NOTE: Letter 11 was originally published in two parts; I have collated them into a single seamless piece here, and this will be the post listed in the table of contents. Warning—this article is 6,500 words, so if you would rather read this in manageable chunks, click below.

Letter11a—Reign of GrainLetter 11b—Polaris

Just like both posts obviously! Feel free to challenge or ask for opinions in the comment section.

Letter 11: Apes of Wrath

Originally Drafted: January 2026-April 2026Originally Published Letter 11a: 04/09/26 Letter 11b: 04/15/26 Complete: 04/18/26Last Updated: 04/18/26

What's Right?

You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

—George Taylor (Charlton Heston), Planet of the Apes

Enrico Fermi was a 20th-century Italian-American physicist who helped pioneer modern nuclear physics and worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear bomb. Five years after the Trinity Test, in 1950, Fermi returned to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and while chatting casually with colleagues over lunch, the conversation drifted to UFOs and the possibility of alien life.

Considering the vastness and age of the universe, the number of galaxies and stars, life should be pretty common. After all, life is just chemistry and physics. If intelligent life is even moderately possible, and if a technological civilization can spread from star to star, then over millions of years, the galaxy should be teeming with life, full of at least detectable signs of it. We should see probes, radio chatter, megastructures, or at least … something—anything?!

But…all we get is silence.

This led Fermi to cut through his fellow physicists’ speculation with a blunt question: “So… where is everybody?” That disconnect between the mathematical probability of alien life and what we actually see has come to be called the Fermi Paradox, and it is a question we have grappled with ever since.

One theory for why we don’t see alien life is known as the “Great Filter.” It proposes that somewhere between dead matter turning into life and a civilization becoming advanced enough to spread through the galaxy, there’s at least one brutally hard step that almost nobody makes it past, which is why the universe looks so quiet. It was proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in an essay he wrote in the late 1990s (“The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?”).

Hanson posed it as a question, and then argued that the odds hinge on where the “hard step” is. If the toughest barrier is cellular (abiogenesis, complex cells, multicellularity, etc.), then we might be “almost past it”; if those steps are relatively common, then the filter is more likely ahead of us (self-destruction).

Personally, I say, why not multiple great filters? I believe the jump from unicellular to multicellular life is one filter, and the capacity to understand and manage a species’ power is another. We passed the first one, but from 5:29 a.m on July 16, 1945, in the middle of the New Mexico Desert, with Fermi present, we reached the second one.

And we were not ready.

Nuclear weapons have given us the power of the gods for a species that is still trying to understand the implications of having the power of man. To be fair, we have done well avoiding nuclear apocalypse, outside of that one close call in 1962 over Cuba. Oh, and that one time in 1969 when Nixon was drunk and ordered the U.S. to nuke the DPRK in retaliation for a U.S. plane shot down over North Korea. Then there was that time in 1973 when Israel panicked and almost used them in the Yom Kippur War. That time in 1983 when NATO did a military exercise, and the Soviets nearly used them. And that is just the intentional close calls. This does not even get into the whoopsy-daisies, like that time in 1961 when a B-52 bomber carrying two 3-to-4-megaton nuclear bombs broke up midair near Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping the nukes in the process, where, I shit you not, only a single switch prevented Goldsboro from becoming a crater. And it just goes on and on and on. I could give you fifteen more examples.

Author’s Note: For that 1969 incident with the DPRK, it was Henry Kissinger, THE Henry Kissinger, who got Nixon to back off on that. Not only was this basically the only positive contribution of his lifetime, but how assured does that make you feel, knowing the only thing between you and nuclear winter is HENRY KISSINGER?

I consider all of this to be suboptimal.

The irony, of course, is that this type of shit was what we were trying to avoid when we first organized into societies. We didn’t create them for fun! It gradually emerged as the best way to avoid the constant threat of death and extinction. (…Oops.)

So…what happened here? Well, that takes us back to that exponential growth of Letter 7. In fact, we pick up where we that left off—the Agricultural Revolution.

If you want to check that out (after reading this), click here:

Part 1: The Great Reign of Grain

Before agriculture, many humans lived in small, relatively egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Leadership tended to be informal and temporary, grounded in skill and trust rather than durable authority. Anthropologists call these ‘band societies,’ where wealth and status rarely hardened into fixed classes. Many groups also practiced something like ‘reverse dominance’: collectively ridiculing, resisting, and sometimes ostracizing would-be strongmen to prevent them from consolidating power. In that sense, the pre-agricultural social world came with a kind of built-in freedom. So why would we give up such a free, decentralized system for something more restrictive?

Let’s first take a look at our biological “gamer stats.”

Strengths: We are big monkeys with big brains and high cognition. We are capable of coordinating and organizing. Unlike the other apes, we walk exclusively on two legs, and we can throw stuff at range and on target. We also sweat as a means of thermoregulation, which is absolutely elite. It gives us a massive endurance advantage.

Drawbacks: We have to eat a shit-ton of calories. We can’t be like a crocodile, surfacing to snatch a meal every two weeks—we have to eat constantly. That means leaving the relative safety of the cave or dwelling to hunt and forage so we can fuel the industrial engine that is our brains and bodies. While we are skilled at both, walking the tightrope is a challenge. We are physically weak for animals of our size, and no amount of chicken, broccoli, or creatine can save you from that. That makes us more susceptible to injury, and because of how our bodies are built, it is hard to compensate for serious injuries on our own. Even something as simple as breaking your thumb can critically compromise your ability to hunt or defend yourself from being hunted.

But because we have massive noggins, we can actually address such problems. Never underestimate the power of friendship. A lone person can hunt, gather, and survive for a while, but they cannot reliably absorb bad luck: injury, illness, drought, a failed season, or a tiger. The moment humans learned to cooperate at scale, they discovered a way to make randomness less lethal. By living together, sharing food, pooling labor, caring for the injured, and passing knowledge on, groups could stabilize the lower layers of life long enough to plan beyond tomorrow.

However, because we are a live version of Pac-Man, we still have to keep eating, and since we are all living together, we are also all fucking each other and having kids.

Human children are, from a survival perspective, useless. They are a one-way funnel of resources. They cannot hunt, they cannot forage, they cannot defend—unless the defense is sacrificing the child to whatever is chasing you—and, as any parent can attest, you have to watch them 24/7 because it almost feels like they are trying to kill themselves. As the number of these groups and children grew, the demand for resources increased, and the nomadic lifestyle became increasingly untenable.

But what if, instead of eating the seeds we gathered while foraging, we collected them and planted the best ones? Now we do not have to move. Now we can plant a seed and, to some extent, make the plant grow where we want it to.

Now you have agriculture. Agriculture creates a surplus that can be stored, enabling permanent settlement and specialization. Once people can stay put and coordinate, you get some people farming, some building, some defending, and some organizing.

Now, as you probably know if you’ve ever had siblings or lived in a dorm, living in a shared space brings some… complications. People want different things, someone is salty, people feel slighted, and so on.

To make sure we do not ruin the good thing we have going, people accept a trade: we give up some freedom to do whatever we want in exchange for the protections and benefits of shared life. You agree not to harm me, I agree not to harm you, and we both agree to the mechanisms that make that bargain real. Now we have a social contract.

But a contract is not self-executing. Making it real requires coordination, and coordination requires decisions. Who farms the land (labor)? Who controls the land and owns the surplus (property)? Who sets prices (markets)?

We need a shared set of standards so this whole arrangement can work. However, since we are no longer a small band but a collective working in tandem, we cannot rely as easily on a simple custom or a wise sage.

If two people want the same chicken, one to eat and the other for eggs, well, we cannot exactly share. But we also do not want people handling the problem by killing each other, which kind of defeats the whole point of living together. So someone has to decide in a way that does not feel arbitrary. Perhaps some ground rules: laws. Now, who writes the rules (law)? Who enforces them (police)? What legitimizes the order (religion)? Who fights for it (military)? The moment these questions have answers, power exists, because someone is deciding and others are living with the decision.

To carry those decisions across time and scale, societies build apparatuses that outlast any one person: institutions. They standardize rules, allocate resources, enforce obligations, and produce legitimacy. Institutions make cooperation reliable beyond family and immediate personal trust.

Voilà: the birth of civilization. This is the gravitational pull of practicality at work, and it transformed everything. It also brought a lot of bad shit: hierarchy, slavery, patriarchy, stratification, class, and expropriation. During this research, there were a few moments when I genuinely caught myself thinking, Damn, society kind of sucks!

Now there are two schools of thought about this:

The first view is that societal institutions are the problem, that the apparatuses themselves are what hinder and enslave people. There is no way to build such institutions without their becoming oppressive; therefore, they must be eliminated. That is the anarchist approach and, to a lesser extent, the Randian and libertarian approach, also known as the wrong approach.

The second view is that the decline in societal stability stems from a failure to uphold the social contract, which in turn leads to misaligned incentives and the calcification of power. It treats it as a problem of institutional design, also known as the right approach.

Institutions are easy to dismiss when things are going well. You barely notice them when shit works: when shelves are full, the lights stay on, and the pipes work. It is when things get tight and resources shrink that you feel them. That is when the absence of durable coordination and enforcement, combined with an uneven distribution of consequences, leads to breakdown. When scarcity is shared, solidarity can hold. When scarcity is uneven, THAT is when the blood flows. Trust breaks down, suspicion and backstabbing rise, and people, in both good and bad faith, leverage their positions in the supply chain to secure more supply or more influence. Then death piles up, and it piles up fast. It can devolve very quickly into a Lord of the Flies, every-man-for-himself situation. In the humanity business, we call that bad.

Society and institutions exist to make survival less random, to keep things from falling apart when conditions get tight. Even if I grant the argument that we never should have built civilization and institutions to this degree, we are so far past that decision that there is no clean undo button. Modern population levels depend on large-scale systems such as agriculture, logistics, sanitation, medicine, and basic order, which can only be maintained through centralized distribution. Pull those systems apart completely, and billions of people die. Billions, with a b. I am not trying to be dramatic. I just genuinely do not see how you avoid the math. To me, those losses are unacceptable.

So the real question is not whether society helps or hurts. It is what society is built for and what its limits are. Do those limits protect flourishing, or do they enforce domination? That is a question of purpose and design.

So, how do we design this so we don’t blow everything up (what I like to call “The Big Stupid”) and don’t erase what we have built?

How can we build without complete implosion?

Part 2: A North Star/SDN10

A common theme in this series is our relationship to our chimpanzee and bonobo cousins. As a reminder, chimps tend to live in environments where food is scarcer, competition is fiercer, and aggression is a workable survival strategy. Bonobos, with richer and more stable resources, can more often afford social bargaining, de-escalation, and cooperation.

