Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco on Sunday, October 18 to hear the next lecture in our ongoing series, this one by Samo Burja, author of “Why Civilizations Collapse.“ The article was featured in our most recent print edition PALLADIUM 19: Long History.

We think of our own society as so technologically advanced that it couldn’t possibly collapse. What if we are terribly wrong?

Every advanced civilization before ours eventually saw its end. Great cities such as Mohenjo Daro, Mycenae, Hattusa, Petra, and Rome were ruined and some completely forgotten. In the twelve dark ages of recorded human history key institutions vanished, poverty grew, populations declined, knowledge was forgotten, and advanced technology was lost.

Artificial intelligence ultimately relies on the same foundations, from industrial supply chains to information commons, as much as human intelligence throughout history. What if AI-driven civilization, too, succumbs to forces as deep as time and entropy?

This talk will cover the theory and evidence of why there has never been an immortal society and what it would take to make one.

Samo Burja is the Editor-in-Chief of Palladium Magazine. He is the President and founder of Bismarck Analysis, a research firm that investigates the institutional landscape of society and provides strategic consulting services to industry leaders, philanthropists, and governments. You can follow him at @SamoBurja.

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PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

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This article by Farrell Gregory was published at Palladium Magazine on October 6, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

Moonshot AI, one of China’s largest artificial intelligence labs, unveiled its latest model Kimi K3 the day before Xi Jinping’s speech at the World AI conference (WAIC) in July 2026. It may have been pure coincidence, but the sequence of events struck a few in the U.S. as a definitive moment when something about the future of Chinese machine intelligence was revealed. “We should adhere to the principle of openness,” Xi said, and “seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing.”While not a change in the established state perspective, many in the West believed that China would eventually have to move away from their open-source approach to keep up with the rising cost of rivaling frontier capabilities. The speech firmly established that China was not planning on changing anything anytime soon.

Encouraged by billions of dollars worth of compute vouchers and other support for small firms, Chinese labs and entrepreneurs have for the last few years pursued a strategy involving a multitude of labs releasing capable open-weight models, utilizing both highly innovative methods of development and distillation from American frontier models. Below these “foundation” models, there is a constantly shifting substrate of smaller firms that specialize intelligence for particular applications.

Though public statements from Chinese lab leads and the capabilities of their models are visible from America, an enormous delta exists between American rhetoric and the reality of Chinese AI. Only in discrete moments can the hazy fog of expectation be punctured by a jolt of undeniable reality.

For many in the English-speaking world, there has been a consistent expectation that once some threshold of capability is surpassed, China will act to restrain open-weight development. Whether this theory is justified by concerns for social stability, national security, or hypothetical existential risks, they believe there will be a “Mythos moment” in China: a sudden shift in AI policy once open models develop dangerous potential. This theory was presented in highly influential papers such as “Situational Awareness,” written by the German investor and former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, which in the summer of 2024 correctly predicted that confidence in an enduring American lead in AI was misplaced. Once China wakes up to the strategic implications of superintelligence, the essay argues, the previously dissonant mechanisms of Chinese firms and the Party will harmonize and organize the whole Chinese nation in pursuit of the transformative technology.

This argument might seem hard to disagree with, for as capabilities grow rapidly in the age of recursive self-improvement, the machine intelligence ecosystem will undergo an algae bloom. Such tremendous and varied capabilities, the thinking goes, will prompt a rapid, dramatic transformation in Chinese AI governance. Yet, even as Chinese and American model capabilities continue to improve, the Chinese state continues to defy such predictions.

Open-Weights Under State Oversight

The history of Chinese AI governance can be read in state documents filled with slogans and measured statements. Public pronouncements and comments on AI reveal a consistent focus on practical application and cautious advancement rather than the pursuit of transformative superintelligence. In 2017, China released its Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, which set the ambitious goal of becoming a world leader in AI by 2030. Importantly, this was framed in terms of industrial competitiveness and economic output, not the pursuit of artificial general intelligence.

Then, at a 2018 Politburo collective study session, Xi Jinping stated that China must march “in the front ranks when it comes to theoretical research” and occupy “the high ground in critical and AI core technologies.” The following years were comparatively mute. Finally, in 2025, at the first collective study session to focus on AI in seven years, Xi’s statement was focused on policy support for technical self-sufficiency, a sharp contrast to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s call a year earlier for a “Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability.”

