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Introduction

The controversies that dominate American public life often appear to be separate disputes. Debates about sexuality, race, identity, religious authority, and political power seem to arise from different constituencies and require different answers. Yet beneath them lies a common philosophical question: Is truth something the mind discovers by conforming itself to reality, or is truth produced within a historical struggle over language, institutions, and power? The answer determines far more than one’s theory of knowledge. It shapes how a person reads Scripture, understands the human person and identity, evaluates moral claims, and decides whether disagreement should be answered through persuasion or political coercion.

This conflict stands at the center of my new book, Faith in the Crossfire: When a Dialectical Revolution Targets Christianity. In the first half of the book, I trace a line of development through Gnostic and Hermetic themes, Hegelian philosophy, modern and contemporary hermeneutical theories, Marxist theory, modern theology, and contemporary identity politics. I argue that these movements differ in important respects, but share patterns of thought that elevate hidden knowledge, contradiction, negation, historical development, and transformative praxis. The second half offers a constructive Christian alternative grounded in Classical Realism, the first principles of reason, objective divine revelation, and the eternal Logos. The book is therefore both a diagnosis of our present confusion and an argument for the recovery of the historic Christian faith.

Truth and the Order of Reality

The correspondence theory of truth begins with a claim so basic that it is easily overlooked: our judgments are true when they affirm reality as reality actually is. Aristotle expressed the point by observing that to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true. The truth of a proposition does not arise from its popularity, psychological usefulness, racial identity, or political consequences. If a chair is brown, the proposition “the chair is brown” is true because what it affirms corresponds to the object under consideration. A coherent account of something can still be false, just as an unpopular judgment can still be true. Therefore, truth must seek something beyond coherence, and yet not less than coherence. In brief, truth must seek correspondence with reality.

The correspondence theory of truth does not require exhaustive knowledge or an infallible interpreter. Human judgments are often partial, and they are sometimes mistaken. The possibility of error, however, presupposes a reality about which we can be wrong. A map can misrepresent a city only because the streets possess an actual arrangement that the map either represents accurately or fails to represent accurately. In the same way, disagreement about morality, history, theology, or the natural world presupposes that there is something to know. If there were no reality independent of our interpretations, there would be no difference between interpretation and invention. Also, if there were no reality independent of our interpretations, there would only be power struggles between dominant groups to determine which view can “will to power” its prominence in society.

Classical Realism develops this insight about knowledge and reality by insisting that being precedes knowing. The mind encounters a world that already exists and possesses an intelligible order. Reality is not produced by consciousness, language, social status, perspectives on an intersectional spectrum, or political power. In the Classical Realist formulation (held by noted figures such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Adler, and Gilson), truth is the conformity of the intellect to reality (i.e., adaequatio intellectus ad rem). This conviction supplies the foundation for meaningful disagreement. Two contradictory claims about the same subject in the same respect cannot both be true; therefore, evidence, proper definitions, and reasoning matter in our approach to knowledge. Once that common reference point is removed, disputes and arguments become less an effort to discover truth than a contest over who possesses the authority to impose a description of the world.

This account also requires a careful distinction between Classical Realism and Critical Realism. Both ordinarily affirm that a real world exists independently of the mind and that human beings can possess genuine knowledge of it. Critical Realism should not be confused with relativism, postmodernism, or Critical Theory, since many critical realists defend objective truth and some form of correspondence. The difference concerns the starting point and the degree of mediation involved in knowledge. Classical Realism begins with being and maintains that the intellect genuinely knows the real thing through its intelligible form. Critical Realism begins more self-consciously with the knowing process and emphasizes the cognitive operations, such as language, conceptual frameworks, historical circumstances, and interpretive judgments through which knowledge is acquired. Its purpose is to preserve realism while accounting for human finitude and fallibility.

That critical emphasis can be valuable, but it also carries a danger. If the mediating structures become so prominent that the mind appears to know only its interpretations or representations, reality itself recedes from view. Truth may then shift from conformity with being toward coherence within an interpretive framework. Classical Realism resists that movement by insisting that interpretation remains answerable to what exists. The mind does not manufacture its object of knowledge. It receives and understands a reality that was already there.

From Correspondence to Dialectic

The term dialectic has carried several meanings throughout intellectual history, and not every use of the term dialectic is objectionable. My concern is with systems that make contradiction, negation, and historical conflict the mechanisms by which truth and reality develop. In the Hegelian tradition, truth is understood through a historical process in which tensions are taken up and overcome within a higher development. Marx relocates that movement into material and class struggle. Later critical theories analyze institutions, morality, language, and knowledge through conflicts between oppressor and oppressed. Within this framework, a truth claim is rarely evaluated only by asking whether it corresponds to reality. The critic also asks whose interests it serves, which structures it reinforces, and whether it advances the work of liberation.

The result is a significant change in the function of reason. Logic is no longer received simply as an expression of the stable structure of being. It is interpreted through history, culture, identity, and power. Contradictions may be tolerated because tension is believed to drive transformation, while every present settlement remains vulnerable to future negation and reconstruction. This does not mean that every thinker influenced by dialectical traditions denies ordinary facts. Such a claim would be a caricature. The deeper disagreement concerns the governing framework within which facts are interpreted. Correspondence asks whether a claim conforms to what is. Revolutionary dialectic tends to ask how a claim participates in a process of becoming and whether it advances or resists transformation.

This distinction helps explain why contemporary controversies often become impervious to evidence. Facts are filtered through narratives of identity and power before they are considered on their own terms. Appeals to objectivity can be dismissed as disguises for domination, while disagreement can be reclassified as a form of harm and oppression. The dispute is no longer confined to the truth of a particular proposition. It concerns whether truth can stand above the struggle and judge every participant, including those who speak in the name of liberation.

The Logos and Divine Revelation

Christianity offers more than a practical defense of logic. It provides an ontological foundation for the intelligibility of reality. The opening of John’s Gospel identifies Jesus Christ as the eternal Logos through whom all things were made, and Paul teaches that all things hold together in Christ (John 1:1-3; Colossians 1:17). The Logos is not an impersonal rational principle but the personal and eternal Word of God. Because the world is created through Him, reality possesses order rather than ultimate chaos. Created things have determinate natures, and the principles of being (i.e., laws of identity and noncontradiction) reflect the intelligible structure of reality rather than arbitrary conventions imposed upon an irrational world.

Human beings, made in the image of God, possess minds fitted to know the world He created. Sin and finitude limit our knowledge, but limitation is not the same as total skepticism or agnosticism. A person can know something truly without knowing it exhaustively. The Logos grounds both the objective world that is known and the rational creature who knows it. The unity of truth is therefore secured by the unity and faithfulness of God, who created the world, created the human mind, and communicates through general and special revelation.

The conflict becomes especially serious when dialectical impulses enter theology. Historic Christianity confesses a faith delivered to the saints and a God who communicates intelligible truth. Doctrine may develop in precision and application, but its truth does not arise from contradiction or become its opposite through historical transformation. Dialectical theology can alter this relationship by relocating revelation from objective divine communication to paradox, crisis, existential encounter, or the evolving consciousness of a religious community. Biblical language may remain while the authority that gives those words their meaning is gradually transferred from the divine speaker to the interpreter or community. This approach to theology has become the hallmark of neo-orthodoxy, post-liberalism, and many of the present-day hermeneutical approaches by both evangelical and non-evangelical scholars.

Contemporary identity-centered hermeneutics intensifies the problem. When meaning is controlled by race, sex, class, sexuality, or social status, divine revelation no longer addresses all people with a stable and publicly accessible message. Competing communities generate competing readings, and contradictions are explained as the products of different intersectional standpoints.. Carl F. H. Henry provides an important corrective at precisely this point. For Henry, the living God speaks in objective, intelligible, and propositional revelation. God does not reveal Himself exhaustively, but what He reveals is true. Divine mystery does not entail contradiction, and human finitude does not reduce theology to skepticism. Revelation carries authority because its source is the faithful and unchanging God.

Correspondence Truth and Public Life

The correspondence theory of truth is not an abstract principle reserved for philosophers. It makes correction, justice, and common life possible. A court must ask what actually happened. A physician must identify the condition a patient actually has. A historian must distinguish events from fictions, and a theologian must ask what God has actually revealed. In each case, sincerity and internal coherence are insufficient. A false account does not become true because its advocates find it meaningful or construct a consistent narrative around it.

Correspondence also places a limit upon power. If truth exists independently of politicians, institutions, and social movements, then every exercise of authority remains answerable to reality and moral judgments based upon the natural law. No government, political party, academic discipline, church, or activist movement can make falsehood true by commanding assent. A person may stand against an entire institution and still speak the truth because truth is not determined by counting votes or measuring influence. When truth becomes a function of struggle (or cultural Marxist struggle sessions), however, power gains the authority once assigned to reality. Those who control language acquire the ability to redefine justice, freedom, identity, and even human dignity and worth.

The crisis of truth is therefore inseparable from the crisis of freedom and the pursuit of liberty. Rational persuasion assumes that people share access to reality and can evaluate claims by common principles. When that confidence disappears, persuasion gives way to propaganda, moral formation gives way to ideological conditioning, and disagreement gives way to the struggle session of oppressive regimes. Opponents are no longer treated merely as people who may be mistaken. They become obstacles to historical progress whose resistance must be overcome. They must be overcome by psychological warfare, governmental control, and in extreme cases, death.

