Beyond Democracy - My Response

bitmason · November 29, 2025, 5:38pm

Michael,

Thank you for your extended thoughts on what it would look like to revitalize our society. You know well the group that you sent this to, and we are all very interested in the topic. First and foremost, I invite you to collaborate. What you are speaking of is in alignment with my goals on The County Fence, and it’s in alignment with many projects that are happening in the valley. This valley has a lot to share with the world, and a few of us including you have some skills in communication that could be used to expand that impact. And in turn, the people and projects here would benefit from an influx of resources, if properly aligned in intent.

Here is my complete reply to your article.

If we genuinely have a degraded population - chronically stressed, metabolically dysregulated, cognitively impaired by poor nutrition and environmental toxins, psychologically damaged by atomization and propaganda - then asking them to suddenly govern themselves well is like asking someone who’s been living on gas station hot dogs and energy drinks to suddenly become Michael Pollan. The capacity needs to be rebuilt first.

Yes. This is why I find the viewpoint that “people are dumb and need to be led” coming from the elites extremely cynical and irresponsible. It seems to completely ignore the effect that conditions have had on people. And the elites, having accumulated enormous asymmetric power for themselves, seem to feel no responsibility for using it wisely or kindly.

Ten people on a Zoom call can fairly reliably identify who among them listens most carefully, who asks the best questions, who shows genuine concern for others’ wellbeing, who remains calm under pressure.

What I found in launching the County Fence, to my dismay, is that people arrive with all of their training and conditioning for how to be and how to interact. I can’t take people who have been trained on Facebook algorithms to self promote, seek attention, and gravitate to the most outrageous and salacious content… I can’t expect them to be transported into a Stoic forum and know how to conduct themselves.

My thoughts on this now are:

People need small, tangible tasks to accomplish.
Most people need to go on a guided tour, they’re not ready to have a map put in their hands and be told “Good luck.”
We should start with the familiar - learn to cook, learn to farm, learn to run a business.
The task of weaving proper principles throughout the curriculum should be accomplished by the educators - they are ready to look at maps and to apply them, the students are not.
Tim Mitchell has said this in a compelling way: It’s not possible to create cultural change as 1 person. There must be a group of people who can embody a functioning social cohort, operating in “the new model”.
I don’t think we need to solve “democracy” to start out with… we need to solve “the village square”. People need a training ground at smaller scale before they are capable of knowing how to participate at grander scales.
That doesn’t mean that the model can’t affect a large number of people - just that it will do so by replicating, not by becoming enormous.
I would give people a few years of operating smaller groups before we start to talk about federating the groups and creating a broader governance structure.

By the time you reach the final cohort, you have people who have been observed by thousands of their peers across hundreds of hours of interaction, solving problems, demonstrating knowledge, showing character.

I think we’re on the same page about building up from the small to the large. But one thing I would add is that it just has to be practical and tangible at the small scale. If you have 10 people talking about how to solve global governance, and none of them are elites and decision makers in the current structure, then it’s just armchair philosophy. Fantasy football. It matters a lot what we talk about - that we are focusing our energy on things that we have the capacity and will to change, which is typically going to be very local. I think the proper sandbox is:

an organization (for profit, non profit, ecovillage, land trust, farm, whatever)
with a dedicated physical space
a mission, shared values, identity, shared story about the world and our place in it
timeline, goals, roles, “tours of duty” for membership with specific intentions
economic viability

…other things, I won’t list them all, but Tim Mitchell has mapped this out, and we all have our ideas on it

Built-In Sunset Mechanisms: The Critical Safeguard

Yep, 100% agree. Baking time periods into agreements is a beautiful and elegant way to provide for evaluation and evolution of approach.

The metrics might include:

Literacy rates and educational attainment

Health outcomes and life expectancy

Corruption indices (measured by third parties)

Economic opportunity (social mobility measures)

Public trust surveys

Crime rates

Environmental quality indices

Beautiful, yes. But again I would shrink the scope to what is within our power - which depends on the mission, purpose, and composition of the group.

If I go back to The County Fence, and what I believe is actionable right now:

Get a group of 12 educators together, who specialize in different subjects.
Personal autonomy is the connecting thread (almost certainly achieved within the context and in balance with the needs of a small group).
Provide support, provide a regular place and time to meet, provide the “meta education” that is the thread that connects us
We don’t need funding, we don’t need to own the building. We can meet in the Library, the Learning Council, the laundromat, the Grange, people’s houses, a barn, The Trading Post, etc.
We work on revenue models. How are we all going to be supported in our efforts?
We start building curriculum. We build in person experiences and we charge for them.
We offer discussion groups and hangout spots for students.
We film and publish online education.
We build a marketing and outreach footprint.
We see the plan in action, benefiting students and educators.

And this can grow to the point where we can buy land, we can build classrooms, we can create more of a comprehensive embodiment of “the village”.

Let me just say in closing: We’ve all been thinking about this. We’ve all been yearning for a way of life that’s more connected, and kind. And where it doesn’t feel like the different parts of our lives are in conflict. We’re looking for a place where we can find peace and rest, where activities, relationships, and the passage of time feel harmonious.

We’ve pulled back from that, saying “We don’t have the money.” “We don’t have the land.” “We don’t have the right people.” “The people aren’t ready.” and I have been asking myself: What is the seed of the renewal of life? The cycle must start somewhere, right? So what is the blueprint, that when introduced to water, sunlight, and soil, forms roots, forms a stem, forms leaves, and begins to grow and interface with the substrate?

Maybe the seed is education. An invitation. Maybe it’s the right place to start. Maybe if we do it, even at a small scale, even tiny, the latent resources of the Earth will find it irresistible to participate, to allow themselves to be incorporated in a new blueprint.

Footnotes/Nitpicks:

Bioelectric Fields

Several studies have been conducted on survivors of the Holocaust and their offspring. For example, incidences of suicide and PTSD in the children of survivors far exceed the rate found in the general population.

There may be another mechanism which is as yet unconsidered by modern biology. The electromagnetic field of the organism is a place for memory and habit. The electromagnetic field is the causation of physical form (not the DNA), and we may find that other phenomena such as the psychological state of the individual are more easily explainable by electric fields than by matter and chemistry (although there are crossovers and interplays between the physical and electrical systems). See Michael Levin’s work on bioelectric fields for experimental evidence of these statements.

Anatomy of a Psyop

There was also a recent talk by Chase Hughes where he mentions that in some cases of multiple personalities, one personality will have a tendency to have a skin rash, or will be near sighted and the other personality does not suffer from the same limitations or abnormalities. And they can reproduce this under hypnosis. He also goes into great detail here about how psyops (individual or en masse) weaponize a person’s basic needs for social inclusion.

Non-Hierarchical Decision Making Process

Imagine a technical question about nuclear reactor safety. The wise noocratic council might recognize they need deeper expertise, so they convene specialists. But unlike pure technocracy, the specialists advise rather than decide.

Eh. I want competent people running the nuclear reactor, and they should be empowered to make decisions. A slower, broader, consensus based decision making is appropriate for the policies governing the reactor, but not for the day to day decisions. You mentioned Eleanor Oustrom and layers of governance - I think the same principle applies here. The decision making and learning process of something like a nuclear reactor team could definitely be improved and evolved though. See “Turn The Ship Around” - a management book developed by a nuclear submarine commander which both applies an enlightened approach, and is proven for dealing with the exact circumstance we are speaking about.

Also the Enspiral organization - a functioning body of over 300 small business owners and freelancers - uses the advice process. You can find documentation in their handbook, which is open source I.E. we could fork it and evolve it on our own.

Responsibility of Leaders

wise rulers would recognize when they need those with more demonstrated competence on specific issues.

I agree with your statement, but I believe it must be enforced by the broader group. Wise followers should tell the ruler to get bent when he displays characteristics of narcissism, sociopathy, or tyranny. But the people’s capacities can and should be augmented by education of personal rights and powers, and how to detect and exclude socially toxic neurodivergence.

Within an organization of our own definition, we can codify the powers of the membership at large to prevent abuse and tyranny.

Also do we need leaders? And what new form should they take? We definitely don’t need rulers - people who presume to rule us.

The Developmental Sequence

The practical bootstrap sequence might look like:

Years 0-2: Design and Legitimation Phase
Years 2-3: Selection Tournament
Years 3-4: Transition
Years 4-23: Guardianship Period
_**Years 20-25: Transition to Participatory Governance

I see what you’re proposing, but I think there’s a better way to approach it. Let me say first why I believe this approach will fail.

It feels like a monolithic design. You’re engaging with a small group of people who are capable of understanding “the map”. You’re dedicating yourselves to talk about things which you haven’t actually been granted authority or responsibility to oversee. You’re expecting to develop a governance structure in parallel, which the people in the current governance structure will dismiss at first, and then they will want to destroy it if they actually understand it to be viable. If you overcome the personal motivation challenges (a small group of people dedicating years of their life to this) and you achieve the design and proof of concept, then the transition will inevitably involve conflict and force. The majority of the population, who didn’t follow or care what you were doing, will be surprised and resistant to the proposal. Because everyone hates change - it disrupts their lives and involves risk.

In essence - the approach necessitates force, and must be applied at scale. At some point you have to force your ideas on the people who weren’t in the room or a part of the process all along.