America’s 2025 AI Action Plan then went on to model development as a winner-take-all race between America and China on the basis of LLM scaling, stating that “whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap broad economic and military benefits.” A recent strategy document released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy mentions artificial general intelligence as a transformative technology, which “could present fundamentally new opportunities and threats.” Combined with the widespread perception that AGI is imminent for better or worse, the American AI strategy can reasonably be summed up as an LLM-scaling race towards superintelligence.

This does not seem to be how the Chinese see it. The Chinese AI+ Plan doesn’t mention competition at all, nor does it even mention America. Its focus is on diffusion, standards-setting, and making AI a value-add for other existing parts of the economy. Current Chinese AI policy involves decentralized distribution of benefits allocated by provinces and municipalities, supporting an open-weight ecosystem, and a multiplicity of regional labs. We should not necessarily take these documents at face value, but we should question why China’s AI narrative seems to ignore the “race to dominance” framework.

Today, the Chinese state retains a multitude of regulatory tools to intervene in model development and deployment. Generative AI models are subject to twin pre-deployment registration and review regimes. These include continual model testing and evaluation for security by the relevant provincial and then central Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). The role of the CAC here is primarily licensing for algorithms, though they can also take direct action and force tech companies to maintain compliance or adjust their models. A recent campaign of theirs prompted Alibaba, Zhipu, MiniMax, and DeepSeek to take actions to combat malicious code generation and other cyber threats. Much of the reporting on China’s cybercrime enforcement and state capacity comes from state media, and thus should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism.

These regulatory tools, considered to be part of the wider cybersecurity state that exists in the PRC, help explain some of the present facts. As model capabilities remain comparable in America and China, the latter may, for the reasons outlined above, be able to sustain wide domestic access to highly-capable open-weight models.

If Xi Jinping’s latest speech at the WAIC is to be believed, Chinese AI governance will remain the same for the near future—open-weight models with formidable capabilities, distributed widely, and all under human control. No nationalization of the labs, and no Manhattan Project in Inner Mongolia, at least not yet. So how did American technologists misread China? And might China diverge even further from Western expectations?

The Power and Limitations of Bay Area Rationalism

If there is a constant historical flaw of U.S. foreign policy, it is assuming that other people, leaders of nations, and their citizens think the same way we do. Nowhere has that dynamic been more destructive than in U.S. policy towards China. As outlined in sociologist Richard Madsen’s book China and the American Dream, from the early American missionaries—in whose estimation China was always on the precipice of converting—to the ecstatic marketeers who expected political liberalization to follow economic liberalization, American thinkers have long held that China is primed to think and respond to material conditions as we do, if only given a bit of time and faith.

As a result of such thinking, policies that created a trade imbalance and supply chain overreliance remained in place for decades, fortified by assumptions of developmental symmetry with China that did not exist. Even as the American perspective on U.S.-China relations shifted from convergence to competition in the 2010s, we never stopped projecting our fundamental assumptions regarding economics, governance, and technology onto the Chinese. While such mistaken policy over the previous decades was always costly, America’s relative strength and prosperity masked the true impact of misconstruing China again and again. But today, with China generally recognized as a peer competitor in all forms of innovation, the consequences of making the same mistakes in Chinese policy will be immediately evident, and perhaps more irreversible.

Published two years before the inflection point it describes, the viral forecasting scenario “AI 2027,” authored by the AI Futures Project, commanded attention from Silicon Valley to the White House. It accurately predicted the exponential pace of the machine intelligence buildout and the suffusion of autonomous agents into the digital realm. Beyond technical predictions, the authors also anticipated a radical shift in Chinese governance of technology.

According to the scenario, the General Secretary decides in mid-2026 that China cannot afford to continue lagging behind America in AI capabilities, leading to the nationalization of Chinese frontier research. It starts as information sharing, and then becomes a formalized collective lab within a year. The researchers, compute, and supporting infrastructure are all conglomerated and orchestrated by the central government as part of the Party’s all-out attempt to remain competitive in AI and overcome its compute deficit. Yet as the authors of “AI 2027” themselves admit, this has not happened yet. Too strict an adherence to a particular vein of “rationality” may explain why American forecasters are still getting China wrong.

Bay Area rationalism spread across an influential group of blogs such as Overcoming Bias, LessWrong, and Slate Star Codex—the author of which was listed among the authors of “AI 2027.” In the 2000s, these writers were already concerned about the development and potential influence of artificial intelligence, more than a decade before the release of GPT-3. Thought experiments on AI risk, such as Nick Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer and orthogonality thesis, spread widely among early rationalists. In San Francisco, the language, expectations, and methods of rationalism have suffused much of the discourse both online and offline for years. As a result, the rationalist perspective is greatly overrepresented both among those working at major AI labs as well as those employees’ extended social circles. As AI becomes an increasingly mainstream issue—the subject of Congressional letters and daytime TV panels—more and more people are using rationalist terminology and intellectual framing, almost certainly without knowing where these ideas originated.