Being related equally to both, where do humans lean? It depends on the conditions, doesn’t it? We are in constant tension with opposing biological pulls, so the environment tends to be the deciding factor, as it often is in biology. When we think resources are running out, the mind narrows, and instinct takes the wheel: more suspicion, more territorial behavior, a greater appetite for force, and a greater willingness to accept “necessary” cruelty. When resources feel stable, we can afford diplomacy, patience, bargaining, and empathy.

Author’s Note: Notice how this grafts onto reactionary and progressive ideologies. Reactionary politics tends to assume chimp conditions: scarcity, threat, zero-sum competition, and the need for discipline, hierarchy, boundaries, and force to keep order. It leans on rhetoric about being exterminated, overtaken, and replaced. It even ties back into sex, unspoken fears about cuckoldry, reproduction rates, and who gets to “carry the future.” Progressive ideologies tend to lean more into the bonobo side: diplomacy, freedom, and peace. That often invites ire in a world that feels, and is by design, very cutthroat.

Lobster Boy (Jordan Peterson… remember when this was about him—no? Check it out after.) was not wrong because he appealed to biology as a plane of understanding. He is wrong because he forgot, or intentionally excluded, that a great deal of biological behavior is dependent on environmental conditions. For once, and only once, we will appropriately incorporate Darwin into a political discussion. The whole “survival of the fittest” thing is the one best suited to the environment, not the “strongest”. Survival goes to those who adapt, not those who dominate.

Environment shapes behavior, and humanity has the special ability to shape that environment. It is kind of our thing, for better or worse.

Over the last thousand years, we have built an environment made for domination and conquest. While diplomacy is usually cheaper than brute force in the long run, our perspective and long-term focus do not usually extend beyond the length of a human lifetime. And to be fair, both strategies proved relatively effective for humans until the turn of the twentieth century. Then the two world wars happened, a lot of people died, we built weapons that could level cities, and then spent the next fifty years making them stronger and more numerous. Perhaps ironically, in our pursuit of domination, we unknowingly turned everything on its head, rendering that avenue incapable of supporting the species’ future prosperity. We changed the environmental conditions on this planet—and now we must adapt.

The stakes of the game have changed, and you can see it everywhere. Aggression as a means of achieving political ends is diminishing in value with each passing day.

Hey, how is that Iran War going, btw?

The problem is that, in their failure and incompetence, leaders will slowly lose control of their own situations and fall back on what they understand: conquest and destruction. But now that destruction implicates the entire species.

Now there is a big red button in the middle of a room, and if anyone presses it, the room explodes and kills everyone. That “feels” like enough incentive, but that assumes people value life over winning. But what happens when someone realizes they cannot win, and the goal becomes making sure no one else wins either? When a leader who gambles on aggression loses and faces personal or political ruin, they may decide they have nothing left to lose and, in one final act of nihilism, say fuck it and launch nukes at their enemy, or simply burn the house down with them.

So now we are playing a game of keep-away from the person who really wants to press the button, while also trying not to press it ourselves, because it does not take much pressure. At the same time, you cannot de-escalate by giving in to demands just to avoid pressing the button. That only makes every player more likely to threaten it whenever they want something, which in turn makes it more likely that someone eventually presses it. “Give me X, Y, or Z, or I will turn the world into a parking lot.”

This is not a tenable long-term solution. Even if there is only a 5% chance of the worst happening, the more situations we create, the more we keep flipping the coin; the greater the chance that one of those flips lands on tails.

And all it takes is one unlucky flip, and then we are fucked. I do not think we will go “extinct,” but we will set ourselves back a millennium. This is not an inevitability, but like a current, we are slowly drifting towards this reality.

Luckily, diplomacy and cooperation are the conditions on which we built society in the first place. It is how it started, and we have now come full circle. A society’s ethos shapes its incentives and institutions, and those institutions shape human behavior in return. Humanistic values tend to foster humanistic behavior, which in turn produces humanistic outcomes. Punitive values encourage punitive behavior and produce punitive outcomes. I think society is best understood, and functions best, when it tries to manufacture bonobo-like diplomacy to limit chimp-like aggression.

To get bonobo-like diplomacy, you need bonobo-like conditions. That means conditions that are less environmentally strenuous, more resource-rich, and where needs are easier to meet. Bonobos can get by with some shelter and a cornucopia of fruit. Humans need a little more.

From Maslow, we learned that people require physiological needs like food, water, and air, along with safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Yet that sense of purpose is sharpened by Self-Determination Theory’s three core “nutrients”: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

And what does society get in return? I think it gets what Maslow later described as his “bonus” sixth layer: self-transcendence. Beyond self-actualization, people seek meaning outside themselves through service, unity, spirituality, or devotion to a higher cause. People who feel invested in and supported are statistically more likely to support others and feel worthy of support.

This relationship is what makes such a society possible and sustainable. It is the return on investment that keeps the relationship reciprocal rather than one-sided. So what would a society built around human needs look like? The more the social contract demands of people, the more it owes them. More rules mean more restraint, more compliance, and more obligation. In return, society owes protection, stability, fairness, and real opportunity.

This is the basis for the SDN10, or the “Societal Charter,” of Social Democratic Nationalism. It’s not a policy platform so much as a skeletal outline of what we want society to accomplish and intend to build.

The Societal Charter/SDN10

Simply put, to create a functional, cohesive, and free society, its institutions must:

* Guarantee the 4 securities,

* Protect the 3 freedoms,

* Build the 2 capacities

* Serve the 1 mandate.

Now let’s go through it: first in list form, and then with slightly more explanation in outline-style sub-notes.

In Short

I. Guarantee the Four Securities

* Personal Security— Protection from violence

* Economic Security— Protection from desperation

* Institutional Security— Protection from oppression

* Political Security— Protection from repression

II. Protect the Three Freedoms

* Individual Freedom — The freedom of autonomy

* Public Freedom — The freedom of expression

* Practical Freedom — The freedom of practice

III. Cultivate the Two Capacities

* Agency— the capacity to think and act independently

* Community—the capacity to think and act collaboratively

IV. Serve the One Mandate

To secure, to the fullest extent possible, the conditions necessary to create an interdependent society through democratic institutions with distributed power that serve all its people.

Slightly Expanded

To create a functional, cohesive, and free society, that society and its institutions must:

I. Guarantee the Four Securities

* Personal Security — Protection from violence

* Protection from physical violence by individuals AND the state.

* This is the bare minimum for which society was created. If you cannot do this, you might as well not even pay taxes.

* Economic Security — Protection from desperation

* Protection from economic insecurity. This must include publicly provided access to the bare necessities required to function in a modern society with any real degree of capacity. This includes the Core 5:

* Nutritional food

* Clean water

* Stable shelter

* Education

* Unconditioned health treatment.

* Institutional Security — Protection from oppression

* Protection within and from legal institutions: rule of law, due process, equal protection, rehabilitation, and defined civil liberties.

* Because power becomes most dangerous when it is institutionalized. A free society must ensure that its legal institutions do not merely maintain order, but are themselves bound by law, reciprocity, and human dignity.

* Once institutions are seen as self-serving, captured, or beholden to those who run them, legitimacy evaporates. It is no longer a social contract. A society built on obligations without reciprocity is just oppression. Institutions must provide what people cannot reliably secure on their own.

* Political Security— Protection from repression

* The right and genuine opportunity to participate in, and be represented by, an open democratic government.

* This requires a stable and functional system amid competing factions, with reliable transitions of power.

* It also requires a balance between maintaining workable majority rule and preserving meaningful minority representation.

* To be blunt, shit will always be happening. There will always be some reason to clamp down on opposing factions and limit them. The strength of a political system is measured by its ability to function under pressure without stripping individuals or factions of their rights.

* Political suppression, whether physical, such as cracking down on protesters, or bureaucratic, such as gerrymandering, creating obstacles to voting, making it impossible to run for office, or limiting the powers of an office before an opponent assumes it, is antithetical to this security interest.

* This is very much a means-over-method standard. The will and freedom of the people are not defined by technicalities.

II. Protect the Three Freedoms

* Individual Freedom — The freedom of autonomy

* The freedom of privacy, conscience, faith, and identity, free from surveillance and arbitrary interference.

* “Arbitrary” means restrictions based on anything other than conduct that actively infringes on the rights of others.

* This means you have the right to practice and live by your own norms and values, whether religious or otherwise, but not to govern or conduct yourself in ways that limit the rights of others.

* I do not care if you are straight, gay, trans, bi, catholic, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, or whatever. We want to encourage people to show up as the best version of themselves, and that means the one most authentic to each person.

* The same obviously applies to race if it can be said to “apply.”

* Public Freedom — The freedom of expression

* The freedom of speech, expression, creation, organizing, and dissent around any cause, for any reason.

* I am much closer to a free speech absolutist than not. But again, it cannot be used directly to repress others’ public freedom.

* This is one of the few places where I think the current American implementation of the First Amendment is the proper standard.

* Practical Freedom — The freedom of exercise

* This embraces positive freedom, meaning the actual ability or capacity to do something; in other words, the freedom to exercise the other two freedoms.

* Freedom in principle is not the same as freedom in practice. If society makes those freedoms impossible to exercise, then they are not meaningfully free.

* This takes many forms. For examples

* In America, this often takes the form of debt.

* While Americans have a certain degree of formal freedom, if all meaningful ways to exercise it are behind a paywall, you are not free.

* In socialist and communist countries such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Laos, or North Korea, this often takes the form of political oppression.

III. Cultivate the Two Capacities

* Agency— the capacity to think and act independently

* Provide people with the tools, education, skills, and sense of personal identity necessary to function with confidence and competence. This requires a meaningful degree of independence and healthy individualism.

* A person must be able to form an identity apart from the collective. No single identity should rule over others. Healthy individualism is indispensable to collective growth.

* Community—the capacity to think and act collaboratively

* Cultivate the capacity to think and act collaboratively by creating and investing in mutual, nurturing environments that foster reciprocal bonds across races, genders, and identities.

A healthy society does not treat people as isolated units nor cogs in a machine.

* It teaches them how to live with, care for, and build alongside one another. Community is what turns coexistence into solidarity.

IV. Serve the One Mandate:

To secure, to the fullest extent possible, the conditions necessary to create an interdependent society through democratic institutions with distributed power that serve all its people.

* Rewritten to state the implicit explicitly: To secure, to the fullest extent possible, the conditions necessary to create an integrated and interdependent society through pluralistic, democratic, and responsive institutions that serve all its people, with power distributed, transparent, and contestable, so no single entity (office, agency, party, or private actor) can control the conditions of life.

I hope that makes sense.Because it will never be as simple as I just put it for the rest of our lives.

Part 3: Biology of an Ideology

I recognize that when most people say they are going to write a manifesto, which already is not most people, but regardless, they usually do not start by trauma-dumping and then pivot into lessons in biology, psychology, and metaphysics. Usually, you would start with income inequality, capitalism, why white people are superior, stuff like that. But we need to understand the seeds before the trees.