I propose an alternative that does not need force to accomplish the objective. I outlined the basis of it above - we need an organization, a dedicated space in which to meet and work, and we need to demonstrate our principles functioning on a day to day basis. The philosophy should be developed in tandem with an embodied activity. Why this will work:

People need to experience the “philosophy in action”. “Show, don’t tell.” Most people aren’t very receptive to abstract concepts without an implementation in front of them. Whereas when they experience it in action, they will “get it”.
Some people will never care about replicating this. I.E. the barista may have no interest, ever in her life, to run a coffee shop herself.
The people who DO care about replicating it will find their way to “the map”, to the meta-education provided to leaders/educators.
The job description (or workshop/class description) meets them where they’re at. Come. Participate. Play this role. We care about you and we’ll take care of you. You’ll learn and you’ll have a good time.
The people who’ve experienced healthier ways of relating will no longer accept the shitty conditions that they’ve been accepting because they didn’t know there was an alternative.
No one needs to control anyone. We’re a group of people choosing to do this because it’s better, and we enjoy it more.
We get to enjoy it now, because it’s what we’re choosing to do with the resources and people at hand who are willing.
We’re creating a bubble where “things are actually working correctly” which may not solve the world’s problems, but it will do a lot to alleviate and comfort our nervous systems by changing our actual day to day experience.
We publish, we celebrate, and we create opportunities for new people to be exposed and immersed in this environment.
We don’t have to spend years of our lives fighting a system that doesn’t want to change, and all of the emotional frustration, outrage, self doubt, and powerlessness that goes along with that.
There’s no force: people are invited, they experience, and then their identity changes, their wants change, and they begin to seek out (or create) more opportunities that embody this new way of being.

In essence, we need a cultural change, and the problem of national governance is unsolvable until that takes place. But conversely, the misery experienced by being within the current structure is largely unnecessary - we can create lives for ourselves where we no longer need to experience much of that misery.

Michael · November 29, 2025, 10:33pm

Brandon,

Thank you for engaging so thoughtfully with my article. The spirit of collaboration you offer is welcome, and I appreciate that you’ve taken the time to identify both points of agreement and genuine tension between our approaches. Let me address some of your critiques and clarify where I think we may be talking past each other.

Point 1

You write that people arrive at platforms like The County Fence “with all of their training and conditioning” from Facebook algorithms—self-promoting, attention-seeking, gravitating toward outrage. Here, I’d argue this is precisely what the tournament selection mechanism is designed to address.

The first round of the tournament will indeed contain degraded participants. But the mechanism isn’t static—it’s iterative. Each successive round functions as a filter. The attention-seekers and self-promoters may perform well in mass-media contexts, but small-group dynamics over extended interaction expose these patterns. The person who listens carefully, who synthesizes rather than dominates, who demonstrates genuine concern for others’ wellbeing;…these qualities become visible in intimate settings in ways they cannot be faked across multiple rounds with different cohorts.

By round seven, you’re not dealing with people selected by popularity contests or media performance. You’re dealing with people who have been observed by thousands of peers across hundreds of hours of actual problem-solving. The Facebook algorithms, the conditioning, all of it gets progressively filtered out, not by excluding people at the start, but by the selection pressure of the process itself.

Point 2

You argue that most people aren’t receptive to abstract concepts without implementation in front of them, and therefore we should start with tangible activities—cooking, farming, running a business. I don’t disagree that these are valuable. But I’d push back on the framing.

The inability to engage with abstract concepts is itself the social deficit we’re trying to address. A dumbed-down, stressed, dysregulated populace that is largely incapable of managing themselves collectively—this is my entire argument for noocratic management in the first place. The wise council’s role is precisely to identify and develop the on-ramps that increase the population’s capacity to flourish. They’re the ones who can see the map and translate it into guided tours for those who aren’t ready for navigation.

As I wrote:

If we genuinely have a degraded population—chronically stressed, metabolically dysregulated, cognitively impaired by poor nutrition and environmental toxins, psychologically damaged by atomization and propaganda—then asking them to suddenly govern themselves well is like asking someone who’s been living on gas station hot dogs and energy drinks to suddenly become Michael Pollan. The capacity needs to be rebuilt first.

The practical, embodied activities you propose are excellent components of that rebuilding. But someone has to design the curriculum. Someone has to recognize which activities actually heal versus which merely feel good. Someone has to hold the long-term developmental arc while people are learning to cook. That’s what noocratic guidance provides—not top-down control of daily life, but stewardship of the conditions for growth.

Point 3

You suggest that building the population’s capacity to “tell the ruler to get bent when he displays characteristics of narcissism, sociopathy, or tyranny” is equally important as selecting wise leaders. I understand the appeal, but I think this inverts the problem in a way that leads us back into the dysfunction we’re trying to escape.

The biggest obstacle might not be technical but psychological. Modern populations have been so thoroughly propagandized with democratic mythology that any alternative sounds tyrannical, even when current “democracy” is obviously captured and dysfunctional. Extraordinary crisis conditions - economic collapse, social breakdown, external threat - may be necessary to create the permission space for such radical restructuring.

Everybody thinking they know best, everybody is convinced they have greater access to the truth of things. Our current society is awash with groups and individuals hurling abuse at each other—calling each other narcissistic, fascistic, woke, libtards, tyrants—simply because their team is not in the ascendant.

The truth, as integral theory suggests, is that all socio-political factions are right and wrong in varying degrees. More damage is done because we accept that political infighting is a valid way of addressing conflicting ideas. Political infighting is part of the problem, not the solution.

Democracy, as I argued in the article and in the following quote from my book, often reduces to

…we get to control the activities of people we don’t like, or their ideas. If we can’t achieve authority on our own terms, we collectively place what authority we have in the hands of a particular person or party, with the expectation that they will do the controlling for us.

“Wise followers” who think they can reliably identify tyranny are probably not wise—they just think they are. The Dunning-Kruger effect at the local scale. Everyone believes their mental models are the correct ones. The thing about truly wise, caring and noble men (and women), is that they often follow paths that are counter-intuitive and therefore misunderstood. That’s because they have developed complex mental models of reality that others haven’t. They should be given license to apply them (and it is a license, not a monopoly).

A noocracy smooths out this problem by recognizing that democracy-as-shouting-match is insufficient—hence the title of the article. If a rigorous selection process, one which actively and systematically tries to select the best of the best across hundreds of hours of observed interaction, cannot filter out narcissism, sociopathy, and tyranny, then our problems truly are unsolvable. But I’d rather bet on iterative peer selection than on the current arrangement, where degraded populations choose between pre-selected candidates optimized for fundraising and television performance.

Our Points of Agreement

Your other observations are not controversial to me, and several deserve incorporation into the broader framework.

The Enspiral model and the advice process represent exactly the kind of proof-of-concept we need more visibility on. Real-world examples of functioning horizontal governance strengthen the case that alternatives exist—they’re not merely theoretical.

Your critique of the nuclear reactor example is correct. I conflated strategic governance with operational competence. A wise council might determine whether to build nuclear capacity—weighing values, risk tolerance, resource allocation—but reactor operators need authority for real-time safety decisions. The distinction between governance layers needed more precision.

Tim Mitchell’s point about needing a functioning social cohort to embody the new model—that cultural change cannot happen through individuals alone—deserves more than passing mention. Indeed, you need enough people operating by new principles simultaneously to demonstrate viability. My discussion of the 35-40% threshold gestures at this, but your framing of it as the essential seed condition is more on point.

And the bioelectric field research you reference (Michael Levin’s work) may add to my understanding of how dysfunction persists intergenerationally through mechanisms beyond epigenetics. Worth further exploration.

On Scale and Replication

Where I think we genuinely differ is on the question of scale. You advocate for village-level solutions that replicate organically, while dismissing national-level governance reform as “armchair philosophy” and “fantasy football” when conducted by non-elites.

I understand the resistance. But I’d ask: at what point does your replicating village model aggregate into something capable of challenging dysfunctional macro-structures? The meta-control problem I outlined in my article (where entrenched power actively suppresses alternatives once they become viable threats) doesn’t disappear because you’ve stayed small and practical. History suggests the opposite: successful parallel institutions get targeted precisely when they become visible enough to matter. Your confidence that change happens through invitation alone, that “no one needs to control anyone,” may underestimate how the dominant system responds to genuine alternatives. Staying below the suppression threshold indefinitely isn’t a strategy. At best, it’s a holding pattern.

I do believe that the village-scale work you propose is valuable in its own right—it creates pockets of health, demonstrates proof of concept, and provides refuge. I’d like to live in it! But it isn’t a precondition for the tournament mechanism. The tournament is designed to work with the population as it exists, precisely because its iterative structure filters out dysfunction progressively. We don’t need to wait for a generation of healed communities before the selection process becomes viable. The process itself does the filtering.

What your village model does provide is a complimentary path (one that heals from the ground up) while the noocratic structure guides from above. Both can proceed in parallel. The tournament identifies and elevates those capable of wise stewardship; the village communities create the lived experience of flourishing that makes the noocracy’s guidance legible and trustworthy to ordinary people. As I wrote in my book:

I’m not suggesting that we have to wait until conditions are perfect for self-realization. Think of it as a double helix with one strand being societal advancement and the other being personal empowerment. Each strand needs to match the other as energy moves from bottom to top, each entwined strand serving this upward momentum. New levels of consciousness supported by new levels of social improvement, which then supports new levels of consciousness in an ever-virtuous cycle. The last piece of this grand puzzle is put in place not by some thought leader, priest, or politician—it is put in place by us all. Indeed, that is the only way it can be accomplished.

These don’t have to be sequential phases. We’re describing concurrent efforts that reinforce each other.

Your invitation to collaborate is much appreciated, and I recognize we share more common ground than our different emphases might suggest. Where we may differ is on what comes next—whether organic replication is sufficient, or whether some intentional architecture for aggregating local wisdom into larger-scale coordination will eventually be necessary. I suspect so.