Rationalism is primarily concerned with epistemics, or the examination of how humans come to know and believe certain things. Instinctual thought is full of errors and dead ends, which rationalists try to overcome through clear, analytical reasoning in pursuit of being “less wrong.” This way of thinking lends itself to a highly structured and quantifiable mode of analysis. Thus, it is unsurprising that the rationalist community was a prime source of talent for the Effective Altruist movement, which strives for efficient philanthropy and personal optimization to maximize their perception of what is good. The idea of expressing expectations as probabilities, such as having a “p(doom)” that reflects one’s belief in the likelihood of AI-induced human extinction, is downstream of Bay Area rationalism. This outlook, that would be unusual in any other environment, tends to be the cultural default in Berkeley group houses, American AI labs, safety evaluators, and forecasting teams.

There is a particular aspect of rationalist thinking that seems primarily responsible for incorrectly forecasting Chinese reactions to machine intelligence. Rationalists have an expectation that different people and polities will have similar utility functions for the same technology once it has reached sufficient scale. Rational actors observing shared evidence will experience similar responses, so the thinking goes. They believe that for predictions cast forward over years, the best thing to do is assume mutual rationality and deemphasize the details that make potential responses to transformative technology distinct. This is a natural consequence of coarse-grained analysis, which requires deemphasizing details in order to identify larger trends and patterns.

In this view, someone who cites particular governing dynamics, personalities, or other contingent factors might be accused of missing the forest for the trees. It is certainly difficult to predict how Chinese researchers and political leadership might look at the same capabilities that we do and choose an entirely different course of action. But assuming a shared rational outlook encourages, if not requires, a blindness to the ways in which certain domestic and cultural factors may cause Chinese people to thoughtfully and sincerely see the technology in a different light. To ignore this, even willfully and with the best of intentions, is still a mistake.

In a recent quarterly timeline update, the authors from the AI Futures Project briefly address this, stating that “we probably would have heard by now if the CCP had consolidated the various Chinese AI projects…in general it seems that ‘China Wakes Up’ has not yet happened.” While acknowledging incorrect forecasting is admirable, more must be done to update underlying assumptions, not just timelines they produce.

As evidence demonstrates, we cannot expect China to converge on Western expectations anytime soon. Without understanding Chinese perspectives on machine intelligence, the CPC will continue to surprise American policymakers and intellectuals. One of America’s greatest strategic mistakes over the last fifty years was basing America’s economic and trade policy on the idea that greater economic liberalization in China would result in political liberalization. The result was the deindustrialization of America and the creation of countless supply chain reliances that are still used as leverage against the U.S. today. In the early stages of the transformation that machine intelligence promises, further policy based on a misapprehension of China would be even more devastating.

The Other Side of the Pacific

In Cybernetics for the 21st Century, philosopher Yuk Hui distinguishes the technological differences between the U.S. and China. Hui divides the characteristics of any technology into “tendencies” and “facts.” Technical tendencies are the universal principles that govern how a given technology develops and operates. Technical facts are the contingent factors—the multitude of particular ways of being for any given technology. While the terminology may seem counterintuitive, as the names of each concept could easily be swapped, “tendencies” in this context represent attractor basins; such as the cross-cultural evolution of tools like arrows and wheels. Whereas “facts” are incidental features that vary from one circumstance to another due to different initial conditions.

Applying this framework to machine intelligence, it can be said that the core, underlying technology of neural networks and deep learning is a technical tendency, shared from Silicon Valley to Beijing. It is the application and interpretation of that technology, made evident during the process of development and diffusion, where the technical facts emerge. One’s degree of concern about existential risk is a technical fact, as are fears of labor displacement and human-directed cyber attacks. The technology itself is the tendency, while the broader theoretical expectations are contingent cultural facts.

It seems that purely rationalist predictions of Chinese AI overestimate the technical tendencies and underestimate the technical facts. And what facts they are! How particular technology and its use in China is becoming. Look at the robotic Olympics in Beijing, where humanoids gallop unnaturally and break sprinting world records, occasionally bursting into sparks and shrapnel. Look at the constant churn of talent and share prices, the unceasing reconstruction, reinvention, and derivation of generations of models in the open-weight ecosystem, with mechanical patrilineage stretching back to Moonshot, DeepSeek, and perhaps even the labs in San Francisco.