I start with humanity because every ideology begins with a fundamental premise on human nature, and the premise of Social Democratic Nationalism, or New Social Democracy, is that humanity is interdependent. From there, it asks the next question: what would an interdependent society look like? That is the SDN10. Then it asks the most pressing one: from where we are, how do we build it?

There is a biological principle called phylogenetic, or evolutionary, constraint. Evolution can only modify what already exists. Species develop through inherited structures and available pathways; they do not leap straight to their final form. Political development works much the same way. You cannot cut something out completely; you can only transform it from what it is.

To a certain degree, this applies to capitalism, with emphasis on that degree. In case you didn’t know…we live in a capitalist society. Like super-duper capitalist. It extends to every single aspect of our lives. We cannot quarantine it, eliminate its influence, or even pretend there is a way to completely avoid its pull.

To believe capitalism can simply end because we declare it so is to misunderstand the development of human civilization and the way people and institutions actually work. You cannot simply create something out of thin air and think that because you have different values, you are going to build something different. Attempts to ignore that reality often reproduce the same oppressive institutions under different names.

I always point to Russia as a great example. The Russian Empire was a totalitarian state run by a few, suppressing its population and treating human life as cheap in pursuit of imperial glory. The Soviet Union, in practice, became a totalitarian state run by a few, again treating human life as cheap, this time in pursuit of proletarian revolution. Those are largely just word changes. Trading a tsar for a general secretary makes little difference to me. The substance is everything.

To Lenin’s credit, which is not something I give often, when the Bolsheviks took power, he did try to institute some of the revolutionary changes. But nothing in Russian society had any real basis or organization for what he was calling for. So he immediately fell back on what it had been built for: autocracy. Less dramatically, this same shit happened in the 1990s with the chaotic imposition of capitalism. Lenin promised peace, land, and bread, and yet the first fifteen years of the Soviet Union were dominated by war, displacement, and starvation. If anything, it was worse because now it was centralized, planned destruction under the guise of the greater good. The Bolsheviks thought they would need to teach the workers, but I do not believe they ever considered that they first needed to educate themselves on what they were taking over, or the extent to which their own “bourgeois” biases were imprinted upon them. This reality is not inherently bad, but pretending you are above it because you have read enough theory is.

We are in an endless state of evolution and transition, which means any new order must be constructed from the imperfect conditions already before us. To build something in name, you must build it in substance. If something is truly necessary, it has to be developed with what we have, no matter how flawed the current thing may be.

That is really what SDN is: a transitional framework shaped by the constraints of the world we currently inhabit. It is aware of its own impermanence. SDN only works as an ideology if it understands itself within the broader context of human development and our understanding of the universe. It is part of a larger theory of civilizational change. That is what turns it from a civic-nationalist version of social democracy into something unique, a distinct ideology altogether. It becomes three-dimensional and alive. It is the ideological embodiment of that phrase I said somewhere in these diatribes: keep one foot planted in the earth and one hand reaching for the stars. The goal of such an ideology is to promote something that makes sense across numerous levels of reasoning while leaving the door open to evolution.

That is a difficult balance to strike, but in finding it, we open doors you did not even know existed. It almost becomes unfair because we now do what can only be described as political alchemy. You can be a nationalist and an internationalist simultaneously. You can lean into America’s rich, if troubled, history without abandoning broader global intentions. You can make a convincing argument that SDN is the future you want, whether you are a capitalist, a socialist, a nationalist, or a moderate.

That is why I say all roads lead back to Social Democratic Nationalism. I also think it is politically effective and lends clarity and confidence to what we want and how to achieve it. We believe it, we can see it, we can imagine it, and we can place it in perspective.

I am a nationalist, but I know nations are not real. I do not see the nation-state as the final political form, but I do see it as the level at which we have to begin, because it is the level people can identify with now and the one that can be tailored most closely to what we are trying to build. I think America is special, but not inherently. It is just the best, if not the only, place to model a prototype for a broader global society. And if we can do it in this country, with this history, with this size, with this government (with reforms), then there is literally no excuse for anyone else. Figure it out.

But that balance relies on two things: direction and navigation. A North Star to show you where true north is, and a torch to light the way and keep the fire going. Our North Star is the SDN10. And our torches are the principles to which we adhere in pursuit of such a revolution.

The torch marks the end of one series and the beginning of another as we close the book on this one. We, the Great Apes—the ones who left the trees, overcame every bottleneck, and faced every challenge head-on—stand at a crossroads and need to light the way toward the next step. It is a challenge, absolutely, but we have faced many in our incredibly brief yet storied history on this rock. We have endured before, and we must endure now.

Because at the end of the day, when Enrico Fermi posited the question of why we do not see alien life, it was not a challenge to become a living example of why. It was a challenge for humanity to become the kind of civilization that can endure long enough to answer it.

I will see you in Series 3.

‘Till Next,

Alexis Mordecai

Previous Letter:

Beginning of Series 2:

Where it All Began:

Next Letter: Series 3: TBD:

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This is the second part of a two-part letter. To check out Part 1: Click Here

Part 2: A North Star/SDN10

A common theme in this series is our relationship to our chimpanzee and bonobo cousins. As a reminder, chimps tend to live in environments where food is scarcer, competition is fiercer, and aggression is a workable survival strategy. Bonobos, with richer and more stable resources, can more often afford social bargaining, de-escalation, and cooperation.

Being related equally to both, where do humans lean? It depends on the conditions, doesn’t it? We are in constant tension with opposing biological pulls, so the environment tends to be the deciding factor, as it often is in biology. When we think resources are running out, the mind narrows, and instinct takes the wheel: more suspicion, more territorial behavior, a greater appetite for force, and a greater willingness to accept “necessary” cruelty. When resources feel stable, we can afford diplomacy, patience, bargaining, and empathy.

Author’s Note: Notice how this grafts onto reactionary and progressive ideologies. Reactionary politics tends to assume chimp conditions: scarcity, threat, zero-sum competition, and the need for discipline, hierarchy, boundaries, and force to keep order. It leans on rhetoric about being exterminated, overtaken, and replaced. It even ties back into sex, unspoken fears about cuckoldry, reproduction rates, and who gets to “carry the future.” Progressive ideologies tend to lean more into the bonobo side: diplomacy, freedom, and peace. That often invites ire in a world that feels, and is by design, very cutthroat.

Lobster Boy (Jordan Peterson… remember when this was about him—no? Check it out after.) was not wrong because he appealed to biology as a plane of understanding. He is wrong because he forgot, or intentionally excluded, that a great deal of biological behavior is dependent on environmental conditions. For once, and only once, we will appropriately incorporate Darwin into a political discussion. The whole “survival of the fittest” thing is the one best suited to the environment, not the “strongest”. Survival goes to those who adapt, not those who dominate.

Environment shapes behavior, and humanity has the special ability to shape that environment. It is kind of our thing, for better or worse.

Over the last thousand years, we have built an environment made for domination and conquest. While diplomacy is usually cheaper than brute force in the long run, our perspective and long-term focus do not usually extend beyond the length of a human lifetime. And to be fair, both strategies proved relatively effective for humans until the turn of the twentieth century. Then the two world wars happened, a lot of people died, we built weapons that could level cities, and then spent the next fifty years making them stronger and more numerous. Perhaps ironically, in our pursuit of domination, we unknowingly turned everything on its head, rendering that avenue incapable of supporting the species' future prosperity. We changed the environmental conditions on this planet—and now we must adapt.

The stakes of the game have changed, and you can see it everywhere. Aggression as a means of achieving political ends is diminishing in value with each passing day.

Hey, how is that Iran War going, btw?

The problem is that, in their failure and incompetence, leaders will slowly lose control of their own situations and fall back on what they understand: conquest and destruction. But now that destruction implicates the entire species.

Now there is a big red button in the middle of a room, and if anyone presses it, the room explodes and kills everyone. That “feels” like enough incentive, but that assumes people value life over winning. But what happens when someone realizes they cannot win, and the goal becomes making sure no one else wins either? When a leader who gambles on aggression loses and faces personal or political ruin, they may decide they have nothing left to lose and, in one final act of nihilism, say fuck it and launch nukes at their enemy, or simply burn the house down with them.

So now we are playing a game of keep-away from the person who really wants to press the button, while also trying not to press it ourselves, because it does not take much pressure. At the same time, you cannot de-escalate by giving in to demands just to avoid pressing the button. That only makes every player more likely to threaten it whenever they want something, which in turn makes it more likely that someone eventually presses it. “Give me X, Y, or Z, or I will turn the world into a parking lot.”

This is not a tenable long-term solution. Even if there is only a 5% chance of the worst happening, the more situations we create, the more we keep flipping the coin; the greater the chance that one of those flips lands on tails.

And all it takes is one unlucky flip, and then we are fucked. I do not think we will go “extinct,” but we will set ourselves back a millennium. This is not an inevitable but like a current, we are slowly drifting towards this reality.

Luckily, diplomacy and cooperation are the conditions on which we built society in the first place. It is how it started, and we have now come full circle. A society’s ethos shapes its incentives and institutions, and those institutions shape human behavior in return. Humanistic values tend to foster humanistic behavior, which in turn produces humanistic outcomes. Punitive values encourage punitive behavior and produce punitive outcomes. I think society is best understood, and functions best, when it tries to manufacture bonobo-like diplomacy to limit chimp-like aggression.

To get bonobo-like diplomacy, you need bonobo-like conditions. That means conditions that are less environmentally strenuous, more resource-rich, and where needs are easier to meet. Bonobos can get by with some shelter and a cornucopia of fruit. Humans need a little more.

From Maslow, we learned that people require physiological needs like food, water, and air, along with safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Yet that sense of purpose is sharpened by Self-Determination Theory’s three core “nutrients”: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

And what does society get in return? I think it gets what Maslow later described as his “bonus” sixth layer: self-transcendence. Beyond self-actualization, people seek meaning outside themselves through service, unity, spirituality, or devotion to a higher cause. People who feel invested in and supported are statistically more likely to support others and feel worthy of support.

This relationship is what makes such a society possible and sustainable. It is the return on investment that keeps the relationship reciprocal rather than one-sided. So what would a society built around human needs look like? The more the social contract demands of people, the more it owes them. More rules mean more restraint, more compliance, and more obligation. In return, society owes protection, stability, fairness, and real opportunity.

This is the basis for the SDN10, or the “Societal Charter,” of Social Democratic Nationalism. It’s not a policy platform so much as a skeletal outline of what we want society to accomplish and intend to build.

The Societal Charter/SDN10

Simply put, to create a functional, cohesive, and free society, its institutions must:

* Guarantee the 4 securities,

* Protect the 3 freedoms,

* Build the 2 capacities

* Serve the 1 mandate.

Now let’s go through it: first in list form, and then with slightly more explanation in outline-style sub-notes.

