I think that I, and most, when we think of the Founding, we think mostly of the political aspect and as such, it provides a relatively narrow pov of how and why they built what they did. Then when we include the metaphysical aspect, or even the adherence to reality and truth... The terms of liberal or conservative in these senses really muddy the water.

Consider the metaphysical, the Receptivist and the Constructivist (I googled the terms…) Calling the former conservative and the latter liberal ends up mixing the political implications; for one can hold the former and be politically liberal and vice versa.

And in consideration of the aspect of adherence to truth... I highly doubt that conservative or liberal labels even apply. I can think of no person who would call themselves other than conservative.

Which then the conversation then becomes “I am a liberal conservative liberal” or “I am conservative conservative conservative”...

And to be honest, we could drop the adherence to truth aspect as it is largely unhelpful both as a label - because of how broad it is - and as a tool of discourse because it would make those whom one would call liberal, automatically the villain of the conversation.

So then we are left with two, and even then, the terms are still too loaded. Both metaphysically and in the ordering of government. I don’t believe we should use the terms in the metaphysical sense as it again doesn’t actually capture the distinction being drawn, although it does do it better than truth. I was familiar with the concepts, not exactly what they were called…

One is what I’ve been calling Recognition of being aka Receptivist: we live in a created order - moral, physical, metaphysical - that we did not make, and our duty is to recognize it, receive it, and conform ourselves and our institutions to that higher order as best we can.

The other is Creation of being aka Constructivist: reality, moral norms, or even human nature itself is treated as something plastic that we can and should actively shape, will, or reconstruct according to our own lights.

I could see how liberal and conservative could fit these categories but again, too many categories are being pressed into those terms, nor do they capture the essence of them.

As to the definition within the political sphere... It largely holds as it refers to the consolidation of power, liberal meaning the limited nature, conservative meaning in the consolidated nature... Yet this too is also inaccurate as the actual question is how individuals should relate in a collective.

Therefore the better method would be to define it by Individualism and Collectivism. The former being the respect and recognition of the right of the individual to create his own life because each man is created in the image of God and he is thus meant to live according to the judgment of his own reasoning mind. He is endowed with rights and responsibilities that are not negated by the group when conflict arises. The necessary limitations being the transgression of another individual’s rights.

The latter emphasizes that when a conflict arises between what you believe and what the other members of the group believe, the needs of the group must often come first. The group is said to have fundamentality over the individual, and it is said to have rights over the individual. (Paraphrasing @CodyLibolt for these two definitions)

So liberal and conservative are still a better fit, yet I’d still say that they don’t really belong…

If we are conservative, we need to define what we are conserving, hence the oft fought argument between conservatives, classical liberals, and post-liberals.

Conservatism is therefore unclear... Both from a metaphorical and political view point, it is often, and accurately so, accused of being the rawl to the Liberal ratchet. This too was a Burkean flaw. One can see it in his resistance to change being more of push against haste instead of error.

Liberalism is in that sense, the revolutionary aspect, the removal or changing of things, often taken to the radical extreme of France.

Classical Liberalism is fine for it captures the Founding governmental structure quite well, but it lacks the metaphysical level, per se…

Burke is a conservative in the classic sense, that is to say not of the metaphysical or political, but of the preservation of a thing or things. Quite often for the sake of the thing itself, for it was believed to have carried the wisdoms and truths of the ages before simply due to its age and endurance. This being his core presupposition in the nature and purpose of government.

Post-Liberals are in an aspect quite Burkean in their distrust of abstract individualism and his respect for tradition, but they often move beyond Burke by making the political community itself the active guardian of the common good.

See, America was Receptivist in its metaphysics and Individualist in its governmental structure, designed to control the effects of faction rather than to perfect souls or impose a single moral vision. That combination produced something distinctive. Thus it was both conservative and liberal in the classical sense, and in so doing, rendered a newer political ideology chiefly known as Americanism. That particular combination produced something distinctive. It was not simply European liberalism (which often lacked the same metaphysical grounding) nor European conservatism (which tended to be more Collectivist in structure).

I think this is the term needing to be brought back as it captures both aspects of the Founding. Primarily because of its distinction of the metaphysical level from the structural level. It lets us describe the Founding without forcing it into the overloaded European terms: liberal/conservative. Both of which often operated as a collectivist, regardless of Receptivist or Constructivist metaphysics; often stretching the terms across the metaphysical and structural levels at the same time. Americanism, by contrast, keeps the two levels more clearly distinguished, and it provides a clearer, less muddy concept to conserve.

Burke fits interestingly here, though not quite in the way many assume. He is not commonly understood as a Constructivist, for he plainly believed in a higher moral order, natural law, and truths that transcend any particular society. Rather, he is best understood as a Traditionalist, a form of synthesis between Receptivism and institutional inheritance. The distinction is important because it reveals both the strength and limitation of his thought.

For Burke, inherited institutions, customs, and traditions are the primary repositories of political wisdom. They are not merely historical accidents but the accumulated experience of generations attempting to live in accordance with a higher order. In this respect, Burke adopts a receptive posture toward reality. Yet his reception of the higher order is largely mediated through tradition itself.

This can be seen in his defense of the American cause. Burke’s argument rested heavily upon the colonists’ appeal to prescriptive rights rooted in the English constitutional tradition. The American Founders, however, justified their claims on different grounds: that rights are pre-political, derived from the nature of man and the laws of God, and therefore remain valid whether or not any particular institution recognizes them.

Here their divergence becomes apparent. The Founders begin with rights and judge institutions accordingly. Burke begins with institutions and infers rights through them. Both affirm a higher order, but they disagree about how that order is known and applied in political life.

This is the chief limitation of Burke’s framework. Because inherited institutions become the primary means by which political truths are understood, those institutions acquire a presumption of legitimacy that can make them difficult to judge by an external standard. Rights remain theoretically prior to institutions, but in practice institutions increasingly mediate the recognition and exercise of those rights.

The result is a tension within Burke’s own thought. He wishes to defend a higher order above society, yet his epistemology places such weight upon inherited constructions that the constructions themselves begin to function as the practical standard of legitimacy. This does not make Burke a Constructivist in the modern sense, nor does it mean he opposed change. Indeed, he opposed primarily radical and abstract change, preferring precedent. But it does mean that his framework is better suited to explaining why societies should be cautious in reform than why they are justified in overturning longstanding institutions that have become unjust.

And yet this is where the American Founders part company with Burke. By grounding rights directly in the higher order rather than in inherited institutions, they possessed a standard external to the institutions themselves. Institutions could therefore be measured, corrected, reformed, or even abolished when they violated the rights they were meant to secure. Burke’s framework, by contrast, tends to blur the distinction between the standard and the thing being measured by it. In that sense, his traditionalism tempers revolutionary excess, but it also weakens the force of his critique against unjust traditions and inherited political arrangements.

This limitation becomes especially apparent in later political movements influenced by Burke. Once the inherited institutions themselves lose their connection to the higher order, Burke’s framework offers fewer resources for distinguishing between what is merely inherited and what is genuinely just. The result is often an increasing reliance upon institutions, traditions, or political authority as arbiters of the good, a tendency that can be observed in varying degrees among many post-liberal and integralist schools of thought.

See, if we’re going to keep using “conservative”, it behoves us to be clearer about what exactly we’re trying to conserve - the Receptionist posture toward reality, or just the existing arrangements. Most modern and European models assume that a Receptivist metaphysic necessarily requires an institution-centered or common-good-centered political order. Aka, Collectivist. The Founding rejected that inference. The Founders believed that because reality, human nature, and moral law are objective, rights are objective as well, and therefore government must be limited by them.

Thoughts?

D00M42 posts about politics and philosophy on X at https://x.com/D00M42 and writes . D00M42 prefers to stay pseudonymous.

The modern “Judeo-Christian” formula is frequently treated as the timeless foundation of Western liberty. This essay argues, however, that it is a twentieth-century civic synthesis which extracts a shared political vocabulary from distinct and frequently incompatible theological traditions. Its utility as an emergency framework does not render it a sufficient metaphysical foundation for the public order. By examining James Lindsay’s defense of the formula, this essay asks whether a neutral procedural square can preserve human liberty after the transcendent authority that originally limited political power has been excluded from it.

I. The Synthetic Scaffold: The ‘Judeo-Christian-American’ Framework

In the contemporary conservative imagination, the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis has attained the status of a foundational myth, often depicted as a three-legged stool supporting Western civilization: a tripod of Hebrew covenant, Christian grace, and American proceduralism. For secular conservative thinkers—most notably James Lindsay—this framework serves as a vital firewall against the corrosive impulses of the modern Left. In his reflections on America’s 250th anniversary, Lindsay frames the American Experiment as a moment of integration, arguing that the Calvinist Pilgrims and the Founders revived the Covenant of Sinai in a “Christian-Gentile” key. By blending Jewish notions of responsibility, Christian mercy, and Enlightenment common sense, he proposes a uniquely “Judeo-Christian-American” philosophy that represents the essence of the West.

The attempt to anchor this synthesis in the Puritan founding, however, reveals a fundamental detachment from history. Advocates like Lindsay point to the Puritans as the architects of this covenantal integration, yet this ignores the reality of the Puritan world. Far from seeking a “Judeo-Christian” partnership, the Puritans were strict supersessionists who viewed their commonwealth as a New Israel under the exclusive lordship of Christ. To the Puritan mind, the “hyphen” would not have been a source of strength, but a dilution of the very truth that defined their community. By rebranding these rigorous, vertical believers as proponents of a modern, proceduralist synthesis, contemporary conservatives do not recover the American past; they project a secularized, administrative sensibility onto a seventeenth-century faith that would have found such an identity alien.

The appeal of Lindsay’s position is not merely rhetorical convenience; it reflects a genuine intellectual response to the vacuum of modern conservatism. In a landscape defined by the deconstruction of Western heritage, his framework offers a “usable past” that feels both grounded and distinctively American. By framing the American experiment as a deliberate integration of Western and Hebraic roots, he rescues the conservative tradition from the charge of being a collection of reactive prejudices. Furthermore, by identifying a high-stakes enemy—the “managerial progressive” machine—he allows his audience to view their advocacy as the defense of civilization itself. His focus on “values” rather than “dogma” bypasses divisive theological debates, offering a streamlined identity that can be shared by secularists, Christians, and Jews alike. For those exhausted by the perceived moral drift of modern life, this framework promises a restoration of order that is intellectually rigorous and immediately deployable in the public square.

Yet, when subjected to historical inquiry, this “three-legged stool” reveals itself as a late-modern civic coalition rather than an ancient inheritance. The model promises a public order robust enough to sustain a shared moral vocabulary while remaining sufficiently “neutral” to accommodate secularization. In practice, however, it functions as a structural artifice, reframing Hebrew tradition as “covenant-as-contract,” Christianity as “grace-as-sentiment,” and the American founding as a triumph of “procedural neutrality.”

The addition of “American” to this hyphenated synthesis is the final move toward procedural neutrality. By defining the West as “Judeo-Christian-American,” the framework shifts the source of liberty from the transcendent Logos to the procedural genius of the American Founding. Here, the “American” term acts as a stabilizer—a secular container that allows “Judeo-Christian” values to be utilized without the “danger” of their original, non-negotiable theological claims. The American hyphen does not merely describe our tradition; it redefines it as a manageable set of administrative values capable of sustaining a neutral public square.

This transition from a participatory to a procedural order is rooted in the late-medieval “nominalist turn.” As John Milbank argues in Theology and Social Theory, this shift dissolved the classical understanding of participatio—the belief that created realities possess their meaning, goodness, and intelligibility by sharing analogically in the divine order rather than existing as autonomous, self-contained entities—and replaced it with a world of discrete, unrelated objects governed by the arbitrary will of God or the mechanics of power. If justice is no longer a reality in which one participates through the Logos, it must be constructed through social contract. Consequently, we moved from an order limited by a transcendent horizon to a system where order is generated exclusively through the negotiation of individual wills. As Charles Taylor observes, this ushered in the “buffered self,” the modern individual who views the world as an impersonal, disenchanted space. The “neutral” square is thus not a discovery of inherent balance, but the political architecture of a disenchanted reality that, having lost the capacity to recognize a shared divine order, is left only with the administrative management of competing desires.

This formulation achieves stability through systematic omission: it brackets the sovereign authority of the living Logos. By defining the West through functionalist values rather than a shared metaphysical reality, the framework inadvertently adopts the very nominalism it purports to oppose. By stripping the world of its inherent, divinely ordered meaning, it renders the state unable to govern by recognizing a pre-existing justice, forcing it instead to become a mechanism that merely adjudicates between conflicting wills. Rights are no longer participations in a divine order, but self-evident political fictions negotiated within a hollowed-out public square. The danger is not merely that this framework is secular, but that it is epistemologically hollow: by positioning the “Judeo-Christian-American” synthesis as the timeless ground of the West, the modern conservative movement defends a construct that cannot generate its own soil, having excluded the only authority—the sovereign Logos—capable of limiting political power to something other than the administrative management of a disenchanted reality.

II. The Modern Invention of the Hyphen

In this climate, the “Judeo-Christian” label was an act of political triage. President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the term civic permanence, famously declaring that American democracy rested upon a “Judeo-Christian concept”—before adding, with telling indifference, “I don’t care what it is.” That blunt admission captures the essence of the project: the term functioned not as a serious theological claim, but as a generic placeholder for a unified civic identity.

By emphasizing a shared moral inheritance, the architects of this coalition carved out a defensive perimeter against existential threats. Yet, this success rested upon a fundamental misreading of theology. To make the “hyphen” functional, the irreducible tensions regarding the Messiah, the nature of the Covenant, and the requirements of salvation were relegated to private “belief,” while a flattened, generic version of “moral law” was promoted to the level of public “foundation.”

Ironically, the same postwar consensus that embedded this synthesis into the American lexicon coincided with the entrenchment of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower himself would later warn posed the gravest threat to the American way of life. Far from a neutral philological descriptor—as biblical scholar Wes Huff asserted in a recent post, claiming the term “has nothing to do with geo-politics or a one world order”—the “Judeo-Christian” formula has demonstrably functioned as a durable geopolitical and institutional scaffold. Its history reveals a striking convergence with expansive state architectures and the progressive blurring of jurisdictional lines between spiritual authority and temporal power.

This transformation stripped the Covenant of its supernatural character, reducing a historical relationship with the Living God to a set of contractual rights. Similarly, it reduced the radicality of grace to a sentiment of universal brotherhood. The irony is twofold: the term was deployed to preserve the religious character of the West, yet it functioned as a “legitimacy trap” that rendered religion irrelevant to the state. By providing a “value-neutral” basis for legitimacy that did not require acknowledging Christ’s sovereignty, the framework incentivized religious institutions to operate as mere “value-suppliers” for a state that manages the procedural “sandbox,” trading their jurisdictional independence for a seat at the table of American civil religion.

Resistance from within the Jewish tradition was both early and persistent, serving as a vital corrective to the homogenizing impulse of the hyphen. Arthur A. Cohen’s The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition remains the definitive rebuttal, laying bare the theological dishonesty of the synthesis. Cohen argued that the label was an American political invention designed to foster a comfortable civic consensus at the expense of theological truth. He demonstrated that the synthesis required Judaism to shed its particularity and Christianity to abandon its unique messianic claims. Scholars like Jacob Neusner and Eliezer Berkovits similarly argued that Judaism is defined by its distinctness from Christianity; for them, any synthetic blurring was not a source of strength, but a threat to Jewish integrity.