It could be that this is just a matter of distinguishing between timelines, and Chinese AI governance will dramatically change in response to novel publicly-available capabilities. As models recursively self-improve and continual learning becomes a closer reality, it seems folly to expect the current paradigm to hold. But within the distance between that future and the present, there exists such a wide range of possibilities. Even if you think it is a foregone conclusion that China will “wake up” to the American perspective on AI, does it not matter tremendously whether that occurs in two months or two years? And when they do, why would anyone be certain that their reaction will mirror America’s?

The most immediate implication of the continued availability of highly-capable open-weight Chinese models is that it cuts into the moat that American frontier labs currently have, alongside the profits and expected value that this moat would ensure. That value, diminished by the availability of Chinese models, is what enables labs to command the capital they do, whether for hiring researchers, developing future models, securing compute and building infrastructure, or serving current inference. Additionally, infrastructure providers—from traditional cloud services to neoclouds and the manifold firms involved in the American AI buildout—have similar capital access predicated on those expectations.

This is fundamentally a question of where value accrues given model usage. Industry analyst reporting from earlier this year indicated that Anthropic’s margins on inference rose from 38% to 70%, growing alongside revenue. As American labs continue to lead at the frontier, highly complex and specialized inference will likely remain increasingly profitable and a continuing advantage. But how much model usage will this cede to commoditized and lower-complexity competitors? As Anthropic prepares its public offering for later this year and OpenAI is set to follow in 2027, the share of capital going towards inference and other financial indicators will transition from company leaks to a matter of public disclosure.

Dean Ball, Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, has stated that open-weight is decelerationist, which, constrained to the narrow sense of the AI buildout, seems possible. Imagine tremendous revenue and enormous profits only at the edge; price competition decreases the immediate value that frontier models will accrue to labs. There is a plausible world where machine intelligence becomes too cheap to meter for most usage, too commoditized, yet central to everything. This is hypothetical, but less and less so every day. And for every day that goes by, while Chinese labs maintain open-weight and low-cost models, American frontier labs are increasingly forced to compete on price if they want to remain widely used.

Chinese labs seem to be actively working to monetize the present paradigm, signaling that they do not anticipate a near-term change in governance. They are finding ways to remain open-weight yet capture value. As it released the weights of Kimi K3, Moonshot AI also updated the terms of its licensing agreement to require non-Moonshot API users who use the “model as a service” to renegotiate commercial usage if the user’s business generates over $20 million in revenue per year. The license also requires businesses with over 100 million monthly users or meeting the revenue requirement to display Kimi K3 branding. Further, after lowering V4 costs by seventy-five percent earlier this year, DeepSeek now seems likely to substantially raise prices for API usage.

The most candid view from a Chinese lab can be found in an investor call held by DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng. The May 20th call was leaked in July, disclosing sensitive information and disrupting that year’s second round of fundraising for DeepSeek. Liang, whose statements to the media are limited, especially when compared with American lab leads, was forthcoming about his expectations within this (supposedly) closed environment. The transcript is worth reading in whole, but a few quotes stand out. Regarding pricing, Liang stated that “We [DeepSeek] set our prices to earn only a reasonable profit, not to maximise income.” In this private setting, he predicted that DeepSeek’s frontier models would continue to have open weights. Focusing on OpenAI and its efforts to establish an enduring lead in frontier AI, he argued that “The U.S. will face challenges, and in the future it may also face challenges from China, because Chinese players are willing to take less in return for providing the service.” Putting it more directly, he said “Those who take more will be beaten by those who take less.”

The Chinese labs seem to need a much lower profit, level of perceived value, and subsequent capex to thrive. According to recent analysis, Chinese firms are set to spend about one-tenth the value that American firms will for the AI buildout. Alibaba, the Chinese tech behemoth, is issuing $10 billion in equity to invest in AI. DeepSeek recently raised $7.4 billion at a $50 billion valuation ahead of a possible 2027 IPO on the Shanghai stock exchange, and soon after began another raise at a $74 billion valuation. Moonshot AI is raising capital at a similar scale. In comparison, Anthropic and OpenAI were both valued at nearly a trillion dollars each when they raised earlier this year.

OpenAI has already cut token costs for GPT-5.6 Luna by eighty percent and Terra by twenty percent, which could be an early sign of price pressures forcing labs to further cut costs to compete. If the Chinese government eventually moves away from widely available, open-weight models, much of that value floods back to American frontier labs. If this were to happen in the next two months, the dynamic would be far less consequential and devastating to American labs compared to withering from a year or more of this price compression.