The Logos Against the Dialectic

Faith in the Crossfire argues that the deepest struggle of our age is not simply between political parties or competing cultural tribes. It is a conflict between two visions of reality. One begins with the Logos, receives reality as created and intelligible, and understands truth as conformity to what is. The other elevates contradiction, conflict, and transformation until truth becomes subordinate to the revolutionary process. Throughout the book, I follow this conflict from its philosophical foundations into cultural movements, modern theology, seminaries, churches, biblical interpretation, and evangelical institutions.

Christians should not answer this challenge by abandoning reason or retreating into private religious experience. Neither should they respond to one ideology with another will to power. The better path is to recover confidence that God is there, that He has spoken, and that His world can be known. Scripture must be received as divine revelation rather than treated as raw material for political reconstruction. Truth is not a synthesis produced by conflict or a possession created by personal experience. It is the conformity of the intellect to reality, and for the Christian that reality comes from the God who created through His Word and made Himself known in the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ.

I wrote Faith in the Crossfire to help both Christians and non-Christians recognize this conflict and recover the intellectual and theological resources needed to answer it. The argument presented here is one part of that larger case. Readers who want the historical genealogy, the detailed analysis of contemporary movements, and the constructive defense of objective truth and divine revelation will find them developed throughout the book.

About the Author

William C. Roach, Ph.D., is the author of Faith in the Crossfire: When a Dialectical Revolution Targets Christianity.

Dr. Roach is Dean of the Norman L. Geisler School of Apologetics at Veritas International University and Chair of Systematic Theology at Redeemer Seminary. He is the author or coauthor of several books on theology, philosophy, and Christian apologetics, including Defending Inerrancy, Hermeneutics as Epistemology, and Defending Evangelicalism. His work focuses on systematic theology, apologetics, biblical authority, epistemology, and the philosophical foundations of cultural movements.

Connect with William C. Roach: Website | Substack | X | YouTube

Learn more and purchase the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947929372

1. Introduction

The American Founders began with a created world, not with government. God, the Creator, made reality. Reality is an order that can be known. Human beings are part of that order, and separate from God. They are not raw material for a planner. They are not sovereign over truth. They are creatures with minds. They can see, judge, promise, err, and owe. Common sense, joined to reason, can grasp a portion of that order, including a portion of morality: life, agency, family, property, honesty, and duty.

Because they are creatures, human beings owe a duty to the Creator. That duty is prior to every government and every political order. No legislature invented it. No majority may cancel it. The individual must be free to discharge it. Rights exist for that reason. They are the claim against other men, including magistrates, that a person may fulfill the duty he already owes. They are therefore pre-political and unalienable. Government does not create them. Government is instituted to secure them.

From that duty follow liberty of conscience and the limits of civil power. From those limits follow self-government. If the duty is forgotten, rights become license or slogans. If the state enforces the duty as if the state were God, rights disappear into coercion.

Michael Novak called this kind of God a God of Rights. That conception appears, often without being named, in the Declaration of Independence and in the Virginia documents in which the argument was stated with the most care. It is not a creed test for citizenship. It is why individual freedom is not a gift of the magistrate, and why self-government is possible.

## 2. Rights Protect Duties

The Founders did not treat this duty as a private feeling. They defined religion as the duty owed to the Creator. Mason wrote it into the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776): “the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” Therefore “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” Madison repeated the definition in the *Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments* (1785). He drew the line of jurisdiction. The duty is prior to civil society in time and in obligation. A man is first a subject of the Governor of the Universe and only then a citizen. For Novak and Jefferson, the content of that duty is acknowledgement: gratitude and worship in spirit and truth, from a creature who knows he did not make the world or himself. Because the duty must be inward to be real, no magistrate can discharge it by proxy, and no law can manufacture it by fear. The right of conscience is the freedom required to do what is already owed.

The order of Mason’s sentence matters. Duty comes first. The right exists so the duty can be discharged. Madison stated why the right is unalienable. First, a person’s opinions follow the evidence contemplated by his own mind and cannot follow the dictates of other men. Second, “what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.” If freedom of religion is abused, “it is an offense against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.”

The same pattern holds beyond religion. Moral realism is the claim that duties are features of the created order, not preferences or products of a vote. A person has a duty to preserve life. The matching right is the right to life. A person has a duty to exercise judgment and agency. The matching right is liberty. A person has duties of family: to form a household, to raise children, to honor parents. The matching rights protect that household from other men and from the state. A person has a duty to provide and to keep what he has justly acquired. The matching right is property. A person has a duty to speak truly and to keep promises. The matching rights are speech and contract. Liberty of conscience is first because the duty to the Creator is first. The others follow from the same rule. The right exists so the duty can be discharged.

Modern talk treats rights as primary and duties as optional. The founding account runs the other way. An individual has a right against other men because he already has a duty that other men did not assign. No legislature created the duty. No majority may stand in for the person who owes it. No church using the civil sword may perform it on his behalf. If another person, church, or state forces the homage, two wrongs are committed at once: an injury to the individual, and an intrusion into a jurisdiction that belongs to God.

Thomas Jefferson made the same point in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Almighty God “hath created the mind free.” Attempts to influence it by punishments, burdens, or civil incapacitations “tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness.” They are a departure from the plan of the Author of religion, “who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either.” Force can produce outward compliance. It cannot produce conviction. A political order that confuses the two trains people to lie.

## 3. The Declaration’s Four Names

The Declaration of Independence names God four times: Nature’s God, Creator, Supreme Judge, and Providence. None of the names is a sectarian title. None is “Trinity,” “Redeemer,” or “Messiah.” The names are public names. Across the Declaration and the Virginia documents Novak finds a wider, “radically Jewish” vocabulary: Creator, Lawgiver, Governor, Judge, and Providence. “For the most part,” he wrote, “these are not names that could have come from the Greeks or Romans, but only from the Jewish Testament.” Scholars often call this Deism and stop thinking. These are not the names of a watchmaker who winds the world and walks away. They name a God who creates persons, endows them with rights, judges intentions, and acts in history.

### Nature’s God

The opening appeal is to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Nature is not a scenic backdrop. It is not a war of all against all. It is an order that can be known. Law is not merely the command of the stronger. There is a standard above kings and parliaments. A people may appeal from a human court to that standard. That is what makes independence an argument rather than a riot. If there is no law above the ruler, the ruler’s will is the last word, and “rights” are whatever he still permits.

### Creator

Rights are “endowed by their Creator.” They are not manufactured by society. They are not a privilege of blood or church membership. Because they are endowed, they are unalienable. A person cannot sell them. A parent cannot confiscate them. A government cannot invent their opposite and call it progress. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness name the field in which a person discharges the duties of a moral agent: preserving life, exercising judgment, forming a family, holding property, speaking truth, keeping promises. “Pursuit of happiness” is not a hunt for pleasant feelings. It is closer to what Aristotle called eudaimonia: a life well lived, the flourishing of a moral agent over a whole life. Happiness in that sense is activity in accord with virtue, not a mood the state can deliver. Government is instituted to secure these rights, not to redefine them.

### Supreme Judge

The signers appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” Human courts see outward action. They do not see motive. The founding generation knew that rebellion can be ambition dressed as liberty. They placed their intentions before a Judge who sees the inner forum. That appeal is not decoration. Conscience is answerable to God. No earthly tribunal has the last word on the heart.

### Providence

They conclude with “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” Providence is not fatalism. It is the claim that history is not meaningless and that liberty is not an accident. A people may act, suffer, and fail, and still have reason to hope that the order of things is not hostile to honest self-government. Without some such reliance, politics collapses into force plus rhetoric.

The four names describe a moral universe in which individuals are creatures with agency. There is a standard above the ruler, and a Judge above the faction that holds office. Limited government follows from that. Consent of the governed is the republican form given to the same fact: persons can judge, so they can authorize and replace rulers. Judgment is possible only if there is truth to judge by.

## 4. Five Characteristics of a God of Rights

Not every idea of God will support this structure. A god who is a stone, a storm, a tribe, or an unaccountable Will can demand ceremonies. He cannot ground unalienable rights of conscience. After quoting Virginia’s definition of religion, Novak asks the question the definition forces: “Which particular God is it who cares about what happens in our conscience? Not only what we do externally, but what goes on in our hearts. And not our hearts, exactly, but our minds, for we are moved to recognize these duties ‘by reason and conviction.’” Even Madison and Jefferson, he adds, “grounded religion liberty in the nature of a Jewish-Christian God of Rights.” Then he isolates five characteristics.

1. “God is defined as Spirit and Truth, not a thing, not a snake, nor rain, nor tree, nor stone, but logos and mind, where mind is understood as insight (light) and judgment.”

God is not a force of weather, a sacred object, or a tribal mascot. Logos means the world is intelligible. Mind means insight and judgment are possible. Rights rest on the possibility that truth can be recognized. They do not rest on raw submission to power.

2. “He is a judge of consciences, and not merely of outward action.”

Human authority can reach visible conduct. God reaches the inner act of judgment itself: motive, conviction, the suppression or acknowledgment of light. Outward compliance without inner assent is not the same thing as righteousness. A political order that treats the visible performance as the whole of religion has already mistaken the forum it is competent to govern.