In Short

I. Guarantee the Four Securities

* Personal Security— Protection from violence

* Economic Security— Protection from desperation

* Institutional Security— Protection from oppression

* Political Security— Protection from repression

II. Protect the Three Freedoms

* Individual Freedom — The freedom of autonomy

* Public Freedom — The freedom of expression

* Practical Freedom — The freedom of practice

III. Cultivate the Two Capacities

* Agency— the capacity to think and act independently

* Community—the capacity to think and act collaboratively

IV. Serve the One Mandate

To secure, to the fullest extent possible, the conditions necessary to create an interdependent society through democratic institutions with distributed power that serve all its people.

Slightly Expanded

To create a functional, cohesive, and free society, that society and its institutions must:

I. Guarantee the Four Securities

* Personal Security — Protection from violence

* Protection from physical violence by individuals AND the state.

* This is the bare minimum for which society was created. If you cannot do this, you might as well not even pay taxes.

* Economic Security — Protection from desperation

* Protection from economic insecurity. This must include publicly provided access to the bare necessities required to function in a modern society with any real degree of capacity. This includes the Core 5:

* Nutritional food

* Clean water

* Stable shelter

* Education

* Unconditioned health treatment.

* Institutional Security — Protection from oppression

* Protection within and from legal institutions: rule of law, due process, equal protection, rehabilitation, and defined civil liberties.

* Because power becomes most dangerous when it is institutionalized. A free society must ensure that its legal institutions do not merely maintain order, but are themselves bound by law, reciprocity, and human dignity.

* Once institutions are seen as self-serving, captured, or beholden to those who run them, legitimacy evaporates. It is no longer a social contract. A society built on obligations without reciprocity is just oppression. Institutions must provide what people cannot reliably secure on their own.

* Political Security— Protection from repression

* The right and genuine opportunity to participate in, and be represented by, an open democratic government.

* This requires a stable and functional system amid competing factions, with reliable transitions of power.

* It also requires a balance between maintaining workable majority rule and preserving meaningful minority representation.

* To be blunt, shit will always be happening. There will always be some reason to clamp down on opposing factions and limit them. The strength of a political system is measured by its ability to function under pressure without stripping individuals or factions of their rights.

* Political suppression, whether physical, such as cracking down on protesters, or bureaucratic, such as gerrymandering, creating obstacles to voting, making it impossible to run for office, or limiting the powers of an office before an opponent assumes it, is antithetical to this security interest.

* This is very much a means-over-method standard. The will and freedom of the people are not defined by technicalities.

II. Protect the Three Freedoms

* Individual Freedom — The freedom of autonomy

* The freedom of privacy, conscience, faith, and identity, free from surveillance and arbitrary interference.

* “Arbitrary” means restrictions based on anything other than conduct that actively infringes on the rights of others.

* This means you have the right to practice and live by your own norms and values, whether religious or otherwise, but not to govern or conduct yourself in ways that limit the rights of others.

* I do not care if you are straight, gay, trans, bi, catholic, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, or whatever. We want to encourage people to show up as the best version of themselves, and that means the one most authentic to each person.

* The same obviously applies to race if it can be said to “apply.”

* Public Freedom — The freedom of expression

* The freedom of speech, expression, creation, organizing, and dissent around any cause, for any reason.

* I am much closer to a free speech absolutist than not. But again, it cannot be used directly to repress others' public freedom.

* This is one of the few places where I think the current American implementation of the First Amendment is the proper standard.

* Practical Freedom — The freedom of exercise

* This embraces positive freedom, meaning the actual ability or capacity to do something; in other words, the freedom to exercise the other two freedoms.

* Freedom in principle is not the same as freedom in practice. If society makes those freedoms impossible to exercise, then they are not meaningfully free.

* This takes many forms. For examples

* In America, this often takes the form of debt.

* While Americans have a certain degree of formal freedom, if all meaningful ways to exercise it are behind a paywall, you are not free.

* In socialist and communist countries such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Laos, or North Korea, this often takes the form of political oppression.

III. Cultivate the Two Capacities

* Agency— the capacity to think and act independently

* Provide people with the tools, education, skills, and sense of personal identity necessary to function with confidence and competence. This requires a meaningful degree of independence and healthy individualism.

* A person must be able to form an identity apart from the collective. No single identity should rule over others. Healthy individualism is indispensable to collective growth.

* Community—the capacity to think and act collaboratively

* Cultivate the capacity to think and act collaboratively by creating and investing in mutual, nurturing environments that foster reciprocal bonds across races, genders, and identities.

A healthy society does not treat people as isolated units nor cogs in a machine.

* It teaches them how to live with, care for, and build alongside one another. Community is what turns coexistence into solidarity.

IV. Serve the One Mandate:

To secure, to the fullest extent possible, the conditions necessary to create an interdependent society through democratic institutions with distributed power that serve all its people.

* Rewritten to state the implicit explicitly: To secure, to the fullest extent possible, the conditions necessary to create an integrated and interdependent society through pluralistic, democratic, and responsive institutions that serve all its people, with power distributed, transparent, and contestable, so no single entity (office, agency, party, or private actor) can control the conditions of life.

I hope that makes sense. Because it will never be as simple as I just put it for the rest of our lives.

Part 3: Biology of an Ideology

I recognize that when most people say they are going to write a manifesto, which already is not most people, but regardless, they usually do not start by trauma-dumping and then pivot into lessons in biology, psychology, and metaphysics. Usually, you would start with income inequality, capitalism, why white people are superior, stuff like that. But we need to understand the seeds before the trees.

I start with humanity because every ideology begins with a fundamental premise on human nature, and the premise of Social Democratic Nationalism, or New Social Democracy, is that humanity is interdependent. From there, it asks the next question: what would an interdependent society look like? That is the SDN10. Then it asks the most pressing one: from where we are, how do we build it?

There is a biological principle called phylogenetic, or evolutionary, constraint. Evolution can only modify what already exists. Species develop through inherited structures and available pathways; they do not leap straight to their final form. Political development works much the same way. You cannot cut something out completely; you can only transform it from what it is.

To a certain degree, this applies to capitalism, with emphasis on that degree. In case you didn’t know…we live in a capitalist society. Like super-duper capitalist. It extends to every single aspect of our lives. We cannot quarantine it, eliminate its influence, or even pretend there is a way to completely avoid its pull.

To believe capitalism can simply end because we declare it so is to misunderstand the development of human civilization and the way people and institutions actually work. You cannot simply create something out of thin air and think that because you have different values, you are going to build something different. Attempts to ignore that reality often reproduce the same oppressive institutions under different names.

I always point to Russia as a great example. The Russian Empire was a totalitarian state run by a few, suppressing its population and treating human life as cheap in pursuit of imperial glory. The Soviet Union, in practice, became a totalitarian state run by a few, again treating human life as cheap, this time in pursuit of proletarian revolution. Those are largely just word changes. Trading a tsar for a general secretary makes little difference to me. The substance is everything.

To Lenin’s credit, which is not something I give often, when the Bolsheviks took power, he did try to institute some of the revolutionary changes. But nothing in Russian society had any real basis or organization for what he was calling for. So he immediately fell back on what it had been built for: autocracy. Less dramatically, this same shit happened in the 1990s with the chaotic imposition of capitalism. Lenin promised peace, land, and bread, and yet the first fifteen years of the Soviet Union were dominated by war, displacement, and starvation. If anything, it was worse because now it was centralized, planned destruction under the guise of the greater good. The Bolsheviks thought they would need to teach the workers, but I do not believe they ever considered that they first needed to educate themselves on what they were taking over, or the extent to which their own “bourgeois” biases were imprinted upon them. This reality is not inherently bad, but pretending you are above it because you have read enough theory is.

We are in an endless state of evolution and transition, which means any new order must be constructed from the imperfect conditions already before us. To build something in name, you must build it in substance. If something is truly necessary, it has to be developed with what we have, no matter how flawed the current thing may be.

That is really what SDN is: a transitional framework shaped by the constraints of the world we currently inhabit. It is aware of its own impermanence. SDN only works as an ideology if it understands itself within the broader context of human development and our understanding of the universe. It is part of a larger theory of civilizational change. That is what turns it from a civic-nationalist version of social democracy into something unique, a distinct ideology altogether. It becomes three-dimensional and alive. It is the ideological embodiment of that phrase I said somewhere in these diatribes: keep one foot planted in the earth and one hand reaching for the stars. The goal of such an ideology is to promote something that makes sense across numerous levels of reasoning while leaving the door open to evolution.

That is a difficult balance to strike, but in finding it, we open doors you did not even know existed. It almost becomes unfair because we now do what can only be described as political alchemy. You can be a nationalist and an internationalist simultaneously. You can lean into America’s rich, if troubled, history without abandoning broader global intentions. You can make a convincing argument that SDN is the future you want, whether you are a capitalist, a socialist, a nationalist, or a moderate.

That is why I say all roads lead back to Social Democratic Nationalism. I also think it is politically effective and lends clarity and confidence to what we want and how to achieve it. We believe it, we can see it, we can imagine it, and we can place it in perspective.

I am a nationalist, but I know nations are not real. I do not see the nation-state as the final political form, but I do see it as the level at which we have to begin, because it is the level people can identify with now and the one that can be tailored most closely to what we are trying to build. I think America is special, but not inherently. It is just the best, if not the only, place to model a prototype for a broader global society. And if we can do it in this country, with this history, with this size, with this government (with reforms), then there is literally no excuse for anyone else. Figure it out.

But that balance relies on two things: direction and navigation. A North Star to show you where true north is, and a torch to light the way and keep the fire going. Our North Star is the SDN10. And our torches are the principles to which we adhere in pursuit of such a revolution.

The torch marks the end of one series and the beginning of another as we close the book on this one. We, the Great Apes—the ones who left the trees, overcame every bottleneck, and faced every challenge head-on—stand at a crossroads and need to light the way toward the next step. It is a challenge, absolutely, but we have faced many in our incredibly brief yet storied history on this rock. We have endured before, and we must endure now.

Because at the end of the day, when Enrico Fermi posited the question of why we do not see alien life, it was not a challenge to become a living example of why. It was a challenge for humanity to become the kind of civilization that can endure long enough to answer it.

I will see you in Series 3.

‘Till Next,

Alexis Mordecai

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Letter 11: Apes of Wrath

Originally Drafted: January 2026-April 2026Originally Published: 04/09/26Last Updated: 04/14/26

What's Right?

You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

—George Taylor (Charlton Heston), Planet of the Apes

Enrico Fermi was a 20th-century Italian-American physicist who helped pioneer modern nuclear physics and worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear bomb. Five years after the Trinity Test, in 1950, Fermi returned to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and while chatting casually with colleagues over lunch, the conversation drifted to UFOs and the possibility of alien life.

