent force, ripe for supplantation by a “civilizational program” of renewed vigor. Fuentes articulates it with stark, blood-and-soil fervor. Carlson orbits the same core, his broadcasts laced with pleas to shield the volk from “chaos” via enlightened guardianship. Aesthetics diverge: Sargon’s pugilism, Fuentes’s firebrand zeal, Carlson’s patrician drawl. But the etiology converges: liberalism as toxin, the state as elixir, now sanctified in Christian-communitarian garb. They part ways only on the throne’s occupant, not its fundamentals.

Beneath this alliance lurks a more profound peril, one that unmasks postliberalism’s kinship with its ostensible foe, Marxism.

Both traditions repose faith in an enlightened vanguard (be it commissars or confessional clerics) deemed wise enough to blueprint society from on high. Both culminate in coercion, for human nature defies fiat. “They are also wrong to recommend that politicians promote a particular conception of the good life,” the critique warns. “No one is clever enough to know how strangers should live better than those strangers do themselves. And no one is virtuous enough to be trusted with the power to make others live as he sees fit.”

These lines should be etched into the postliberal conscience. Every entreaty to “redeem” the administrative state through right-wing moralism replays the left’s perennial reverie: a priesthood of the pure, wielding coercion for the collective weal. But the state, once baptized, devours its summoners.

You cannot domesticate the beast; it will turn, godlike, then jailer.

Sargon, Fuentes, and Carlson are thus fellow wayfarers, charting a path from ordered liberty toward a collectivism rechristened as salvation. Whether they avow it candidly or merely prime the pump for its arrival is the lingering query. For those who cherish republics, the counsel is clear: In moments of moral tumult, do not barter constitutional dikes for therapeutic panics. That exchange invariably concludes in the same theater: the state, no longer servant, enthroned as sovereign, then scourge.Quotations from “Taking liberties: Why postliberals are wrong about personal freedom” https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/314013

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The author of this piece asked to remain anonymous