With respect,

Michael

bitmason · December 1, 2025, 6:11pm

Michael,

Thank you for your detailed response! It’s not often these days that I have an extended dialogue like this in text form. It’s helping me to flesh out some of my own ideas, as I imagine it is for you as well. For anyone reading this, I hope the density of the material is not intimidating. I assure our readers - for my part I have no intention to create a walled garden or to use language and jargon as a way of separating and creating an “in club”. Everything we’re talking about here is open to questioning and further engagement. And I also believe it can “be lived” and is not merely rhetoric. So thank you to anyone who is joining us on this journey.

Michael, before I begin to respond I’d like to just restate, succinctly what I hear in your message. This will be in my own words, so forgive me and please feel free to correct if I’m misstating anything.

These are the points I’m hearing from you:

rounds of tournament selection would promote wise rulership
inability to engage with more abstract concepts is itself a deficit which must be addressed
life stressors and focus on survival make it difficult to achieve strategic/long-term/integrative perspective
someone must hold the long term development arc (what does this mean to you? How must it be “held”?)
“tell the ruler to get bent” means to you “everybody thinking they know best” but people are highly caught up in polarizing narratives
Democracies can be tyrannies of the majority
you believe iterative peer selection, while maybe not perfect, would be an improvement on our present system
people tend to think they’re wiser than they are
democracy has devolved into a shouting match
contention: is exploring alternative national governance “armchair philosophy”?
at what point does village building challenge the dysfunctional macro-structures?
what stops our villages from being smashed?
change happens through invitation alone, no one needs to control anyone: this underestimates the forceful response of the opposition
village scale work is valuable in it’s own right: I’d like to live in it!
village work is not a precondition for the tournament mechanism
both approaches can proceed in parallel
double helix of personal empowerment and societal advancement
the last piece is not granted by authority, it is realized by the individual
the invitation to collaborate is appreciated - what comes next?

Now my response, out of necessity will be lengthy. These are detailed and nuanced comments and they deserve the same level of detail in response. I will say firstly that my purpose is this: to hear your perspective, and to state my own. To see and be seen. I agree with you that the approaches we are suggesting are not contradictory, and they do not have to be approached in sequence, they can be parallel. So my purpose is not to convince you otherwise, but simply to lay out my own perspective which as a result gives me my present priorities and focus.

I will say as well, that it is not necessary for everyone to approach the subject in this way. We are engaged in a highly intellectual form of approaching this, which I laugh about as I write this. It’s fun for me. It’s a fun sandbox to play in. But it’s not necessary. People have an intuitive understanding of whether they enjoy a certain way of being and working. They have an intuitive understanding of whether their boundaries are being violated, or if they feel respected and valued and honored. The essence that I feel we are both devoted to achieving is a world that is more caring and kind, which seeks to allow the seed of possibility within each human develop with full support, and without interference or harm from the outside.

Here are my responses in detail.

rounds of tournament selection would promote wise rulership

This is intriguing. How will you know what qualities and characteristics to look for? How will you prevent subterfuge - someone who uses the language we want to hear, but has no real dedication to achieving this in policy and practice?

One of the major problems with our current politics is that rhetoric is disconnected from reality. Politicians are those that can form a bridge between:

moneyed interests: who want power over all the people
the people: who in truth have the power of free will, but aren’t always wise about how they wield it

The politician’s job is to successfully market themselves, and then achieve the goals of the moneyed interests. They must achieve an illusion of serving the people long enough to get the desired policies implemented on behalf of their donors. If they’re successful they will be rewarded with wealth and influence far beyond what their station in life would normally accord. Their quality of life and their offspring will benefit from material abundance.

So I would suggest as an important part of a selection process that the principles must be embodied - we must have examples of the philosophy being lived, and not merely articulated. Which points me back towards sandboxes - be that corporations, non-profits, or government posts, where the candidates can demonstrate through their actions an adherence to their own principles. And if those organizations themselves are autocratic - if whistleblowers are silenced (e.g. Boeing) and there is no accountability to the well being of the workers or the customer - then the results of these “case studies” proving the person’s merits for leadership cannot be trusted.

In other words, we’re living in authoritarian institutions from top to bottom in our society, including churches, families, schools, and workplaces. The authoritarian nature of these institutions facilitates information hiding, abuse, and silencing of dissenters. Which allows a false narrative of virtue to be promoted regarding a politician or elite persona, and allows them to gather popular support that they did not rightfully earn (this is a core narcissistic trait by the way). See the book “Guru Papers: The Masks of Authoritarian Control” for a thorough discourse on exactly how bad it is, how thoroughly permeating these modes of operation are within our society.

The living memory of people alive today is a few generations at most (you can talk to your grandparents and get their perspective, but there’s nothing beyond that), and so the tragedy is that we don’t remember there ever having existed a world which was not top-down controlled.

inability to engage with more abstract concepts is itself a deficit which must be addressed

Maybe. I believe that there are many valid ways of interacting with the world. Let’s take for example people with disabilities: down syndrome, blindness, deafness. Their way of functioning and relating to the world may be entirely shut down in one category. And yet they may have a beautiful and complete way of operating with the world in their own right. One which the rest of us may learn and benefit from by witnessing. And one which may in fact present wonderful learning, exploration and joy to the individual in question.

And the “common man” - whatever that means - is a gestalt of many different varying capabilities and interests, who will each relate to the world according to their strengths and preferences. So I don’t think it’s right to prescribe one way of relating to the world - the intellectual or academic in this case - and say that that is the highest or best.

I think a core question is “What is truth?” And “How do we know the truth when we see it?”

And one could also ask: “What is strength?” “What is virtue?” “What is goodness?”

To one person, their way of arriving at the truth may be the scientific method. They recognize that individuals have bias, and even if we don’t intend it, we may be fooling ourselves and telling the story we want to believe, rather than what the evidence supports. This is a good and valid way of seeking the truth, and the victories and accomplishments of this approach are self evident. We have silicon transistors and GPS devices. Our knowledge of physics is not merely theoretical, it is embodied and proven through use.

To another person, the truth may be “what resonates with me.” Or as I say “The I am presence within all things recognizes truth as self.” Is this wrong? Is this misleading? It can be. Let us say it is a starting point which can point a person in the right direction, but it needs further steps of confirmation in order to assure that a person is not merely fooling themselves.

Above all else, the person has to want the truth. The person has to know the value of truth over lies. That the danger of a lie is that even if it is momentarily comforting, if human relationships are built on it, if technologies and devices and infrastructure are built on it, eventually the inaccuracies of that lie will compound and will destroy the entire construct. Witness Boeing’s inability to tell the truth, and its consequences in planes falling apart. Witness the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and Richard Feynman’s critique revealing the “little lies” that compounded into a “big explosion”.

I don’t believe that we can build a complex civilization without a culture of truth telling. I don’t believe we can sustain our current level of development without it. And I don’t believe our present culture appreciates the gravity and consequence of this.

So to reconnect with the original idea - I would say that the more fundamental thing that must be maintained is truth telling. The idea that everyone should adopt and be able to engage in intellectual complexity is not necessary. But truth telling is necessary, is essential, and without it civilization (and anything else of complexity) simply collapses.

life stressors and focus on survival make it difficult to achieve strategic/long-term/integrative perspective

Yes. Absolutely. But doesn’t this argue for the individual being supported, and coming into an environment where their nervous system can calm, where they can begin to access these higher capacities of self?

someone must hold the long term development arc (what does this mean to you? How must it be “held”?)

In my concept of The County Fence, at least in this most recent iteration of approach, we would offer:

workshops to help a person explore and flesh out their curriculum
a “meta-education”: what does it look like to weave the principles of autonomy within each subject area?
support in copy writing, video production, business model and cashflow development
a brand which establishes a movement and a marketplace of ideas, where people care about autonomy, and are interested in the subjects being presented
a theory of change, by which we build the “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” and the activities of our daily lives remain connected to this
a forum of discussion where we can ask “How are we doing?” “Are we living our values?” “How can we do better?”

So a core team at The County Fence would be “holding the long term development arc”. Our relationship with the educators would be “communication, not force” I.E. the principles we are suggesting be woven in and the support structures we are offering are available but the individual educators make determinations about how and when to incorporate them. The educators retain creative freedom in the content and approach of their education.

The only thing that would mark a “parting of ways” is if more fundamental principles are violated by the approach taken. Namely, there must be:

Autonomy of individuals
Relationships of mutually informed consent
Do no harm to life or property of others

This could be fleshed out more. I have articulated this and similar principles in other writings present on The County Fence.

“tell the ruler to get bent” means to you “everybody thinking they know best” but people are highly caught up in polarizing narratives

Democracies can be tyrannies of the majority

I didn’t mean to express the power of individuals as an absolute. Only that it must be present, in balance with other powers. And that the concept of “responsible rulership” can only be accomplished by powers held and reserved by those to whom the responsibility is directed.

If you were to draw the force vectors within a governance model, or even a society, and if you care about balance and fairness, you would want to see arrows going both ways, that no one part of the whole is an unchallengeable authority (a tyranny) over the rest.

If we think about a Democracy as a diagram that has all its force vectors coming from the population, you are right: this has a failure condition where either by means of propaganda or by just a natural emergent degradation of values and capacities the people come to be highly manipulated, highly reactive, and begin to approve and celebrate insane and destructive policies.

A Republic such as established by the United States constitution has some interesting qualities, namely that the 3 branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, all hold a portion of the power and can act as checks and balances against autocracy forming in any of the other branches. And if we were to consider “the people” as the fourth branch of government, then we could draw the force vectors of accountability, choice, and power reserved by the people within this model.