Viewing the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis as a timeless foundation is a profound historical error. It mistakes a wartime defensive measure for the structural steel of the building itself. We have inherited a tactic designed for the 1940s and elevated it to a metaphysical necessity. The result is a conservative movement that fights for its existence on the terms of a temporary coalition, unaware that the coalition’s foundational premise—that a pluralistic nation can be sustained by a de-dogmatized “value set”—is the very mechanism that has left our culture spiritually defenseless. This civic de-dogmatization paralleled deeper shifts in the scriptural foundations themselves.

III. The Ancient Christian–Rabbinic Fork: Two Worlds, Two Texts

The “Judeo-Christian” hyphen rests on the popular assumption of a continuous, harmonious scriptural tradition. In reality, the history of the biblical text is one of profound divergence. Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, the scriptural inheritance of Israel was curated, contested, and bifurcated. These were not peripheral variants; they were intentional divergences that crystallized as the Apostolic proclamation of the Incarnate Logos intersected with rabbinic efforts to delineate communal boundaries.

Christ and the Apostles were not bridging two co-equal religions; they were announcing the eschatological fulfillment of Israel’s Scriptures in the person of the Messiah within the living tradition that became the Church—long before the post-70 AD rabbinic reconfiguration crystallized distinct trajectories.

The Apostolic Textual World

For the early Church, the Septuagint (LXX) was not merely a translation but the inspired delivery system of the Logos. New Testament authors operated within this Greek textual world, citing it authoritatively as gegraptai (“it is written”). As Eugene Ulrich demonstrates, the “original” biblical text of the Second Temple period was a fluid, developing collection of manuscripts. The Church received and interpreted the Greek Old Testament within the living tradition of the altar and priesthood, seeing these texts not as static documents, but as illuminated by the Incarnate Word.

A vital clarification is necessary: the Great Isaiah Scroll at Qumran (1QIsaᵃ) presents a text with a proto-Masoretic character, confirming that the Masoretic tradition did not emerge ex nihilo after 70 AD. It drew upon an older, established stream of Hebrew transmission. However, this only deepens the theological stakes. As Karen Jobes and Moises Silva observe, the diversity of Second Temple texts was eventually pruned by a “standardization of tradition” that reflected the competing needs of distinct communities. The rabbinic project of standardization was a hermeneutic decision to prioritize a textual stream that resisted the Church’s claims. The Qumran scrolls do not prove the Masoretic text is “wrong,” but they confirm that its canonization was a deliberate act of identity formation in direct opposition to the Church’s Christology. By the second century, the Masoretic Text (MT) became the bedrock of an emerging Rabbinic Judaism that defined itself in critical, non-negotiable contrast to the early Church.

The Chronological Schism

Beyond textual variance, the post-70 AD rabbinic movement produced a distinctive chronology of sacred history. The Seder Olam Rabbah (c. 160 AD), the foundational rabbinic chronicle, compresses the Persian period by approximately 160 years compared to the timelines reflected in Ptolemy’s Canon and other external sources. This is more than a historiographical curiosity; it alters the arithmetic of Daniel’s prophecy of the “seventy weeks” (Daniel 9:24–27). Under the Seder Olam’s reckoning, the prophetic timetable no longer converges upon the lifetime of Jesus. Whether this was an internal methodological choice or, as scholars like Mitchell First suggest, an act of “theological engineering,” the result is clear: by the second century, Christian and rabbinic traditions operated within chronologies that no longer mapped the same historical landscape.

The Testimony of the Early Church

The Church Fathers were acutely aware of this schism. In Dialogue with Trypho (c. 150 AD), Justin Martyr explicitly addressed the divergence: “They [the Jews] have altogether taken away many Scriptures from the [Septuagint] translation... your teachers [the rabbis] have caused you to believe that the Scriptures are not as they are, but have interpreted them differently.” While modern scholarship cautions against overstating “deliberate alteration”—noting that some LXX variants reflect broader Second Temple pluriformity—Justin’s diagnosis captures a genuine historical reality: this was not a philological dispute, but a battle over the identity of the Messiah.

Pressure Points of Proclamation

These divergences cluster precisely where Apostolic proclamation confronted post-70 AD rabbinic boundary-setting:

The Sign of the Virgin (Isaiah 7:14): The LXX renders the Hebrew ‘almâ as parthenos (“virgin”), the prophetic signal of the Virgin Birth. Rabbinic readings later pivoted to alternatives that obscured this Christological application.

The Pattern of Sacrifice (Psalm 40:6 / Hebrews 10:5): The Apostolic reading—“a body you prepared for me”—reveals the Old Covenant’s localized sacrifices as fulfilled in the Incarnate Logos. The Masoretic tradition reads “ears you have dug for me,” steering the text toward ritualized obedience rather than the body as the site of definitive atonement.

The Divinity of the Messiah (Deuteronomy 32:43 / Hebrews 1:6): The LXX includes the exhortation, “Let all the angels of God worship him,” affirming Christ’s sonship. The Masoretic tradition omits this, reflecting a boundary-setting impulse that the Apostolic mission dismantled.

The Wounds of the Messiah (Psalm 22:16): The LXX reads ōryxan cheiras mou kai podas (“they pierced my hands and my feet”). The Masoretic tradition reads ka’ari (“like a lion”), a reading many textual critics regard as syntactically incomplete, which obscures the verse’s crucifixion resonance.

The Inclusion of the Nations: The LXX epilogue to Job and its reading of Amos 9:11–12 (“that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord”) provided the scriptural mandate for the Church’s universal mission. The Masoretic tradition narrows these texts, reinforcing the particular boundaries the Apostolic Church sought to transcend.

These are not mere artifacts of translation; they are tectonic plates of tradition. The modern “Judeo-Christian” synthesis treats these Scriptures as interchangeable reservoirs of “ethical values” to be harmonized through a proceduralist lens. But for the Apostles and Fathers, they were the historical unfolding of the Logos into time. By forcing these two divergent worlds into a singular, hyphenated box, the current consensus does not preserve tradition; it hollows it out, minimizing the scandal of the Cross and the necessity of the Incarnation.

IV. The Displacement: How the Hebrew Text Entered the Christian West

The “Judeo-Christian” synthesis assumes a stable, monolithic textual foundation. In reality, the history of the Western canon is defined by a slow-motion displacement of the Church’s original blueprint. The bridge between the Apostolic Church and the modern hyphenated consensus was not one of natural continuity, but a series of deliberate shifts in textual authority that systematically favored the post-70 AD rabbinic stream over the Apostolic Greek inheritance.

The Quest for Hebraica Veritas

For the early Church, the Septuagint (LXX) was not merely a translation but the inspired delivery system of the Logos. The rabbinic movement, however, viewed these Greek Scriptures as a distortion. Around 240 AD, Origen’s Hexapla established the Hebrew text as a “master” standard, implicitly positioning the Church’s Greek text as derivative. This trend accelerated with St. Jerome and his pursuit of Hebraica veritas (“the Hebrew truth”). Jerome famously relied on clandestine rabbinic instruction, a move that prompted Augustine’s sharp protest in De Civitate Dei (18.43). Augustine argued that the Septuagint’s authority was providential and that undermining it risked severing the Church’s continuity with the Apostles.

Despite Augustine’s warnings, the trajectory of Western philology—driven by humanist and scientific concerns—gradually sidelined the Septuagint in favor of the Masoretic Text (MT). The Reformation’s ad fontes principle completed this displacement. By treating the post-70 AD Masoretic text as the “neutral” original, Reformers bypassed institutional Church authority. Once the Church accepted a Hebrew canon defined outside its own tradition as the “real” Old Testament, the semantic and theological bridge for later syntheses was fully constructed. This pursuit of historical precision, while valuable, marginalized the Apostolic hermeneutic that read the Old Testament as an organic, Christological fulfillment, eventually sacrificing the Church’s interpretive sovereignty on the altar of historical-critical detachment.

The Semantic Deformation of Justice

This philological displacement had profound political consequences. The shift in the Western understanding of justice was not the product of a single translation, but Jerome’s preference for Roman legal terminology in the Vulgate acted as a critical conduit for a broader intellectual reorientation. By translating the Apostolic dikaiosynē—a term evoking the holistic, participatory harmony of the soul under the Logos—as the Latin iustitia (frequently inflected by the Roman concept of aequitas), the translation facilitated a move toward an administrative, procedural understanding of right relationship.

As Gerhard Kittel notes, dikaiosynē is fundamentally relational and participatory; it describes a person’s standing before God. When flattened into iustitia, it began to carry the weight of Roman legalism—a concern for the balanced ledger of rights and duties. This coincided with the “nominalist turn” that replaced a cosmos of objective participation with one of discrete objects and legal contracts. Where dikaiosynē denoted harmony under the Logos, aequitas shifted the emphasis toward balancing competing individual claims through external rules.

Over centuries, this semantic pivot helped detach justice from its vertical, transcendent horizon, increasingly framing it as a horizontal negotiation between rights-bearing agents. This provided the late-medieval and Enlightenment legal orders with a new, less theological vocabulary for governance. By the time this reached the modern era, “justice” had been successfully abstracted from the life of the Church and tethered to the procedural management of the State.

Some argue that because the Septuagint originated as a Greek translation for the Jewish diaspora, the Church’s reliance upon it was merely the adoption of a Jewish document, thereby vindicating the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis from the start. This observation is philologically accurate, yet it is ecclesially insufficient. It confuses provenance with participation. The Church did not receive the text as a static artifact of ancient Judaism, but as the transfigured language of the Incarnate Word. By the time the Apostles cited the Septuagint, it had been fundamentally remade by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ; it had become the Church’s unique textual life-blood. When the West abandoned this participatory framework in favor of a neutral, philological “original,” it did not merely switch translations; it dismantled the mechanism of Christological participation, facilitating the modern, administrative neutralization of the public square.

V. The Actual Architecture of Western Liberty: Jurisdictional Sovereignty

The “Judeo-Christian” hyphen is an intellectual artifice that obscures the genuine historical development of Western civilization. The architecture of the West was not assembled by a generic coalition of “values”; it was forged through the integration of Roman procedural jurisprudence, Greek metaphysics, and—most crucially—the revolutionary jurisdictional claims of the Church as the living Body of the Logos. This synthesis did not arise from neutral negotiation; it was born because the Church possessed the authority to baptize, discipline, and reorient the civil sphere. Liberty was not an abstract gift of the state, but a boundary line drawn by the Church against the totalizing reach of temporal power.

The Jurisprudence of the Logos

The trajectory of Western law—from the Roman tradition to the emergence of constitutionalism—is fundamentally a story of Christianized synthesis. The defining moment was the “Papal Revolution” of the 11th century, which, as Harold J. Berman documents, systematically established the independence of ecclesiastical law from secular rule. While Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis provided the procedural toolkit, articulating that imperial majesty must be “armed with laws” for the common good, it was the Church that provided the limiting principle. Medieval canonists looked not to a secular contract, but to the vertical gaze of the Incarnate Logos. They understood law as an objective, participatory reality to be discovered rather than invented—an extension of divine order that provided a horizon no ruler could transgress without forfeiting legitimacy.

St. Thomas Aquinas crystallized this in the Summa Theologiae. In I-II, Q. 95, Art. 2, he grounds the claim in Augustine’s dictum that “that which is not just seems to be no law at all,” concluding that a law which deflects from the law of nature “is no longer a law but a perversion of law.” He restates the principle even more sharply in I-II, Q. 93, Art. 3: “Human law has the nature of law in so far as it partakes of right reason; and it is clear that, in this respect, it is derived from the eternal law. But in so far as it deviates from reason, it is called an unjust law, and has the nature, not of law, but of violence.” This principle, coupled with the doctrine of the Two Swords articulated by Pope Gelasius I, established dual jurisdictions as a structural check against totalization. The Magna Carta (1215), forged in a climate of ecclesiastical assertion regarding the limits of royal prerogative, embodied this tension in practice, demonstrating that limited government was a direct consequence of the Church’s insistence that it held a jurisdiction distinct from the State.

The Ontology of Dignity

The concept of “human dignity” derives its operative weight in the Western legal tradition not merely from its scriptural mention in Genesis—an inheritance shared with ancient Israel—but from its Christological fulfillment and elaboration. As Larry Siedentop argues in Inventing the Individual, the doctrine of the Incarnation fundamentally reoriented the status of the human being by identifying the person as a soul capable of a direct, vertical relationship with God, thereby breaking the ancient monopoly of the city-state (and, by extension, any immanent collective) over identity. Aquinas grounded human reason in this same vertical relationship, describing it as an imprint of the Divine light on the soul.

The Imago Dei thus became the ontological sanctuary: creatio continua—the doctrine that God sustains the person and the universe in every moment—and the Pauline understanding of conscience as an internal witness created a sphere of dignity that the state cannot penetrate. This specific theological labor, rooted in the hypostatic union and the realism of the Logos, birthed the concept of limited government. The “individual” was not a product of secular philosophy or generic biblical theism, but an ontological category carved out by the Church’s insistence that the human person possessed an inherent, participatory value that the magistrate was bound to respect.

The Destruction of the Metaphysical Architecture

The “realism” of the West relied on the recognition that human nature is an objective, ontological reality rather than a legal fiction. In English Common Law and clerical equity, law functioned as a check on power because it recognized a source of justice antecedent to the state. Rights were inherent attributes of a creature sustained by God, not merely the claims of “rights-bearing agents” negotiating a hollow secular contract.

We must reject the notion that Western liberty is merely the product of a “Judeo-Christian” synthesis. Such a framing is historical revisionism, stripping away the high-stakes theological labor that forged our freedom. The West was built by those living under the immediate sovereignty of the Living Logos—not in a neutral square where theological claims were bracketed for the sake of consensus. By reducing this legacy to a hyphenated value set, we preserve the procedural machinery of law while dismantling the metaphysical architecture that once rendered that law binding upon the conscience of both ruler and ruled. In the absence of the Logos, that machinery inevitably decays into an administrative engine of control; when the state no longer acknowledges the ontological sanctuary that the Church once defended, it assumes the authority to define the human person by its own administrative metrics.

VI. The Neutral Square Contradiction

The fundamental incoherence of the secular-conservative project lies in its desire to retain the fruits of Western liberty while discarding the roots that nourished them. James Lindsay’s demand that we “slough off most of the religiosity” in our values—while defending the cultural inheritance of the Bible and “Judeo-Christian” ethics—is a profound nominalist error. In his framework, “Nature’s God” and “natural law” function as sufficient substitutes for the Triune God and a thick theological order. He views the history of the West as a civilization that only achieved its potential once Enlightenment thinkers “put faith in the flames.” This celebrates the very process of desacralization that dismantled the ontological framework necessary to sustain the civilization he seeks to protect.

By demanding a public square cleansed of “religiosity,” Lindsay and like-minded thinkers are not defending Western liberty; they are ensuring its erosion. If human rights are not rooted in the objective sovereignty of the Logos—if they are merely “values” reached through procedural consensus—they become entirely dependent on the administrative apparatus to define their meaning and scope. As Alasdair MacIntyre demonstrates in After Virtue, once the teleological framework of human life is discarded, we are left with “emotivism”—a state where moral language is drained of objective content and reduced to the expression of preference. In such a vacuum, “procedural neutrality” is not a protective shield; it is the final arbiter of human nature. Once the transcendent authority standing above the state is removed, one does not create a neutral space; one creates a power vacuum that the state, by necessity, must fill.