3. “For Whom conscience is not coerced.”

The decisive judgment is inner, so it cannot be produced by force. Coercion can change behavior. It cannot change the verdict of conscience. A God who judges conscience cannot be served by methods that treat conscience as something to be broken or programmed. Faith extracted by fear is not faith. It is a public lie about a private act.

4. “For Whom acceptance by women and men must be free, and judgments are based in evidence for mind, not submission of will.”

Assent is an act of mind, not an act of crushed will. Evidence, reasons, and insight are the proper mode of approach. This rejects both “believe because I command it” and “believe against the light you actually have.” Error is possible. Delayed or incomplete seeing is not automatically rebellion. The standard is truth presented to mind, not uniformity of profession.

5. “Who allows for personal liberty, variation, dissent, difference. Some people see ‘light’ later than others. Only God judges.”

Earthly authorities may restrain harm. They may not claim the office of final judge over another person’s seeing. A God of Rights does not need a civil inquisition to complete His work.

These five points do one piece of political work. They make limited government follow from the nature of God rather than from taste. A God who is Mind, who judges the inner forum, who does not coerce conscience, who requires free assent on evidence, and who alone judges the timing of insight cannot be represented by a state or a church that treats dissent as something to extinguish.

Novak is careful about what this does and does not require of a citizen. “Clearly, it is not necessary for any American citizen to hold that the Jewish/Christian God is true. But it is necessary to understand the nature of the God to whom the Founders turned in grounding rights.” The five characteristics map that nature. They are not a creed test.

## 5. What Individual Freedom Is

Individual freedom is not the absence of every restraint. In any society, force is sometimes used: by government, by associations, and by individuals. The question is when force is justified. A free society applies force to protect persons in the discharge of their duties and rights. An authoritarian society applies force to produce belief, gratitude, or a required vision of the common good.

Freedom is independence aligned with morality, not a maximum number of approved choices. An authority can multiply options while destroying agency. It can feed, house, school, and instruct a population that no longer judges for itself. Common Sense Realism, set out in *Foundations of a Free Society*, holds that ordinary sense and reason can know a portion of reality, including basic morality: life, individual agency, family, private property, honesty, and duty. Those goods are not sectarian inventions. They are the field in which a person lives a moral life of his own accord.

Self-government has two layers, and they depend on each other. The first is government of the self: a person capable of judging, promising, repenting, and bearing consequences. The second is government by consent: a people capable of electing, limiting, and replacing rulers. If the state occupies the inner forum, voting and representation become a show. If the inner forum is treated as sovereign over truth itself, “conscience” becomes another word for appetite, and the first layer collapses. The founding solution is neither. Conscience is free from human coercion because it is not free from reality or from God.

Judgment has to be developed. A child does not start with it complete. A free people need persons who can tell truth from flattery, duty from appetite, and a real injury from a wounded pride. If that faculty atrophies, the second layer of self-government has nothing to stand on.

That is why the inner Judge matters for ordinary life, not only for worship. If the only audience is the policeman, men ask what they can get away with. If conscience is answerable to God, virtue when no one is watching is rational. A people who strive for that virtue become a high-trust people. Contracts can be short. Neighbors can be believed. Officials can be few. A people who strive only for what they can get away with become a low-trust people. Every promise needs a guard. Every market needs a monitor. The state grows because character has already failed. Force can punish the visible cheat. It cannot manufacture the unseen habit that makes force less necessary.

That is why liberty of conscience carries the other liberties. Speech is the public working of judgment. Association is the joining of persons who have judged together. Property is the material means of an independent life. Family is the first school of duty. If the magistrate may program conscience, each of these becomes a concession. If conscience is used as a license to harm others, each is consumed by the strongest faction.

## 6. The Limit of Human Jurisdiction

The founding argument draws a line between two forums. The inner forum is belief, conviction, the yes or no offered to truth. It is not the magistrate’s. The outer forum is action that touches other persons’ bodies, property, contracts, and peace. That is the magistrate’s proper concern.

Freedom of religion is therefore not an unlimited license to act. It is immunity of conscience from coercion, plus a strong presumption in favor of peaceful practice. The presumption yields where practice violates the equal rights of others or the minimum conditions of civil peace. Human sacrifice, enslavement, forced marriage, the punishment of exit, and the use of a congregation as cover for fraud or sedition are not protected “exercises.” They are harms. Restraining the hand is not judging the heart.

The opposite error is just as common. A state may claim to protect public order while occupying the inner forum: punishing blasphemy as such, requiring a profession, forbidding delayed insight, or treating dissent itself as a breach of the peace. That is the state playing God. Madison had already assigned the accounting for abuse of this freedom. It is rendered to God, not to man.

The same line explains why the Constitution could omit a sectarian name for God without becoming an atheist document. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” is a limit on Caesar. Limited government is not secularism in the modern sense of banishing the Creator from public reason. It is the refusal to let civil power complete a task that does not belong to it.

## 7. Which Faiths Can Bear This God

Two questions must be kept apart. The first is civil: who is protected by American law? The second is theological: which account of God can ground that law? The comparisons in this section follow Novak. A citizen need not hold that the Jewish and Christian God is true. He does need to understand the God to whom the Founders turned when they grounded rights. The rights of conscience cover those who reject the story. It does not follow that every doctrine of God can generate the doctrine.

The test is the five characteristics. Can the tradition say that God is Spirit and Truth; that He judges consciences, not merely rites; that conscience is not coerced; that assent follows evidence for the mind; and that only God judges delayed seeing? Where it cannot, it may still contain truths. It cannot be the theological ground of American self-government.

On that test, several accounts fail, and they fail for different reasons.

Hinduism and the older pantheisms fail the first mark. God is not Logos and Mind, separate from the world and judging the inner forum. The divine is power, cycle, or thing. Buddhism may not require a God at all. In Novak’s phrase, such traditions can be “satisfied by outward obeisance. Do your duty, and no one inquires into what your secret thoughts may be.”

Islam names a Creator distinct from the world, and still fails the fourth mark. Acceptance is submission of will, not assent of mind to evidence. “In Islam, omnipotence requires unbounded will, not limited by laws. Submission, not reason, is essential.” Where the magistrate is assigned the care of inner uniformity, it fails the third mark as well.

Rabbinic Judaism can fail the fifth mark when communal law is treated as the last judge of belief, and dissent from that law is a matter for coercion of the inner forum. The Jewish Scriptures give the paper its names for God. A politics that finishes God’s judgment of the heart does not.

Catholic integralism fails the third and fifth marks. It asks the civil sword to suppress religious error and to complete the church’s teaching office. *Dignitatis Humanae* (1965) rejects that use of the state: the person is not to be forced to act against his own beliefs in religious matters, and the civil power lacks competence over the inner act of faith. A church may still teach. It may not conscript Caesar to judge the heart.

What can bear the God of Rights is the discovery isolated in the Jewish and Christian Bible. Every story is a story of “what happens in the arena of the human will.” “Liberty is the reason God made the universe.” God “wanted at least one creature to be able, not as a slave but as a free woman and man, to reciprocate His proffered friendship.” Historic free-church Protestantism, especially the Baptist rule that God alone is Lord of the conscience, matches the five characteristics with unusual clarity. So do Jewish and Christian streams that keep the inner forum out of the magistrate’s hands.

Persons remain protected even where their theology cannot generate the argument. The conception “is intended to be applied to all human individuals, far beyond the ranks of Jews and Christians: to Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, etc.” Compatibility is about the source of the law, not about the civil standing of persons. The teaching judges the failures. The failures do not rewrite the teaching.

## 8. Eternal Vigilance

A republic can keep the outer forms of the founding (elections, courts, a bill of rights) after it has discarded the inner logic. Rights then float. They attach to whatever cause is strongest. Conscience becomes a demand that other people pretend. Duty becomes an accusation aimed at one’s opponents. The Creator becomes a mascot for a faction, or an embarrassment to be edited out of the Declaration. When duty to the Creator is forgotten, men stop asking what they owe and start asking what they can get away with. That is how a high-trust republic turns into a supervised population.

The correction is not a new established church. It is the recovery of a few self-evident relations. Persons are creatures with minds. Minds are made for truth, not for programming. Duties to the Creator, and the natural duties that common sense can see (life, agency, family, property, honesty), are prior to civil society. Government exists to secure the rights that protect those duties. It does not exist to save souls, manufacture virtue on demand, or decide which insights may arrive late.

Self-government begins where that line is kept. It ends where either the state or a private power claims jurisdiction over conscience. The God of Rights is the name for the limit that makes a free people possible. Only God judges the heart. Caesar may police the street. Between those two sentences lies the American idea of liberty.

Jon grew up in Illinois, computer science school in California, career as software developer, now in Florida after the lockdowns. He is a Common Sense Realist / Second Enlightenment advocate. You can find him on X at

@shootingsoul

## Notes

1. Michael Novak, “The Jewish and Christian Principles of the Founders,” in Daniel N. Robinson and Richard N. Williams, eds., *The American Founding: Its Intellectual and Moral Framework* (New York: Continuum, 2012). Unless otherwise noted, quotations of the five characteristics and of the Virginia definition are from that essay.