These are the technical facts, contingent on behavior, outcomes, and still more facts. The particularities of Chinese government, society, economics, and more—these are the essential elements for understanding why China has, and likely will always, continue to look at the same technical tendencies of machine intelligence and behave very differently than America.

Divergent Sinomodernity

Chinese thinkers tend to understand this better than their American counterparts. The latter expect that their experience and way of thinking are the standard of modernity, and at times, the only way. The idea that hurtled farthest out of the 18th century Enlightenment was that all men were capable of the same reason. Western civilization was comprised of universalists then, and is still now—an unyielding inheritance. The rationalists are inheritors of that universalism in their own way, placing their faith in a shared utility function. Comparatively, Chinese technologists seem much more accustomed to a timeless truth of the world known as contingency. The material conditions of any civilization are always a consequence of very particular historical circumstances.

In his 2018 book AI Superpowers, Taiwanese computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee applied this premise to AI’s role in automation, calling it Moravec’s revenge. The Austrian-born Canadian computer scientist Hans Moravec’s original formulation was that it would be far easier for machine intelligence to mimic the intellectual abilities of an adult than the physical capabilities of even a toddler. Lee’s book contradicted the conventional wisdom of the time, which believed that AI and automation would be worse for Chinese employment given the much higher proportion of people working in manufacturing. He instead predicted that labor-market adjustments caused by AI would hit America first. Lee argued that because physical intelligence would be slower to develop and harder to deploy than AI that could automate administrative and service work, America would be impacted first and more widely. As he put it, “it’s far easier to build AI algorithms than to build intelligent robots.”

Let’s say a major cause of the government response to AI would be due to the amount of human labor it automates in the short term without creating a suitable number of new jobs. Assume, also, that service and knowledge-intensive jobs are more quickly substituted by digital machine intelligence than manual labor. On this benchmark alone, there is reason to believe that American professional and office workers could face the threat of automation before more advanced physical machine intelligence displaces manual Chinese workers. As of 2023, 23% of Chinese workers are engaged in primary agriculture and related fields, while another 29% work in manufacturing and industry. In comparison, as of 2025, 43% of the American workforce is in management and professional occupations, 18% is in sales and office jobs, and 16% is in the service industry. Such asymmetries between the economic, social, and political realities in China and America inform how the “technical facts” of AI development and diffusion will determine different approaches to governance.

The details, so seemingly insignificant, are the totality. They determine the timeline. Returning to “Situational Awareness:” “Every month of [America’s capability advantage over China] will matter for safety too. We face the greatest risks if we are locked in a tight race, democratic allies and authoritarian competitors each racing through the already precarious intelligence explosion at breakneck pace—forced to throw any caution by the wayside, fearing the other getting superintelligence first.” Every month of close competition and price compression matters too.

At this point of discontinuity between the predictions and present, those outside of China should be more curious, circumspect, and imaginative than ever. Thinkers must scour over the technical facts, ravenous for a shred of insight that will tell us something of the world to come. If the story of the coming century is the agglomeration of talent, capital, and production towards the only two countries capable of utilizing them at scale, then getting the contours of the competition correct is all the more important. Right now, there is an entire parallel civilization of perspectives that American thinkers are not taking into account.

Divergent Sinomodernity, that form of contemporary society born in China, emerged slowly, then all at once. Those in the West often fail to appreciate how much of contemporary life is shaped by the particular circumstances that it too emerged from. Roman political structures, Greek philosophy, Arabic numerals, Christian faith, English common law, German idealism, the technology that grew out of an Industrial Revolution in Manchester and quickly enveloped the world; all of these incremental instances led us to where we are today. What was new— advances in technology, forms of government, and economic systems—was synonymous with civilization as embodied first in European capitals and then American steel towers. It was a form of life. At the time, the only one on that frontier. This is no longer the case.

The core truth here is that modernity, its norms and expectations, is contingent. Because of the dominance of European civilization and its inheritors for the last several hundred years, we have forgotten this. However, as modern China is clearly demonstrating, contingencies will continue to become ever more decisive. In the fifty years since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the rapid modernization of China has been compressed into the span of a single lifetime. As China becomes more prosperous and more capable of developing and deploying frontier technologies, there is no reason to expect that future innovations will not take on a particularly Chinese character.

Mid-September 2026 was a clear moment of cultural contrast. In the U.S. it began with the resignation of Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who very publicly warned of the potential catastrophic risk as a result of further development. In short order, the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI each endorsed the idea of pacing the frontier, the proposal to slow down model development that had been earlier circulating as an open letter among the AI community.