I think most will acknowledge at this point that our beloved Republic has failed to retain the integrity and balance of powers that it sought out to achieve. The branches of government have been infiltrated by forces which are colluding with one another. Loopholes have been found to extend government powers to God-like levels, such as:

the war on drugs: being in truth a perpetual war on personal freedoms, a means to single out and eliminate enemies of the state, a punitive approach to people who are themselves victims experiencing breakdown, and a way for the cartels who are embedded in “the deep state” to eliminate competition while maintaining their own drug trafficking
the war on terrorism: being in truth a perpetual war on people’s right to privacy, a way to abandon the rights of habeas corpus, a term “terrorism” that can be used to strip a person of their rights without due process, a way to justify endless spying upon the population without any warrant or proof of wrongdoing
the war on pandemics: coronavirus or otherwise, a way to perpetually justify putting power into the hands of bodies like the World Health Organization, and billionaires like Bill Gates. A way to justify complete centralized knowledge of humanity’s health records and genetic data. A way to justify medical mandates and ID cards proving obedience as prerequisites for employment, travel, and participation in society.
the war for AI: a war which paradoxically, must be fought by feeding all of human knowledge into AI, by constructing massive data centers which require energy in quantities comparable to the entirety of contemporary human civilization, and through massive government subsidizing both economically and through classified, privileged data.

In my estimation these measures are the actions of a psychopathic minority who by their willingness to sacrifice all else to achieve it, have accrued for themselves the power to wield and direct the economic and productive force of the planet. It’s not only the United States, because you will find these same narratives used to justify government overreach in all of the nations around the world who we consider our allies and friends. Which may be pointing to a deeper truth - that The Empire is very much alive. Just because the means of control have changed does not mean the power structures have went away.

I say all this to bring up the question: If this is how our present attempt at governance was compromised, then what prevents a new model from being subject to the same attacks? What were the breaks in accountability that allowed greed, corruption, and criminality to become the norm? It wasn’t that most people wanted the darker aspects of human tendency to be given primacy and deference. It was that they were unable to detect and prevent them.

Another core issue which has been brought up by Catherine Austin Fitts among others, is that if people are truly educated about what is making the machine go, they will know that a major portion of the United States economy, as well as the world economy, is in fact fraud and criminality. That if you were to push a button today and get rid of it all, you would see all the pensions collapse. The USD would collapse. The banks would collapse. The world would be plunged into a depression and would remain thus until we sorted out how to get the engine started again - praying that we could do so without the criminality that corroded the old engine into a heap of slag.

So theoretically if a “good and virtuous reformer” goes into Washington, what happens when that person becomes “initiated” - when their eyes are open to the truth - that if they were to apply the principles upon which they were voted in, that an even worse circumstance would result. The economic devastation of the people that voted them in. The collapse. And this well meaning do-gooder, they would go down in history as the person who collapsed it all.

I don’t know exactly what a person going to Washington is faced with. I’m sure each individual story is different. But think of Ned Stark in “Game of Thrones”. Being executed, with the people you thought to do right by jeering and throwing rotten fruit as they celebrate your demise. Who did you serve? What did you accomplish?

This is not to say that your approach to reform is incorrect - truth be told I don’t fully understand what you are proposing. I think there are some details about methodology and selection criteria that remain to be fleshed out. And I think that your approach, just like mine, would evolve over time with the learnings of the participants. Here I’m just sharing my understanding of some of the factors that led us to where we are, and I believe we must incorporate this understanding if we want a better model.

you believe iterative peer selection, while maybe not perfect, would be an improvement on our present system

That seems like a good idea. I’m only adding to that that I think that “embodiment” and demonstration of ones principles is an important part of that, and I think it’s something that’s missing, disconnected, and dysfunctional within our present society. It’s something that occurs naturally at village scale, because then we can see people operating in all aspects of their lives, not just a narrow “media personality” where we see only what we’re being presented with. And I’m saying that if we don’t have smaller organizations functioning in integrity and with proper principles, I don’t know how a person would ever prove their worthiness to lead something larger.

people tend to think they’re wiser than they are

That’s a fair thing to say. However, I would not like to see it used as justification that people are not deserving of their own power.

Something like this argument has been used for a long time by elites to justify why they have power over the citizenry.
If people don’t have wisdom, then seek to develop it within them. Don’t use it to justify why we take power over them.

Wisdom, knowledge, autonomy, cannot be developed by pushing something into a person. They must be developed from the inside out. The word “education” comes from the root “educe” which means “to draw out”. The only thing we can do from the outside is create an environment which offers a person the opportunity to develop according to their inner tendency. This can be likened to providing soil, water, and sunlight to a plant. It is the blueprint of the seed which determines how to assemble what you’ve given it into a living form of a particular type. Consider an education process with these ingredients:

safety: the person must know that they are safe from physical harm
inclusion: the person will not be shunned or humiliated for expressing their creativity
possibility: a question, a curiosity, a subject to explore
medium: an environment in which to try new things and see whether understanding is correct
accountability: actively asking the question: have we achieved understanding? how do we know?
celebration: recognition and acknowledgement of the student’s success
reciprocation: students are encouraged to share what they have learned, and learn from one another

Is that sufficient to unlock the creative potential of the individual? And of the collective? Would a person experiencing this be transformed? Would they see the world now with a different set of expectations with how to be treated? With how they expect interactions with others to occur?

democracy has devolved into a shouting match

Yes. But:

We don’t have a democracy in the United States (or anywhere else allied with us).
We aren’t “promoting democracy” within the rest of the world, we are completely happy to stage coup de tats on democratic governments and install dictators if those dictators will guarantee us access to exploit the people and resources of that country.
“Democracy” as the term is used in the United States is an aspirational - something that we knowingly trick ourselves into believing in order to pretend that “we the people” have a stake, and that our opinions matter

The reason our dialogue has devolved into a shouting match is because the things we are shouting about are all outside of our control. People have strong opinions about what the other political party should be doing, what their leaders should be doing, what the leaders of other countries should be doing. But the energy that is spent in this way is taken away from “What am I doing today?” “How I can be more available and understanding to the people I meet today?” “How can I embody my principles today?”

This is the nature and purpose of propaganda: When people are focused on what is outside their control, they will be ineffective to oppose, stand up to, or present an alternative to anything. The victim mindset is a foregone conclusion, because of what they are focused on, they can only be a victim. The victim mindset, while it paralyzes the person, justifies the empowerment of the state, who take the objective by force. Now, having taken it by force, the portion of the population who dwelled in victimhood now support the actions of the state to some degree. The state being justified (enough), is not overthrown. Those who disagree dwell in their victimhood a while longer, until there are enough of them that they win back the popular vote. Their victimhood is now used to justify a swing back in the other direction, to the outcry of “the other side”.

This is the Hegelian Dialectic. A process by which two sides are pitted against each other for the accomplishment of a third, hidden objective. Here is James Lindsay explaining the Hegelian Dialectic to a Christian audience. You don’t have to be a Christian to understand the power dynamics and tactics he is describing. Currently that third objective appears to be Technocracy, or something in that realm. And it is being implemented not only in the friends and allies of The United States, but strangely even in our “enemies” like Russia and China. This points to an obvious conclusion: that the source of this development is beyond the reach and power of any individual nation, and yet seeks to implement uniform policies across all nations.

If we want to get out of the Hegelian Dialectic, then we must stop expending our energy in this way. Stop trying to control other people, and take responsibility for our own lives. Take up a Libertarian principle, which is to say that the only legitimate exercise of power is to enforce a person’s rights. A subset of those rights, sufficient for this discussion is:

The right to control your own body and mind
The right to personal, private property
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
The right to enter into contract of willing, mutual, informed consent

If I’m seeking to exercise power over another, and my objective is not to secure these rights for a rightful party, then I’m in the wrong. And the state is not elevated to special privilege, it is merely the embodiment and enforcement of a set of principles that (hopefully) we can all agree upon. I know agreement amongst vast swaths of the Earth’s population is rare, but look again at the foundations above and consider how many people on the planet would truly disagree; and are those people in disagreement the 4% of the population that would be diagnosed as psychopaths? Are we as a body ok encoding that in a set of principles, that the sociopaths amongst us will not have the power to abuse us arbitrarilly? I think that was actually the stated goal of the American constitution. “No taxation without representation” and throwing off what was seen as the tyrannical exploits of King George.

Here is a dissertation on property rights and land use, argued from this perspective.

It is possible by extension and proper application of these principles, to arrive at something resembling very closely a “common law” without the complexities of a system which tries to describe every scenario in excruciating detail. Conversely, when these principles are absent, law itself ceases to have any meaning. It is only the dictates of a man with a gun.

If people do not understand the principles I have outlined above, or to put it another way, if they do not have some kind of internally consistent understanding of the nature of law and power, then they have no hope asserting their rights in relation to the state. So something like the above must be included as an area of education in order for the individual to stand in the knowing of their own power.

contention: is exploring alternative national governance “armchair philosophy”?

People are very aware of the problems we face. The issues with the economy, and the impacts on them personally. The issues with relationships and dialogue breaking down into polarization, breaking up families, communities, and productivity in the workplace.

But being able to point to the problems is not sufficient. If you read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, he’s very articulate at pointing out the problems of capitalism. But when you look at the results of what has been implemented in the name of communism, massive swaths of humanity have been killed in order to facilitate their revolutions. And the resulting state of total control is not generally spoken highly of except under duress, or by the few who are wielding that control.

To come back to what I believe is the core principle: If you do not have healthy organizations which can vouch for the leadership qualities of a person, then I don’t see how such a person would prove their suitability to lead on a grander scale.