2. The comparisons among religions in §7 follow Michael Novak, “The Faith of the Founding,” *First Things* (April 2003), and “The Jewish and Christian Principles of the Founders.” The self-abnegating application of the rights to Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists is from Michael Novak and Jana Novak (his daughter and co-author), “Faith of Our Fathers,” American Enterprise Institute (October 25, 2006). See also Michael Novak, *On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding* (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002).

3. Virginia Declaration of Rights, art. 16 (June 12, 1776); James Madison, *Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments* (1785); Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1777/1786); Declaration of Independence (1776); Second Vatican Council, *Dignitatis Humanae* (December 7, 1965).

4. Jon Guerin, “Foundations of a Free Society,” *New Discourses* (August 18, 2025). Quotations in §5 on objective reality and on freedom as “independence aligned with morality” are from that essay. Common Sense Realism is defined there as the claim that ordinary sense and reason can know a portion of reality, including the basic moral goods of life, individual agency, family, private property, honesty, and duty.

Introduction

In recent times, many have become aware of the proliferation of the following in western societies: group classification, ways of knowing, identity-centered truth, increasingly wasteful redistribution schemes, loss of individual rights, increased taxation, and commitments made by incumbent parties to international organizations. What do they all have in common? They are all aspects of a society organizing itself on a collectivist understanding of human life.^[1]

While ostensibly offered as solutions to pressing problems like “hate”, homelessness, inadequate infrastructure, and a stagnant economy and declining quality of life for the average citizen (particularly in Canada), the solutions never seem to convincingly demonstrate efficacy for their intended purpose. But is that really the case? I suggest that they all make progress toward a common purpose, collectivism itself, and that this supersedes the needs of the human being. Worse still, they organize all humans into a system with its own purpose and intentions which runs as a zombie process, but without being a coherent entity in and of itself.

We Need Clarity

I’ve spent time thinking about those of a collectivist perspective, and not necessarily by their own declaration, but as it being my opinion to allege of them. It began with those whom I have an intimate relationship, but broadened over time to those who react to politically-relevant utterances and appear to believe the things they say and speak in good faith. Despite my own cognitive biases, I tried to identify what common elements might exist amongst them because it had become difficult to ascertain not just the authenticity of the discourse, but whether they, in operating from what they believed to be authentic, had become unable to participate authentically (I’ve come to refer to this as initiation into cult collectivism).

I was curious about the qualities associated with “each side” of the supposed political divide as I had found that changes in culture over time had made radical statements and initiatives more popular, and it didn’t coincide with the qualities assumed of certain political dispositions.

Look, I get it, there seem to be leftist and rightist attitudes, sentiments, and ideas, and they seem to proliferate according to the political orientations of a given movement, but these are larger scale phenomena, and they tend to be whatever is most visible through politicians, political movements within organizations (that are overwhelmingly leftist), and the most politically radical activists whose feet are on the ground. But that’s not the personal experience we each have in our day to day lives. What I mean is, that isn’t the interpersonal experience we have in the most important social practices we engage in, which are one-on-one exchanges with the people of our personal lives. It is in these situations where we observe most intimately the personality and psyche of an individual alongside their political proclamations. It is here that things don’t match the common view, and where getting over our sociopolitical hangups offer the ripest ground for resolving conflicts and coming to agreement on what progress should mean for a healthy society.

Unfortunately, many of us are at the place of deciding whether those close to us can be trusted to take part in mediation of our points of contention, rather than the details of mediation themselves.

That said, it’s important to remind ourselves that we can still be willing to take an optimistic approach to life. At one point, I decided to ignore “politics”, so to speak. I don’t just mean the day-to-day current thing being forced down our throats, but even the ideas-side of things, which too seemed to be an endlessly unproductive battle. Politics in general serves little more than a means to capture attention, diminish meaningful productive drive, and bury everyone in a pit of dissatisfaction and despair. And hopefully, it was just the sensationalism at play; I assumed that the negative characteristics were particularly more visible to me out as I was actively seeking them out.^[2]

Instead, I focused on technology, which is both fun and necessary to make life better for everyone. I had ambitious aspirations about using technology to improve the world while developing myself, building a career, and supporting a family.

But then, the COVID era began, with many defining features, such as snitch lines, and I felt I hadn’t done my part to help those close to me understand the potential dangers of failing to look at new and ongoing issues through multiple lenses. I felt like I had missed an opportunity to steer things in a better direction, if even just in demonstration among those in my immediate sociopolitical milieu, and that my simplified drive and focus had squandered the chance to avoid worsening the social conflicts that appeared to be worsening at an accelerating pace.^[3]

Though grappling with guilt, I knew everyone is both a participant and not solely to blame. I hadn’t done all I could to try and stop the sociopolitical transformation of society, but I had at least tried with a reasonable effort when confronted with relevant situations. Nevertheless, if things were to ever get really bad, I wouldn’t know what effect I might have had.

As such, there’s a better position to take. In anticipation of future uncertainty affecting my children, I wrote a book on Collectivism. But why was it relevant, and what led me to believe I had anything important to say about the subject?

We Need Agency

In the midst of the continuous onslaught of political agitation, cult initiation, mind-numbing recreational excess, and institutionally-directed self-interpretation, we might wish to take a moment to consider what the future prospect of self-directed thought will look like. Many of us have children, and wonder whether they, and their peers, will have the tooling necessary to rely on themselves regardless of the nature of society, but particularly so in the face of institutions which might not be operating such as to respect their best interests.

How do we preserve agency in the midst of such concerns? Identifying the problem is one part of our strategy, and self-evident from the subject of this article. Another part is identifying the skills and modes of development which lead to endowing humans with those capabilities we deem valuable, but that is beyond the scope here. Our interest here is understanding why it’s important to push back on proposals which limit our agency, how to identify them, and what we need to know to give others a chance to think openly about these issues.

Offerings

Through my own attempt to work through those issues, I’ve come to focus on some areas of study and develop concepts that I believe are helpful for us to truly make progress and preserve essential aspects of the human condition in the midst of societies which continue to develop technologically.

Before getting into them too deeply, let’s reflect on some experiences many of us have plausibly gone through these past few years, which help us understand the nature of the issue, and what is missing in people’s understanding of it.

Relationships

What We Had and Lost

Our relationships are important to each of us. Even in the case of the hermit who has shunned every form of relation in favour of solitude, their characterization of themselves, their life, and perhaps even the task they are working through, is contextualized by the relationships they have engaged in—be they the ones they currently participate in, those that they wish to improve, or even a relationship with the divine, to the exclusion of others. Even those eschewing relationships altogether have chosen that path because of the relationships they have had. The fact of the matter is that, if you’re reading this article, you’ve likely experienced a disintegration in the nature of at least some of your relationships. It may have prompted you to consider new views, or to make decisions that you were previously apprehensive to make, and you’re now interested in what can be done to bring back the prospect of better relations in the future.

Many of us experienced a breakdown in the quality of communication throughout our lives, but especially with our family and friends. Institutions and political organizations are already something operating through the abstraction of an administrative body, and beholden to commitments which inform their purpose and continued viability, thus it’s natural to not keep the highest expectations for the relations that are formed through them. But once our personal relationships begin to break down, we are liable to enter into existential crises and ask big questions about our purpose and whether there is a viable prospect of a fulfilling life.

For most of us, the summit of tension and collapse of trust occurred in the past few years, but was it really something that began suddenly? Did those we related to believe the hype and suddenly take up a stance that was incompatible with the rest of us? Doubtful. I am sure most would agree that the rift began long ago and had even been, at one point, modest disagreements that were perfectly healthy to express and discuss. Was it that the nature of disagreement was doomed to fail? Or was there a form of radicalization at play that began to express itself in disagreements which wouldn’t have otherwise posed a problem for the relationship? All things considered equal, we should consider the latter for at least some of them.

How We Lost It

I argue that it’s not the fact of there being a disagreement which has become untenable, but that the use of our language has become incompatible as a consequence of cult radicalization—disparately idiosyncratic vis-a-vis esoteric vs exoteric use of language []. This proliferates a deepened attachment to a metaphysical perception which demands totalizing conformity as a prerequisite of the initiate to accept their peer. Unfortunately, the nature of a totalizing belief system is that the conformity is itself impossible, as it will never attain a state of uniformity, and such an end will inevitably be sought as the intuition of the initiate will never be satisfied.^[4]

It may sound hyperbolic to state it as such, but if the theoretical predicate to one subject’s conception of collective is not so important, the concept itself not going to be persistently adhered to and will come to be released and forgotten. If we’re talking about a worldview about political society that is maintaining itself across time, it must necessarily become totalizing for a given subject, and if it’s shared by a significant set of people or personages revered or otherwise embedded in that subject’s life, then it catalyzes their certainty in pursuing passionate entrenchment yet further.

Where We Go

So what now? Do we just give up on those with whom we no longer have a healthy mode of communication? I am not one to give up hope, and I remain optimistic in the long term, but the immediate course of action is to understand how things went wrong, recognize the tooling that has induced and widened the rift, and develop the means to defuse dialectical bombs (no, you needn’t defuse them all) so we can maintain focus and clarity while passing on a potent arsenal of logic and reason to those with whom we are still able to communicate.