Considering the vastness and age of the universe, the number of galaxies and stars, life should be pretty common. After all, life is just chemistry and physics. If intelligent life is even moderately possible, and if a technological civilization can spread from star to star, then over millions of years, the galaxy should be teeming with life, full of at least detectable signs. We should see probes, radio chatter, megastructures, or at least … something—anything?!

But…all we get is silence.

This led Fermi to cut through his fellow physicists’ speculation with a blunt question: “So… where is everybody?” That disconnect between the mathematical probability of alien life and what we actually see has come to be called the Fermi Paradox, and it is a question we have grappled with ever since.

One theory for why we don’t see alien life is known as the “Great Filter.” It proposes that somewhere between dead matter turning into life and a civilization becoming advanced enough to spread through the galaxy, there’s at least one brutally hard step that almost nobody makes it past, which is why the universe looks so quiet. It was proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in an essay he wrote in the late 1990s (“The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?”).

Hanson posed it as a question, and then argued that the odds hinge on where the “hard step” is. If the toughest barrier is cellular (abiogenesis, complex cells, multicellularity, etc.), then we might be “almost past it”; if those steps are relatively common, then the filter is more likely ahead of us (self-destruction).

Personally, I say, why not multiple great filters? I believe the jump from unicellular to multicellular life is one filter, and the capacity to understand and manage a species’ power is another. We passed the first one, but from 5:29 a.m on July 16, 1945, in the middle of the New Mexico Desert, with Fermi present, we reached the second one.

And we were not ready.

Nuclear weapons have given us the power of the gods for a species that is still trying to understand the implications of having the power of man. To be fair, we have done well avoiding nuclear apocalypse, outside of that one close call in 1962 over Cuba. Oh, and that one time in 1969 when Nixon was drunk and ordered the U.S. to nuke the DPRK in retaliation for a U.S. plane shot down over North Korea. Then there was that time in 1973 when Israel panicked and almost used them in the Yom Kippur War. That time in 1983 when NATO did a military exercise, and the Soviets nearly used them. And that is just the intentional close calls. This does not even get into the whoopsy-daisies, like that time in 1961 when a B-52 bomber carrying two 3-to-4-megaton nuclear bombs broke up midair near Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping the nukes in the process, where, I shit you not, only a single switch prevented Goldsboro from becoming a crater. And it just goes on and on and on. I could give you fifteen more examples.

Author’s Note: For that 1969 incident with the DPRK, it was Henry Kissinger, THE Henry Kissinger, who got Nixon to back off on that. Not only was this basically the only positive contribution of his lifetime, but how assured does that make you feel, knowing the only thing between you and nuclear winter is HENRY KISSINGER?

I consider all of this to be suboptimal.

The irony, of course, is that this type of shit was what we were trying to avoid when we first organized into societies. We didn’t create them for fun! It gradually emerged as the best way to avoid the constant threat of death and extinction. (…Oops.)

So…what happened here? Well, that takes us back to that exponential growth of Letter 7. In fact, we pick up where we that left off—the Agricultural Revolution.

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Part 1: The Great Reign of Grain

Before agriculture, many humans lived in small, relatively egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Leadership tended to be informal and temporary, grounded in skill and trust rather than durable authority. Anthropologists call these ‘band societies,’ where wealth and status rarely hardened into fixed classes. Many groups also practiced something like ‘reverse dominance’: collectively ridiculing, resisting, and sometimes ostracizing would-be strongmen to prevent them from consolidating power. In that sense, the pre-agricultural social world came with a kind of built-in freedom. So why would we give up such a free, decentralized system for something more restrictive?

Let’s first take a look at our biological “gamer stats.”

Strengths: We are big monkeys with big brains and high cognition. We are capable of coordinating and organizing. Unlike the other apes, we walk exclusively on two legs, and we can throw stuff at range and on target. We also sweat as a mode of thermal regulation, which is absolutely elite. It gives us a massive endurance advantage.

Drawbacks: We have to eat a shit-ton of calories. We can’t be like a crocodile, surfacing to snatch a meal every two weeks—we have to eat constantly. That means leaving the relative safety of the cave or dwelling to hunt and forage so we can fuel the industrial engine that is our brains and bodies. While we are skilled at both, it is a tightrope to walk. We are physically weak for animals of our size, and no amount of chicken, broccoli, or creatine can save you from that. That makes us more susceptible to injury, and because of how our bodies are built, it is hard to compensate for serious injuries on our own. Even something as simple as breaking your thumb can critically compromise your ability to hunt or defend yourself from being hunted.

But because we have massive noggins, we can actually address such problems. Never underestimate the power of friendship. A lone person can hunt, gather, and survive for a while, but they cannot reliably absorb bad luck: injury, illness, drought, a failed season, or a tiger. The moment humans learned to cooperate at scale, they discovered a way to make randomness less lethal. By living together, sharing food, pooling labor, caring for the injured, and passing knowledge on, groups could stabilize the lower layers of life long enough to plan beyond tomorrow.

However, because we are a live version of Pac-Man, we still have to keep eating, and since we are all living together, we are also all fucking each other and having kids.

Human children are, from a survival perspective, useless. They are a one-way funnel of resources. They cannot hunt, they cannot forage, they cannot defend—unless the defense is sacrificing the child to whatever is chasing you—and, as any parent can attest, you have to watch them 24/7 because it almost feels like they are trying to kill themselves. As the number of these groups and children grew, the demand for resources increased, and the nomadic lifestyle became increasingly untenable.

But what if, instead of eating the seeds we gathered while foraging, we collected them and planted the best ones? Now we do not have to move. Now we can plant a seed and, to some extent, make the plant grow where we want it to.

Now you have agriculture. Agriculture creates a surplus that can be stored, enabling permanent settlement and specialization. Once people can stay put and coordinate, you get some people farming, some building, some defending, and some organizing.

Now, as you probably know if you’ve ever had siblings or lived in a dorm, living in a shared space brings some… complications. People want different things, someone is salty, people feel slighted, and so on.

To make sure we do not ruin the good thing we have going, people accept a trade: we give up some freedom to do whatever we want in exchange for the protections and benefits of shared life. You agree not to harm me, I agree not to harm you, and we both agree to the mechanisms that make that bargain real. Now we have a social contract.

But a contract is not self-executing. Making it real requires coordination, and coordination requires decisions. Who farms the land (labor)? Who controls the land and owns the surplus (property)? Who sets prices (markets)?

We need a shared set of standards so this whole arrangement can work. However, since we are no longer a small band but a collective working in tandem, we cannot rely as easily on a simple custom or a wise sage.

If two people want the same chicken, one to eat and the other for eggs, well, we cannot exactly share. But we also do not want people handling the problem by killing each other, which kind of defeats the whole point of living together. So someone has to decide in a way that does not feel arbitrary. Perhaps some ground rules: laws. Now, who writes the rules (law)? Who enforces them (police)? What legitimizes the order (religion)? Who fights for it (military)? The moment these questions have answers, power exists, because someone is deciding and others are living with the decision.

To carry those decisions across time and scale, societies build apparatuses that outlast any one person: institutions. They standardize rules, allocate resources, enforce obligations, and produce legitimacy. Institutions make cooperation reliable beyond family and immediate personal trust.

Voilà: the birth of civilization. This is the gravitational pull of practicality at work, and it transformed everything. It also brought a lot of bad shit: hierarchy, slavery, patriarchy, stratification, class, and expropriation. During this research, there were a few moments when I genuinely caught myself thinking, Damn, society kind of sucks!

Now there are two schools of thought about this:

The first view is that societal institutions are the problem, that the apparatuses themselves are what hinder and enslave people. There is no way to build such institutions without them becoming oppressive, and, therefore, they must be eliminated. That is the anarchist approach and, to a lesser extent, the Randian and libertarian approach, also known as the wrong approach.

The second view is that the decline in societal stability stems from a failure to uphold the social contract, which in turn leads to misaligned incentives and the calcification of power. It treats it as a problem of institutional design, also known as the right approach.

Institutions are easy to dismiss when things are going well. You barely notice them when shit works: when shelves are full, the lights stay on, and the pipes work. It is when things get tight and resources shrink that you feel them. That is when the absence of durable coordination and enforcement, combined with an uneven distribution of consequences, leads to breakdown. When scarcity is shared, solidarity can hold. When scarcity is uneven, THAT is when the blood flows. Trust breaks down, suspicion and backstabbing rise, and people, in both good and bad faith, leverage their positions in the supply chain to secure more supply or more influence. Then death piles up, and it piles up fast. It can devolve very quickly into a Lord of the Flies, every-man-for-himself situation. In the humanity business, we call that bad.

Society and institutions exist to make survival less random, to keep things from falling apart when conditions get tight. Even if I grant the argument that we never should have built civilization and institutions to this degree, we are so far past that decision that there is no clean undo button. Modern population levels depend on large-scale systems such as agriculture, logistics, sanitation, medicine, and basic order, which can only be maintained through some form of centralized distribution. Pull those systems apart completely, and billions of people die. Billions, with a b. I am not trying to be dramatic. I just genuinely do not see how you avoid the math. To me, those losses are unacceptable.

So the real question is not whether society helps or hurts. It is what society is built for and what its limits are. Do those limits protect flourishing, or do they enforce domination? That is a question of purpose and design.

So, how do we design this so we don’t blow everything up (what I like to call “The Big Stupid”) and don’t erase what we have built?

How can we build without complete implosion?

The answer—and more—lies in the societal framework I call the New Social Democratic Charter, or SDN10, and it is where we will pick things up in Part 2—Polaris.

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Letter 10: A Hierarchy of Needs

Originally Drafted: October 2025-February 2026Originally Published: 02/24/26Last Updated: 02/24/26

What’s Down?

Remember the famous Snickers ad: You are not you when you are hungry!

My favorite of these ads is the one with Willem Dafoe, playing a cranky Marilyn Monroe. In part because he nails it, and, in part, it is a role that you can only imagine Dafoe taking (and taking with glee).

Personally, I become more of an asshole when I’m hungry and tired. For me… I didn’t even know that was possible. Like, that’s amazing, but perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.

You could be talking about Palestine, the Holocaust, smallpox, the collapse of America—if I haven’t eaten, I couldn’t give less of a shit. I’m thinking about how the guy’s cheeseburger at the table next to me looks fucking delicious.

Fuck them kids! Long live the empire!

Now…does this make me a bad person or an uncaring neanderthal?

But there is some evolutionary basis here that I will happily pass off the blame to.

Part 1: A Hierarchy I Can Get Behind!

Eating and sleeping are among the “non-negotiables” of life, and trying to negotiate with a non-negotiable leads to some snags, both in the area of being alive and in your potential to use your brain. The Snickers ad ain’t wrong. (Although giving them a Snickers will likely kill them faster.)