I think the problem with something like communism being developed in the academic sense and then applied by force… well the problems are obvious and significant. Evolution and proof of concept at smaller scales is how you mitigate the dangers of a new approach.

at what point does village building challenge the dysfunctional macro-structures?

what stops our villages from being smashed?

The current regime faces a legitimacy crisis already. Their hold on the population is very tenuous. The people know that they’ve been abused, and as soon as they start to put names and faces on that and connect the dots about the actions that led us here, there’s a lot of danger for the people who implemented that abuse.

There are a number of things we can do to make ourselves a less attractive target:

be friends with everyone around us, left, right, and center
involve people, invite them to events, let them participate
volunteer, contribute back to the community

These things are in alignment with the principles of human care and what is guiding the organization to begin with. But the more it’s publicly visible and obvious what we represent and the kind of work we are doing, the harder it is to justify any hostile response to it.

That’s surface level. Dig down further and the regime has other discretionary ways of eliminating communities:

propaganda campaigns - they won’t smash you right away, they’ll smear you first then smash you
weather warfare - the government has had this power since the 70’s, used it in the Korean war, and it’s a nice way for them to deny that they had any involvement
space lasers, HAARP, radio frequencies - I find the weaponization of this known technology plausible
fires - maybe natural, maybe not
crime - what excuses will be made for lack of enforcement? I’m sure they’ll be creative.

The common theme between all of these is “plausible deniability”. This is the ground that politicians, spooks, and the mafia love to stand on. So we need to call them on it, document it, pull together the evidence of wrong doing. Challenge them in courts. Challenge them in the public sphere. There’s a lot more law abiding citizens on the planet than there are criminals, and if we stand together we can assert our right to live our lives free from abuse.

The other theme here is “disaster capitalism”, where in my words:

People’s lives and property are destroyed (with plausible deniability).
Land developers buy the property for pennies on the dollar.
They invest, often with the help of government subsidies.
They profit by holding and renting, or selling the properties.

It’s one thing to note that this may be happening around the world, with the help of US corporations and US military. It’s another to ask, could it be happening here? The Lahaina Fires, cattle being cooked in Texas, and the North Carolina hurricane are three examples of suspicious circumstances.

I don’t have a complete answer to this sort of threat, but I hope that people are waking up to this and starting to criticize the land developers who benefit from disasters, and looking into how the disasters start in the first place. More open source reporting is needed in this area.

change happens through invitation alone, no one needs to control anyone: this underestimates the forceful response of the opposition

In Star Wars, there is a scene where Luke Skywalker meets Emperor Palpetine for the first time. Luke says “Your overconfidence is your weakness.” and Palpetine responds “Your faith in your friends is yours!”

There’s a difference between light and dark, and the methods used by each. When I look inside myself, I see that the motivation to use force comes from fear, anxiety, lack of safety. In other words, the more I perceive myself as a victim the more I can justify use of force. Using force doesn’t get us out of the cycle - it perpetuates it.

The light operates by communication, not by force. It allows individuals to choose their own way. It’s exemplified by the light of the creator, who provides the animating force of this reality, but does not direct from the top down the individual particles and life forms.

As Thich Naht Han said: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

village scale work is valuable in it’s own right: I’d like to live in it!

If you truly believe that it’s possible, and you want it, and you take steps to create it, then you will live in it. I have full faith and confidence in that.

village work is not a precondition for the tournament mechanism

No, but as I’ve outlined it is the necessary training ground for bigger games. To the extent that viable leaders are present now, who could be promoted to positions of power within the existing structure, it is because they have participated in or founded healthy functioning organizations.

To be clear by “healthy functioning” I mean an enlightened functioning such as what is presented in Frederick Laloux’s book “Reinventing Organizations”. Laloux describes different governance models: rule by force, rule by law, rule by achievement, rule by relationships, and the integrative view which incorporates all of these into a balanced whole. These are different values systems which can be found present in various organizations. And Laloux presents a handful of examples of existing ones to draw inspiration from. A key concept from the book is that there is a synergy between the self-realization of the individual, and that of the organization. And this may be an important key to unlocking human potential - to realize that we naturally exist in communities. Emotional state is more completely described within a constellation of relationships, not within an individual. And the proper embodiment of enlightened principles cannot exist in a vacuum, it must be in relationship to others.

So from my perspective: could we find these people and promote them? Yes, but only to the extent that they were fostered in healthy organizations. And when they “get to the swamp” there is a good chance that they become swamp creatures themselves, because that is a necessary function of “the swamp”. It must incorporate new entrants and make them a part of itself, otherwise it would not have sustained and built strength for all this time. And also because what we accredit to the individual may more appropriately be accredited to the entire group in which they evolved and became who they are. Take them out of that, and you have greatly weakened their support structures.

I think that an effort to transform the existing system now is premature. Our leaders don’t have experience leading the kinds of organizations that I think would be effective. And our population at large does not have the experience being in them to recognize and discern the marketing hype from fact and reality. So I think it would involve a lot of effort, and the chance of success is small.

On the other hand, if a cultural movement were to occur which results in people living better happier lives, filled with more kindness, love, and sincerity, then I think the transformation of the governing structure would be inevitable. Because healthy people wouldn’t tolerate this kind of abuse.

both approaches can proceed in parallel

No doubt, and I don’t want to discourage the pursuit of the noocratic approach you have outlined. I offer you what resources and support I have, and I will celebrate your accomplishments.

double helix of personal empowerment and societal advancement

Yes. I think the book “Reinventing Organizations” which I had mentioned before is excellent source material and inspiration for how we can develop this.

the last piece is not granted by authority, it is realized by the individual

If the first step must be granted by authority, then it will never happen. The first step must be rooted in the power of the individual.

the invitation to collaborate is appreciated - what comes next?

I foresee an ecosystem growing where no one controls anyone, we are all free to pursue our callings. There’s a code of conduct, some basic agreements. The agreements can be evolved through conversation. See the Enspiral Handbook for a living example of what I am describing. I propose we should operate through the advice process - you don’t need approval or consensus, but you should check in with the people who will be impacted by your actions, and if your actions would harm them or their projects they have the right to veto. We can pool our resources, we can find ways to synergize and support one another. We need to develop some business models and not just be starry eyed, otherwise we won’t get very far.

As I said, I’m happy to support, encourage and celebrate your efforts, and anyone else who is aligned on unlocking human potential and seeing our species thrive.

Thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation. By doing so you’re helping me flesh out and articulate my own ideas. I hope this has been of interest and benefit to those who are reading. Please feel free to reach out if you are inspired towards collaboration.

Peace and be well my friends!

Michael · December 2, 2025, 3:55pm

Brandon,

Thank you for engaging so thoroughly with my ideas. I’m glad to engage with someone as enthusiastic about these ideas and the issues they attempt to address. And I appreciate your willingness to share your own perspective without attempting to override mine. That spirit of mutual inquiry is exactly what healthy discourse requires.

Let me address several areas where I think we’re misreading each other, and then offer some additional framing that might help clarify where I’m coming from.

On Intuitive Understanding

You write: “People have an intuitive understanding of whether they enjoy a certain way of being and working. They have an intuitive understanding of whether their boundaries are being violated, or if they feel respected and valued and honored.”

I appreciate the sentiment, but this is precisely the assumption my framework challenges. As I wrote in my book,

Because the human race operates within parameters designed to limit its awareness, our evolution has been stunted materially and spiritually. So we also need a special kind of investigation which actually tries to figure out, first, what the concept of healthy, happy humans consists of for a whole society and, secondly, how it is materially to be achieved.

As long as we don’t have a world structured in such a way as to facilitate a social dialog/inquiry as to what it is we really desire and how we can achieve it, then we won’t find out what we really want. Nothing can be more mistaken than the spiritual notion that we simply have to release our resistances and integrate our shadow aspects to realize our true natures, despite the dysfunctional world in which we live. If our true natures are being effectively repressed or oppressed by our conditioning (and are therefore not self-obvious), it’s a mistake to imagine we already know exactly what they are. If they have been repressed effectively, this will create genuine ambiguity among us about recognizing them. We won’t find out how to walk through life just by looking into our hearts/heads, as much as I’d like to believe otherwise.

Think of it this way: a fish doesn’t know it’s wet. Someone who has only ever eaten processed food may genuinely believe they’re eating well—their “intuition” tells them the food tastes good and satisfies hunger. Only after experiencing real nutrition do they recognize how depleted they were. Similarly, people raised in dysfunctional families often unconsciously replicate those patterns, believing they feel “normal” because dysfunction is all they’ve known. Their intuition has been calibrated to pathology.

As I explore in The Age of Healing, we are normalized to trauma—but because it is normalized, we don’t recognize it as such. A traumatized nervous system doesn’t reliably signal what’s healthy; it signals what’s familiar. The person who flinches from genuine intimacy because vulnerability was punished in childhood isn’t following healthy intuition—they’re following conditioned avoidance. Their boundaries aren’t protecting authentic selfhood; they’re protecting the wound.

This doesn’t mean intuition is worthless. It means intuition must be educated, refined, and tested against reality. The conscious man doesn’t abandon intuition—he develops it through deliberate work, through exposure to healthier models, through the kind of relational containers where new patterns can be experienced and integrated.

On Truth

You raise a profound question: “What is truth? And how do we know the truth when we see it?”

Let me offer a framework from Edward de Bono’s work on thinking. De Bono distinguished between “rock logic” and “water logic.” Rock logic deals in fixed categories, binary distinctions, and static truths—something is either true or false, you’re either right or wrong. Water logic recognizes that understanding flows, that context shapes meaning, that the same proposition can be true from one angle and false from another.