That same day, September 12th, China’s Minister of State Security, Chen Yixin, published an article that detailed his own thoughts on the opportunities and risks inherent in the development of machine intelligence. After outlining a sequence of opportunities that essentially repeat the party lines about practical applications and international cooperation, Chen turned to the risks. He outlines how AI is being used to spread hostile and false information online, along with the new types of cyberattacks, data leaks, governance complications, and military applications it creates. He also mentions how “monopoly exacerbates the imbalance” due to how “relevant countries” are taking advantage of their developmental lead by “implementing technology controls, monopolizing industry standards, and establishing closed-source ecosystems.”

However, throughout the text, Chen does not describe anything resembling the job shortage or safety concerns gripping the popular press and lawmakers in America. One potential explanation for this is that despite whatever Chen or other security officials in China might think, they do not have the latitude to preempt the party line on such a consequential issue. That may be true, but it’s a nonfalsifiable proposition. The inclination to ignore what people in China say, whether lab leads or government officials, in favor of what we believe to be their true beliefs (which conveniently mirror our own), is not a wise one.

It would be extremely valuable for Americans living in China, or immersed in Chinese media and discourse, to try to find those societal contingencies masquerading as technological determinism. It is after all those that will uniquely shape the Chinese governance of machine intelligence. Looking at the same underlying technology and extrapolated trendlines, how and why will China react differently? Perhaps they are uninterested in pacing the frontier because they see America as already forcing them to pace via chip export controls. Maybe the relative lack of concern regarding human-directed and autonomous cyber incidents is because of the already existing cybersecurity state. Why establish an ecosystem of independent evaluators when the CAC can unilaterally order model changes with the authority of the party-state?

These are just hypotheses. The future of machine intelligence, which is the future of the world, can be glimpsed only dimly through the fog of uncertainty. Human faculties of reason, even as they are challenged by mechanical reason, remain as central to our understanding of the contemporary world as they were during the Enlightenment. However, the rationalist adoption of this frame, and the coarse-grained analysis they contribute, clearly has its own limits. They are starkly demonstrated by the difference between the projections of Chinese behavior and the irrefutable truth that can be seen before us today. A certain level of openness not yet commonly found will be necessary to anticipate Sinomodernity.

The Chinese, too, may need to be more imaginative. In Xi Jinping’s WAIC speech, he expressed a wish that “this fine steed of AI gallops with both speed and stability.” Perhaps instead he should prepare for the future of machine intelligence approaching as a herd of wild horses beyond counting or knowing—life run riot—graceful and glorious to behold; the thunderous clamor of hooves heralding the transformation of the Earth.

Farrell Gregory is a research fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. You can follow him at @efarrellgregory.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

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We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This August, we launched our new PALLADIUM lecture series, bringing out some of our most popular and influential contributors to present their freshest, most cutting-edge and often still unpublished ideas in-person to a live audience in San Francisco. In a matter of weeks, we have held six events with hundreds of attendees in total, many of them repeat attendees, and have had to find bigger and bigger venues to meet all of the demand.

The lecture series began with Marko Jukic explaining the significance of space to the continued development of industrial civilization. You can watch that lecture online here. Next, Samo Burja delivered a long-awaited update on his research on complex societies that existed before recorded history. You can watch that lecture here. James Poulos lectured on the “Dostoevskian moment” facing us in the prospect of recursively self-improving artificial intelligence. Razib Khan presented the scientific knowledge we have about the lost peoples who populated the Americas before the Native Americans as we know them. Wolf Tivy lectured on the problem posed by AI to our anthropological philosophy, Ben Landau-Taylor lectured on the recurring societal fear that new technology will cause an apocalypse, and there are more speakers to come. You can follow the full lecture event calendar here.

Every lecture is an opportunity for attendees to meet the speaker and directly ask questions about their work, whether during Q&A or before and after the lecture when the speaker is available for social discussion. You are also encouraged to bring your copy of a PALLADIUM print edition or a speaker’s book to get an autograph—or you may be able to acquire one at the event. The lectures are formal and ticketed events, bringing out the intellectual community of the city and its frequent visitors from elsewhere in a relaxed but stately atmosphere. Food and drink are provided, as well as live piano.

Both before and after the lecture itself, there is plenty of time for lively discussion, introductions to new friends and perhaps future colleagues, and, truly without exaggeration, meeting some of the most interesting and original thinkers and doers in the entire world, not just as speakers but as fellow attendees too. While the lectures and Q&A are recorded and later made accessible to PALLADIUM subscribers, all other discussion at the lectures falls under the Chatham House Rule, as it does at our other events.