Perception

Collectivism

What is collectivism? Is it just a philosophy that people discover and read about? Is it the case that the logic of such a philosophy makes sense to some and not others, and that those who follow it, convinced by its logic, become the collectivists? Perhaps there’s some sort of a balance between individualist philosophy and collectivist philosophy that, through juxtaposition and deliberation, lead to the advancement of human thought and that this corresponds with development of society and technology—diversity of thought!

Though we can analyze a philosophy or ideology and make the case about whether or not it is “collectivist”, that is not my approach to understanding collectivism, nor do I believe that it’s useful in defusing the problem which has led to the breakdown of relationships and empowerment of the state to become increasingly authoritarian.

I believe collectivism has to be understood as the conceptual phenomenon plausibly perceived by the human mind. Why? Because humans aren’t orienting themselves according to the most provably correct doctrine, but through what occupies their mind, what is being focused upon, and how this affects them biophysiologically, which is to say the manner in which it informs how they feel. My book examines this, and the basic premise is that our minds are individuated by the nature of our biological embodiment, and constrained by its limits in spacetime. To perceive a collective is to cognize a change in the state of reality to a different potential permutation, to desire its attainment as a morally indicated endpoint. The semantics for the concept of collective are what we are most engaged in when we come into sociopolitical conflict and, for many, it’s the arguing of those details which comprises the waging of war for culture and politic. The details can be important, particularly for working through challenging junctions imposed by force bearing ramifications on the prospect of human freedom and liberty, but it’s important to get the basic understanding correct, because any notion that a collectivist mode of organizing society is wrong not because one might be better conducive to production or flourishing, but because adherence to the logic of a collectivist view of human life implies a position that is metaphysically distinct from human experience, which must be perceived as an individual.

To simplify, what all that means is that the proposition of a collective needs to be examined for its coherence and logical consistency. The concept of a collective is only coherent if the construct of the collective is meaningful. The collective, however, is not something tangible in the real world. It can be spoken of, referenced, and implied, but it can only exist in the mind of the subject, or as can be deduced through the application of force to other individuals whereby the configuration of their bodies and composition of utterances can be made to present the aesthetic of a collective. Beyond that, however, it is not something tangible and, thus, to compel all of mankind to its construction, and the moral objectives that can be deduced from its specification, is to doom all of mankind to its own destruction on the basis of reifying fantasy.

Still too abstract? It is abstract. The entire premise of collectivism always remains abstract, because every potential participant will always have their own perception of what it is, and what it means to be on the right side of its proposition.

But here lies the rub: if you are against collectivism, you’ll find that, in the events of your own life, the insistence upon it will yield an opportunity for you to best intervene in the following two forms:

1. Policy

2. A true-believing interlocutor

Please note, it’s not always worth your time to try and intervene. Activists are there to help you waste time, lose focus, lose hope, and make a fool of yourself to any who might notice. Rectifying the poor policies of a sinking ship be of little value once you take your last breath and are sucked into the void.^[5]

For those situations that you deem worthy, however, you’ll find that advocacy for collectivism, in spite of a well-accepted understanding that it comprises a philosophy of prioritizing the “needs of the many” over that of the individual, will necessarily presume that the model of being indicated by the collective—the identity of the in-group, marginalized, or what have you—is somehow providing an authentic reference to actual people. This is false, as the uniqueness of any living being is infinitely intricate, and advocates of collectivism must write-off any exception that fits the superficial qualification of their model, which will always exist.

The model of collective is the rationale to dismiss any individual who does not accord with the view of the subject imposing the collective standard and, as the experience through one’s perceptual frame is the only aspect of existence for which a human can have faith as being real, collectivism is always dehumanizing. To be pointedly aware of this fundamental flaw will help you avoid a misstep when bombarded with colourful, complicated, and authoritative language which threatens to paint you as incompetent and unprincipled.

Cognizing the Collective

Collectives aren’t empathetic, altruistic, selfless, or charitable. What they are is self-destructive, self-deprecative, and anti-human. Most of all, to insist on adherence to a collective is, as an act by one who cognizes it, selfish and delusional.

To cognize the collective is to imply or elucidate a structure representing systemic state, correspondingly-indicated objects, and temporal potential. A demarcation of systemic state, and the greater scope of system that includes that which is within vs that which is without. A predicate of what can be within, and the meaning of a human’s placement; it is the judgment of verifying humanity. That its effects have not yet been expressed in natural order denotes its temporal potential.

The collective symbolizes a desire for change and the capacity to evaluate human beings. One cannot cognize the collective and not also conceive of their relation to it, as part of it, and as wishing to be transformed through it: wishing to be subject to a transformation of the environment informed by it, the context of which is adequately described by interpretation through its premises. Through championing what one has cognized, one accepts a structure of oneself, one’s life, and that of those indicated by the collective model (which, given that it is a collection of humans, implies all humans). Additionally, one accepts the possibility of change biasing one’s focus through the declaration of the collective. In championing the proposition of a collective, one distributes a weight of valence articulating a desire for progress along the dimension most relevant to whatever theory forms the basis of the collective, and conveys a form of resolution being sought.

It’s Just Society!

You’ll always hear activists say that collectivism is just the reality of living amongst other people, that individualism is the blatant and simplistic disregard for the presence of other beings, and that this is proven because we follow rules to live together.

That people accord with the laws of that land is a weak standard of what a collective is, because it’s basically coming into agreement that we follow one set of rules to protect property and sustain the ability for one pursue their affairs. But if that qualified “collectivism”, then there’d be no need for anyone to moan about anything beyond those laws and their equal application to the plurality of humans in a given jurisdiction. Once you bring an ideology, a material specification to classify of the body, and a basis for morality inferred from separation of types of humans, beyond the constraint of whether or not they are citizens of the country, then we put forward a theory of knowledge, content of mind, description of character and structure of morality for those within vs without. This becomes a test of who is sufficiently human. This is why dehumanization is a feature of collectivism.^[6]

No Collective, Only Perceptual Frame

Cognized Collective Model (CCM)

The concept of a collective can never exist tangibly as a real, perceiving construct, but will instead be limited to exist as an abstract concept, and as the imagination of any individual who generates a reference to the concept of a collective as expressed in their own cognition.

To include anyone else in that moment of cognition is to project one’s own beliefs about the instance of perception and content of mind and assign it to that person, such that they can be conceived as one’s projected extension of self. There is not even the possibility of ascertaining that one’s projected manifestation of another could be accurate, as there is no verification of perception and no collective perception. It is entirely a ruse and cannot develop beyond that, but to champion it insists on my description.

To truly acknowledge the existence of another will always remain a challenge, regardless of whether one champions collectivism, or has clarity about the fact of them perceiving reality as an individual. At best, one can assume that others have a perception, the presence of an environment that exists independent of one’s perception and will, and that their perceptual frame is continuously engaged in, even if attempts to verify through correspondence are undertaken. As such, the fact of one being embedded in their perceptual frame means they can ultimately override any sense of constraint, should they choose to. That makes it one’s responsibility to perceive correctly, for themselves, but through this responsibility too comes one’s agency.^[7]

Paradox of the Perceptual Frame

The Perceptual Frame refers not just to human embodiment but the human constraints to the experience and, most importantly, how to model this concept so we can correct the erroneous assumptions being made about human identity. That is to say, while the perceptual frame describes an instance of consciousness embodied in spacetime with volitionally directable focus and a faculty to process and abstract information, any attempt to reify an enumerated identity is itself an abstraction whose reference can be used to compel the elision and consideration of the actual instance of being. Referring to the model of Perceptual Frame is necessary to remind ourselves of our unique, individuated experience, and the manner in which we are able to act and acquire knowledge. Supposing that the Perceptual Frame applies to all other humans is the minimum act of faith necessary not only to extend dignity to our fellow interlocutors, but to maximize the potential to reasonably apply logic in our interactions. Any attempt to inform our view of another using an enumerated model of identity is necessarily fictitious, fantastical, and doomed to informing erroneous deductions.

The Perceptual Frame needs to be considered in the context of the SAFKT model, which is an acronym for the fundamental conditions of human experience: Senses, Abstraction, Finitude, Kill/Knowledge of death, Time/Temporality. It is against this contextual understanding that we paradoxically find both the means to best mitigate the limitations of human observation as well as the susceptibility to delusion. The latter of these, our susceptibility to delusion, is what primes cult behaviour which, through proliferation, is the fundamental basis of collectivism.

Consequences

Operating through the human Perceptual Frame, with its intrinsic capabilities that differentiate it from the other organisms we know and love, is the ease at which we can entrench and complicate our delusions. To best illustrate this, it’s helpful to contextualize it with the phenomenon of cult formation. A cult is not a material object, and though organizations and clubs that can be deemed to be cults may have documented pledges and related literature, a cult is ultimately a concept to understand the group dynamics humans are liable to engage in.

Cult initiation occurs linguistically, inviting people into community where they perform activities as praxis. The praxis is the activism, often as an activity already meaningful to them. Performing the activity induces you into crises bound to the cause of the collective. All initiates are committed to solving the objectives of the collective, and these objectives form the cult specification.