The failure of the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis is a structural necessity of the modern managerial state. As Walter C. Opello and Stephen J. Rosow argue, the liberal state emerged by subordinating individual subjectivity to the “rules of reason” that maximize social productivity, effectively trading the thick, participatory moral orders of the past for a utilitarian calculus. By positioning “neutral” values as the basis of the public square, the state creates an environment where citizens are no longer bearers of inherent, pre-political rights, but efficient contributors to the administrative order. In this system, “neutrality” acts as a mechanism to neutralize all non-instrumental human motivations—such as love, loyalty, or obedience to a transcendent order—that might disrupt the bureaucratic machine. By de-dogmatizing our tradition, we have not created a space for pluralistic freedom; we have surrendered the only vocabulary capable of challenging the administrative state’s claim to be the final arbiter of human life.

This dynamic echoes Eric Voegelin’s critique of Gnostic tendencies in modernity: the immanentization of transcendent symbols into political ideologies that promise intramundane salvation. Lindsay deploys a similar diagnosis against “woke” Marxism, yet the caution remains: without vertical anchorage, proceduralism invites the very Gnostic-like totalism it opposes. As Patrick Deneen suggests in Why Liberalism Failed, liberalism’s success in liberating the individual from traditional bonds undermines the cultural preconditions necessary for self-government, leading to a “soft despotism” of administrative oversight. Without the vertical reality of the Church bearing witness to the dignity of the person as imago Dei, the administrator becomes the final interpreter of existence.

Against this, some advocates argue that the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis need not be secularized, but can serve as an ecumenical defense of natural law. They maintain that Western liberty is rooted in moral truths that remain accessible to human reason across sectarian divides. However, this “thicker” defense ultimately founders on the jurisdictional shoals identified by Oliver O’Donovan in The Desire of the Nations. By divorcing natural law from the vertical, Christological reality of the Church, this framework implicitly concedes that the public square can be ordered by a “general” morality, while the “specific” truth of the Gospel remains a private, ecclesiastical matter. This forces a bifurcated existence: we are granted the right to hold our faith privately, but we are denied the right to challenge the state’s administrative logic with the fullness of that faith. Consequently, this synthesis remains tethered to a neutral proceduralism, lacking the jurisdictional authority to assert that the state itself is subject to the sovereignty of the Logos.

Lindsay attempts to combat the “managerial progressivism” of the Left, yet he fights it on its own terrain. By utilizing a secularized, “hyphenated” baseline, he advances a program of immanent repair encoded in the Enlightenment project. He seeks to combat the totalitarian machine while insisting on operating within the same pristine, neutral construct designed to function as its staging ground. He fails to acknowledge that if the public square is truly “neutral,” it possesses no immune system against a totalizing state. The “neutral square” is not a fortress of liberty; it is a temporary waiting room for the next administrative override. Proceduralism, detached from participation in the eternal Logos, lacks the moral density to sustain the very civilization it claims to protect.

VII. The Hyphen as Transitional Triage, Not Foundation

It is necessary to concede that the “Judeo-Christian” hyphen was not born of malice. Under the existential pressures of the 1930s and 1940s, it served as a functional act of civilizational triage. Confronted by the nihilistic threats of Fascism and Soviet atheism, defense intellectuals and religious leaders identified the need for a unified civic front. In that specific geopolitical crisis, the hyphen functioned as a pragmatic barrier designed to hold back a totalitarian flood that threatened both the synagogue and the altar.

The “Judeo-Christian” synthesis involves a degree of immanentization for civic utility—a strategy that buys time but inevitably erodes without replenishment from deeper sources. While it successfully avoids the worst modern Gnostic eruptions, it cannot generate the cultural density required for the long term. The tragedy of the contemporary Right is its inability to distinguish between a temporary tactical arrangement and a permanent foundation. By treating a wartime measure as an ontological baseline, secular conservatism has mistaken the tourniquet for the limb itself.

The erosion of the jurisdictional barrier between the state and the religious institution is no longer a theoretical concern; it is a feature of administrative governance. The conventional understanding of the “separation of church and state” is frequently invoked as a wall to keep the Church from infringing upon the state’s neutrality. In practice, however, the state has established its own secular religion—the religion of Procedural Neutrality—and is using its coercive power to force all other institutions to conform to its dogmas. The state is no longer an external referee; it is acting as an ecclesia, an authoritative body that determines which “values” are permissible and which are illicit.

This “reverse breach” is evident in the systematic encroachment upon institutional autonomy:

Institutional Autonomy: Mandates regarding health coverage force religious organizations to facilitate practices they define as inherently immoral, overriding their internal moral order.

The Ministerial Exception: Efforts to apply secular employment non-discrimination statutes to the hiring of ministers treat the Church as a mere employer subject to the “neutral” labor calculus of the managerial state.

The “Neutral” Orthodoxy: Administrative efforts to judge which activities are “religious” enough for exemption effectively place the state in the role of a theologian, stripping faith-based organizations of their jurisdictional autonomy and reclassifying them as secular agents of the state’s own moral framework.

These are not isolated instances of bureaucratic overreach; they are the natural fruits of a “neutral” system that lacks a transcendent recognition of a power higher than itself. If the state is the sole author of the values that govern the public square, it will invariably ensure that all other moral authorities remain subservient to its administrative ends.

We must distinguish between tactical alliance and metaphysical foundation. Legitimate civic cooperation between Christians and Jews is both possible and necessary; we can stand together against tyranny and protect the conditions of a peaceful public order without dissolving our distinct theological realities into a hyphenated abstraction. The danger lies in the claim that this cooperation supplies the foundation for the law, human rights, or the nature of liberty itself. A temporary coalition can preserve civic peace, but it cannot ground the objective moral order of the universe.

To hold on to the hyphen as our primary foundation is to admit that we no longer believe in the veracity of our own civilizational source code. It is an act of intellectual surrender, suggesting that we are too secularized to stand on the ground we actually occupy, preferring the “neutral” middle ground of a defensive construct. The mid-century emergency has long since passed; persistence in this framework breeds stagnation, leaving conservatism reactive—defending outcomes without replenishing the theological soil that produced them. By allowing the hyphenated synthesis to frame our political existence, we have allowed the state to become the Summus Pontifex of our age, defining the boundary between the permissible and the prohibited. Escaping this trap requires a restoration of the jurisdictional reality that actually birthed Western freedom. The doctrine of the Two Swords is not a nostalgic relic, but the only mechanism capable of breaking the state’s monopoly on the definition of the human person.

VIII. The Alternative: The Two Swords

The path out of the managerial trap is not found by digging deeper into localized archetypes or retreating into the “neutral” sandbox of the Enlightenment. If we are to reclaim Western liberty, we must recover the only framework capable of resisting the corrosive engine of the administrative state: the classical doctrine of the Two Swords.

The Jurisdictional Split

As Pope Gelasius I formulated in 494 AD: “Two there are, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of the priesthood and the royal power.” This is not a relic of a theocratic past but the foundational architecture of limited government. As Harold J. Berman documents, it was this jurisdictional conflict—the creative tension between these two authorities—that birthed the Western legal tradition by establishing that the state is not the ultimate source of law. This jurisdictional split is the only structural check against a totalizing project. The temporal sword holds the mandate for the physical maintenance of peace and procedural justice, while the spiritual sword holds the authority to interpret metaphysical reality, define the human person, and anchor dignity beyond the reach of the state.

The “hyphenated” consensus attempts to merge these spheres into a single, manageable civic unit, creating a secular integralism that forces the state to become a surrogate for the Church. By failing to distinguish between the two, we have allowed the cultural apparatus to become the final arbiter of human nature, replacing the imago Dei with “values” subject to administrative revision by fiat. Concepts such as Abraham Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty” extend this insight: distinct spheres—family, church, state, academy, economy—each possess derived authority under the cosmic lordship of Christ, preventing any one from becoming totalitarian.

The Recovery of Sovereignty

Authentic Christian realism recognizes that the public square is a procedural necessity, but it insists that this square is not the source of our meaning. When the Two Swords are properly ordered, tyranny is structurally constrained because the state lacks the authority to define the human person. Spiritual authority acts as a constant, vertical check on temporal power, reminding the magistrate that his authority is delegated, limited, and subject to a higher Law. The Logos does not abolish jurisdictions; it orders and sustains them.

We are left with a choice that no typographical dash can obscure. We can continue to rely on the collapsing three-legged stool of modern proceduralism, waiting for the administrative state to finalize its reach, or we can return to the vertical reality of the Logos. Western liberty was not built by synthesis, nor by “neutral” contracts; it was built by the shattering of immanent idols and the assertion of Christ’s cosmic lordship over both realms. Any system that attempts to bypass the altar—whether it flees into the neutral rooms of the Enlightenment or the mythic forests of the digital fringe—will find its structures compromised by the same metaphysical law: if one does not gather with the Logos, one will inevitably scatter into the vacuum.

The Jurisdictional Buffer

The doctrine of the Two Swords is the original blueprint for jurisdictional pluralism. Its recovery requires us to cultivate and defend “intermediate institutions”—the family, the parish, and the local association—as active jurisdictional buffers. The modern individual stands naked before the state precisely because the “little platoons” that once mediated between the person and the sovereign have been hollowed out by administrative centralization. By recovering a robust sense of subsidiarity, we move beyond the “hyphenated” consensus that treats the public square as a sterile, neutral void.

In this model, the state ceases to manage the person and instead protects the spaces where the person is defined by higher loyalties. When these institutions operate under the lordship of the Logos rather than the administrative guidelines of the state, they become the primary mechanism for breaking the state’s monopoly on the human person. We do not need a new secular “values” coalition to save the West; we need to re-empower these autonomous spheres to perform their role as an immune system against the hubris of the managerial machine.

The hyphen was an emergency scaffold. Scaffolds stabilize patients in crisis; they must eventually yield to foundations. The alternative to the “Judeo-Christian” hyphen is the unapologetic assertion of two jurisdictions under the living Logos—a framework that protects the temporal order from the hubris of the state and the spiritual order from the corruption of the square. It is time to move past the hyphen, discard the mask of the utility machine, and return to the demanding reality of the faith that actually built the West. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). We must stand on the only Pillar that sustains the world.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources & Historical Texts

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Christian Classics, 1981.

Augustine. De Civitate Dei (The City of God). Translated by Marcus Dods. Modern Library, 1950.

Gelasius I. Duo Sunt (Letter to Emperor Anastasius). In Patrologia Latina, edited by J.-P. Migne.

Jerome. Select Letters. Translated by F. A. Wright. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1933.

Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Hendrickson, 1994.

Justinian. Institutes. Translated by Thomas Cooper. Various editions.

Secondary Scholarship & Modern Works

Avineri, Shlomo. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism. New York University Press, 1985.

Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Harvard University Press, 1983.

Cohen, Arthur A. The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. Harper & Row, 1970.

De Lubac, Henri. Exegesis of Medieval History, vol. 1. Translated by Mark Sebanc. Eerdmans, 1998.

Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2018.

First, Mitchell. Jewish History in Conflict: A Study of the Major Discrepancy between Rabbinic and Conventional Chronology. Jason Aronson, 1997.

Gregory, Brad S. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Belknap Press, 2012.

Hamburger, Philip. Separation of Church and State. Harvard University Press, 2002.

Hayes, Christine. The Emergence of Judaism: Jewish Religion in Response to the Critical Age of Antiquity. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Herberg, Will. Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Doubleday, 1955.

Jobes, Karen H., and Moises Silva. Invitation to the Septuagint. 2nd ed. Baker Academic, 2015.

Kittel, Gerhard, and Gerhard Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Eerdmans, 1964.

Kuyper, Abraham. “Sphere Sovereignty.” In Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, edited by James D. Pratt. Eerdmans, 1998.

Legutko, Ryszard. The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. Encounter Books, 2016.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd ed. Blackwell, 2006.

Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Nisbet, Robert A. The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. Oxford University Press, 1953.

Oakley, Francis. The Watershed of Modern Politics: Law, Virtue, Kingship, and Consent (1300–1650). Yale University Press, 2015.

O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Opello, Walter C., and Stephen J. Rosow. The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics. 2nd ed. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004.

Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Belknap Press, 2014.

Silk, Mark. “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America.” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1984): 65–85.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Tierney, Brian. The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law 1150–1625. Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, 1997.

Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed. Fortress Press, 2012.

Ulrich, Eugene. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible. Eerdmans, 1999.

Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. University of Chicago Press, 1952.

Zimmerman, August. Subsidiarity: A Study of the Social Philosophy of the Catholic Church. Radio Replies Press, 1957.

Additional References

Huff, Wes (@WesleyLHuff). “So much noise online regarding the term Judeo-Christian…” X post, July 13, 2026.

Lindsay, James (@ConceptualJames). “For America’s 250th...” X post, July 4, 2026.

Various patristic and biblical references (Septuagint, Masoretic Text variants, Colossians 1, Romans 2) drawn from standard critical editions (Nestle-Aland, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Rahlfs-Hanhart LXX).

Dark Jordan is a Juilliard trained musician with a deep interest in Philosophy, Politics, Esotericism, and Orthodoxy. You find him on X at https://x.com/TheDarkJordan and follow his writing .

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Why People Are Concerned

2.1 Criminality

2.1.1 The Difference

2.2 Privacy (Safety)

2.2.1 Who Wants Privacy

2.2.2 Thought Harvesting

2.2.3 Stunted Growth

3 Who Is Speaking Up

3.1 Old-school Eco Warrior

3.2 Trad-Con

4 The State’s Digital Destination

4.1 Muh Dark Web

4.2 A Living Implementation

4.3 Hardware Surveillance

5 What We Can Do

5.1 Totalitarian

5.2 Identity

References

1 Introduction

New legislative changes have come to Canada, and the broad response has been underwhelming. This is notably the case with the general public, and with institutions which might have asserted themselves more strongly in times past, like the media, academia, unions, NGOs, and professional bodies such as the Canadian Bar Association. This comes to no surprise to many of us, who note the compound effect of digital pacification upon a culture that prides itself on avoiding conflict. But are those who have amassed the cojones necessary to voice some concern portraying the issue correctly?

With the recent passing of Bill C-9 and, likely to follow, Bill C-22, some are stunned by the speed at which federal law is changing, and some are attempting to share their opinion before it might be more commonplace to be criminally punished for doing so. These changes are coming courtesy of a variety of bills, with some of the most significant being Bill C-9 (Combatting Hate Act), Bill C-22 (Lawful Access Act), and Bill C-34 (Digital Safety Act). This article intends to discuss the ideas of these bills, the sociopolitical direction they lead us down, and the ways we’re likely to be thinking about them. Why? Because if we’re serious about wanting to move away from these trends, we need to discover ways of breaking out of our motivations for chasing them, which embrace negative sentiments, and cause society to become increasingly intolerant of humankind and human mind.

It’s one thing to realize the nature of these pieces of legislation and consider that society is transforming in precisely the ways many of our universally celebrated intellectual heroes had warned about. This is especially striking given that the legislation doesn’t even need to be given a far-fetched interpretation. But it’s bitter, off-putting, and cringey to see any actually in support of these changes, and particularly those who explicitly advocate for them to the end of presenting those who disagree with the legislation as already being guilty of what this legislation criminalizes:

“Bill C-9 is the combating hate act and this is absolutely a good thing unless you are a part of the problem and hate on vulnerable and marginalized communities. We should be accepting all persons. Bring back equality and equity. Bring back humanity. Less hate; more love.”^[1]

“So you want to be able to post a swastika and be a terrorist but remain anonymous”^[2]

Indeed, the agitators are out in full force, and whether they are intentional or not, their modus operandi is to draw you into a web of doubt and confusion. This has been explicated as the “aufheben der Kultur”, among other things, and, in that way, thought it’s not necessary to engage in “Jiu-Jitsu” with bad-faith interlocutors, there will come moments in some of our lives where we’re faced with a critical junction where we’re able to effect change. As such, it’s necessary to understand the ideas, not to benefit wraith-like cult initiates, but for impactful situations where the logic of policy is challenged, or a reasonable denizen of political-influence lends their ear.