When you are fed and have slept, when the baseline is handled, you get a minute to think. Your mind stops screaming about immediate survival and starts doing what it was built to do: thinking, planning, reflecting, and imagining. That is when you can (best) ask questions, do some introspection, and understand your relationship to others and the world.

Authors Note: I am going to add author’s notes from time to time to when I want to add something that may be relevant or irrelevant. You can skip over them if you want as these are added “in post”. Anyway back to the regularly scheduled programing!

You can say that your body has an order of operations. This phenomenon has been extensively studied, most notably by Abraham Maslow (1908–1970). Maslow was an American psychologist often linked to humanistic psychology. In 1943, he published “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in which he described human needs as tending to organize into rough layers or levels.

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Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has 5 of these layers, with basic needs at the foundation and more existential needs at the “top.”

* Physiological: The essential biological requirements, such as air, food, and sleep, that keep the human body alive.

* Safety: The desire for a predictable and secure life, including protection from danger, financial stability, and health.

* Love/belonging: The emotional need for connection through friendships, intimacy, and being part of a supportive group.

* Esteem: The pursuit of self-respect and the desire for status, recognition, and appreciation from the people around you.

* Self-actualization: The personal drive to reach your full potential, grow your talents, and find true self-fulfillment.

In general, physiological needs (food, sleep, shelter) and safety needs become dominant when they are unmet. You know, when you aren’t thinking about existential questions?—when you are dead from starvation. You can’t do shit then. But when they are met with some reliability, attention, and energy become available for other concerns, such as belonging, esteem, and growth.

Author’s Note: It is important to note that Maslow’s hierarchy is not absolute or rigid, nor did Maslow believe it applied in all circumstances. You can be homeless and still care about growth, for example, but, in general, it’s a decent way to show how needs lay out in tiers.”

The model frames human fulfillment as a progressive satisfaction of deficits followed by growth toward potential. Maslow distinguished “deficiency needs” (the first four levels, which stem from lacking something – we seek food, security, love, or esteem when they are deficient) from “growth needs” (self-actualization, and something he would later call self-transcendence), which arises not from absence but from a positive desire to grow. This distinction highlights that truly fulfilling one’s life is not just about alleviating deficiencies but about pursuing personal development and self-expression.

Philosophers and scientists have long distinguished needs from mere wants or preferences – needs are things that are “necessary, indispensable, or inescapable” for fulfillment. Fulfillment is a multifaceted phenomenon incorporating psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Psychologically, we know people require health and security, belonging and love, esteem and achievement, autonomy, competence, and meaning to truly flourish. Philosophically, this is echoed in concepts such as the pursuit of purpose and the enjoyment of fundamental capabilities. Sociologically, it’s clear that environment matters: a nurturing community and stable conditions can dramatically expand an individual’s ability to meet these needs, whereas adverse social conditions can thwart even the most determined person. Even if someone is safe, comfortable, and surrounded by others, they may feel unfulfilled if life seems empty or pointless. Recent scholarship reinforces this: “Being able to experience meaningfulness is a fundamental part of having a life worth living.”

It is compelling that human beings across cultures share these needs, even if they manifest differently in varied environments. The universal nature of these needs hints at a common human family that spans cultures, continents, and time, where we all share a focus on creating well-being and a sense of life satisfaction.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, is a modern, research-driven framework for universal human needs. It argues that well-being and growth depend on three basic psychological “nutrients” that must be satisfied across cultures: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy is the sense of agency and choice, meaning you feel like the author of your own decisions rather than being controlled by outside forces. Competence is feeling effective and capable, with real opportunities to learn, master skills, and meet challenges. Relatedness is feeling connected, cared for, and included through close relationships and belonging to a community. SDT holds that these needs are essential and universal, and studies show that when they are supported, people report higher well-being, while blocking them undermines motivation and mental health.

So, how are we doing as a society at ensuring people’s needs are met?

—HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! 😂😂😂😭😭😭

—wait, really?!

Part 2: Misery Loves Company

So there is this weird country called the United States (of America, I think?) that embodies the ethos that hunger, poverty, and sleepless nights are great promoters of human ambition and progress. So the theory goes, the more people who are desperate, the more they will strive towards bettering themselves. In fact, helping these people is anti-American and is tyranny!

This is a fascinating take, for sure, indicative of the fact that we live in a healthy society, set to prosper for centuries. So, leave it to me to criticize such a sound approach, but I’m starting to wonder if there might be some flaws in this philosophy… like maybe society would benefit if more people didn’t have to dedicate their entire lives to survival. What if chronic deprivation shrinks freedom to whatever keeps you alive? What about all the studies showing that people are more productive and contribute more when they have stable work and living conditions?

To some extent, I know I am preaching to the choir, but let’s just take a step and look at the consequences broadly. Between 52% and 68% of the US population lives paycheck to paycheck, so over half (AT BEST) of the U.S population is shackled from jump. Take all of these people, and think of all the contributions, ideas, innovations, artistic creations, and flush them down the toilet.

Author’s Note: Obviously, obviously, obviously people who live paycheck-to-paycheck can, have, and will create and contribute to society. Challenging economic conditions just makes it much more difficult to have the time and energy to do so.

So immediately, the nation is crippled, America has fallen, and cannot get up! The kicker, the coup de grâce, is that we do it for like—no reason. Well, no good reason, obviously, there is always a reason. Their reason is to hoard wealth, obviously.

I am not saying anything… BUT—

* Is there an incentive for powerful elites to keep life hard, or make it harder on working people, convincing them to accept being squeezed today in the hope of squeezing others tomorrow?

* Are there entire careers built around reinforcing this myth: that dominance hierarchies are rooted in nature, stretch back hundreds of millions of years, and appear across virtually all animals? Therefore, to challenge them is to challenge nature! 🦞🦞🦞

* Are scarcity and exhaustion tools to prevent solidarity, perhaps among the working class, by keeping them too hungry and weak to look up, but providing enough crumbs to fight each other over?

Again, I am not implying anything—…because I will say it explicitly—yeah!

What I mean by 'no reason' is that it’s not like the wealthy gain anything from this, economically or personally. Have you met someone who is ultra-wealthy? They are bitter and joyless prunes with inferiority/superiority complexes, obsessed with conquest. Like setting aside all the evil and downright disgusting things that are done by these people, they are sad, lonely, childish, and just pathetic.

Capitalism can cover Physiological and Safety, but it cannot build love, esteem, or self-actualization from scratch, and it often disincentivizes them. At a certain level of wealth, you have to stay ruthless past any real returns, which leaves little room for exploration, belonging, or meaning. Think about family dynamics: what kind of parent does that make you, and what kind of home does it create when love is power and control? You are fucked from jump in a different way.

Author’s Note: Exhibit A: Succession. I know is a dramatized version of the Murdoch family, but I would bet money that a lot of wealthy families are like that to some degree.

So we take money that could go to a person who would spend it, so they could provide the needs that capitalism can help with, and give it to a person for whom it can’t. Economically, this is blasphemy because the marginal dollar gets parked at the top rather than circulating, which weakens demand and pushes the economy toward debt, speculation, and asset bubbles. A dollar is worth more to someone with $100 than to someone with $100 million, yet we keep feeding the pile anyway, so rich people can sit on it and make themselves miserable over it, because it still cannot buy the human needs they lack.

So not only does it break in the nation and make everyone miserable, but it also proves ruinous to the economy. Great system!

Does it do anything right?—Nope!

So why hasn’t it been reformed? Like we know why, but if this were about economics, they would have already made reforms. It is almost certainly in the wealthy’s economic interest to do so. But an astute observer can look around and see the opposite happening: the rich are pouring everything into stopping change. They want to be miserable forever, damn it.

So what the fuck is actually happening here?

The better question is, what does capitalism (and its wealth) mean to these people? Remember, at the end of the day, capitalism and socialism are economic theories about how to allocate resources.

…but not for them.

For the ultra-wealthy, it is a religion. Beyond sacred. The stock market is the church, NASDAQ is the altar, and Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman take turns playing Jesus.

Because it is treated as sacred and infallible, they are trapped in a cycle. They chase wealth and status because they are measurable and rewarded, only to realize that money cannot manufacture love, belonging, self-respect, or meaning. So they escalate. It cannot be that capitalism is faulty; they just are not doing capitalism hard enough. They need more of it, more money, more control, more insulation, more conquest, because changing course would mean admitting the game cannot deliver. But the game, the conquest is everything. And if it cannot deliver, that would mean admitting they have no idea who they are apart from money. Protecting capitalism becomes protecting their self-worth, an ultimate good-versus-evil against socialism that must be defeated at all costs. Admitting capitalism fails in crucial ways to create a healthy, functional society is like saying God isn’t real. Acknowledging that some socialism might be useful for society at large is like siding with the devil.

So… this is a cult, even if they are not aware of it, and it has a predictable conclusion: explosive disintegration, just like a rapture—both of them!

Maybe that is why the ultra-wealthy and Christian nationalists make such a clean alliance. They are operating on a similar wavelength. They believe they are building toward an inevitable reckoning, an apocalyptic reset where the faithful are rewarded and everyone else is sorted out. It will all make sense then. You know, the rapture. Fascists, Christian nationalists, and free-market capitalists ritualize their beliefs until it becomes simple: they either get what they want, or there will be nothing left to get.

Author’s Note: I don’t think everyone is “on board” for this. Some may have a eureka moment, because most of them do not have a rocket to escape with. Just because you had a first-class ticket on the Titanic, it didn’t grant you a seat on a lifeboat. Do you smell that? I smell a potential crack in class solidarity!

In summary, this is a society defined by religious deference to capital and built on a rigid hierarchy that can’t be maneuvered. It is brutal and crushing at the bottom, creating desperation to climb it, only to realize the top also super sucks (but you can be miserable in Gucci), with the most powerful having no interest in improving it or any ideas beyond it. It’s capitalism or oblivion.

Here is the problem: because this vision of how society should be organized is not grounded in economics or the public interest, it cannot be reformed as it stands. It has to be replaced, recalibrated, and reimagined.

Author’s Note: While some may say explosive disintegration is necessary, I find it suboptimal for reasons I will discuss in the next letter. I agree however, that this is not something that can be solved with passing universal healthcare and calling it. It requires a broader reimagining of society.

Part 3: Minutes to Midnight

If you are not you when you’re hungry, then who are you when hunger is all you’ve ever known? Who are you when your life is defined by desperation? Ask someone who grew up with empty pantries and went to sleep with an empty belly. How many are not consumed by the anxiety of financial insecurity? How does it shape their goals and aspirations in life? How many get to be dreamers? What kind of freedom do these people have?

The freedom to die? No offense—you don’t need society for that, you can do that on your own.

Throughout history, people have sought to organize their lives and societies so that their collective needs are met. Whether through personal striving (as in self-help or moral discipline) or collective effort (as in social welfare and community building), the end goal is the same: to allow individuals to live with dignity, to grow into their best selves, and to experience life as deeply worthwhile.