The key insight is that attachment to a particular viewpoint, idea, or mental map is unwise. Better to hold a particular “truth” and then try to continuously challenge and change it with better information. These would be “proto-truths.” Proto-truths are the best working model of reality, currently available, without which forward progress would not be optimal or even possible.

This is what I mean when I write about consciousness in Arete: A Path to Human Excellence: “Don’t believe everything you think.” The conscious person holds positions provisionally, remaining open to revision. They recognize that certainty itself is often a warning sign—if you find yourself absolutely convinced that your team is right and the other side is deluded, chances are you’ve been captured by someone else’s agenda.

You’re correct that truth-telling is essential for civilization. We agree completely on that. The Boeing example you cite—little lies compounding into catastrophic failure—perfectly illustrates why. But there’s the deeper problem. in a traumatized population with dysregulated nervous systems, truth itself becomes threatening. The truth about one’s childhood, about one’s participation in harmful systems, about the actual nature of the institutions one depends on—these truths require a regulated nervous system to even receive, let alone integrate.

This is why the work of governance reform and the work of healing cannot be separated. You cannot build a truth-telling culture among people whose nervous systems experience truth as existential threat.

On Virtue, Strength, and Goodness

You ask: “What is strength? What is virtue? What is goodness?”

This is far too large a subject to address succinctly, but let me offer this. These must be measured in a larger context. What are the virtues which, when fostered, produce the healthiest, happiest society? This is an empirical question, not merely a philosophical one.

The ancient Greeks understood this. Arete—excellence—wasn’t an abstract ideal but a practical orientation toward the fulfillment of function. A knife has arete when it cuts well. A horse has arete when it runs well. A human has arete when they fulfill their potential as a human being. But what does that mean concretely?

In Arete Part 2 (sorry, this interface limits me to two links in a post), I outline core qualities: holding space (witnessing without judgment), wisdom (determining pathways while weighing different truths in full context), self-discipline (acting in alignment with core values even when you don’t feel like it), strength of character (being unshakable without being rigid), and directness (knowing one’s mind and clearly revealing it).

But here’s the nub of it. These virtues cannot be developed in isolation. As I note, “Personal excellence doesn’t develop in a vacuum. The structures we inhabit—economic, educational, political, social—either enable or obstruct the cultivation of human capacity.” You need mentors. You need communities that can hold you accountable. You need time not consumed by survival. You need spaces where you can fail safely and learn.

This is why your village-scale work matters. And it’s also why the noocratic framework matters. Both create conditions for virtue development that don’t currently exist at scale.

On the Tournament Mechanism and “Wise Followers”

You suggest that the power of individuals to “tell the ruler to get bent” must be present in any healthy system. I understand the appeal of this check on authority. But I think you underestimate how this capacity has been weaponized.

Consider what actually happens when people believe they can reliably identify tyranny: every faction accuses the other of it. “Wise followers” on the left see fascism rising; “wise followers” on the right see communism encroaching. Both are absolutely certain. Both marshal evidence. Both genuinely believe they’re protecting democracy from its enemies. And both are being manipulated by the very forces they think they’re opposing.

As I noted in my initial response, the Dunning-Kruger effect operates at local (and civilizational) scale. The person who is certain they can spot the narcissist is often the least equipped to do so—their certainty itself is the tell. Meanwhile, genuinely wise leaders often pursue counter-intuitive paths that the crowd misreads as dangerous precisely because it challenges their unexamined assumptions.

The tournament mechanism addresses this by removing the individual judgment call entirely. Rather than asking traumatized people to correctly identify wisdom in others—a task they’re systematically miscalibrated for—it creates selection pressure that surfaces wisdom organically. Think of it like natural selection versus intelligent design: you don’t need a designer who knows what “fitness” looks like if the environment itself filters for it. The tournament is the environment. Extended small-group interaction over months creates conditions where certain qualities simply cannot be faked, regardless of whether observers can articulate what they’re selecting for.

If even this process fails to filter dysfunction, then we’ve learned something important: that wisdom cannot be reliably surfaced by any mechanism, and our situation is genuinely hopeless. I’d rather test that hypothesis than continue with systems we already know produce captured leadership.

On Embodiment and Proof of Concept

You emphasize that principles must be embodied, not merely articulated. I agree completely. But here’s where I think you misunderstand the tournament’s function.

You write: “If we don’t have smaller organizations functioning in integrity and with proper principles, I don’t know how a person would ever prove their worthiness to lead something larger.”

The tournament doesn’t ask candidates to present credentials from existing institutions—institutions you yourself acknowledge are largely authoritarian and unreliable. It creates its own proving ground from scratch. Note the difference between hiring based on résumés (which can be fabricated, padded, or falsified) versus hiring based on a months-long working trial where the candidate collaborates with peers on real problems while being continuously assessed.

The silver-tonged corporate sleeze-ball who captures the room in a 45-minute interview often reveals his limitations within weeks of hiring. The tournament extends that observation window across hundreds of hours with rotating cohorts, making sustained performance nearly impossible.

What is necessary is to frame the tournament process with an understanding of the desired outcome (wise and knowing leaders). Contemporary wisdom research (Sternberg, Baltes, Ardelt) provides empirically-grounded markers (I have the book, A Handbook of Wisdom: Psychological Perspectives by Robert Sternberg and Jennifer Jordan, if you’d ever like to borrow it). These are the integration of cognitive depth, reflective self-examination, and compassion, alongside the capacity to balance competing interests towards a common good. The tournament’s extended observation allows these qualities to emerge—and, crucially, reveals the five fallacies of foolishness (egocentrism, false omniscience, omnipotence, invulnerability, unrealistic optimism) that disqualify candidates.

Your village-scale model and the tournament process actually shares this insight. Both recognize that character reveals itself through relationship over time, not through performance in artificial contexts. The difference is scope. Villages surface local wisdom through organic community life. The tournament attempts to surface wisdom at scales too large for everyone to know everyone personally.

On the Double Helix

We agree that personal empowerment and societal advancement must proceed together. As I write in The Age of Healing:

“Think of it as a double helix with one strand being societal advancement and the other being personal empowerment. Each strand needs to match the other as energy moves from bottom to top, each entwined strand serving this upward momentum. New levels of consciousness supported by new levels of social improvement, which then supports new levels of consciousness in an ever-virtuous cycle.”

The external mechanisms are not in place, which means that internal mechanisms are not supported and individuals are left clutching at straws. Flip it around and you can see that the more optimized the environment, the more people are empowered. And the more they are empowered, the better able they are to optimize the environment.

Your village work contributes to this. My governance framework contributes to it. Neither alone is sufficient. Both can proceed in parallel.

What This Means Practically

I don’t claim the noocratic tournament is ready for implementation tomorrow. There are details to work out, experiments to run, failures to learn from. What I’m offering is a direction. In other words, a recognition that neither pure democracy (which devolves into manipulation of traumatized masses) nor elite technocracy (which serves entrenched interests) nor libertarian withdrawal (which leaves macro-structures unchallenged) provides the path forward.

Your County Fence work aims to create pockets of health. It demonstrates what’s possible. It builds the relational skills and community containers that any healthy society requires. This is genuinely valuable.

What it doesn’t do—and what I don’t think it can do by replication alone—is aggregate local wisdom into governance capable of coordinating at larger scales. At some point, villages need to federate. Decisions need to be made that affect multiple communities. Resources need to be allocated across regions. The question isn’t whether larger-scale coordination will happen—it’s whether that coordination will be captured by the forces that have captured everything else, or whether it will emerge from genuine wisdom surfaced through rigorous selection.

I suspect we’re both working on identifying different phases of the same multi-generational project. You’re tilling soil. I’m designing irrigation systems. Both are necessary.

With appreciation,

Michael

bitmason · December 2, 2025, 9:26pm

On Intuitive Understanding

You’re right to note that “the fish does not know the water it is swimming in.” I meant as much when I said “The living memory of people alive today is a few generations at most… so the tragedy is that we don’t remember there ever having existed a world which was not top-down controlled.”

I’m with you. I’m not saying that intuitive understanding is always right, and yes, we are normalized to trauma, poison, abuse, and distraction.

But let’s say you want to start this process of correcting the intuition, so that it more closely serves the benefit of the individual. Where do you start? What faculties, if any, do you trust in the individual to be accurate and true?

In the Pink Floyd song “Wish You Were Here” these themes are explored:

Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

In my view, this is a song about propaganda and narrative, and how deeply distorted a person’s perspective can become. And the desire to reconnect through it all.

I’m not saying that we can trust 100% our own perceptions and intuitions or those of others. But I am expressing confidence that it is not all lost. I believe, and I know it to be true from my experience so far, that if I look for it within any individual I can find aspects of them that are tuned into truth that I myself recognize. Common ground where we feel and see that truth together. And that must be the foundation that we build upon in education, and in healing our communities.

And also: for a framework to have value, it must be implementable with the resources and people at hand.

On Truth

De Bono distinguished between “rock logic” and “water logic.”

Water logic sounds like it bears some traits of non-dualistic thinking.

The key insight is that attachment to a particular viewpoint, idea, or mental map is unwise. Better to hold a particular “truth” and then try to continuously challenge and change it with better information.

We agree upon this.

in a traumatized population with dysregulated nervous systems, truth itself becomes threatening.

Yes.

This is why the work of governance reform and the work of healing cannot be separated. You cannot build a truth-telling culture among people whose nervous systems experience truth as existential threat.

Yes and no. A person is not “one unit of truthiness” which is either correct or incorrect. We hold constellations of beliefs and values. What is your entry point? What are the conditions which are present now, which you will accept as sufficient to begin your work?