2 Why People Are Concerned

The changes are focused around 3 areas:

1. New definitions for criminality

2. Erosion of privacy

3. Assurance of “safety”

As the erosion of safety occurs through the promise of safety, we can examine them together.

2.1 Criminality

These legislative changes add new offences to the criminal code:

• Intimidation and Obstruction: illegal to provoke a state of fear to impede access to a “protected place”. Exception for those seeking to obtain or communicate information.

• Hate Crime Offence: if one is deemed to be motivated by hate while committing any offence, one will be charged with an additional “hate crime offence”.

• Hate Propaganda Offence: illegal to promote hatred using a symbol:

– Terror-associated symbols

– Nazi symbols

– A noose

– Others symbols that can be confused with the above

Of course, the entire notion that one’s bias of hate can be detected through forensic and evidentiary methods only seems coherent because of a presumption of humans having “identities” and that one’s identity, or one’s most meaningful “identity”, comes through these dimensions: colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or mental or physical disability.

With these dimensions referenced in law, the state recognizes disparate types of citizens. That people are enumerated in this way is only relevant on the basis of the relations between the different types, with the details of those relations constituting the means by which the crime of hate is interpreted.

More specifically, since hate is defined through the ambiguous combination of the emotion one is experiencing as they express themselves, and the speculation of whether a reasonable person would view their expression as exposing an identifiable group to hatred, the entire determination is ultimately unfalsifiable. In fact, beyond directly making it forbidden to utter, write, inscribe, or otherwise record specific words or phrases, any hate speech legislation needs to be unfalsifiable, as it is always the forbidding of emotion, or otherwise expressing something which could invite condemnation. Any other more egregious example of what one would refer to as “hate speech” could otherwise be called incitement, with the one gray area possibly the repetition of slurs, but even that is impossible to fully understand. (Tourette Syndrome? Culture shock? Naive enunciation absent comprehension?)

As far as dimensions of identity upon which hate is theoretically predicated, if there weren’t a theory of the historical effect of group relations being applied, we wouldn’t have many of these dimensions for the state to contemplate. And though some might remain, like sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, or disability, at least they would be grounded in factors that are logically deducible. Most still know what a woman is. Age can be tracked. People of faith can declare it openly, as they can their sexual orientation. Disabilities can be diagnosed.

2.1.1 The Difference

“What’s the difference?”, some will say. “We still have group categories upon which to evaluate hate!”.

The difference is we shouldn’t be giving the state the power to assert it can read the minds or emotions of anyone. Worse than that, the moment we do grant that power to the state, we throw away the best epistemological toolset that can be used to protect people from undue harm and oppression: the opportunity for universally-applicable logic and reason. The only means by which rights and dignity can be fought for on even ground.

2.2 Privacy (Safety)

For many of us, it was always assumed that privacy is never something that can be guaranteed, just as one cannot operate in the world without having a body and face that are observable (notwithstanding the pathological effects of masking in public, be it as a criminal or as a good Covid cult initiate). When it came to the use of networked digital devices, one always wonders the degree to which law enforcement and security services operate neatly to the letter of the law, or whether there’s a difference between what information is monitored, and what information is legally acted upon. Techniques and technologies to violate privacy have existed since the advent of networked computers and digital telecommunication, and very few individuals utilize a perfectly rigorous process to maximize the care with which they use their devices.

That being said, there is a difference between operating under the expectation that the state and its agencies are prepared to use malicious practices to endow themselves with an enhanced ability to conduct surveillance on citizens, and the announcement of what is essentially an open-ended intent to do so.

With that intent declared, and acted upon, we should emphasize the need for attention to the fact that the state has taken it upon themselves to determine the definitions and methods to fulfill the requirements indicated by the new acts. Even if such details were to be formulated and presented through new legislation requiring the same level of scrutiny as the preceding initiating bills themselves, the fact of the original intent having been validated as appropriate generates some concern that it may be a foregone conclusion that future articulations will be acquiesced to obediently. But hopefully a threshold of unprecedented interest will be placed upon the revelation of those details, which will be the Governor in Council (the cabinet, which can be observed here for a reliable rictus buffet: https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/cabinet), the incoming Digital Safety Commission of Canada, and an assortment of meetings with legal representatives and private consultants to whitewash the gravy train of perpetual tyranny which has the potential to ensue.

Do humans really want to feel private? Aren’t we ultimately led, inspired, and tormented by our relationships with other people? Aren’t we perpetually chasing the amendment of those relations, our amendment through them?

What are some motivations that might exist for anything to be private at all?

• Irrelevance: Something not worth sharing for there would not be a sufficient purpose in doing so.

• Unfinished thoughts: A thought was formed, but isn’t yet fully understood, or not yet fleshed out.

• Inappropriate: “Do you have any Grey Poupon?”

• Offensive: Things better left unsaid, lest someone soil themselves.

• Security: Things that, if shared, could provide a common enemy with a tactical advantage.

Those advocating for the state’s prying eyes will claim that the prying only happens to those who deserve it, and might suggest that things don’t really need to be kept private anyway, except those things which you never share with others.

And when such things get uttered, one has to wonder whether there might be some level of projection. We see it all the time: people having to have their delusional self-image confirmed by those around them. They can’t but help themselves, and there’s no shortage of examples in anyone’s life—from ourselves, from those we hold dear, and from those playing the role of foe. Our experiences as children also serve to remind us just how and why, at least at an emotional level, we give our minds consent to run through these patterns.

2.2.1 Who Wants Privacy

“More fear porn bullshit propaganda from a brainwashed simp. How have these bills affected you?”^[3]

Who has an expectation of privacy? Forget the prospectively targeted dissidents, or the awkwardly-intentioned stumbling normies, and let’s consider the activists, agitators, and the more enthusiastic of totalitarian apologists, of whom some might suggest they don’t have anything to hide, or anything to keep private beyond the details of their own loved ones. Would they claim to share everything else?

If we are to take such agitations at face value, because surely there are those who might think this way (and certainly such things would be thought by those who want to push these bills through), we need to consider human perception in the context of assuming one’s compliance to ever-encroaching tyranny, or Perceiving Imminent Collectivist Authoritarianism (PICA). It’s not enough to simply think “these people are tyrants who hate us, so obviously they want more tyranny”, and it’s also not enough to think “these people are sheep, and pushovers at the suggestion of increasing state control”, because some are not taking a passive stance at all, but either offer an enthusiastic hand to participate in empowering the state, or are at least active in their desire to agitate those whom they see as their other.

So in returning to our question of whether members of “team tyranny” are in favour of there being no privacy we ask:

“Are there things you are not sharing?”

If the logic is that anything expressed in communication between humans (and for now we’ll say, digital communication) should pre-emptively be made accessible to the prying eyes of the state, then it stands to reason that any communication that would have otherwise taken place privately should have been compliant with the objectives of our political society as understood by the state. And if that is the case, then what is the ultimate goal of this initiative? Is it not to reveal those who are not congruent to the objectives?

If unsafe expression of thoughts and ideas is harming members of our society, and the state has taken it upon itself to prevent that from occurring, would it not be ruinous to the effort for the bad actors to become more scrupulous in their malicious dissemination?

Assuming that is indeed the case, the supposed successful effect of the undertaking would either be to capture the ill-formed thoughts, or to prevent them from occurring, thus it becomes more reasonable to demand that all thoughts be shared.

2.2.2 Thought Harvesting

It’s difficult to predict whether technology and our understanding of neurobiology will ever get to the point of having instruments able to losslessly read thoughts, but it doesn’t matter, as the instruments of today are already, to varying degrees, attempting this. Be it through reading user preferences, or leveraging machine learning to continuously score a system’s prediction performance regarding online user behaviour, each time we allow for the state to be made increasingly in charge of ensuring the safety of the expressions able to be received, we tacitly legitimize the question of whether the state should ensure the safety of the expressions able to be conceived. And though we could let our imaginations go wild on how an implementation of such a capability might one day be developed, we can at least understand that, for now, a simple means of detecting when a biometric shift occurs in an observed subject could suffice in indicating that a thought has formed without it yet having been publicly expressed.

2.2.3 Stunted Growth

Good ideas might seem to come from thin air, but that’s seldom the case. A good idea becomes lucid in the mind of the thinker because of the thoughts and experiences preceding it.

A big part of the process of developing good thoughts comes in the form of presenting their seeds, or premature approximations of those things that could elevate human experience, in one’s exchanges with their peers, foes, and other participants. Should we impede our capacity to engage in that process, we relegate ourselves to old ideas and a system of force which becomes ever-increasingly rigid in its blind adherence to them. Indeed, many believe they can disburden themselves of creative work by employing a tool of approximating language, the aesthetic of which presents an ever-refined accuracy in its orchestration of terms (namely LLMs), and hope that this somehow permits humans to have its new evolution of existence, but we’ll be left sucking on our own dust if we expect the fundamental source of an idea to come from anything other than human thinking (little green men and entities occupying the manifolds of psychoactively-observed hyperspace notwithstanding).

3 Who Is Speaking Up

Though some higher profile institutions and organizations normally concerned with liberty, like unions, academia, NGOs, the Bar Association, and academia, have voiced some concern regarding new legislation, most of it provides consent to it in the same breath. That is to say, they validate the undertaking while claiming that there could be some unintended consequences. Of course, those unintended consequences are rarely described as affecting people universally as individuals attempting to state what they believe as true, but as negative effects on “marginalized” or “minoritized communities”. This is no surprise, and is one of the motivations for my writing about this subject.

The logic of these bills is that humans express and are presented with information which has been assured to fit within a range of specification over which the state assumes the role of best understanding. Whatever undermines that configuration will, over a long enough period, come to be a counterproductive and damaging element to be responded to accordingly, as opposed to an exceptional case worth of nuance consideration.

With that in mind, let us consider some disparate sources of criticism for the legislation which are doing a better job of describing the threat, who could be organized into buckets of Old-school Leftists and “Conservatives”.

3.1 Old-school Eco Warrior

As far as “Old-school Leftist” is concerned, a lot of people reacted positively to seeing Elizabeth May of the Green Party of Canada demonstrating concern for Bill C-22. Indeed, earlier this year May had shown some apprehension to the bill, particularly concerning the language used from which a threshold for procuring a warrant would be affected, but ultimately still supported the purpose of the bill and simply wanted it amended.^[4]

Ultimately, she abandoned support of the bill, and said that it should be scrapped altogether. Juno News^[5]

Though it’s great she finally refused to get behind the bill, it’s likely that this isn’t because a change in her worldview that would have otherwise caused her to cease empowering the state with additional surveillance capability. Her gripe was on the distinction of reasonable grounds to suspect to reasonable grounds to believe and, though that’s a worthy distinction, it’s ultimately on the basis of whether ANY offense from ANY Act “has been” or “will be” committed. Given the set of Acts entailed includes ones covering “hate crime” and identity-related offenses, we really don’t need to celebrate Elizabeth May finally having good sense about applying limits to government.

This is an operational consequence of approaching political society with a collectivist worldview. There is no way to avoid having to erect a tyrannical means of governance, regardless of how aesthetically pleasant and unimposing one hopes for it to be. But, she does show some distrust of government from time to time, as demonstrated with her pushback of Bills C-9, C-22, and back in 2015 when she opposed the Conservatives’ Bill C-51. Elizabeth May^[6]

So how is it that someone employing a collectivist worldview, which desires a socialist perspective on environmental issues, supports social justice—including Critical Social Justice and Decolonization—and supposes goals of equity which fundamentally conflict with aspects of civil libertarianism she exhibits from time to time, can still demonstrate resistance to the types of government overreach which would be necessary for meeting those goals?

Anyone ensconced in a collectivist worldview is engaged in a historical mission of completing the collectivist mission, which invariably must be some representation of a frictionless collective. It isn’t a matter of having the principles in place, even if they appear to be championing those principles in the meantime. The friction, tension, and contradictions of engaging political society are the evidence that they are engaged with their historical mission, and that they sport some form of proletarian consciousness.

In the case of the climate justice warrior, they will portray a mythology of the earth-loving steward concerned for all its inhabitants, and their oppression by a hegemonically-possessed machine of greed and lust for power. Ultimately, it must be them or their delegates who hold the levers of power—levers which must be wielded in order to meet their objectives. And, sure, it might seem that she’s only willing to empower tyranny when it’s aesthetically modest, but note that her excuse is not a principle of human freedom, but that of legal precedent. This hints us back to a rule by law vs. rule of law distinction, which is further placed in perspective when considering May’s support of Decolonization.

3.2 Trad-Con

Those who identify or otherwise perceive themselves as “conservatives”, or those who believe they can be associated as the type of citizen who embodies stereotypical traits broadly associated with the “traditional” inhabitant of the land, will feel explicitly targeted by the new legislation (particularly Bill C-9). They might believe they are witnessing a play by adversaries to codify in law the means to evoke a political advantage. This isn’t necessarily an incorrect perspective, but it only scratches the surface and, in doing so, causes many to miss an opportunity to catch a glimpse the serious issues these pieces of legislation introduce, and how to consider one’s principles in the face of that.

The truth is that many self-professed conservatives are amenable to having the state remove harmful threats from society, with some removals making more sense than others. Sure, in one regard the concept of borders is a fundamental component to a functioning society, and a pre-requisite to prosperity, and, thus, removing those things which should otherwise be kept out through a properly functioning border, like dangerous people who are in the country illegally, makes it appear that the state is indeed in charge of removing bad elements from our lives. But other examples are a bit more slippery, and even break the facade of an adherence to principles of liberty, with some well-known examples being the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and the push for warning labels on music in the 1980s, the application of obscenity laws and pressure campaigns by conservative public figures to remove offensive albums from record stores, and demands for strict radio broadcasting regulations. Many of those were criticized by the “mainstream left” of the day and, at that time, may very well have been doing so for reasons that are not so heavily biased by partisanship as has become the norm today. Ironically, for those who have taken to a more leftist partisan bent, the critics of those bills may be quite supportive of empowering the state to curate our digital experiences and assign us identity labels today, with the conservatives of the 1980s possibly being part of an older generation which haven’t the clarity of understanding necessary to form an informed and principled position on digital safety.

A good example of how conservatives of today have the right general concern, but are primed to be susceptible to suggestions that are at odds with liberty, is on the issue of digital devices and children. Certainly, giving children screen time is detrimental to their development, and though many public school advocates claim that the screens help children develop the “21st century skills” necessary for success in modern society (stupid, lazy, and misguided, at best), children don’t in fact need screen time, and most people with a modicum of good sense who spend a moment thinking about it come to the same conclusion. Unfortunately, when many of these people come across Jonathan Haidt, they suddenly agree that the state should invoke the force of law to ban social media for children, believing this will mitigate exposure to harmful content, restore wasted time otherwise spent staring into the abyss, and even help with discipline by not leaving them vulnerable to as many addictive activities. Jonathan Haidt^[7]

Whatever Haidt’s motives for taking this position, it affirms that the role of the state is to know what content is being looked at by which citizen, making a determination about what content the citizen is and is not to consume, and making it their business to limit, incentivize, and punish the consumption of particular information. It also affirms that the state is responsible for guiding, limiting, and directing a child to information in a capacity otherwise undertaken by its parents.

They’ll argue that corporations target children, and that they have a business incentive for doing so. And, no surprise, as this is perfectly in line with why anyone should be suspicious of public-private partnerships and the like. No one is waiting for a corporation whose axioms are centered around a child’s wellbeing, even if they’ve ostensibly made that their product. The fact remains that parents should be making decisions and setting boundaries for their children, just as they’ve always had to.