The problem is that we are failing, at every level, to create the conditions for dignity and flourishing, and it seems many have given up on trying.

We have gotten this far only because WE, not you, not I, but WE have been able to take the steps necessary, usually at the 11th hour, to correct course and begin anew. The human mind is complicated enough that we will still be mapping the foundations of what we seek from life and each other for quite a while. This is the product of centuries of accumulated inquiry, and it keeps advancing because organized society creates the stability, institutions, and shared tools that let people meet needs, ask better questions, and pass answers forward.

Author’s Note: Capitalism, at one point, was an improvement to humanity over what preceded it (mercantilism). But not anymore. Yesterday’s solutions are today's problems, and today’s solutions are tomorrow’s problems! We structure things around what serves humanity, and when it stops serving humanity, we change it!

To Social Democratic Nationalists, the approach is simple (in theory): as our understanding grows, our standard for what society should consistently provide should grow too. Some needs must be guarenteed, others must be protected, and others must be built.

In his later years, Maslow suggested that ultimate fulfillment may come from connecting with something beyond the self, such as altruism, spiritual ideals, or causes that benefit others. He called it self-transcendence. I call it the real return of investing in people: giving back in ways they could not have otherwise. With this understanding, we must design a civic system that reliably meets people's needs and, in return, yields healthier, steadier, more capable citizens.

We can build around something like that… or we can say fuck you, you are all a bunch of pussies and build around some ethereal return to the “glory days,” a time when things are less confusing. You know: When men could be men!!! 💪🏻💪🏻 And you could say Merry Christmas!!!🎅🏻 — All while going in circles of economic and political outrage, as this nation corkscrews into the earth’s core with increasing speed.

Tough choices!—

But, apparently, it is! The reaction from most seems to be:

What can you say? Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, twice as potent if that past never existed in the first place. It is a byproduct of Botch-ulism, a society that is built on nihilism and apathy. (Series 1 callback)

But when you take a step back, what is society for if not to provide things collectively? If you ask people to pay taxes and accept real trade-offs, you had better ensure they receive what they cannot reliably secure on their own. Who the fuck wants to live in a system that demands everything, gives nothing back, and treats the right to live like something that must be earned?

That sounds like shit.

So, when we return for the final letter of Series 2, let’s lay out the stakes for the nation and the species if we do not change course, and what we must change course to, as we reveal the foundations of the SDN’s societal charter and the SDN10.

Because, ladies and gentlemen, the 11th hour draws near.

‘Till Next

Alexis Mordecai

Could you…

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If you want to read about what the hell happened to our brains, you can read about it here!

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Author’s Note: I made some last-second additions and cuts, and I moved a few sections around. As a result, the citations are currently inaccurate, especially the ones marked “Ibid.,” which just means “same as the previous citation.” In the coming weeks, I will return and correct them to make sure everything matches. The text itself, however, is final. Still need to do this as of 02/24/26!

Warning: I am going to spoil a video game called BioShock, a 2007 first-person shooter released by 2K Games. You have been warned.

Hey, it’s Alexis! I thought for this letter I would have a voiceover, considering the length of these letters is getting to be memoir length. I hope you enjoy. This was recorded January 19.

Letter 9: Atlas Wept

Originally Drafted: October 2025-January 2026Originally Published: 01/19/26Last Updated: 01/19/26

What’s Up,

Have you ever played BioShock?

The original one—not BioShock: Infinite?

… I will assume not. It is a horror first-person shooter, and an excellent game choice if you think you are sleeping a little too well at night. You crash somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, swim to a lighthouse, and take an elevator that descends into the depths to reveal Rapture, an underwater city built by industrialist Andrew Ryan.

Andrew Ryan is a zealot for free-market capitalism. He fled Soviet Russia and became a staunch opponent of collectivism. After WWII, he went on to create a new Eden, one where government, religion, and morality could not reach. A place where the strong could rise, unrestrained by the weak. His slogan was simple: “No gods or kings. Only man.”

By the time you arrive, Rapture is in ruins. All that remains is an Art Deco-inspired dystopia consumed by madness. Its people have torn themselves apart chasing a gene-rewriting drug and the illusion of unlimited power. You are guided by a man on the radio named Atlas. He guides you to take out a mentally deteriorating Ryan before it’s too late.

That has nothing to do with anything. I just wanted to share a fun game from my youth.

Part 1: Ayn Can’t

Anyway, Ayn Rand was an atheist writer and philosopher.

She grew up in Russia, saw the Bolsheviks nationalize her father’s business, and never forgave collectivism for it. She carried that anger into a whole worldview: history, she said, is a struggle between creators and parasites. Civilization moves forward when brilliant minds are allowed to create for their own profit. It collapses when society demands that those creators sacrifice themselves for the collective.

She called her system Objectivism—a philosophy that emphasizes the primacy of reason, individual achievement, and self-interest as moral imperatives. In her moral framework, altruism is not a virtue; it is a moral trap. Dependence is not a neutral fact of life; it is a kind of spiritual death. The ideal human was a lone genius: a productive, rational, self-sufficient man of the mind.

Her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, imagined what would happen if those minds went like, “nah” and dipped.

✌️😚✌️

The plot follows industrialists who grow tired of carrying an ungrateful world on their backs. They retreat to a hidden capitalist enclave and let the rest of civilization collapse. Rand saw this as prophecy. The world survives, she argued, only so long as its geniuses choose to carry it. Every invention comes from a lone visionary. There is no such thing as a collective brain. No such thing as shared insight. Only the originators and the copycats.

Now, Ms. Rand is no longer with us, which is unfortunate because she will never be able to answer a simple question I have:

What the fuck are you talking about? What Earth dimension are you from? … I guess that’s two questions.

Some caveats. First, I am not an economist, and I have no intention of ever being one. This is not a breakdown of how markets, shares, risk models, or liquidity work. Luckily, there are enough economists to populate a medium-sized city who have already dismantled libertarianism, including Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, Mariana Mazzucato, and Thomas Piketty. And yes, there is even friendly fire: libertarian-leaning economists who have gone after Rand’s Objectivism too, including Bryan Caplan and Murray N. Rothbard.

There is a distinction between Rand’s Objectivism and modern libertarianism. Rand framed her philosophy as moral: the pursuit of profit wasn’t just practical, it was good. Libertarians tend to be more agnostic, arguing that markets and minimal government simply work better. Luckily for us, my critique has nothing to do with morality and centers on the fact that both ideologies are based on premises of humanity that are loads of horseradish.

Start with invention. Most breakthroughs are not lightning bolts in one person’s skull. They’re the slow result of multiple people, ideas, accidents, and iterations. When conditions are ripe, you often see the same basic discovery pop up in multiple places because the environment is pushing everyone toward the same solution. People then put their minds together to tinker, experiment, and improve upon the previous iteration.

So let’s use an example from Letter 7, the invention of soup.

Soup was a civilizational game-changer because it turns scraps into calories by boiling them into something usable. No longer did the precious fats just drip into the fire and vanish. It pulls nutrition out of connective tissue and bone and makes the hard-to-use parts suddenly edible and valuable: collagen and gelatin, marrow, minerals, whatever your ancestors could wring out of bad luck. Who figured that out?

No, seriously.

Who is the genius here, the one who deserves credit, profit, and control over all future bowls of soup? Who is the soup king?

Picture a band of prehistoric humans huddled around a fire, stumbling toward boiling by trial and error. Which of these esteemed cavemen is responsible for its creation?

* Ooga Booga, who first realized fire could be controlled and carried.

* Ooga Aagah, who hunted and brought home a hunk of meat.

* Googa Dooga, who threw heated stones into a vessel of water to see what would happen.

* Ooga Googa, who tossed in herbs and roots and discovered flavor leaches into water.

* Arrooga Boogoo, who tried again with bones and scraps and got something rich enough to matter.

Now imagine believing one of them deserves the exclusive “rights” to soup and the authority to define how soup gets made forever. That would be stupid. Right?

That’s the entire point of working in groups. Most of modern life exists because collective creativity stacks over time. Not because a hundred thousand geniuses sat down and invented “society,” but because a million small contributions piled up until they became structure. In such conditions, ideas begin to take on a life of their own.

Ooga Googa may never have had another smart idea in his life. But because he was there, because he participated, because he contributed one tiny piece to a shared process, he helped push a real creation into being and improve on the previous iteration. That’s what humans do. It’s what sets us apart from every other form of life on this planet. Chimps can make tools too, but a thousand generations later, they’ll still be working with variations of the same ones. We, for better and worse, have intercontinental ballistic missiles.

We’re a species with recurring drives: belonging, status, safety, meaning, control. But how those drives express themselves is never fixed. It is shaped by context, culture, incentives, technology, scarcity, and whatever a society rewards or punishes. What are the incentives that Rand’s worldview cultivates?

Rand’s perspective leads people to imagine themselves as unappreciated geniuses in a world of parasites. It breeds distrust, arrogance, and contempt for shared responsibility or achievement. Worse, it fosters deception, especially when others have something to gain by your honesty. You don’t want to be the sucker who loses out, do you? Instead of working together to improve, we aim to be the first to capitalize. Instead of trying to innovate, we now focus on replicating behaviors and riding others’ coattails to the top.

Notice that the focus and incentive structure have now shifted from the rewards of invention to the rewards of profit—money. Now it’s not about making anything, you are selling something! And in those conditions, success is determined less by who’s actually capable and more by who can convince the most people that they’re capable.

This is foreshadowing.

Part 2: The Gravity of Reality

That’s what makes all the talk about “individual freedom” so slippery, even as Rand and modern-day libertarians worship it. What the fuck is a “productive, rational, self-sufficient man of the mind” in the real world? What does “freedom” mean when most people’s beliefs, tastes, ambitions, and even personalities are shaped by narratives and incentives they didn’t choose, in a world sculpted by generations they never met? Libertarianism smuggles in a fantasy that freedom automatically equals empowerment, an assumption built on pixie dust and wishful thinking.

And it assumes something it has no right to assume: that people will treat others’ freedom as sacred in practice, not just in principle. That’s naive on its own, but it becomes genuinely absurd once you add capitalism, because the incentives pull the other way. In competitive markets, the rewarded behavior is not “respect everyone equally.” It’s “win,” and winning often means finding leverage, pushing costs outward, and turning other people’s needs into your advantage.

For libertarianism, which treats power as something produced by institutions and government rather than as a byproduct of social life, that creates a basic problem: power still shows up where, by the theory, it isn’t supposed to exist.

These fucks think we do government for fun, or because we like controlling people. No. Government is a mechanism for managing the byproducts of living together. We do not invent rules because we love rules. We invent them because cooperation creates spillover: conflict, coordination failures, freeloaders, fraud, violence, monopolies, and the constant temptation for the strong to turn “freedom” into a weapon. And yes, rules create their own problems, but they are not inventing power. They are channeling it.