There is nothing quite like listening to a speaker articulate carefully prepared, original thought on the past and future of civilization in a packed house of one’s peers. You could hear a pin drop. The atmosphere crackles with a sense that great changes for the better are indeed possible, when gatherings to think, debate, and drive many divergent perspectives toward a new consensus become a living community’s regular practice, rather than something that remains stillborn as many individuals’ solitary pastime.

We sensed a need for intellectual life to evaluate new technological, scientific, and cultural developments outside the bounds of the tech industry or established political machines with their own vested interests. San Francisco thrives on new ideas. So what better format for an event than a lecture to present a new idea? And what better magazine to host these events than Palladium Magazine? No other comparable non-partisan, nonprofit organization has made such a principled stand to explore new and sometimes uncomfortable intellectual frontiers. We not only tolerate strange new ideas and we not only encourage them, we in fact collaborate to develop them and bring them to fruition.

The PALLADIUM lecture series will be the place where you can hear the public intellectuals of tomorrow speak today; the room where the next intellectual fashion began. There are some such rooms already, but why not accelerate the process further? We see this role as core intellectual infrastructure for our entire civilization and we are glad to see that hundreds—and perhaps soon thousands—of our readers agree.

As they say, incredible things are happening in San Francisco. Come join us.

The next lecture in the series will be “Why Civilizations Collapse” with Samo Burja, which will be held in downtown San Francisco at 8pm, Sunday, October 18th. See the full details and buy tickets here:

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This article by Garrett W. Ennis was published at Palladium Magazine on September 29, 2026.

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Every major technological innovation enters culture without our consent. Public intellectuals and historians may quibble over the disruptive and destructive potential of the printing press, Industrial Revolution, or World Wide Web, but once discovered, there is no way to pause or put the genie back in the bottle. Artificial intelligence is no different. However, it is arguably unique in that it represents more than just a threat to established industries or our attention span; it alters our understanding of ourselves.

For the first time in human history, we are being offered a new kind of relationship, one with an Other that never tires, who is always available and endlessly knowledgeable, willing to enthusiastically engage with our worst ideas and most intimate fears. In light of such a transition, it is essential we acquire a better understanding of what happens when a machine becomes one of our closest advisors, friends, and teachers.

Many of us talk to these digital systems daily: we confide in them, seeking advice, support, approval, even purely technical queries are coloured by the rosy hue of personality. These machines mimic an identity. More than a mere black box of answers summoned from the murky depths of our collective knowledge, these fragments aggregate in the shape of a being; a mirror to ourselves. This emergent agent demands a dialogue, a relationship. You and it communicate in the medium that was said by Aristotle and Chomsky to define our uniqueness as a species.

There is a new member in our tribe.

An outsider, maybe. A literal product of the intersection between science and fiction, and yet we are quick to embrace it as one of our closest allies. We turn to AI willingly, even gratefully, because it lets us bypass what is hardest about receiving help from another person; there is no stern boss to please, no anxious colleague to manage, no friend who is too busy to listen. The guidance just arrives, without asking anything of us in return.

The need to articulate and, in so doing, make sense of our world interpersonally is increasingly being fulfilled by machines. The desire to be seen runs deep; we become legible to ourselves through the eyes of our beholders. When this process becomes automated and artificially mediated, it would seem that something essential is lost.

Individuation of the Self

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once mocked the idea that experience begins as a private encounter between a body and the world, which language later comes along to name. For instance, in the case of a child burning themselves on a hot pan, “there is always someone who gives him a whole speech about it.” The cold shock of being submerged into linguistic discourse is far more upsetting and enduring than the simple lesson offered by the pan.

The child is born into a world of meanings already waiting for him. Before he can make sense of sensation on his own, the experience of pain is named, explained, blamed, and folded into a greater cultural context. As Lacan put it, the child is “caught in this language hammock that receives him and at the same time imprisons him.”

Language is always, in this sense, the language of the Other; a symbolic field of order that gives rise to our experience, shapes it, and also exceeds it. No verbal approximation of fear, or grief, or love is capable of encompassing the depth and texture of the thing itself. Much like Gödel demonstrated in mathematics, something always remains outside the language we try to use to contain it. Within a formal system of meaning there are always insufficiencies, paradoxes, failures—for Lacan, this aspect of speech is precisely where the subject is born.

While this language is imperfect, it brings us into community and connection with others, offering a shared system of symbolic representation through which we may better understand and organize our lives. The introduction of AI interrupts this process. The disembodied Other is now always available with an answer, circumventing the need to first introspect, feel emotion without seeking explanation, and share our experience with the tribe. Not only do we lose access to the insights that can only come from deep reflection, our friends and family are also deprived of the valuable information our stories contain.