That will be countered by with the assertion that parents can’t be trusted to execute to a high-enough degree of success, and that too many children will still succumb to the depression, indoctrination, adoption of destructive habits, and formation of an erroneous worldview that social media sites threaten to burden us with. But the natural baseline of a society is that, whatever alleged polities it might entail, its fundamental components always break down to the familial and the individual. There is no fundamental unit of society described as a set of humans raised by the state, and anything resembling as such has always been rife with problems, such as a government-operated orphanage—or, say, a residential school.

But forget about comparing to see which approach offers the best performance: choosing the best performance is the wrong way to be thinking about it. We aren’t trying compare two baseline behaviours. One intervenes and disrupts the distribution of roles as occurs in nature, and so the case must be made for the intervention, not both “approaches”. And how is this case to be made? Not on the basis of whether the intervention produces an outcome that is good enough to justify the means, but on the fundamental basis for governance itself, and whether it is ethical to even apply such a measure to any human, much less all of them. No one has the right to vote away another human’s ability to procreate or ability to raise a child. Even if one human could give consent and demand to have the state take over their own child-rearing duties, that wouldn’t justify the state applying that consent to all other families it wishes to concern itself with.

4 The State’s Digital Destination

4.1 Muh Dark Web

I always found it laughable to hear people refer to the “Dark Web”, as though there is some location in a cyber-universe of alternate dimensions which is physically demarcated. The internet is simply a term to acknowledge our capacity to digitally transmit data, and it is nothing more cryptic than that. These same people are liable to suggest that the government can regulate some portions of the internet, and not others, similar to walking around a plaza and placing police tape on one brick-and-mortar store, and not the next. But what is being policed here is the capacity for data to be transmitted and received, and that we might stylize this in terms of social media platforms through which much of that data flows, the state’s mandate does not revolve around a set of corporations, but the capacity for information it deems illegitimate or inappropriate to be received by certain parties.

In a recent Access to Information disclosure by Blacklock’s Reporter, it was shown that the government would consider legal action against persons it finds to be impeding its efforts to “uphold the integrity of and public trust in government information”. Such language better demonstrates fluid and movable limits to the application of force that the state would be prepared to utilize to maximize the supreme presentation of itself.^[8]

4.2 A Living Implementation

As was said before, the interpretation for some of this legislation and the standards by which they will be applied is still to be determined, and this will play out at the “pleasure” of the current administration and a new Digital Safety Commission, which is all the more reason to think about these legal shifts in terms of the ideas they’re based on, and the direction they move us in, rather than the semantics by which they’re expected to be constrained.

With these Acts, the state is acknowledged as being tasked with assuring the public (and itself) that the information being transmitted electronically is sanitized, and that there is oversight to understand who it is being received by. It is ambiguous enough to measure things against the term social media, given that all digital transmission intended for human eyes is arguably a form of social media—it is sent and received as a social act, pertaining to one’s social relations and socialization in society, and it is to be decoded as media that is legible and intelligible to human eyes—but the wording of the Act has made it into an even stickier and broader wildcard, by measuring it against the term Electronic Service Provider.

In a sense, there’s almost no activity we engage in anymore which does not involve an electronic device, and nearly every electronic device is capable of transceiving data, making it liable to be construed as an endpoint in digital communication or somehow pertaining to the provisioning of an “electronic service”. Any sort of modernized professional or recreational service comes with an elaborate interface comparable to what one expects when using a well-known social media platform. Emails from services might be interpreted as social media, even if they don’t display comments from other people (which they often do). And though we might assume that the devices themselves are not to be included in the list of items that are somehow indicated by these new Acts, the precedent is set, the state’s satisfaction as to whether it has succeeded in its efforts is likely insatiable, and if the completed standards or future interpretations of the legislation don’t bleed over into surveillance through hardware, future Acts which build upon these precedents can surely do that, especially as technology continues to improve.

4.3 Hardware Surveillance

“What do you mean by”Hardware Surveillance?” Doesn’t surveillance need to be implemented through services accessible through the internet?”

Well, what is the internet? It is not a place. It’s just an understanding of the ability to transmit data broadly across many systems by virtue of the fact that computers are able to transmit data to one another whatsoever. Our carriergrade telephony is leveraged via infrastructure designed to facilitate this, and our protocols are designed to attempt connections through whatever networks are available until the route is realized. But do we even need for that perfect route to be setup before surveillance data can be sent to one of the state’s systems specifically tasked for this purpose?

Not necessarily. All microcontrollers and CPUs have firmware—memory on the hardware itself—and future development could give greater consideration to the potential for surveillance by having firmware which runs software alongside the operating system presented to the user of the system containing those chips. The firmware work in conjunction with UEFI to launch software outside the OS, before the OS launches, or such as to automatically cause installation of specific commands and services once the user’s operating system is installed. The firmware can also be the operating system, as is the case with many embedded/IoT products, whether running RTOSes (Real Time Operating Systems), or even more minimal systems.

Would surveillance technology being placed on hardware have to use your internet in order to transmit data to the state? No, it wouldn’t. Though, it could certainly try to do that first, and that would be the most effective way to get that surveillance data to its intended destination. But, barring that, other means could be utilized, such as custom radio modules and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) solutions. If this initiative were sought long term, the state could see it fit to ensure that a rich pool of radio-capable devices were ubiquitously available to ensure surveillance data is always able to make its way to the destination, regardless of a citizen’s connectivity to the internet.

Here’s how Grok presented a hypothetical legislative path to digital surveillance at the hardware level:

What begins as an open-ended initiative with safety legislation, a new mechanism for enforcement, and a demand for corporate alignment with state policy is made all the more ridiculous in that the standards and interpretations are left open for the state to form and curate as it sees fit. Though it promises to do this with consultation should not assuage anyone’s concerns and should, in fact, do the opposite, given the federal government’s track record for awarding bloated contracts to companies and organizations with whom it has conflicts of interest. In time, reinterpretation, amendments, and publicly-funded pilot programs will lead to state standards for trust certificates at the hardware level, the assurance of “safe booting”, and digital safety standards for IoT, embedded security, and module safety centered not around encryption and permission to enforce operational privacy for an individual user, but “safety” regarding what information may theoretically be presented to a human. Indeed, as we’ve become accustomed to, and so the dialectic progresses, with a dialectic of digital safety.

Where this concludes is wherever the limits of technology happen to be, but which can thus far be imagined to include firmware signing, state safety standards for the reading and transmitting of sensor data, and safety for capture and storage of biometric data. A system of governance measures its success in the degree of control it has over the outcome of its initiatives, and so to grant it the semblance of legitimacy to assure the safety of our minds is to project a demand for the state to assert control over them.

Figure 1: Hardware Surveillance

5 What We Can Do

There’s little doubt that many are feeling helplessly left without a voice as it seems that the partisan structure of our system of governance is well-suited to passing in whatever legislation it targets, with the only pushback coming in the form of demands for amendments which imply the goal of the legislation is sound. For those who consider what future constraints are logically demanded by such legislation, they may feel at a loss to explain why Canadians are so warm to authoritarianism. The truth is that there is likely little to no support for an authoritarian system, freakish outliers notwithstanding, but that most are supportive of the logic to erect one so long as it is proposed under the veneer of what is socially acceptable. What this means is that hope is not lost, and that so long as there is room to move and a capacity to discuss, we can find opportunities to help people consider that they may be overlooking points about the issue that are not simply of a nature that opposes their values, but are actually ones for which their interest should ignite precisely because of those values.

5.1 Totalitarian

It’s easy to avoid imagining how a long term initiative might develop when the immediate rationale is based on “the children”. For this reason, it’s always necessary to bring people back to a base of understanding about incentives for power and professional advancement. There’s no doubt that anyone who is swayed by the argument “the corporate executives are willing to sacrifice your kids for extra bucks” can be led into agreeing that this extends to any position of sociopolitical import which, in addition to being remunerated, yields political and economic influence. Once we bring people into that view about those who draft, compose, vote on, and consult for these pieces of legislation, they’re more able to imagine that both the target of the initiative may not be perfectly identifiable, and that the operational scope is not limited to be perfectly discrete.

If you can get that far with people, then the next step is putting forward the question of what right a human being has to its own thoughts, and whether your interlocutor believes they would have a better life by relinquishing control of their mind to a governing entity—assuming, of course, that this entity has greater wisdom and is better able to orient them toward their correct destiny

(lest the interlocutor be a complete nihilist, in which case it’s time to move on).

Using the content of this article, you can then take it upon yourself to illustrate the path toward an increasingly totalizing system, both ideologically (the ideas) and mechanistically (the tech).

5.2 Identity

“The state’s enumeration of identity is precisely its policy to not allow you to be who you are.”

Any political system which seeks to extinguish the capacity for individuals to exert influence must either use immediate brutal force, or a rationale to dismiss those individuals. This means that if we have any hope of amending our system to be fair, support liberty, and potentiate human flourishing, we will need to completely and utterly obliterate any mention of identity from our laws. The only possible exception might be a national identity, but it is my opinion that such a thing is unnecessary so long as the laws apply equally to the citizens of the country, without exception.

Identity, in every case, is the reference to a theoretical model of a human mind, and once one’s association to that model is indicated, the observer can imagine the content of mind that may come to fruition as per the characteristics of that model, and cognize that model as an understanding of you. This, in essence, is a perpetual rationale to supplant any human, so long as the prospect of doing so is perceived to be beneficial.

There is no equal application of justice through laws that recognize a plurality of identities. For those identities to have any relevance whatsoever, such as to have prompted their addition, is for the state to reveal an intention for asymmetrical application of force to disparate classifications of citizen.

To move toward a just configuration of governance, we’ll be well-served by helping people understand that their perception of themselves as unique becomes meaningless in the face of a state that refers to them through group identity.

References

Blacklock’s Reporter. “Would Sue over Social Posts.” Blacklock’s Reporter, July 3, 2026. https://www.blacklocks.ca/would-sue-over-social-posts/.

Gerritsen, Ryan. “Elizabeth May Making It Known That She Along with Every Opposition Party Opposed Bill c-22 Due to Privacy & Constitutional Concerns.” June 18, 2026.

https://x.com/ryangerritsen/status/2067708645366

960578.

Haidt, Jonathan. “Get Phones Out of Schools Now.” The Atlantic, 2023. https:

//www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/ban-smartphones-phonefree-schools-social-media/674304/.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press, 2024. @HungryTrucker. More Fear Porn Bullshit Propaganda from a Brainwashed Simp. How Have These Bills Affected You? X post, 2026.

.

@HungryTrucker. So You Want to Be Able to Post a Swastika and Be a Terrorist but Remain Anonymous. X post, 2026. https://x.com/HungryTrucker/stat us/2072361444419743922.

Juno News. “MP Elizabeth May Says the Government Should Withdraw Bill c-22, Calling It the ‘Spyware Bill.’” June 3, 2026.

.

May, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth May on Combatting Hate Act.” March 23, 2026. https://openparliament.ca/debates/2026/3/23/elizabeth-may-1/only/.

May, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth May on Lawful Access Act, 2026.” April 17, 2026. https://openparliament.ca/debates/2026/4/17/elizabeth-may-5/only/.

May, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth May Speech on Bill c-51.” 2015. https://elizabet hmaymp.ca/elizabeth-may-speech-on-bill-c-51/.

(@mmysticbloom), Finding Serenity. Bill c-9 Is the Combating Hate Act and This Is Absolutely a Good Thing Unless You Are a Part of the Problem and

Hate on Vulnerable and Marginalized Communities. We Should Be Accepting

All Persons. Bring Back Equality and Equity. Bring Back Humanity. Less

Hate; More Love. X (formerly Twitter), 2026.

.

^[1] Finding Serenity (@mmysticbloom), Bill c-9 Is the Combating Hate Act and This Is Absolutely a Good Thing Unless You Are a Part of the Problem and Hate on Vulnerable and Marginalized Communities. We Should Be Accepting All Persons. Bring Back Equality and Equity. Bring Back Humanity. Less Hate; More Love., X (formerly Twitter), 2026,

^[2] @HungryTrucker, So You Want to Be Able to Post a Swastika and Be a Terrorist but Remain Anonymous, X post, 2026,

https://x.com/HungryTrucker/status/207236144441974

3922.

^[3] @HungryTrucker, More Fear Porn Bullshit Propaganda from a Brainwashed Simp. How Have These Bills Affected You?, X post, 2026,

https://x.com/HungryTrucker/status/20723

^[4] Elizabeth May, “Elizabeth May on Lawful Access Act, 2026,” April 17, 2026, https:

//openparliament.ca/debates/2026/4/17/elizabeth-may-5/only/.

^[5] “MP Elizabeth May Says the Government Should Withdraw Bill c-22, Calling It the ‘Spyware Bill.’” June 3, 2026,

^[6] “Elizabeth May Speech on Bill c-51,” 2015, https://elizabethmaymp.ca/elizabeth-mayspeech-on-bill-c-51/.

^[7] The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024).

^[8] Blacklock’s Reporter, “Would Sue over Social Posts,” Blacklock’s Reporter, July 3, 2026, https://www.blacklocks.ca/would-sue-over-social-posts/.

Emmanuel Rajinder Buckshi a telecom engineer in Canada who is optimistic about the prospect of solving many difficult problems through technology. I scrutinize defenses of collectivism and look shrewdly upon the risk of runaway authoritarianism inherent in administering systems of governance.

He is long time musician and former guitar teacher, and believes an appreciation for music as a demonstration of the logical brilliance in nature provides a good starting point for people that are ready to work out differences of opinion in good faith.

He is the author of the new book Tyranny of We: The Selfishness of Collectivism. He posts on X https://x.com/RBuckshi. His book can be purchased

Here

Don Marshall is a normal Christian who loves his country and the liberties upon which it is founded. He is dedicated to doing what he can to prevent radical revolutionaries from destroying it, whether from the left or right. You can read more from him here: .

The author has also recorded an audio version for those who prefer to listen

Today was one of my disc-golf-touch-grass days in a small, more or less local park. A few of the holes run along a small creek, which is nice. My buddy and opponent, whom I’ll call Hank, was looking down into the creek as we sometimes do this time of year because, as you almost certainly know, it’s bluehead chub nesting season.

The bluehead chub is about a seven inch long minnow that’s pretty common in the creeks and streams around here. The bluehead has an interesting mating practice in that it’s a nesting minnow. The male hollows out a spawning nest in the creek sand and decorates one end with a mound of colorful pebbles that it painstakingly collects and arranges at great minnow expense. Chick chubs dig a sweet nest.

It really is pretty cool to see and the brightly colored nests are easily visible from the bank. This time of year, the eggs have hatched and the fries have grown into fingerlings. These young chubs are, unlike their fairly drab parents, a brilliant orange and they make for a pretty display as they swarm and flit around the nest.

Fine, but we were about to drive and I was thinking about the tight gap I needed to thread when Hank said in a loud, excited whisper, “Hey Don, c’mere!”

I looked down and there was a bluehead chub nest with a bunch of bright, orange younguns flitting around. A couple or three adults were swimming around among them, just doing graceful, if somewhat quick, loops and figure eights. Neat, but we see this every year and I needed to dig out my tree-resistant disc (the one with the heavy “bumper” rim) and decide if I was going forehand or a slight, backhand turnover.

I made a brief comment about the nest to satisfy Hank that I had acknowledged his call to the creekside and was about to walk back to my bag when Hank pointed at the nest and said, “No, look!”

Whoa!

Right there, wriggling in place and submerged right on top of the nest was a snake! OK, haven’t seen that before. This really was cool. It looked like a juvenile rat snake maybe 18-24 inches long and it was apparently enjoying an all-you-can-eat chub buffet. That’s something I had never seen.