The proposition to instantiate the cult occurs as the syntactic propagation of delusion from the initiator. The initiating subject, conceiving the potential reflection of the delusion, cognizes a difference between those who accord with the expression, and those who do not (those of and not of the collective). This will always remain the case, regardless of the degree to which the collective is formalized.

Commitment to and participation with the collective varies greatly, but the point at which we evaluate it is in its potential to compel the conformity of others. The collective is not recreational. It’s not merely a group activity, and not just symbolic. As the logic of a collective pursues resolution, its relevance and coherence can only be maintained insofar as it can be insisted upon for a moral purpose. This means that if its premises are adopted by the state, its objectives become the purpose of the citizen and, in the most charitable case, a proxy of one’s humanity. In a more extreme case, it becomes a test of who is truly human.

End of part 1

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

Aoife. Collectivism Is Just Interaction with the Community Really. X, 2026.

Blum, Lawrence. “I’m Not a Racist, but…”: The Moral Quandary of Race. Cornell University Press, 2002.

Buckshi, Emmanuel Rajinder. Tyranny of We: The Selfishness of Collectivism. 2026. https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Collectivism-Emmanuel-Rajinder-Buckshi/dp/1067783725.

Coughlin, Stephen. The Narrative Arc. Political Warfare Briefing, Unconstrained Analytics, 2020.

.

Coughlin, Stephen. Truth Bombs Are Actions in the Blast Zone. X (Twitter), 2025.

.

FrostWave. All Society Is Collectivist. X, 2026.

.

Gaudry, Adam, and Danielle Lorenz. “Indigenization as Inclusion, Reconciliation, and Decolonization: Navigating the Different Visions for Indigenizing the Canadian Academy.” AlterNative 14, no. 3 (2018): 218–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180118785382.

Haslam, Nick. “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology.” Psychological Inquiry 27, no. 1 (2016): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418.

Iao. Every State or Society Is Collectivist by Definition. X, 2026.

.

Lindsay, James. The Current Thing Did Not Take Place. New Discourses Podcast, 2023. https://newdiscourses.com/2023/11/current-thing-did-not-take-place/.

OECD. Revenue Statistics 2025 — Canada. OECD Publishing, 2025. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/12/revenue-statistics-2025-country-notes_3708be73/canada_3aa043fb/795aaca9-en.pdf.

Pardy, Bruce. “Meet the New ‘Human Rights’ — Where You Are Forced by Law to Use ‘Reasonable’ Pronouns.” National Post, June 19, 2017. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-meet-the-new-human-rights-where-you-are-forced-by-law-to-use-reasonable-pronouns-like-ze-and-zer.

Pardy, Bruce. “Racial Discounts for Violent Criminals Was Inevitable in Equity-Obsessed Canada.” National Post, March 22, 2026. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-racial-discounts-for-violent-criminals-was-inevitable-in-equity-obsessed-canada.

Pirro, Andrea L. P. “Far Right: The Significance of an Umbrella Concept.” Nations and Nationalism 29, no. 1 (2023): 101–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12860.

Shiao, Jiannbin, and Ashley Woody. “The Meaning of ‘Racism’.” Sociological Perspectives 64, no. 4 (2021): 495–517. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121420964239.

Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Free Press, 1952.

University of Winnipeg. Indigenous Course Requirement. Institutional policy, 2016. https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/indigenous/indigenous-course-requirement/.

Willing, Jon. “City’s Call Centre Log Provides Snapshot of Ottawans’ Top Irritants.” Ottawa Citizen, January 20, 2021. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/citys-call-centre-log-provides-snapshot-of-ottawans-top-irritants.

^[1]Adam Gaudry and Danielle Lorenz, “Indigenization as Inclusion, Reconciliation, and Decolonization: Navigating the Different Visions for Indigenizing the Canadian Academy,” AlterNative 14, no. 3 (2018): 218–27, https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180118785382; University of Winnipeg, Indigenous Course Requirement, Institutional policy, 2016, https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/indigenous/indigenous-course-requirement/; Bruce Pardy, “Meet the New ‘Human Rights’ — Where You Are Forced by Law to Use ‘Reasonable’ Pronouns,” National Post, June 19, 2017, https://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-meet-the-new-human-rights-where-you-are-forced-by-law-to-use-reasonable-pronouns-like-ze-and-zer; Bruce Pardy, “Racial Discounts for Violent Criminals Was Inevitable in Equity-Obsessed Canada,” National Post, March 22, 2026, https://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-racial-discounts-for-violent-criminals-was-inevitable-in-equity-obsessed-canada; OECD, Revenue Statistics 2025 — Canada (OECD Publishing, 2025), https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/12/revenue-statistics-2025-country-notes_3708be73/canada_3aa043fb/795aaca9-en.pdf.

^[2]James Lindsay, The Current Thing Did Not Take Place, New Discourses Podcast, 2023, https://newdiscourses.com/2023/11/current-thing-did-not-take-place/.

^[3]Jon Willing, “City’s Call Centre Log Provides Snapshot of Ottawans’ Top Irritants,” Ottawa Citizen, January 20, 2021, https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/citys-call-centre-log-provides-snapshot-of-ottawans-top-irritants.

^[4]Lawrence Blum, “I’m Not a Racist, but…”: The Moral Quandary of Race (Cornell University Press, 2002); Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Psychological Inquiry 27, no. 1 (2016): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418; Jiannbin Shiao and Ashley Woody, “The Meaning of ‘Racism’,” Sociological Perspectives 64, no. 4 (2021): 495–517, https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121420964239; Andrea L. P. Pirro, “Far Right: The Significance of an Umbrella Concept,” Nations and Nationalism 29, no. 1 (2023): 101–12, https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12860; Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Free Press, 1952).

^[5]Stephen Coughlin, The Narrative Arc, Political Warfare Briefing, Unconstrained Analytics, 2020,

; Stephen Coughlin, Truth Bombs Are Actions in the Blast Zone, X (Twitter), 2025,

.

^[6]Iao, Every State or Society Is Collectivist by Definition, X, 2026,

; FrostWave, All Society Is Collectivist, X, 2026,

; Aoife, Collectivism Is Just Interaction with the Community Really, X, 2026,

.

^[7]Emmanuel Rajinder Buckshi, Tyranny of We: The Selfishness of Collectivism (2026), https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Collectivism-Emmanuel-Rajinder-Buckshi/dp/1067783725.

The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by https://econamericas.com/ Fergus Hodgson, CAIA

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The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by https://econamericas.com/ Fergus Hodgson, CAIA

The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by https://econamericas.com/ Fergus Hodgson, CAIA

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The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by

https://econamericas.com/

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The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by

https://econamericas.com/

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The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by

https://econamericas.com/

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The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by

https://econamericas.com/

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The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by https://econamericas.com/

Nein Kings? More Like, Nine Kings.

Greetings and salutations! Remember the “No Kings” protests (which I’d call a color revolution operation more than a protest)? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Ostensibly, it was a protest held in defense of our democracy against being attacked by those who see themselves as kings.

Two things are wrong with that framing. We have kings. And the democracy isn’t ours.

I’ll spend the rest of this article earning both halves of that, but I need to hand you a tool first, and the tool is a concept I want you carrying forward: government is applied metaphysics. I mentioned this back in an earlier article, Abuse and Disabuse, and I want to expound upon it here, as it is a load-bearing concept in my system of thought.

Government Is Applied Metaphysics

What do I mean when I say that government is applied metaphysics? I mean that the very concept of government is built on metaphysical premises. Where there is two men, there is government (so no, you can’t exist without it unless you’re living in the woods like a nymph). Don’t mistake me for saying this as a figure of speech, as I’m being literal here. Government applies (by force, if necessary) and instantiates a given metaphysic. Don’t believe me? Tell me, if we’re a Constitutional republic or Constitutional democracy (I’ll address that later), why does the text of the Constitution no longer have to change for the application of that Constitution to change? It’s because the text matters less than the metaphysical and ontological premises being instantiated. This is where most people stop short in their thought, attributing this problem to activist judges, corrupt politicians, and the like. I think the issue runs deeper than that, and stopping bad actors in government one at a time leaves the foundation untouched. Let’s dive further.

Every law answers a metaphysical or ontological question before it answers a legal one. What is a person? What is a right? What is a marriage? And so on. All the way down to your speeding ticket that you were issued for going five over in a school zone. Courts rule on these metaphysical questions on an hourly basis; philosophers have argued them for millennia. The difference is that the courts have the power of the state behind their decisions. Your neighbor’s opinion about what a human being is, is an opinion. The state’s opinion about what a human being is, is backed by those shiny bracelets that the police love so much (handcuffs, for the uninitiated).

This means that neutrality is unavailable; to think otherwise is a utopian position. A legal system must answer the first principle questions in order to have a basis from which to operate; answering them commits the state to a given metaphysical system; the system then enforces that metaphysics on everyone inside its jurisdiction, including the people who reject it.

Here’s the part that turns all of this from a philosophy lecture into your Tuesday afternoon. A document does nothing. Ink is inert. The Constitution has never once arrested a man, seized an account, closed a business, or told a school district what it may teach. Between the text and your life stands a person holding an office, and that person has to decide what the words require before he can act on them. Every application of law, every single one, runs through a human being performing that translation.