I’m not challenging your objective or even necessarily your mental framework. Both you and I have turned this predicament around in our heads many times, looking for the entry point. And that’s what I’m looking for here. For me, the golden rule is “work on what is within your power to do”. Which includes “work with those who are willing to receive.” And gives me pause any time I am finding myself in a story of victimhood, or in any way justifying a forceful approach with others.

On Virtue, Strength, and Goodness

This is far too large a subject to address succinctly

Yes. Thank you for recognizing that, but also recognizing the importance of these questions.

sorry, this interface limits me to two links in a post

I increased the limit to 10. This is a setting for new users to prevent spam.

I outline core qualities: holding space (witnessing without judgment), wisdom (determining pathways while weighing different truths in full context), self-discipline (acting in alignment with core values even when you don’t feel like it), strength of character (being unshakable without being rigid), and directness (knowing one’s mind and clearly revealing it).

Wonderful! And yes, I agree, these all must be cultivated and demonstrated, not merely repeated by rote.

On the Tournament Mechanism and “Wise Followers”

The tournament is the environment. Extended small-group interaction over months creates conditions where certain qualities simply cannot be faked, regardless of whether observers can articulate what they’re selecting for.

Ok. Can you be more specific by what you mean by this? What is the circumstance and the selection process by which this occurs? If there are specifics that have been presented here they have escaped my notice.

In contrast, I propose that organizations of smaller granularity are the context in which merit of leadership should be proven. This is not undefined because the forms of these organizations are familiar to all of the adults within our society (presumably anyone reading this). The task is to experiment with new modes of stewardship, operation, unifying purpose, and law. And to prove our philosophies by result, which can be measured by:

economic viability
resilience to market & supply line shocks
self realization journey of members/participants (you could use VALS survey for instance)
impacts on local community
impacts on customers/beneficiaries

And to define the terms I just used:

Stewardship - management of resources
Operation - the activities of the organization
Unifying Purpose - the vision, mission, and purpose, and granular timely goals
Law - the agreements, the roles and responsibilities, how we make decisions

This is just a way of slicing down the context of an organization such that the tangible “ways of being” within each category can be examined, experimented with and evolved.

There are some commonalities in this approach with the multi-stakeholder approach proposed by the World Economic Forum (moving beyond bottom-line accounting). But I definitely see the WEF as the snake in the garden, and I don’t trust them at all to define the terms, the narrative, or the regulatory structure in which we will operate.

The person who is certain they can spot the narcissist is often the least equipped to do so—their certainty itself is the tell.

So what would you have us do? How should we approach bolstering the individual’s discernment? My concern is that I find it easy to take a framing like you’ve proposed here and use it to undermine an individual’s self confidence and to gaslight them into believing that they’re not really being abused at all. I feel that it’s fundamental, and it’s so important, that we should always be approaching “education” and the process of “helping others” by building up their self esteem, and their confidence in their ability to make decisions.

In fact there’s a whole approach to conflict resolution based around this. It’s called Transformative Mediation.

On Embodiment and Proof of Concept

[The tournament] creates its own proving ground from scratch. Note the difference between hiring based on résumés (which can be fabricated, padded, or falsified) versus hiring based on a months-long working trial where the candidate collaborates with peers on real problems while being continuously assessed.

I don’t feel like it’s realistic to expect that people will devote this kind of time and effort to a synthetic environment. In a way, there is a precedent of counter example (to my statement) within the entire academic world, where lessons and exercises are arbitrary, and not connected with “building a business”, “doing new science” or “practical skills”. While yes, humanity has been doing this for many generations now, I would say grudgingly, and only by force and lack of alternatives, and almost universally people agree with the statement “There has to be a better way.” Embodied learning is what I propose as an answer to that.

Here’s an example from Phoenix Arizona, where I used to live. Generation Tech Support was founded by Jr. high and high school students under the guidance of Debbie, a woman I’ve met and have some mutual friendships with. They’ve been operating for years now autonomously under student leadership. Students get to experience all aspects of running a business, and their knowledge is very practical and real, because if it weren’t the business would fail. Now, if we wanted to measure their outcomes in the other categories I mentioned, that could be done through surveys. And the suitability of leadership arising from this organization could be considered in context of what was achieved and how they operated and worked with others.

Another fantastic example is Randy Pausch, who offered a “Creating Virtual Worlds” course at Carnegie Mellon. This is a man who touched many lives. By creating a program of embodied learning, he had employers competing to hire his students before they graduated. Because it’s far more meaningful to an employer to ask “What are you capable of?” than to ask “What do you know?” Notably a major portion of the students grades came from the peers within their teams - people had to enjoy working with you in order to achieve the best grade.

Contemporary wisdom research (Sternberg, Baltes, Ardelt) provides empirically-grounded markers. These are the integration of cognitive depth, reflective self-examination, and compassion, alongside the capacity to balance competing interests towards a common good. The tournament’s extended observation allows these qualities to emerge—and, crucially, reveals the five fallacies of foolishness (egocentrism, false omniscience, omnipotence, invulnerability, unrealistic optimism) that disqualify candidates.

Ok, this is interesting and specific. More of a mental model starts to arise in me, hearing this.

Your village-scale model and the tournament process actually shares this insight. Both recognize that character reveals itself through relationship over time, not through performance in artificial contexts. The difference is scope. Villages surface local wisdom through organic community life. The tournament attempts to surface wisdom at scales too large for everyone to know everyone personally.

Ok, if I shift my framing to a “game”, or a set of games specifically designed to demonstrate these qualities and have them arise in obvious ways in the participants, then I can see something that starts to excite me. I have in the past used the game Go in the interview process at my company, because in the space of an hour, I was able to see:

How the individual encounters a complex but unknown arena
How they respond to feedback and guidance
How they respond to perceived losses and setbacks
Whether the person can remain in a state of curiosity

This is a game that in many ways produces a similar set of emotions and contexts to the work of programming itself. And by simply playing and observing, I can see things that no verbal interview would tell me.

Another thing that arises for me: this process doesn’t have to take place slowly. You could on a dedicated Saturday have a tournament, and if you were observing the process with these principles in mind, get a lot of information from it about who to promote and in what ways. “In what ways” is important, because I believe you would identify different tracks for different types of competency, to play a variety of roles which are all needed for a successful organization.

Or even your thought of a several months long tournament, I imagine would actually happen in the off hours, on the weekends. It wouldn’t be a full time job to attend the tournaments and participate in the process. Although it might become a full time job to practice, study, and do well in the tournaments.

There is a book called “Gamestorming” which I have used in a professional setting, and also within what I call “Idea Labs”. This gives some great building blocks which I believe could be used to construct games that would be useful for your intentions. I intend to use tools like this in supporting a cadre of educators in my most recent iteration.

I’m also imagining Magic: The Gathering tournaments (sans the poor hygiene) in terms of the competition brackets. Herman Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game” also comes to mind - a theoretical game within his novel that grew to encompass all forms of human knowledge, where the game had practical understanding and application within the real world. Hesse left the exact details of the game and its mode of application a bit vague - “magic” was invoked. But perhaps there’s a sense in which this can be made real?

On the Double Helix

Yes. Nothing further to add.

What this means practically

What it doesn’t do—and what I don’t think it can do by replication alone—is aggregate local wisdom into governance capable of coordinating at larger scales. At some point, villages need to federate. Decisions need to be made that affect multiple communities. Resources need to be allocated across regions. The question isn’t whether larger-scale coordination will happen—it’s whether that coordination will be captured by the forces that have captured everything else, or whether it will emerge from genuine wisdom surfaced through rigorous selection.

Aggregation, federation, and governance systems have not escaped my attention. My original purpose in building The County Fence was to allow for greater connection and awareness within Delta County, so that we could swing the Land Use Code issue to something more representative of the will and interests of the people at large. That hasn’t gone away. I’m just continually looking for “the entry point” that allows me to get the engine running. In order for the County Fence to have sustainable growth, we need at least 1 value loop which:

meets people where they are at now, satisfying a need or desire they have
allows them to accomplish and fulfill that need
generates additional traffic, buzz, and signups as a result

Given 1 value loop, we can then add another and another. At some point we will pass a threshold where it will be “the place to be”.

One of the great shortfalls of our impulse-driven, give-me-the-headline culture is that people judge the things they see by this single instant in time. And the growth journey of an organization (or a person) cannot be understood within the confines of a headline. I feel a bit frustrated sometimes, like people are pointing out “your tree doesn’t have any apples on it”. Is it really necessary for me to point out that it needs sunlight, water, soil, and time? NO, WE DEMAND APPLES NOW. I’m not saying you specifically Michael, but it feels like a theme for me this year. I don’t know quite how to get out of it except to come to a greater sense of patience myself.

But back to present focus: My current theory for this value loop is the education process: that we can take a set of people who already have ambitions to offer education curriculum, or who are already doing it, and we can offer them a community and resources that would help them evolve their offering, reach new audiences, and thrive financially from following the call within themselves. And if we can coalesce an active core that’s doing this, that might give sufficient reason for me to print and distribute The Fence, promote it, and take it further.

Another reason for having a group of people: I find it exhausting an unrewarding to do the work on my own. To wear all the hats. To convince myself on a daily basis that I’m doing the right thing and to keep going, when inherently I am a social creature. I wasn’t meant to operate in a vacuum, without a tribe to reflect with, strive with, and celebrate with. I need my tribe. I’m putting out the call for that.

Conclusions

Ok, I think there has been some coming together in this exchange. When I see your tournament as a “game” to be played, that seems like something that’s definable, and we have some criteria on the deck for evaluating what a “good game” will be.