Intermezzo

Now I need to take a break from my anecdote and tell you about a recurring nightmare I’ve had for as long as I can remember. It’s about snakes, and odds are decent you have this same nightmare. It goes like this...

I’m walking around in some environment. Could be woods, could be an old house, whatever.

I see a snake and am a little freaked out because I hate snakes. Not enough that I panic or anything, but it does give me the willies. Simple solution, though, I just give it some leeway and leave it alone as I continue on.

But then there’s another snake.

I start looking at the ground, in the dark spaces below the furniture or under the logs and there’s another snake.

And another. And another and another and another.

And, just like that, I realize that the entire ground is virtually carpeted with writhing serpents and there’s no way around them.

I’m sure this has meaning like I’ve been procrastinating and I’m surrounded by squirming, unfinished tasks or something, but there you go. I’ve had this dream forever and it’s an awful feeling realizing you’re surrounded by infinite snakes.

Back to our regularly scheduled anecdote

So Hank and I are looking at this submerged rat snake wriggling in place above the bluehead chub nest. He doesn’t appear to be striking at the fingerlings, but why else would it be lingering there? It was wriggling in that graceful, snakey sine wave pattern but not moving forward. We stared at it for a long moment, maybe several, as it really was a little hypnotic.

But then I saw it.

This time it was me pointing at the stream and saying, “Hey, check it out--there’s another one!”

Sure enough, there it was. Another juvenile rat snake was submerged right next to the first one. These things were nearly invisible against the creek bed and chub nest with their mottled pattern and neither of us had seen the second snake until just now.

But then I saw it again! There, on the rock that was jutting out of the creek next to the bluehead chub nest…

“Holy smokes man, look! There’s another one,” I said to Hank.

It was my nightmare come to life! The closer I looked at the scene, the more snakes I saw. These were harmless rat snakes (which are good snakes to have around, by the way), but when was the last time I saw three of them right there, almost materializing out of the stones in the water? It gave me that same, creepy feeling as in my nightmare...but at the same time it was pretty cool.

Apparently, Mama Rat Snake had lain her eggs nearby and here was her brood enjoying an absolute jackpot of a bluehead chub fingerling smorgasbord in the middle of the creek. Even though it was a little creepy, it was something I’d never seen before and both of us stood there, transfixed, for a decent while. I managed to snap a couple of pics with my phone before Hank, being Hank, tossed a stick into the water right on top of the two snakes at the nest. One stayed while the other darted away through the water. Scene over. On to the precarious drive.

What’s the point of the story? There really isn’t one but, since anecdotes become something bigger when they have morals, maybe there are a couple of lessons here. The first one would be something about your nightmares being a lot less scary when you confront them in the daylight. But the really practical lesson is taking the time to go out and experience nature. Step away from the screen. Take a break from the keyboard. Of course, had I stayed in the office at my desk all day I would have gotten a little more work done but I wouldn’t have had those few minutes of fascination with the ordinary critters of the woods. Rat snakes and bluehead chubs are common in these parts, but today’s vignette wasn’t. It was thoroughly fascinating. It was like being a kid again and marveling at the simplest of nature’s spectacles. And it’s because I went outside and touched grass. Think about doing the same. You won’t regret it.

And sorry, chub family. I hope tomorrow’s better.

Don Marshall is a normal Christian who loves his country and the liberties upon which it is founded. He is dedicated to doing what he can to prevent radical revolutionaries from destroying it, whether from the left or right. You can read more from him here: .

Greetings!

Long time no see, ladies and gents. Back to work (well, I’ve been working this whole time, which is why I’ve not written here). With that said, let’s discuss human communication, as you may labor under the delusion that facts and evidence change people’s minds. Let’s pop the hood on the braincase by way of a scenario.

You are Person A, conversing with Person B. You make a statement; B reacts with something that had nothing to do with your statement. On X, this is a meme of sorts; you say you like pancakes and someone asks why you hate waffles. There’s a kernel of truth there, buried; let’s dig it out.

I. The Operating System Below the Argument

Bold statement incoming: most human communication is unconscious.

I do not mean this as insult, nor as reference to nonverbal gesticulation; I mean it descriptively, and I’ll show you what I mean.

Words do two things in a conversation. Either they point at an individual, examinable definition (something you can pull up and interrogate, answerable to what it actually refers to) or they feed the standing frame the speaker perceives through. The second use dominates; it dominates most in proximity to the load-bearing, unexamined pieces of a person’s picture; the tendency intensifies the more morally charged a topic is from the speaker’s vantage.

Near that core, a word carries almost no definition behind it. It functions as a token (yeah, you thought you were different than large language models, didn’t you?). It is held by positing rather than by correspondence, and returns nothing when you demand the definition, because the definition was never what it was doing.

Watch this.

Trump.

Did you read that, parse it as a card suit or a brass instrument, and move calmly to the next sentence? Or did a frame summon itself; favorable, unfavorable, somewhere between?

I didn’t even need to give you context; nothing regarding politics had appeared in this article up to that word. One word. The frame summoned itself.

Here is what that means for B’s response. The frame casts its content as neutral and true; to place a contradicting input onto that register is to index it as false and bad. The cheapest re-indexing fixes a verdict to the challenging word and skips the definition. What fires back is a label; a word run as a verdict where an argument was owed.

What you’re seeing shall henceforth be known as Framespeak.

Words in various contexts act as frame-tokens; units of a given frame, akin to the tokens an AI uses to parse a request. They carry the frame’s meaning rather than pointing at a definition; more often than not, the definition isn’t what the word is doing.

Let’s go check out some non-controversial examples.

II. Framespeak in the Wild

The Sex Binary

Biological sex in humans is binary. Two gamete types exist; the organism is organized around the production of sperm or egg; there is no spegg. State this in a conversation where the frame is load-bearing and the response does not address the gamete concept. It addresses you as a moral agent.

“Transphobic.” “Harmful.” “You want to erase trans people.”

The gamete sits untouched. The claim was never met.

Intersex conditions are real; they are developmental anomalies within a binary system, not evidence of a third category. A missing limb does not constitute a third class of limb. The frame does not engage this distinction. The distinction is not what the frame is processing.

The Embryological Claim

The embryological claim is this: at fertilization, a genetically distinct human organism is present. New genetic life, identifiable as such by any laboratory.

State this to someone holding the pro-abortion position and you receive an argument. The claim is met as a premise; new genetic life is present, but it is not a person because it is not born; it is a “parasite” and can be killed without moral consequence.

“You want to control women’s bodies.” “You’re imposing your religion.” “You hate women.”

The genetic fact (a new and distinct human is present) is not touched. The pro-abortion frame literally reinterprets the words in a manner that is commensurate with the frame itself; the claim of a distinct human being tends to remain unaddressed.

The distinction here is between an argument (a coherent series of reasons, statements, or facts intended to support or establish a specific point of view, claim, or conclusion) and Framespeak; the former is an evaluation of the topic of discussion (sex is binary or life begins at conception), the other issues a label from the frame being defended and that label is usually morally charged.

III. Under the Hood

All righty; I’ve described the mechanism in question. What I haven’t described is what I used to flesh it out.

Below is the formal argument that underpins the concept that I introduced in this article; this is the kind of structure that Metadiagnostics runs on; namely, the Euclidean method. I do this in order to ensure logical rigor with my thought processes. I won’t showcase every framework this explicitly (because it’s boring) but I will likely do so if I release a written work.

The Frame Spine: A Euclidean Polysyllogism

The Thesis

A word can be used two ways: to point at a standard definition, a referent public and answerable to mind-independent reality, or to carry a frame-centric definition, a meaning fixed inside the frame the speaker perceives through. On any topic that bears on a person’s metaphysical amalgam, the frame-centric use predominates, and it predominates most at the load-bearing, unexamined metaphysics at the amalgam’s core. This is a descriptive claim about how words function in ordinary cognition, prior to any claim about what makes an argument good.

The chain below derives, from this thesis and the foundation it rests on, how a frame holds an amalgam-bearing matter against contradiction, why the defense takes the form of a label, why the defense intensifies on moral ground, how its profile under pressure reads the core’s type, and the one operation that reaches a posited core.

Primitives

A primitive is a term the system does not define and cannot, on pain of regress; it is pointed at, and everything else reduces to it.

• Pr1. Reality. What is, independently of any mind. The terminus of answerability; nothing grounds it.

• Pr2. Mind. The human subject that holds, perceives, reasons, and uses words.

• Pr3. Word. A linguistic token a mind uses.

• Pr4. Reference. The relation in which a word stands for something; the referent is what the word is about.

• Pr5. Logic. The principles by which inference proceeds.

• Pr6. Topic. Any subject matter that can be considered.

Definitions

• D1. Metaphysic. What a mind holds concerning what is fundamentally real. (Pr2, Pr1)

• D2. Metaphysical ordering. The dependence relation between a metaphysic and the levels derived from it. Logic is an aspect of a metaphysic. From the metaphysic follows the nature of man, including whether man has a telos (the end toward which a nature is directed); from the nature of man, ethics (the account of the good for man); from ethics, morality (the lived judgments of good and bad in action). Each derived level follows from the one above it and cannot ground it. (D1, Pr5)

• D3. Metaphysical amalgam. The aggregate of metaphysics a mind holds, typically unexamined, used heuristically, and not necessarily consistent with one another. (D1, Pr2)

• D4. Frame. A coherent subset of the amalgam, activated by a topic, through which the person perceives; self-similar in kind to the amalgam, composed of the same unexamined metaphysics, and locally free of contradiction even where the whole amalgam is not. (D3, Pr6, Pr5)

• D5. Standard definition. A referent that is public, stable across frames, and answerable to mind-independent reality. A dictionary is a corruptible proxy for this, never the thing itself. (Pr4, Pr1, D4)

• D6. Frame-centric definition. The meaning a word holds within a frame, fixed by that frame’s internal freedom from contradiction rather than by a public referent or by reality. (Pr3, D4, Pr5)

• D7. Load-bearing metaphysic. A metaphysic in the amalgam (D3) on which other metaphysics, and the person’s action and sense of who he is, depend. (D3, D1)

• D8. Unexamined. Held without having been tested against reality or made explicit as a proposition. (Pr2, Pr1)

• D9. Moral dimension. A property of a topic; a topic has a moral dimension when the position taken on it implicates the holder’s own goodness, his standing under the morality his amalgam holds (D2). (Pr6, D2)

• D10. Misconstructed metaphysic. A morality placed in the grounding position the ordering (D2) reserves for the metaphysic, commonly a morality imported from another metaphysic. (D2)

• D11. Frame-centric fraction. For a given metaphysic in the amalgam (D3), the proportion of all word-uses bearing on it that are handled by the frame-centric definition (D6) rather than judged against a standard definition (D5); frame-centric uses over total uses, on that metaphysic. (D3, D6, D5)

• D12. Core. A metaphysic at or near the maximum of load-bearing (D7) in an amalgam (D3), one on which the greatest number of the amalgam’s other metaphysics, and the person’s action and sense of who he is, depend. An amalgam may have more than one. The grounding position the ordering reserves for the metaphysic (D2) is a position of maximal load, so a misconstructed metaphysic (D10) is a core. (D7, D3, D2, D10)

Premises

• P1. A word points to one of two targets: a standard definition (D5) or a frame-centric definition (D6). For topics bearing upon the amalgam (D3), the frame-centric use is the more frequent.

• P2. The frame-centric fraction (D11) is greater for a more load-bearing metaphysic (D7), and is greatest at the most load-bearing, unexamined (D8) metaphysics of the amalgam (D3).

• P3. The ordering (D2) holds: logic is an aspect of the metaphysic, and ethics and morality derive from it. So logic is upstream of every derived level, and morality is downstream of logic.

• P4. Where a topic has a moral dimension (D9), the moral dimension tends to obfuscate the logical evaluation of the topic, even though morality is downstream of logic (P3). The obfuscation is greatest when the engaged metaphysic is a misconstructed metaphysic (D10), where a morality occupies the metaphysical role from which it should be derived.

• P5. When a topic bears upon the mind’s metaphysical amalgam (D3), the frame activated by that topic (D4) handles the word through itself; the standard definition (D5) may be consulted, but the frame-centric definition (D6) overrides it and fixes the operational meaning.

• P6. A mind perceives through its active frame (D4), not at it. To represent a frame as one position among alternatives requires a standard outside that frame, against which it and its alternatives are compared.

• P7. A mind may hold a metaphysic in either of two ways. By correspondence: it holds the metaphysic as answerable to mind-independent reality (Pr1), so that reality stands as a standard outside the frame (P6) against which the metaphysic itself can be judged. By positing: it holds the metaphysic as fixed within the frame, answerable only to the frame’s internal freedom from contradiction (D6), so that no standard outside the frame bears on it.

• P8. When a demand for the standard definition of a word exposes that the word answers to nothing outside the frame, a mind may register that absence or may fail to register it; the exposure does not compel registering, and the same exposure is registered by one mind and not by another. (Pr2, D5)

The Chain

1. When a topic bears upon the amalgam and activates a frame (P5, D3, D4), the word is handled through the frame; the standard definition may be consulted, but the frame-centric definition overrides it and fixes the operational meaning (P5). A frame-centric definition is fixed by the frame’s internal freedom from contradiction, mind-independent reality playing no part (D6); a standard definition answers to that reality (D5). ∴ For a word on such a topic, its operational meaning is settled within the frame and is not answerable to mind-independent reality (Pr1); and since this is the more frequent condition of word-use for amalgam-bearing topics (P1), the settling-within-the-frame is the ordinary case across that domain. (from P5, D6, D5, P1)

2. By step 1, for amalgam-bearing topics the operational meaning of a word is fixed within the frame and is not corrected by mind-independent reality. A frame-centric definition is validated only by the frame’s internal freedom from contradiction (D6), and that freedom from contradiction is a standard the frame itself supplies. ∴ Within the domain of amalgam-bearing topics the frame is self-warranting: it is the source of its own operative meanings and the sole standard by which they are validated, with no external check. (from step 1, D6)

3. Within the amalgam-bearing domain the frame is its own sole standard, with no external check (step 2). A mind perceives through its active frame, not at it, and to represent that frame as one position among alternatives would require a standard outside it (P6). Within the domain there is no such standard (step 2). ∴ From within, the frame is not represented as one position among alternatives; it is taken as simply how things are, neutral rather than a stance, and true rather than a view, identified with reality rather than held as a position upon it. (from step 2, P6)

4. Within the amalgam-bearing domain the frame is taken as coincident with reality, the neutral and the true (step 3). A contradicting input is a word whose standard definition (D5) points to something the frame does not contain or denies. To judge that input against its standard definition would set a referent answerable to mind-independent reality against the frame; but in this domain the frame admits no standard outside itself (step 2), and the activated frame overrides the standard definition with its own (P5, D6). ∴ A contradicting input cannot be judged against its standard definition from within the frame; it is handled through the frame, taken on the frame’s own terms rather than on the referent it answers to. (from step 3, step 2, P5, D5, D6)

5. A contradicting input is handled on the frame’s own terms rather than on the referent it answers to (step 4). On those terms the frame is the neutral and the true, taken as coincident with reality (step 3). To place an input that contradicts the true-and-neutral onto the frame’s own register is to assign it the only standing that register leaves for what opposes the true and the neutral. ∴ The contradicting input is received as the untrue and the non-neutral, the false and the partisan, by the frame’s own classification and prior to any examination of the referent it actually points to. (from step 4, step 3)