Which means the operative law of a country is the text as filtered through the metaphysics of whoever holds the office. The Constitution hasn’t changed since 1992, yet the translation of metaphysics into our everyday life continues unabated.

So look at the artifact itself. Why is the Constitution written? Why does it exist as a text at all? England ran for centuries without a written constitution and runs that way still, governed by accumulated statute, custom, and precedent that no one ever gathered into a single document. The founders knew that, as they were Englishmen in every sense that mattered, yet they broke with English practice on this specific point, deliberately, at considerable effort. Why do this?

Because of what they believed about reality.

Each government is a mechanism by which a given metaphysic is brought into the physical reality. The artifacts a regime leaves behind (and the context that surrounds them) will tell you which metaphysics it was operating on. A written constitution is one such artifact. Writing a standard down makes three claims about the way reality works, whether the men doing the writing notice they’re making them or not.

1. There is an objective standard. There is something for words to correspond to, and it existed before anyone showed up with any given grievance.

2. It is accessible to whoever reads it. No mediator required, no special faculty, other than the context in which the law was written and fluency in the language.

3. The officer applying it can be measured against it. Which means he can be wrong. Which means he can be corrected (theoretically).

We shall expand and expound on those three concepts.

Exhibit A: Originalism Versus Living Constitutionalism

For example, let’s take originalism versus living constitutionalism. This is a hilariously silly dispute on its face, as it’s asking “does the law mean what is written, or should the judge have carte blanche to rewrite the law to get the best outcomes?” “Best” being defined by the judiciary, of course.

This is an “ends justify the means” style of thinking that subverts the whole point of a Constitution; that is, to be written down and checked against as an agreed-upon standard.

The Constitution has seven articles, twenty-seven amendments, at roughly 7,600 words. That very document recorded the manifestation of a federal government of limited, enumerated powers, and that government has metastasized into a continent-spanning administrative apparatus that manages you as a cog in a vast machine. Wha? What happen? The same words are being interpreted via very different metaphysics, boyo.

The Revolution That Left the Furniture Where It Was

Chief Justice John Marshall understood this in 1803 when he decided Marbury v. Madison, the case that established the power of a court to strike down an act of Congress, and he built the argument on writtenness itself. The powers of the legislature are both defined and limited, he wrote, and the reason those limits were committed to writing was so “that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten.” That is the whole justification for judicial review. Judicial review is the mechanism that says the Court may check Congress because the text is fixed and legible, and a fixed legible text can be held up against an act to see whether they match. The power that the modern Court uses to make the text mean nothing in particular was originally justified by the text meaning something in particular. Alanis would call it ironic whereas I call it a metaphysical revolution that took place inside a document that never changed a jot or a tittle.

Go back to those three claims and watch what the practice looks like now.

1. The standard lives in the mind of the officer (call it the mens rea of the bench). There is nothing for the words to correspond to until a court announces which parts of the text it seeks to emphasize and which parts it will ignore.

2. Access runs through the men. What the words require is learned by studying the officers instead of the text (which doesn’t matter so much to the officer), and the text gets cited afterward as a justification, usually secondary to the goal of the officer doing the interpretation.

3. Nothing outside the officer measures him. Error becomes a thing only his colleagues are positioned to declare, and they declare it rarely. Who can tell a judge that he is wrong but another judge?

What we have instead of a standard is bias, be it personal or procedural, and bias is inaccessible because it exists only in the mind of the person applying it, shifting with his mood and temperament.

This “living” Constitutionalism facilitates the skinsuiting of the Constitution into new and amorphous forms. For most of the last half century, one such form held that abortion was protected by the 14th Amendment as a “private” matter (that ends a human life), while gun laws weren’t really “infringements” against the 2nd Amendment (because they were “reasonable” in the 21st century). An unwritten right was backed by the highest court in the land, whereas a right written down in plain English got weighed against whatever the era found sensible.

Therefore, the question starts as “who interprets the law?” on its face, but when more clearly stated, it becomes “who defines reality for 340 million people?”

What That Makes a Judge

What does this do to the man in the robe?

If the words no longer fix the meaning, somebody has to supply meaning, and that somebody is whoever happens to be holding the case. At that moment he isn’t so much consulting a standard as he is issuing one, and the only people positioned to review what he issued are other men holding the same office under the same premises.

They have the last word amongst men. That’s what royal means. It has nothing to do with crowns or ermine or bloodlines, and everything to do with where the appeal stops.

This leads to the following question:

Who is educated in the whims of the judges?

You cannot be. Nobody can be. A standard that doesn’t exist until it’s applied to you cannot be studied in advance, cannot be conformed to, cannot be planned around. What can be studied is the men. Their moods, their leanings, their clerks, their circuit, their favored tests, the arguments that worked on them last term. That is rarified knowledge that only comes from existing in their world, within their ranks. You can’t just read the Constitution and expect it to be applied - that would be madness...wouldn’t it? The judges keep society intact, after all. That is their true job, which is why no one will listen to your interpretation of the plain language of the document in question.

We were forewarned about this, way back in yesteryear.

In 1788 a fellow writing as Brutus (a pretty smart one, generally attributed to Robert Yates) warned New York that the proposed judiciary would answer to nobody. Here is the bullet-pointed indictment Brutus/Yates circulated:

1. Finality without appeal. Judicial adjudications are final and irreversible; no court sits above them to hear an appeal, in error or on the merits.

2. Error without correction. No authority can remove them for any error in judgment or want of capacity, and none can reduce their salaries. The framers copied England’s good-behavior tenure while omitting England’s tribunal for correcting judicial mistakes.

3. Power above the legislature. They determine in the last resort the extent of Congress’s powers; they give the Constitution an explanation, and nothing above them can set that explanation aside. English judges are bound by the laws the legislature passes; the will of the judges controls the legislature.

4. Construction by spirit rather than letter. They explain the Constitution according to the spirit of the law, unfettered by the words.

5. The states are dissolved by degrees. Each adjudication becomes a precedent, and the accumulation will silently melt the states down into the general government.

6. Responsibility is absent by design. No court of justice was ever invested with powers so immense while placed in a situation where they are answerable to so few.

7. The summary charge. Independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in that situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.

Hamilton wrote Federalist 78 and 81 to sell the ratification of the Constitution, saying:

1. It’s the least dangerous branch. The judiciary poses the smallest threat to political rights of the three departments, and beyond comparison the weakest of them.

2. The judiciary doesn’t even have purse or sword. No influence over either; no command of the strength or the wealth of society; no direction whatsoever over the two things that make government able to compel a human being.

3. They also have neither force nor will, merely judgment. The bench decides. It has no desire and no command.

4. The judiciary is bound by strict rules and precedents. These would define and point out judicial duty in every particular case, specifically to prevent arbitrary discretion in the courts.

5. Judicial review implies no superiority over the legislature. (Judicial review being the power of the federal and state courts to examine the actions of the other branches and determine whether they square with the Constitution.) The people stand above both the judiciary and the legislature, and judges are servants of a fundamental law they are ascertaining rather than composing.

6. The judiciary is dependent on the executive arm. The courts require the executive even to give their own judgments effect, which is precisely what keeps them modest.

7. Judges require good behavior for their whole tenure. Life tenure exists so judges can resist encroachment from the political branches, with impeachment standing by as the check on the judges themselves.

8. Judicial encroachment is a phantom (81).

Hamilton answered six of the seven charges from Brutus, added two assurances of his own, and stepped around Brutus’s fifth charge. Now hold what was sold beside what was delivered:

1. The least dangerous branch delivers a body that has settled abortion, marriage, school prayer, campaign finance, firearms, presidential immunity, and the reach of every agency in Washington. Name a domain of American life the least dangerous branch has left alone.

2. No purse, no sword delivers federal judges running school districts, prison systems, and police departments by consent decree for decades at a stretch. A court commanding another man’s purse and another man’s sword has no need to own either.

3. Merely judgment delivers the Casey decision, in which the Court announced that liberty includes the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. A court that hands you the authority to define existence has told you where it thinks law comes from.

4. Bound by strict rules delivers tiers of scrutiny conjured whole from a footnote in 1938, balancing tests weighted by the man holding the scale, and stare decisis released whenever a special justification appears, the specialness of the justification being determined by the party seeking release.

5. No superiority over the legislature delivers Cooper v. Aaron, in which the Court’s own interpretation became the supreme law of the land, binding every officer in every state, forever, by its own declaration.

6. Dependent on the executive arm delivers the 101st Airborne escorting nine children to school in Little Rock, after which compliance became a habit and the dependency became a formality.

7. Impeachment as the check delivers eight federal judges removed in the republic’s entire history, and zero from the Supreme Court. Zero.

8. The phantom menace delivers nine officials, life tenure, no appeal, immunity from suit for malice and corruption alike, sole authority to say what their own authority is.

9. And the charge Hamilton never answered. The states melting by degrees delivers incorporation, 1897 through the 1970s. Everson took a clause that barred Congress from touching the religious settlements the states had made for themselves and converted it into the instrument for overriding them. Silently, adjudication by adjudication, precisely as charged.

In short, Brutus identified what he saw as the logical conclusion, what I would call shadow metaphysics (the concept I mentioned in Abuse and Disabuse); that is to say, a metaphysical endpoint that would be reached when following premises to their conclusion. Hamilton sold assurances that these worries would never come to light, and those assurances are goods that have never been delivered.