See, unregulated power operates a lot like physics. Well… social physics.

Let’s talk about mass and gravity.

Social Physics

In science, gravity is what pulls matter together. The more mass an object has, the stronger its pull. Planets form when dust clumps into rocks, rocks into boulders, boulders into cores that draw in even more mass. The Earth itself began as little more than scattered dust, but proximity and chance led some particles to clump together. Each collision added mass, which in turn increased gravitational pull, drawing in even more matter. Over time, this accumulation transformed random debris into a giant rock we can all inhabit and pay taxes on.

Human societies operate similarly. In human terms, mass is influence, and gravity is practicality. Influence, power, and culture tend to aggregate through feedback loops of attraction. Small groups, ideas, or movements—once they gain just enough “mass” (attention, followers, resources)—begin to draw others in, not necessarily because they are inherently “better,” but because their very existence exerts a kind of social gravity.

Once someone is the biggest fish in a given pond, they become the center of the ecosystem, making it more efficient to route everything through them, and impractical, if not downright impossible, to get around them. That convenience pulls more people in, which increases their mass, which increases their pull, and the cycle repeats.

In theory, libertarianism assumes less interference leads to spontaneous cooperation, that if everyone just acts in self-interest, the invisible hand sorts it out. That is an interesting theory, because it is wrong. In observed practice, the invisible hand takes its middle finger and shoves it up your ass.

The “hand” is not a referee. It’s a mechanism. And like any mechanism, it doesn’t float above the system, correcting it from on high. It gets defined by the system’s mass and gravity: by who has scale, who controls chokepoints, who sets terms, who can absorb losses, and who can bend incentives without getting punished for it. Capitalism is also not a referee. It rewards and amplifies existing power. It does not automatically check entrenched hierarchies. It usually inherits them, organizes around them, and then intensifies them, because advantage compounds.

Now there are 800,000 examples that show this very process at work, but let’s choose… THIS GUY!

John Davison Rockefeller Sr.

Rockefeller, pictured above in standard issue and vacuum-sealed, was an oil tycoon and a genius, but not primarily because he invented something. He was a consolidator. He looked at a chaotic industry full of small operators and realized the real prize wasn’t a better barrel. It was control: scale, logistics, pricing, and the chokepoints that decide who gets to exist. Standard Oil became dominant and, by the late 19th century, controlled the vast majority of U.S. refining. And scale wasn’t the end of it. He used that weight to squeeze better terms out of railroads, including secret rebates, then built the infrastructure that made competitors dependent (pipelines, tank cars, storage, distribution, etc.) until Standard Oil could dominate the whole chain from wellhead to market.

By the time regulators caught up, he wasn’t part of the market. He was the market. He was the invisible hand. At one point, Rockefeller’s fortune is commonly estimated at roughly 2–3% of U.S. GDP, depending on the year and methodology.

Libertarians argue that the government is responsible for these problems, but if not for the U.S. Government and the Supreme Court coming down with the hand of god to break apart Standard Oil, this would now be the United States of the Rockefeller Republic.

Even Rand warned against an “aristocracy of pull,” a society run on connections and favoritism. She just didn’t see that her system breeds it, because winners don’t merely compete, they shape the rules, buy loyalty, and lock in dependency. That blind spot runs deeper: Rand builds her philosophy on an ideal man who doesn’t exist, treating Homo sapiens as lone geniuses rather than a social, learning species. The result is self-defeating. It worships “ability” while eroding the cooperative conditions that produce it, and it can breed the very incompetence and stagnation she claimed to hate.

The whole point of libertarianism is that everyone floats freely in their own orbit. Sometimes people gain influence for good reasons. Most of the time, they learn how to play the game. In reality, someone always gathers mass through money, charisma, control of resources, or sheer audacity. Once they do, they bend everything around them. There will always be a system, and if there isn’t a formal one, the strongest actor becomes the system by default.

In a logical world, Ayn Rand is a crackpot nobody listens to. But since we live in clowntown, conservatives treat her like she’s Confucius. She gets praised by conservative judges and politicians as the thing responsible for their political awakenings. It’s what got people like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (remember him?) to go into politics—well, at least he’s gone—but then you realize that Atlas Shrugged is also one of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s favorite books, because of course it is.

Look at Donald Trump and Elon Musk… I rest my case. These two buffoons can’t do anything right, but have the influence of gods. Because they are not failures in building Rand’s system. They ARE Rand’s system, and more importantly, the only plausible manifestation of it. I must say, sports fans, the gravity is fucking crushing.

Part 3: Needs, Dreams, Nightmares, and Realities

Golden Rule #1: If your ideology depends on everyone believing, perfectly and perpetually, in the same ideal for the system to function, it’s non-functional.

Such unilateral commitment never happens outside of theory or cults. Life is messy, and people are messy. Real people are not always rational. Nor should they be expected to be. We are not computers. We do not reliably think long-term. We are emotional, impulsive, and competitive. We make bad decisions based on unreliable information or out of love, ego, anger, rage, and fear. I would argue that’s the point: the system is supposed to temper the damage those impulses can cause to others. It must operate, even when conditions aren’t ideal. Because conditions are never ideal.

Most people do not set out to build dominance. Coordination gets easier when decisions are compressed and redundancies are removed. Resources move faster through one center. Risk feels lower when one actor can plan, store, enforce, and respond. Once that arrangement works, it gets copied, formalized, and defended,

Then the story catches up to the structure. Convenience becomes merit. Dominance becomes order. And eventually it gets ritualized as natural, inevitable, and divinely ordained. Then there are no more choices. There just is.

A society only works when it is flexible and reciprocal, built around what people actually need to survive, function, and stay bought in. Misread those needs, physical, social, and psychological, and your institutions will optimize for the wrong things.

THIS IS FORESHADOWING!

Therefore, we have to understand people’s needs and build systems that flow with human nature rather than requiring humans to become perfect ideological robots. People have impulses. People have needs. We must construct a society that accounts for both.

In Bioshock, Rapture collapsed not because it was too free, but because that freedom created a vacuum that begged to be filled. Ryan’s city was overtaken by a man who understood the system better than he did. And the final twist? Even you, the player, were never free. You were programmed to obey, believing you had a choice.

Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a writer hints at future events—!!!!!

Now, to be fair, in BioShock, you also end up fighting massive human-cyborg tanks in diving suits called Big Daddies, guarding little girls implanted with sea slugs, while shrieking mutants try to harvest their mucus so they can inject it and shoot lightning, fire, or a swarm of bees out of their hands.

So, you know…some subtle distinctions, but I think you get the point.

Part 4: Alone

^^^ That was where the letter was originally supposed to conclude, but I have a few more thoughts.

This is, on its face, a dim view of humanity, right? Libertarians will insist it is actually optimistic because it assumes cooperation and connection emerge without coercion. And that may be true in the abstract. But in practice, capitalism turns that “optimism” into another mechanism to get ahead. There are makers, and there are takers, and if you are not the mover, then you are being moved. It is a worldview that claims to celebrate human potential while quietly teaching you to fear your fellow humans through suspicion.—What do they want from me? What do they want to take? What value do you bring?

It also rewrites and warps history. Now, we narrate history through faces and names because that is how humans think. We remember Martin Luther King Jr. because a single human life is a shape our minds can hold. But, he is (and perhaps rightfully) a symbol of a broader movement and struggle.

Objectivism, however, takes that normal storytelling habit and upgrades it into metaphysics. The “great man” is not just a symbol of a movement; he becomes the movement. The inventor, the entrepreneur, the general, the lone genius, the lone hero. History becomes a parade of solitary men dragging civilization forward like an exhausted dog on a leash.

It doesn’t help that every modern ideology, from conservatives to socialists, absorbs some version of the maker-and-taker instinct. On the left, it shows up as the reflex to audit the tribe for defects, treat imperfect allies as liabilities, and turn politics into an internal proceeding where the goal is not to build power but to prove moral seriousness. Someone says the right thing in the wrong tone, has the wrong history, picks the wrong strategy, compromises in the wrong place, and the response is not correction or coaching. It is humiliation and exile. The movement eats its own because it quietly adopted the same logic it claims to hate: the worthy and the unworthy, the enlightened and the contaminated.

It pressures ordinary people to be “world-changing” just to count, just so you aren’t a failure, and it hides the real engine of change, collective work. The Civil Rights Era was not one speech and not one guy. It was thousands of people building organizations, registering voters, raising money, printing materials, hosting meetings, getting arrested, and coming back the next day. Names like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Malcom X, get absorbed into the entity of Martin Luther King Jr. And there are millions more. Freedom came from community, discipline, and repetition, not a single heroic will.

But Randism/Objectivism fits American individualism so cleanly. It matches the John Wayne fantasy, the rugged lone wolf, the man who needs nobody and answers to nothing—the mover of history. It flatters a certain kind of masculinity, not just because it centers strength, but because it frames dependence as shame. Needing people becomes a weakness. Being part of something becomes surrender. Community becomes a threat. But community is not optional. Community is the base layer of being human. Even the most “self-made” person is standing on a platform of other people’s labor, knowledge, care, and sacrifices, most of which they will never see.

We already live in an arrangement that is too narrow and too isolating. The nuclear family, by itself, puts insane pressure on parents to be perfect providers, perfect teachers, perfect therapists, perfect role models, and it leaves kids growing up in a small private universe with very few adults and very little shared life. It can produce a lonely, thin childhood, in which identity and achievement become a performance in search of meaning and belonging.

Then Randism shows up and says, yes, this is the point. Be the best. Be the mover. Do it alone. If you fall behind, that is your fault. If you cannot carry the weight, you do not deserve help. It is a philosophy that claims to liberate the individual, only to leave the individual unbearably alone.

Wouldn’t it be nice for a developing child to see their parents' flaws and the imperfections of their idols and heroes, and to learn that those imperfections are not disqualifying? To know they are not alone, in the unknown. To grow up watching adults admit mistakes without collapsing into shame or becoming hostile and defensive. To learn that love and respect do not require pretending. That belonging does not require perfection. That you may fall, and others will be there to pick you up. That do not have to change the world on your own to matter.

I agree—it would be nice.

It would’ve been nice.

‘Till Next

These letters take a while to write and assemble, especially given work and life away from here. I would really, really appreciate it if you could hook me up and…

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It’s all gas, no breaks, on the American Renaissance Front:

Just like I did with Letter 1, this is an audio retelling/reading of Letter 2: Botch-ulism.

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Letter 8 is in the works.

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— AM

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It’s not a word-for-word reading—it’s more like an oral retelling or podcast, or like I am telling you the story around a campfire, with the letter as a template with some extra thoughts that didn’t make it into the original.

Let me know what you think in the comments—do you like this format? Would you like to see (or hear) more of these in the future?

Hope you are taking care,

—AM

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