6. A response that engages the contradicting input’s referent would require judging it against its standard definition, a judgment the domain forbids (step 4). The input instead is received as false and non-neutral by the frame’s classification, before any inspection of that referent (step 5). So a response to the input has only two forms available: engage the referent, which is foreclosed, or express the classification already assigned. ∴ Any response the frame makes to the input expresses the assigned classification and does not engage the referent; the input is answered by applying the frame’s category to it, a word that carries the verdict and does not meet the referent the input points to. This response-form is henceforth called a label. (from step 4, step 5)

7. The label assigns the input a category and does not engage its referent (step 6). The one route by which the input could have corrected the frame was to be judged against its standard definition, and that judgment the domain forecloses (step 4). ∴ Once labeled, the contradicting input exerts no corrective pressure; the frame stands unchanged. The labeling operation preserves the frame against the challenge. (from step 6, step 4)

8. Step 7 shows that for the contradicting input in view, the labeling operation leaves the frame unchanged. Nothing in steps 4 through 7 revolves around the particular input: any input that engages the amalgam is handled through the frame (P5), cannot be judged against its standard definition (step 4), is received as false and non-neutral (step 5), and is answered by a label that preserves the frame (steps 6, 7). ∴ Within the amalgam-bearing domain every contradicting input meets the same preservative operation; the frame admits no input that corrects it from within the domain. (from step 7, step 4, step 5, step 6, P5)

9. Step 8 establishes that within the amalgam-bearing domain frame preservation meets every contradicting input. P2 adds that the frame-centric fraction is not even across that domain: the more load-bearing a metaphysic (D7), the greater the proportion of words bearing on it that are handled inside the frame rather than judged against a standard definition (D11). The preservative operation is what frame-centric handling produces, since it is frame-centric handling that overrides the standard definition (P5), forecloses the judging against a standard definition (step 4), and applies the label (steps 5, 6, 7). So the concentration of the operation follows the frame-centric fraction. ∴ The more load-bearing the engaged metaphysic, the more completely frame-centric handling governs and the less the standard definition governs; the preservative operation is greatest, and correction least available, at the most load-bearing, unexamined metaphysics. This is the load-ordering of the frame-centric fraction. (from step 8, P2, P5, step 4, steps 5, 6, 7)

10. By the ordering (D2) a metaphysic descends through ethics to a morality, so the metaphysics composing the amalgam carry moral content, and the frame, self-similar in kind to the amalgam (D4), carries that moral content in small. Step 3 established that the frame, being its own sole standard, represents its content as true and as neutral. The same self-warrant applied to its moral content represents that content as good. ∴ Where the engaged metaphysic is moral, the frame represents its own moral content as good, and a contradicting input, already received as false and non-neutral (step 5), is received also as bad. (from D2, D4, step 3, step 5)

11. Step 9 established the load-ordering: the frame-centric fraction, and with it the preservative operation, is greater for a more load-bearing metaphysic. P4 adds a moral charge whose source is the metaphysic’s implication of the holder’s goodness (D9), not how load-bearing the metaphysic is (D7); it therefore does not increase with load, and can be present at low load or absent at high load. Where a topic has a moral dimension (D9), the position taken implicates the holder’s own goodness. The self is held good by virtue of the positions it holds, so the goodness of the position and the goodness of the self are one; to attack the position is to attack the self, and to oppose the frame is to be cast as holding the bad. The contradicting input therefore arrives as bad (step 10) and as an attack on the self. P4 states that this moral dimension obfuscates the judging of the input against its standard definition, though morality is downstream of logic (P3, D2). The obfuscation differs from the override of step 4 in where it cuts. Under the override, the input is judged against its standard definition and that judgment is then subordinated, the frame-centric meaning winning. Under the moral charge, the input is met as an attack on the self and the defense fires before the input is judged against its standard definition, so the input is never judged against its standard definition at all. ∴ On a moral topic the preservative operation is intensified beyond the load-ordering of step 9: the input is foreclosed as bad and as an attack on the self, the input is never judged against its standard definition, and this charge, arising from self-implication (D9) and not from load (D7), adds to the ordering rather than restating it. Where a topic carries moral content but does not implicate the holder’s goodness (D9), no such charge arises, and the topic is handled by the load-ordering of step 9 alone; the intensification is a function of self-implication, not of moral content as such. (from step 9, P4, step 10, P3, D2, step 4)

12. D10 names a misconstructed metaphysic: a morality placed in the grounding position the ordering (D2) reserves for the metaphysic. The grounding position is the one on which every derived level depends (D2), so a morality that takes the place of metaphysics is maximally load-bearing (D7). Two intensifiers follow from that position, by the two separate routes the chain has built.

1. By step 9, where load is maximal the frame-centric fraction is maximal, so almost no word bearing on this metaphysic is judged against a standard definition.

2. By step 11, the content placed there is a morality, so the moral charge is present, and present at its greatest, since a morality at the ground fixes the holder’s whole standing under morality (D9) rather than his standing on one matter among many; to oppose it is to attack the self entire, not the self on a point.

∴ At a misconstructed metaphysic the two intensifiers coincide and compound: the input (the opposing word or argument) is at once not judged against a standard definition (step 9) and determined as an attack on the self (step 11). This is the least correctable position in the amalgam. (from D10, D2, D7, step 9, step 11, D9)

13. By step 6 a contradicting input is answered with a label, a word carrying the verdict and not engaging the referent. By step 3 the frame represents its content not as one position among alternatives but as neutral and true, coincident with reality. By step 10, where the engaged metaphysic is moral, the frame represents its moral content as good. So a label drawn from the frame’s moral content carries a verdict that the frame represents at once as neutral, as true, and as good, the application of the standard rather than the taking of a side. ∴ The moral label presents as the measure against which the input is judged, not as one moral position set against another; the frame’s own value is presented as the objective moral standard. This presentation is strongest at a misconstructed metaphysic (step 12), where the moral content occupies the grounding position and is held as what is fundamentally real (D1, D2), so the label drawn from it presents as the measure of reality itself. (from step 6, step 3, step 10, step 12, D1, D2)

14. Steps 9, 11, and 13 established the load-ordering of the frame-centric fraction: across the metaphysics of one amalgam, the more load-bearing a metaphysic, the greater the proportion of the words bearing on it that are handled inside the frame by the frame-centric definition (D6) rather than judged against a standard definition (D5); at the most load-bearing metaphysic the proportion is near total, so almost every word bearing on it is handled inside the frame and almost none is judged against a standard definition.

An interlocutor who presses a single challenge nearer and nearer to a load-bearing metaphysic engages, at each step of approach, a more load-bearing metaphysic, and so traverses that ordering in time; the proportion of the holder’s responses handled inside the frame grows greater the nearer the approach comes. This traversal of the load-ordering in time is the approach-behavior of the frame-centric fraction.

By P7 a metaphysic held by positing is answerable only within the frame, with no standard outside it; when the approach reaches it, no input can be judged against a standard outside the frame, because none is held, and handling inside the frame is the only handling available. So for a posited core the proportion grows toward total as the approach nears the core; at the core almost every response is a frame-internal label and almost none is a judgment against a standard definition. By P7 a metaphysic held by correspondence is answerable to mind-independent reality, so a standard outside the frame is held (P6); when the approach reaches it, the holder can step to that standard, judge the input against it, and submit the metaphysic itself to examination (P6) rather than take it as simply how things are (step 3). So for a corresponding core the proportion does not grow toward total; at the core the holder judges the input against the standard outside the frame, and each such judgment is a response not handled inside the frame, so the proportion handled inside the frame stays below total however near the approach comes.

∴ As a challenge nears the most load-bearing metaphysic, the proportion of the holder’s responses handled inside the frame either grows toward total or does not, and which it does forks on how the metaphysic is held. For a posited core it grows toward total, almost every response at the core a frame-internal label. For a corresponding core it stays below total, the holder judging the input against the standard outside the frame and so producing responses not handled inside the frame. The behavior of this proportion across the approach is therefore diagnostic of how the core is held: the proportion growing toward total as the core is neared marks the core posited; the proportion staying below total marks the core corresponding. (from steps 9, 11, 13, P7, P5, P6, step 3)

15. For a posited core the proportion of responses handled inside the frame grows toward total as the approach nears the core, until at the core almost every word bearing on the core is handled inside the frame and almost none is judged against a standard definition (step 14). A word handled inside the frame takes its frame-centric definition, the meaning fixed by the frame and answerable to nothing outside it (D6, P7); a word judged against a standard definition takes a meaning answerable to mind-independent reality (D5). At the core, where the first has grown to near total and the second to near none, the words bearing on the core carry almost only frame-centric definitions and almost no standard definition. ∴ At a posited core a word bearing on the core has, in the limit, no standard definition behind it at all, only the verdict the frame assigns it; the word points to nothing outside the frame. To demand the standard definition of such a word, to ask what outside the frame it answers to, is to demand what is not there, and the demand returns nothing. (from step 14, D6, P7, D5, step 5, step 6, step 1)

16. By step 15, at a posited core the demand for the standard definition of a core word returns nothing, the word answering to nothing outside the frame. By P8 a mind meeting this empty return either registers that the core word answers to nothing outside the frame, or fails to do so.

Failing to register it: the holder does not take the empty return as an absence at all; the demand is met with one more frame-internal label (step 6) or with a refusal to proceed, the handling remains inside the frame, and the posited core remains held as before (step 14).

Registering it: the holder takes the empty return as an absence, registering that the core word answers to nothing outside the frame. To register this is to register that what step 3 held as simply how things are answers to nothing outside the frame. A thing seen to answer to nothing outside the frame is no longer held as reality itself; it is held as a position, one the frame takes. And by P6 holding the core as a position is possible only against a standard outside the frame, which the empty return has just supplied, the contact with reality (Pr1) that the demand produced. So in registering the absence the holder holds, for the first time, the core as a position answerable to a standard outside his frame.

∴ The empty return forks on whether the absence is registered. Where it is not registered, the posited core remains held as reality itself, and the demand changes nothing. Where it is registered, the holder comes to hold the core as a position answerable to a standard outside the frame, and the core that was held as reality itself is held, for the first time, as one position among the positions that are possible. This registering is the first correspondence the posited core admits, and it is reached only through the demand that exposed the empty return. (from step 15, P8, step 3, P6, Pr1, D5, step 6, step 14)

17. At a posited moral core the frame holds its moral content as good (step 10) and as the measure against which inputs are judged, the standard itself rather than one position among alternatives (step 13). By P7 the posited core holds no standard outside the frame, and by step 15 the core word answers to nothing outside the frame. So the only standard available for judging a moral input is the frame’s own moral content, held as good. A standard that is a single content held as good admits, of what it can itself register, exactly two verdicts: accord with that content, which it marks good, or discord with it, which it marks bad (step 11). No third verdict is available to the frame, because a third would require a standard other than the frame’s own moral content, and by P7 and step 15 the posited core holds none. This is a limit on what the one frame-internal standard can register, not a limit on the moral field. ∴ At a posited moral core every moral input the frame registers is sorted into one of two standings, the good that accords with the frame’s content or the bad that discords with it; the frame can place no input outside this pair, because the single frame-internal content is the only standard it admits. This pair exhausts what the one frame-internal standard can register, and the frame presents it as exhausting the moral field itself. The presentation overreaches the registration. (from step 10, step 13, P7, step 15, step 11)

18. Take two minds in contact on an amalgam-bearing topic, each perceiving through a frame (D4). A word the first sends is received by the second through the second’s frame, which handles it by its own frame-centric definition (D6, P5) and, where it contradicts, by the preservative operation of steps 4 through 8. So the word does not arrive in the second mind bearing the first frame’s meaning; it arrives as the second frame renders it. The same holds in the other direction. Words cannot carry a meaning from inside one frame to inside another, because meaning is fixed within each frame and re-fixed on receipt.

Nor is there a shared logic beneath the words to compel agreement across the divide. By P3 logic is an aspect of a metaphysic, so each frame carries its own logic, and an inference that binds within one frame need not bind within the other. There is no logic standing outside both frames, common to them, by which one could force the other to a conclusion it does not already hold.

∴ Two frames in contact cannot reach each other by words or by argument. A word is re-fixed by the receiving frame, and no shared logic compels the inference across the divide; so neither frame can be moved from inside the other’s terms. This is the no-outside: from within, a frame meets every challenge on its own terms and is reachable by no move that stays within words and shared logic, because for amalgam-bearing matter there is no shared logic, and the words do not cross. (from steps 4–8, D6, P5, P3, D4)

19. By step 18 neither words nor argument cross between two frames, so a challenge that defeats a particular label the frame has issued does not reach the frame: the defeated label is one word handled inside the frame, and by steps 6 and 8 the frame answers the next challenge with another label. Defeating labels one at a time moves the defense from label to label and leaves the frame holding. So the labels are not what a breach must reach; the holding is, the frame’s holding of its core as answerable to nothing outside itself (step 15).

By step 16 one operation reaches that holding. The demand for the standard definition of a core word brings the word into contact with reality (Pr1) by asking what outside the frame it answers to (D5), and at a posited core the demand returns nothing (step 15). This demand is not a word sent to be re-fixed by the receiving frame, nor an inference offered to be judged by the frame’s own logic; it is neither of the moves step 18 sealed off. It asks the holder to produce, from his own frame, the outside referent of his own word, and where there is none the absence is his own to register (step 16).

∴ A posited core is reached not by defeating its labels and not by argument across the divide, but by the demand for the standard definition of a core word, the demand that returns nothing and, where the holder registers the absence, begins the conversion of the core from held-as-reality to held-as-a-position (step 16). This operation is the one move that passes the no-outside, because it neither sends a meaning across nor compels an inference, but turns the holder to the standard that stands outside every frame, reality itself. Name this operation the demand for the standard definition. (from step 18, steps 6, 8, step 15, step 16, Pr1, D5)

20. By step 19 a posited core is reached only by the demand for the standard definition, the demand that asks the holder to produce, from his own frame, what outside reality his core word answers to. Consider who can press this demand and have it do its work. The one pressing must hold the matter open to the standard outside the frame, mind-independent reality, since the demand is an appeal to that standard, an asking-what-outside-reality-the-word-answers-to (D5, Pr1); one who held the same matter by positing would have no outside standard to appeal to and could issue only a competing label, which by steps 18 and 19 does not cross and does not reach.

By P7 a mind holds a given metaphysic in one of two ways, by correspondence or by positing. A speaker who holds the matter under challenge by correspondence holds it as answerable to mind-independent reality; for him, on this matter, the word keeps its standard definition, the proportion of his own responses handled inside the frame does not grow toward total as the matter is pressed (step 14), and he can therefore carry the appeal to the outside standard into the other’s frame, asking of the other’s word what he already holds his own word to answer to. A speaker who holds the matter by positing cannot: pressed on it, his own responses grow toward the frame-internal, he has no outside standard in hand to appeal to, and he can meet the other only frame to frame, label against label, the no-outside on both sides.

∴ The demand for the standard definition can be pressed effectively only by a speaker who holds the matter under challenge by correspondence, answerable to the standard outside the frame. Only such a speaker carries an outside standard into the exchange, and only an outside standard carried in can ask of a posited core’s word what it answers to and expose that it answers to nothing. The breach of a posited core requires, on the side pressing it, a corresponding hold on the same matter. (from step 19, P7, D5, Pr1, step 14, step 18)

Conclusion

The whole chain follows from the foundation wherever a frame must hold an amalgam-bearing matter against contradiction.