I think that the Idea Labs and some of the other workshops I intend to offer in context of supporting the educators share some qualities with the tournament that you’re proposing. Although my angle is more as an “incubator for organizations” and your angle is as a “proving grounds for leadership”. There is probably a fair amount of synergy between these two goals. Worth exploring.

Would you be interested in being a part of the first cohort? You can use this environment as a place to develop your ideas, get feedback, get participation from others. The frameworks I’m offering, the exercises, the perspectives - these are all offerings, without any sense of force. They’re tools for you to use if you like them and put down if not. Everyone in the program will retain their creative direction and freedom to develop as they see fit.

The first step would be to get in a room together and discuss what we’d all like to create, and what kind of support and collaboration that will require.

How does that sound? Anything else you’d like to share?

Michael · December 13, 2025, 4:14pm

Brandon,

I appreciate the genuine movement in this exchange. You’re right that common ground is emerging—and more importantly, that the convergence is occurring through the kind of good-faith dialogue that both of us believe is necessary for any healthy system.

Let me address your questions directly.

On Intuitive Understanding

You ask: “Where do you start? What faculties, if any, do you trust in the individual to be accurate and true?”

This is a good question. It’s not easy to answer with any degree of certainty. We’re contemplating building a greenhouse for plants whose mature form we can’t imagine. Every human faculty we might name has failure points. Reason can be detached from external reality (I happen to think the Austrian school of economics is reasonable but irrational). Embodiment (embodied sensation/sensory experience) is manipulable. Optical illusions, psychedelics, sleep deprivation, hypnosis…all of them alter what you perceive without altering what’s actually there. The Müller-Lyer arrows look different lengths despite being identical. Intuition can be wisdom or it can be dysregulation (trauma and conditioning) wearing wisdom’s mask. Emotion signals something real but requires interpretation. From my book,

Emotions want to be loved exactly for what they are, by others and by ourselves. That’s not to say that they may not be based in delusion, it’s just to say that they need to be seen, recognized and welcomed into existence, just like a baby. Emotions don’t affect facts. But facts should affect emotions, which is where integrating our shadow aspects comes in.

It all boils down to outcomes over time. What I’d tentatively trust is not one faculty or another but a process: the iterative tension between direct experience and reflection, tested against consequences, held as proto-truths. I trust faculties that have been refined through deliberate work, tested against reality, and confirmed through relationship over time.

On the Tournament Mechanism and “Wise Followers

You ask for specifics: “What is the circumstance and the selection process by which this occurs?”

I’m reminded of a 1970s, British TV program that brought participants together to address hypothetical political scenarios. A facilitator introduced problems in real time, forcing participants to react and adapt as circumstances evolved. The format was compelling enough that the BBC revived it in 2004 as Crisis Command: Could You Run the Country?, where three participants acted as cabinet ministers navigating crises—terrorist attacks, infrastructure failures, cascading emergencies—while advisors offered input but final decisions remained with the participants themselves.

The format reveals four dynamics essential to understanding the tournament mechanism:

A. Evolving pressure. The facilitator introduces new complications in real time, preventing rehearsed responses. Participants can’t game a static test because the test keeps changing. In one Crisis Command scenario, participants faced simultaneous bomb threats, an attack on the electrical grid, and a hijacked airliner—each decision reshaping what options remained for the next. This is why a Saturday tournament or a Go match, however revealing, cannot substitute for extended iterative engagement. The narcissist can prepare for a known challenge; they cannot prepare for challenges that emerge from their own prior choices.

B. Character revelation under sustained stress. The BBC explicitly described Crisis Command as testing “confidence and the ability to prioritise and keep calm in a tense and rapidly evolving situation.” These qualities surface over time, not in acute performance. You can actually see which participants freeze, which make too-quick (unwise) decisions on the fly, etc. Extended observation makes visible what brief, concentrated, high-stakes responses conceal.

C. Cascading consequences. Decisions made early constrained later options. The participants who hesitated on closing flood doors (on the River Thames) faced compounding damage; those who delayed on the hijacked jet watched it strike Parliament. This mirrors how wisdom (or its absence) compounds across governance. A leader’s early misjudgments don’t simply exist at one point in time—they shape the terrain on which all subsequent decisions must be made.

D. Expert integration without expert capture. Crisis Command’s advisors—military, communications, emergency services—offered input, but final decisions rested with participants. This surfaces a crucial quality: the capacity to integrate expert counsel without being captured by it. The wise leader neither dismisses expertise nor surrenders judgment to it.

But Crisis Command, for all its virtues, remains what I’d call acute performance—brief, concentrated, high-stakes moments where someone can marshal their best self for a limited duration. The program ran hours, not months. It revealed how participants responded under compressed, intense pressure. It did not reveal how they behave across weeks of sustained interaction, whether their principles hold when no one is watching, or how their character emerges through ongoing relationship. It was also about “managing the matrix” but what are you gonna do?

The tournament mechanism extends the Crisis Command insight—iterative, evolving challenges where decisions compound—across a timeframe where additional qualities become visible. Duration adds a separate layer that even sophisticated acute-performance contexts miss.

The tournament doesn’t replace organizational experience—it processes it. Participants would bring their track records from real organizations. But the tournament tests something additional: how they behave when stripped of positional authority, when they must persuade rather than command, when their reputation is made fresh with each new cohort.

Your organizations-as-proving-ground approach and the tournament aren’t opposed. They’re sequential. The organizations develop capacity. The tournament surfaces those whose capacity includes genuine wisdom, not merely competence.

On Gaslighting

This is an important point for you. You pull out my quote “The person who is certain they can spot the narcissist is often the least equipped to do so—their certainty itself is the tell.” and say,

So what would you have us do? How should we approach bolstering the individual’s discernment? My concern is that I find it easy to take a framing like you’ve proposed here and use it to undermine an individual’s self confidence and to gaslight them into believing that they’re not really being abused at all. I feel that it’s fundamental, and it’s so important, that we should always be approaching “education” and the process of “helping others” by building up their self esteem, and their confidence in their ability to make decisions.

Trauma-informed work increases capacity for discernment over time. After genuine healing, a person sees more clearly, trusts their perceptions more accurately, and becomes harder to manipulate. They can distinguish between “this feels uncomfortable because it’s unfamiliar” and “this feels uncomfortable because something is wrong.”

Gaslighting collapses capacity for discernment. The person becomes less able to trust themselves, more dependent on external validation, more confused about their own experience.

The test is simple: does the intervention leave the person more capable of seeing clearly, or less? Does it build their self-trust or undermine it? Transformative Mediation, which you mention, gets this right—it aims to empower parties to make their own decisions, not to impose external judgment.

My framework isn’t “your intuition is wrong, trust the experts.” It’s “your intuition has been miscalibrated by trauma, here’s how to recalibrate it so you can trust yourself more fully.” The goal is restoration of capacity, not substitution of authority.

On The Glass Bead Game

I dug into this a little, not having read the book. Your reference to Hesse is apt—but the novel actually critiques the very thing you’re getting excited about. The Castalian order becomes an ivory tower. The Glass Bead Game masters grow disconnected from ordinary human suffering, absorbed in their own elegant abstractions. The protagonist, Joseph Knecht, eventually leaves Castalia to serve a single student in the real world. His death comes not in the rarefied air of the Game, but in cold water while trying to keep up with a boy swimming.

Hesse’s point was that wisdom that doesn’t translate into embodied service isn’t wisdom at all. The Game became self-referential. Something beautiful but sterile.

This is actually the critique I’d make of purely academic or theoretical approaches to governance reform—including my own if I’m not careful. The question isn’t whether we can design elegant selection mechanisms. The question is whether what emerges from them makes any difference to actual human lives.

Which brings me back to your village-scale work. What you’re doing is embodied. It serves real people in the NFV. The danger of my framework is that it becomes another Glass Bead Game—intellectually elegant, practically inert.

On Entry Points

You keep asking what conditions are sufficient to begin. Let me turn that back on you. What would make you believe the tournament approach is worth testing?

I don’t claim it’s ready for implementation tomorrow. There are details to work out, naturally. But “work on what is within your power to do” applies here too. What’s within my power is to articulate the framework, and refine it through dialogue (like this one).

What might a pilot look like? I don’t know, at this time. Perhaps a cohort of people committed to key principles, willing to engage in structured exercises over several months, with the explicit purpose of observing what emerges? Not selecting leaders for anything real yet—just testing whether extended small-group interaction surfaces the qualities we’re trying to select for.

Your Idea Labs could potentially host something like this. The question is whether there’s appetite for it among the people you’re convening.

To summarize. You’re building an incubator for organizations. I’m designing selection mechanisms for leadership at scale. These aren’t identical, but they’re not opposed.

On Your Invitation

You ask if I’d be interested in joining your first cohort—using The County Fence as a space to develop ideas, get feedback, participate in workshops.

I appreciate the offer. But I’m going to have to decline. My energy levels and overall health are too low these days. It’s taken all my energy to focus on this exchange and I’m now spent. I know I’m younger than I look but my mind and body are ready to depart this mortal coil. The sooner the better. I put a lot of energy into developing local systems for the NFV in the early 2010s, having exactly these type of discussions with Eric (the failed 2019/2020 mystic Mesa community), writing my book to improve the lives of men, and many other projects over my life. When matched against the level of energy I devoted, I’m not prepared to endure again what was ultimately largely futile. For me now, soil without irrigation produces only what rainfall allows.

The villages you’re building need some way to federate without being captured. The tournament I’m proposing needs communities that develop the kind of people worth selecting. Neither of us alone has the complete picture.

With continued appreciation, Michael