So, based on what we see of our current system, have we a Constitutional Republic? Hardly. How about a Constitutional Democracy? Getting warmer. What I see is a Royal Managerial Democracy in all but name.

Royal, because the last word belongs to judge-kings as an institution.

Managerial, because the populace is actively managed in every aspect of its life.

Democracy, because the managed populace votes to choose some of its managers, and to make the choices its managers permit.

The Constitution still exists (as a husk). Federal officers route around it, whilst paying it all the lip service required. The people remain sovereign the way a painting of a smoking pipe is a pipe (in label only).

Returning to the top, there are two things wrong with the slogan No Kings, then. We have kings. And the democracy isn’t ours.

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. Read more at Grinning Brutus

I. Refreshing, Isn’t It?

Let’s talk entropy. There are many scenarios in which the definition of entropy is contingent on the context, so let’s use the thermodynamic variety; a drive toward equilibrium. Hot becomes warm. Cold also becomes warm. This is due to flow of energy from a higher gradient to a lower gradient, like a cup of coffee allowed to sit in a room. The interface is where the heat crosses over from one material (the inner wall of the cup) to another (the outer wall). The energy gradient is the flow of heat from the cup to the air, and when maximum entropy is reached, there is no more gradient, no difference in temperature between coffee and its surroundings, thus equilibrium is achieved. Ah equality; isn’t it refreshing?

Let’s scale that concept up; zoom out and you’ll get to the concept of the heat death of the universe (that escalated quickly). Heat death is what would occur if all energy gradients were leveled and energy was maximally distributed across the entire universe. Just a permanent sea of lukewarm equality where nothing changes ever again because all energy at the most fundamental level has been smeared evenly across the cosmos. I bet you think you know where I’m going with this. Perhaps you’re correct; let’s find out together.

The coffee in that example moves from hot to warm over time, and political positions do so in kind. A position is less a static point on a graph and more of a vector; it has a direction and a velocity.

So the political positions we have are photographs. Where does this or that policy sit? Is that position extreme or moderate? Where do you fall on the spectrum? Every one of those questions asks for a temperature reading and none of them asks in what direction the position is traveling.

What a man holds about what is fundamentally real (metaphysics) determines what he holds about what man is (anthropology, seated within ontology); what he holds about man determines what is good for man (ethics); what is good for man determines what the state should do about it (government application of metaphysics). That chain runs downhill and it does not run back up. You cannot start with a policy preference and reason your way to a metaphysic, but a metaphysic will reach the policy whether its holder intends it to or not, and it will keep going after he stops, because premises don’t have opinions about how far they should be taken.

Concerning velocity, a metaphysic answerable to something outside itself moves slowly, because it must correspond to reality. A metaphysic answerable only to itself has nothing to collide with. It travels at whatever speed its carriers can manage, and its carriers can manage quite a lot.

All of this is to say that if I know a person’s metaphysic, I can tell where they’re headed without looking at where they currently stand.

Let’s find out.

II. Give Me the Metaphysic and I’ll Give You the Platform

To expound on the above, let’s build a (hypothetical) political party via deduction.

Here is the premise, and it is the only thing we get:

Reality trends toward equilibrium, and every gradient is a temporary and unjust deviation from that trend.

That’s it. Now watch what a mind holding that has to conclude, because the ordering is not optional; from the metaphysic follows what man is, from what man is follows what is good for him, and from what is good for him follows what the state must do about it. You cannot skip a level, and nobody gets to stop it from reaching the politics tier; it manifests whether he wants to or not.

Plank One. Universal mixing and boundary dissolution.

Start at the top, because this one is just the premise translated into political grammar. A boundary is a maintained difference; that is the entire content of the concept, whether the boundary is a national frontier or a property line or a wall of a cell. If gradients are unjust deviations, then boundaries are the instruments by which the injustice is sustained, and dissolving them is not one policy among several but the primary act of the entire program. Every subsequent plank is a special case of this one applied to a particular boundary.

Other terms for gradient include disparity, inequality. Does this sound familiar yet?

Let’s continue. An abstract line drawn on a map by dead men should not determine whether a child eats. Sounds reasonable, compassionate, maybe even radically so; the border acts as an interface of injustice in this argument, preventing equilibrium of resources from reaching the child in question.

Plank Two. Reimagined beauty, identity, and human achievement capacity.

Now we descend a level, because the premise has an anthropology in it and we have to state what man is before we can say what he needs.

Under a realist account, a man has a nature; he is a particular kind of thing, with an end proper to that kind, and he flourishes by achieving what his nature is for. Every one of those words is a gradient. A nature distinguishes this kind from that kind. An end distinguishes achieved from unachieved. Flourishing distinguishes the man who got there from the man who didn’t.

Our premise cannot have any of it. If gradients are deviations, then a nature is a deviation, and man is not a kind of thing with an end but undifferentiated material bearing whatever description is currently applied to him. Beauty, then, is not the visibility of a form achieved; it becomes a ranking imposed by observers, and rankings are gradients, and gradients are unjust. The capability of human achievement cannot be higher in one man than another because organizing achievements into a hierarchy would be a gradient. Identities associated with higher gradients of performance cannot be allowed, as we have determined non-equilibrium states are immoralities. As such, they must be dissolved as stated in plank one.

Sex (skinsuited into “gender,” and if you read Skinsuiting for Fun and Profit you already know what happened to the word before anybody argued about the thing) is inside this plank rather than beside it, and it is inside it necessarily. The distinction between man and woman is the sharpest gradient a human being carries, it was not installed by any assembly, and a premise that dissolves natures cannot leave that one standing while taking the others. Anyone who tells you these are unrelated fights does not comprehend the totality of their metaphysical stance.

Plank Three. Agency through systemic relief.

We have dissolved boundaries and we have dissolved natures. There is one thing left standing that can generate a gradient, and it is the acting man. Give a person a real capacity to choose and he will use it, and the use of it produces difference; he studies and another doesn’t, he saves and another spends, he builds and another watches, and within a generation there are gradients everywhere and you have to start over.

So agency itself has to go, and it cannot go by being denied outright, because denying that men act is absurd on its face and nobody would accept it. It goes by relocation. The premise says that outcomes are produced by systems rather than by choices, so the man who succeeded was carried by structures and the man who failed was obstructed by them, and in neither case did anything he did make the difference. Real freedom, then, is not the exercise of a capacity you have; it is the application of entropy to the structures that made your outcome look like your own doing. Personal responsibility becomes a cruelty rather than a compliment.

You have now relieved man of the internal locus of control (which comes with failure states), and as such, the plank positions itself as compassion, because it is the removal of the weight of agency that he was genuinely struggling under.

Plank Four. A kinder equilibrium.

With accumulated dissolutions under its belt, the party now states its terminus in public, because at this point it can do so freely, having incrementally dissolved barriers that would have made outright statements untenable to make out loud.

With boundaries gone, natures gone, and agency gone, what remains is a population of interchangeable units with no distinguishing form, no end proper to them, and no capacity to produce difference through action. There are no gradients left to dissolve. Competition subsides because there is nothing to compete for and nobody in a position to win; striving subsides because striving requires a height and we have removed the heights; suffering from comparison subsides, and this is the plank’s honest promise, since you cannot suffer by comparison when there is nothing left to compare.

The party calls this a kinder equilibrium and the party is not lying; it is kind within its metaphysic. Even though its actions lead to crumbling infrastructure, low trust society, and lack of opportunity for growth, this is kind from the standpoint of an entropic metaphysic. It is also the state in which nothing positive whatsoever can be allowed to occur; a palliative care writ large.

III. Now Go Read a Platform

Everything above was derived. I never looked outward, never consulted a manifesto, never checked what anybody currently believes; I took one premise about equilibrium and followed the ordering down until it arrived at policy.

So go find a platform. Any party, any country, and read it with the derivation in hand.

The Core Diagnostic Question would ask: what would a man have to believe for this to be rational? Not what he says he believes, since he’ll tell you compassion and fairness and he won’t be lying. What would have to be true underneath for these commitments to hang together as a set rather than as unrelated preferences that happen to arrive in the same decade?

The words held still while the concepts underneath were replaced, which is what I mean by linguistically skinsuited. Justice still means justice as far as anyone can tell from outside. So does health, freedom, care. But justice has become outcome parity, health has become the absence of a standard to fall short of (body positivity, for example), freedom has become relief from the burden of choosing, and care has become the reduction of gradient. Classic instances of shared vocabulary and very different dictionaries.

Which is why hunting for the men operating the engine is a waste of an afternoon. A metaphysic doesn’t require a conspiracy, it requires carriers, and a carrier doesn’t have to know what he’s carrying; he inherits a vocabulary, the vocabulary has premises in it, and the premises reach the politics whether he wants them to or not. Unwitting metaphysical advancement is not the exception but the rule; only in this case, it is the advancement of a metaphysical death engine given a political party and rationalization for its actions.

To conclude, consider the man who holds the “sensible” version of every plank and recoils from the extreme version, proud of his moderation and objective stance, able to take the good ideas from both sides. He is moving in the same entropic direction, only slower with a longer timeline, to the same destination.

Your coffee gets cold either way.

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. Read more at

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.