A word on such a matter takes its meaning inside the frame and is not judged against mind-independent reality (steps 1, 2), the frame-centric handling predominating by P1 and P5. The frame represents its content as neutral and true, taken as how things are rather than as one position among alternatives (step 3); so a contradicting input is received as false (steps 4, 5) and answered with a label, a word carrying the verdict and not engaging the referent (step 6), and the labeling preserves the frame against every such input (steps 7, 8). The frame-centric fraction is ordered by load: greater at the more load-bearing metaphysics, near total at the core (steps 9, 14). On moral matter a further charge is added, arising from the metaphysic’s implication of the holder’s goodness and not from load (steps 10, 11), greatest at a misconstructed metaphysic where a morality occupies the grounding position (step 12); there the frame’s own value presents as the objective standard (step 13), and moral judgment is forced onto two values, accord or discord with that value, presented as exhaustive of the moral field (step 17).

Pressed toward the core, the proportion of responses handled inside the frame behaves diagnostically: it grows toward total where the core is held by positing and stays below total where the core is held by correspondence (step 14). At a posited core the core word answers to nothing outside the frame, so the demand for its standard definition returns nothing (step 15); where the holder registers that absence, he comes to hold the core as a position answerable to the standard outside the frame, and the conversion begins (step 16). Between two frames neither words nor argument cross, words re-fixed on receipt and no shared logic beneath them (step 18, by P3); so defeating labels does not reach the frame, and the one operation that reaches the holding is the demand for the standard definition (step 19), which can be pressed effectively only by a speaker who holds the matter under challenge by correspondence, and so carries the standard outside the frame into the exchange (step 20).

∴ On amalgam-bearing matter a frame holds against contradiction by settling meaning within itself, answering challenge with the preservative label, and admitting no correction from inside its own terms; it is reachable only from outside those terms, by the standard that stands outside every frame, reality, brought to bear through the demand for the standard definition by one who holds the matter in correspondence with that standard. And because a frame is self-similar in kind to the amalgam it is drawn from (D4), and the same ordering governs a metaphysic and its derived levels at every level of organization (D2), this same structure recurs wherever a frame must hold an amalgam-bearing matter against contradiction, from the single word in an exchange to the institution. The structure recurs; the particular contents at each scale differ. (from Premise and steps 1–20, with D2, D4)

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

You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s always worth repeating. Something extremely cool about the “Star-spangled Banner,” the American national anthem, is that it asks a question, and it’s the question at the heart of everything in the American worldview.

“Oh, say, can you see
By the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed
At the twilight’s last gleaming...”

So the anthem begins with a question and a scene. One man, a patriot, is asking another man, another patriot, “can you see it?” at sunrise after a long, dangerous night.

The “it” in question is going to be revealed to be the flag, our “star-spangled banner,” which they had last fully recognized and honored as the sun set, daylight failed, and night crept over them the evening before.

Can you see it? Say! Can you see it?!

IS IT STILL THERE?!

“Whose broad stripes and bright stars
Through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched
Were so gallantly streaming...”

Here we find that the “it” is in fact the flag, our star-spangled banner, and we learn why the question is being asked.

The flag is described as having flown and streamed gallantly over ramparts of war through a perilous fight. All could have been lost. The flag, and even the fledgling country for which it stands, one nation under God and indivisible.

Say! Can you see it? Now that the light is back?

IS IT STILL THERE?!

“--And the rockets’ red glare,
The bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there!--”

They could see it through the battle in the light of the rockets and bombs that threatened them, here and there in quick glimpses. But it was still there throughout! But now? At dawn?

Say! Can you see?

IS IT STILL THERE?!

“Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free
And the home of the brave?”

The urgency is palpable with every refrain. They have to know. It’s the first thing they must know as the sun begins to light the sky, even before it rises.

IS IT STILL THERE?!

Say! Say!! Can you see? Can you see it?!

At the heart of every American beats the fundamental truth and reality that what we have here is precious, that it’s worth fighting for, to the death if necessary, and that it’s fragile. That at any moment it can be lost. That we have to remember to look for it because last night might have been the night in which it failed.

Every day, every year, every generation.

The American fight for freedom, to live in self-governance within ordered liberty, is ongoing and never-ending. The price of the land of the free is that it must be the home of the brave. We have to defend it, defend it, and defend it again, against all enemies foreign and domestic, because what we have is amazing, rare, fragile, and worth every cent of treasure, every drop of blood, and every risk to our sacred honor to protect it.

Our anthem is not a declaration. It is not a proclamation. It is not a statement.

It is a question.

Every time we sing our wholly unique national anthem, we as American ask the question again. IS IT STILL THERE?! Are we still America? Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

Because it’s a question, the answer is not known. It is not a guarantee. It cannot be taken for granted and isn’t. And what an honor to ask and take up our part in the story, in the American Experiment, in the greatest country the world has ever known.

For tonight, the last night of our first 250 years, as the sun gave way to twilight’s last gleaming and darkness overtook our land once again, the answer was still yes. We can see it even tonight in the red glare of rockets, with small bombs bursting in air, fill the sky with the noble tribute of fireworks once again.

And we all ask ourselves, will it still be flying at dawn?

This is what it means to be an American.

Happy 250th, America! Now for many happy returns!

James Lindsay is an author, lecturer, and podcaster. He is well known for being based on the internet. This article is a republishing of a post he made on X (ConceptualJames) that he has generously allowed us to republish. You can find the majority of his works at www.newdiscourses.com. He will be publishing a podcast further explaining the ideas in this post soon.

(Editor’s note: My Canadian Ass loves the USA. Happy 250. Here’s to 250 more!)

In this audio episode, Correspondence Theory editor Russell discusses the concept of epistemic exhaustion and why he believes it is happening and where he believes it will lead us. Other episodes he references include:

In 1995 Joel Schmacher released the third Batman movie titled “Batman Forever”. The movie itself received less then favorable ratings but was considered a major film success with a lot of consumer tied in merchandise aimed towards youth. The movie took an abrupt turn from the darker Tim Burton Batman films as a return to a mix of Burton-esque Gotham but with a much lighter tone in the style of Batman. Although Batman and Robin released later would most likely fall into full “campy” Batman reminiscent of the Adam West era, this film still retained some elemental style of the darker psyche of the archetype that Batman represents. There were two themes that I believe came from the movie.

The first theme is trauma. The movie explores the trauma of four main characters Batman, Robin, Riddler and Two-Face. Batman/Bruce Wayne’s split psyche is explored through the archetype of the “femme Fatale” character of Doctor Chase Meridian (played by the always stylish Nicole Kidman). Doctor Chase’s task is to explain the psychology of the villains while also attempting to understand the psychology of Batman. As she explores Batman’s psychology she falls for Batman’s alter ego Bruce Wayne. This aspect of the movie is probably the weakest and serves as an explainer for the characters motivations which as a trope fails as the motivations of characters should be revealed through exposition.

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The second theme of Batman Forever and the one that we will be exploring in depth today is The Riddler’s “Box”. In the movie Edward Nygma is a mentally unwell but genius scientist (Mad Scientist Archetype) who attempts to pitch his device to Bruce Wayne, the owner of Wayne Enterprise whom he works for. Edward is obsessed with Bruce Wayne and proving himself. His research is in brainwaves to direct television signals directly into the human brain, admittedly in his own words “manipulating brainwaves”. The goal is to create a more real then real experience for the viewer. To make the television programming become real and provide a truly emotional experience to the viewer where reality becomes indistinguishable from fiction. Bruce Wayne worries The Box could be used for nefarious purposes so he shuts it down. Edward Nygma tests the device out on his boss and finds out that The Box creates disassociation within the viewer. The victim disassociates consciousness from reality. A vessel without a consciousness is an open vessel for manipulation, or in the case of the movie, the theft of memories and information. Of course knowledge gained that is not earned is damaging, so while the device allows the transfer of information to the owner of the box it also drives Edward mad in the process. This fully fractures the mind of Edward causing him to develop the alter ego of “The Riddler” who wants to gain all knowledge unto himself, unknowingly driving him further into madness. He devises the box and markets it. It is an instant success going into the homes of all the citizens of Gotham. In the movie an Advertisement for The Box goes, “Critics have claimed that the box turns Gothamits into zombies but Edward Nygma just shrugs that’s what they said when T.V was invented”. Edward Nygma, steps out of the shadow of his idolatry of Bruce Wayne and into his own “personality” status. In Gotham you are either one of the uppers or you are struggling and to distract from the grime of the reality of the city there is an obsession with celebrity status figures. Using funding from Two-Face he upgrades the box to develop fully interactive holographic fantasies. Reality becomes utterly severed from fantasy, a full simulacrum of pleasure and vice with none of the consequences.

The Box

“The Box” from Batman Forever is marketed as a revolutionary 3D TV device that beams signals directly into users’ brains, making an engaging and addictive experience. The function is to provide pleasure and create a fully immersive experience for the user. That function of course is a ruse. The real purpose of The Box is to gain access to the victims mind without their knowledge or consent. It serves two functions for The Riddler. The first is that it increases his overall IQ and mental cognition. The second is that it gains him access to “forbidden knowledge”. This mirrors gnosticism as a belief that secret divine knowledge will allow one to transcend the false reality of the world. The movie is simplistic in the rending of what is used with that knowledge, more akin to thievery of credit card information and social insurance numbers as well as secrets that can be used to manipulate the people who use the device.

This movie was released in 1995. At this time cell phones as they were known then were just moving past being big and bulky. They were starting to shrink and very early digital technology was being introduced. Global Systems for Mobile Communications and Time Division Multiple Access were laying the groundwork for future advancements. The most high tech phones at the time had primitive access to touchscreen technology. TV technology was entering into the early stages of Color Plasma Display to allow high definition however the Cathode-ray tube (CRT) was still the primary standard. TV’s were heavy, bulky and only offered Standard Definition. They were also dropping rapidly in price compared to televisions from the 1970’s and 1980’s. They were no longer luxury items. It is also key to note that VCR’s had dropped in price averaging around $100 and VCR tapes allowed people to record memories and purchase movies which allowed for multiple viewing and more time spent in the home. The television was a key staple and people watched it obsessively, they also believed what was on television as they rarely has alternative sources to compare the news.

The Box was eerily precedent as a predictor of the modern era of smartphones and algorithms that invade our lives on a daily basis and take our information from us, while feeding us content that continues to produce a fake more real then reality experience. The Box is mind manipulation on par with Social Media. In the movie people sit for hours mindlessly watching television absorbed, look around at the world around us currently and see how people sit for hours staring at the computer box in public, absorbed. The new and improved Box in the movie fully immerses the user in a virtual reality similar to how Social Media filters create a false reality that is projected for others to see. It is addictive as the desire for that reality becomes wanted for the participant and the observer which multiplies the delusion.

The Box can be compared to Brave New World’s concept of “feelies”. Feelies in Brave New World is a hyper reality simulation form of cinema. Reality and fantasy disappear and the user becomes pacified and compliant. The pleasures of Brave New World is the trap, no boot stamping on the human face forever is required like 1984 because the citizenry is trapped in a pleasure cycle. The Box plugs people in through their television to endless pleasure, it keeps them pacified. The Box interferes with the brainwaves to produce a perfectly immersive experience. In a city like Gotham that is hopeless and people live desolate lives, a box like this enables the lower and middle class to engage in activities they see on television from the “uppercrust” of the Gotham society. A place where figures like Carmen Falcone and Bruce Wayne occupy. The constant need to feel more involved, more informed and part of a larger conversation in our modern world drives us to seek a more Box like experience to have the feelies like in Brave New World. While the feelies are meant to keep people pacified. The Box is more equivalent to a smartphone. It moves past the pacification and into the realm of extracting information from user to gain power for the person who owns The Box. Brave New World came out in 1932 and although there was some conceptualization of what inducing the feelies looked like, it was largely mechanical. The devices used were industrial. The Box however focuses on disrupting brainwaves. In this way the technology of 1932 could not imagine how the feelies could be shrunk down and digitized directly into the brain in 1995. Yet even in 1995 the concept of carrying a Box around in ones pocket to induce feelies was also still in the realm of mostly science fiction. Yet despite the mechanical differences, the result is largely the same, sensation of pleasure to dull the chaos of reality.

Jean Baudrillard developed the concept of “hyperreality” explained in Simulacra and Simulation in 1981. Simulations, a copy without a reality, replaces reality. It is a post-modern concept. We see this when consumerism develops a product, such as french toast flavored goldfish. It has the taste of french toast but is not based on the actual product itself. It is the authentic and the made up collapsing on themselves. The Box in Batman Forever sends a signal to the brain that creates a reality more real then the one that the user experiences through the television itself. The mechanical aspect of the feelies from Brave New World is a limiting factor because there is still some grounding in reality, the mechanical aspect grounds the person because there is still some connection that can showcase that the hyper reality is being produced. The user may not care or even desire the hyper reality but the mechanical aspect still limits the user. With The Box, the walls of the hyper reality are less defined. Yes the user may ultimately understand (since the machine can still be shut off) that it is fake but the perimeters are less limited since the mystical manipulation aspect is more pronounced. The user does not understand the mechanism behind The Box, it simply works which makes the illusion more believable and less restricting.

Now this is not a new concept, Cyber Punk genres have been experimenting with the idea of virtual or augmented reality since Ghost in the Shell, the comic series Transmetropolitan and movies like The Matrix. Modern cellphones have not yet managed to remove the rails completely but advancements have been made. Google Glasses, Facebook’s Oculus, Playstation’s VR and Apple’s AR headsets are a few examples of Generation one technology that has attempted to broach this divide. The limiting factors not really explored in Batman Forever’s Box is the energy requirement to maintain the hyperreality. Real life generation one hyperreality is still limited by energy. Even the most advanced examples such as Apple’s AR headsets still require an external battery source connected to the headset. Despite the energy requirements these platforms are refining and getting better. They will continue to grow in popularity as people long to escape the messy reality that they inhabit on a day to day basis.

This is where The Box is a marketing and technical work of genius for the movie. In 1995 Batman Forever accurately predicted that the television screen was still not real enough and people would crave an even more authentic if not fake reality. Compare this desire to the modern AI revolution of simulacra content. The rise in artificial intelligence is wreaking havoc and moving even the simulacra into chaos through slop generated fake AI content that is becoming more difficult to distinguish from reality itself. What is the point of this AI generated content? Just like The Box, this content is meant to engage people in order to steal information. The Box steals information directly but AI generated content steals time and IP information that is sold to advertisers and agencies to sell products and predict behavior. The simulacra of our reality mirrors the The Box as one part of the equation, as behind the entertainment is a mechanism that is feeding itself as much information that it can legally acquire. The Box feeds it to a single evil villain archetype while in real life we feed our time and information to mega corporations who want us to constantly consume. The Box has a strong correlation to the conceptualization of hyperreality and was a predictor of the demand for an even more engaging form of simulacra content.

In Conclusion

There is a belief that movies are a form of predictive programming. They prime the masses for future technology, events and belief structures. This movie was marketed towards children, the tie in products were vast and that is what made it a better commercial success then Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. One watches this movie to see a story arc about people obsessively watching television yet seeking a more real experience. This became reality but it was not a box on top of the television per say but in the Smartphone. A device that is always listening, trying to keep you engaged with it and offering you a simulated experience with the world. The apps and operating systems on these devices meanwhile, are siphoning off your personal information to data brokers and Governments. They do this to manipulate you, build profiles on you and attempt to get you excited about the next product so you keep spending money. The Box exists and we are plugged into them all day long getting our simulation while our data is siphoned away. As more data is collected, like The Riddler, these corporations get more unhinged and AI gets more psychotic.

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Russell is a Canadian Conservative and Catholic who wants you to spend less time with “The Box” and more time with your family. He believes in volunteerism as a key means to building community and social cohesion. He believes that citizens should be active members in the life of their Country and that rejecting that responsibility has resulted in physical and moral decay in Canada.

In this audio only episode Correspondence Theory editor Russell makes the claim that COVID exposed the complete hypocrisy of the punk scene.

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.