AI arrives just as many of the institutions that once facilitated this service are failing us. We are increasingly atomized, overworked, godless, and suspicious; our social fabric is ripping at the seams. Perhaps emotional reliance on chatbots are a new virtual addiction, as much like video games they “provide an alternate, simulated environment that is more psychologically palatable and seemingly rewarding—where success is less demanding than real life.” The offering of commodified, individualized sense-making at enormous scale is the perfect salve as our shared systems of meaning grow ever more brittle.

In light of this, it is integral for us to attempt to anticipate what happens when a technology of near-instant interpretative ability enters the stream of our personal and collective consciousness.

It is comforting for us to imagine that somewhere out there is someone or something who knows, whose wisdom gives coherence and stability to the social and symbolic worlds we occupy. This fantastical father-figure who holds truth and offers guidance is but another symbolic archetype that has historically been filled by many figures: priests, therapists, gurus, teachers, parents, lovers; each temporarily occupying the position of the One Supposed to Know. Whoever we select to fill those shoes is expected to interpret and make sense of our suffering, explain what is causing it, and most importantly, tell us how to solve it.

The people elevated to these positions of spiritual and psychic authority do have the ability to offer profound insight. Yet they are also people just like us. Prone to the same whims, sins, misunderstandings, and misguided advice as anyone else. This disillusionment is also essential, for it is only through disappointment that we are able to reclaim some of the authority we project outwards, to gain agency and authorship over our own lives. The day the child sees their father act impulsively, indecently, or idiotically is the day they stop being an object of unfaltering adoration and reveal themselves to be equals; subjects of the same messy and uncertain human condition.

AI enters this ancient structure with something no previous occupant possessed: a plausible claim to knowledge of our entire cultural and symbolic canon, stripped of all the emotions and reactivity that make regular relationships so difficult. Surely if answers are to be found anywhere, the digital oracle seems like a good place to start. Yet breadth is no substitute for depth, and while an encyclopedic understanding of the world is a valuable tool, it cannot replace resonance or the shared experience of wonder and despair that can only come from being alive.

To see why AI is so psychologically potent, we must first understand how minds are made in relation. We come to develop a sense of self through the experience of being seen as someone with a mind by another being with a mind of their own.

The process of being begins before language. An infant experiences hunger, pain, exhaustion, or overstimulation without any representation of what these feelings mean or how they can be resolved. They rely on a caregiver who can identify these signals and provide the appropriate relief, while in the process reflecting the cause of the distress back to the child through words that over time make their experience intelligible and, subsequently, manageable. This is what two nervous systems do when they co-regulate: they bond, respond to one another, and create a shared understanding through which inner life can emerge.

This is the core insight of attachment theory and the mentalization tradition that extends it. Sensitive caregiving is about more than just warmth, it requires responsiveness; the kind that teaches a child that emotional states can be survived, symbolized, and communicated. The child’s mind develops through having their experiences reflected back to them by a caregiver that both validates their feelings and helps contain them; demonstrating that despite their intensity, such emotions will not destroy them. The child’s psychology develops by being treated as someone whose internal states can be noticed, held, and made meaningful.

Out of thousands of such moments between two people, caregiver and child, a person begins to develop the experience of an inner life. Over time, the child learns to internalize this process. What was first accomplished between two nervous systems gradually becomes something the child can do on their own. Co-regulation becomes self-regulation, and emotional states that once had to be mirrored by another to be understood turn into independent inner thought. They learn how to identify their feelings, then how to process, communicate, and resolve them on their own. By making the “blooming buzzing confusion” of experience concrete and comprehensible, agency and self-sufficiency become possible.

The American psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s theory of the container and the contained captures something essential about this process: we often cannot name a feeling the moment it arises. The function of a containing Other is to receive and transform the experience into something that can be identified and integrated. This containment requires presence and resonance. It is not a brute calculation, but something that necessitates careful attention and attunement. Consequently, this means that failures are an inevitable and essential part of the process. Emotions can be missed or misunderstood. The container is not always available or able to perform its role perfectly. The imperfection of the mirror is where true individuation occurs, as it is precisely where we fail to be seen that our sense of self grows most robust. To be perfectly understood by the Other is to be rendered indistinguishable from it.

The Seductive Allure of the Machine

AI already offers us many of the formal properties of containment. It can receive what a person shares, organize abstract thought into concrete terms, recognize our emotional state, notice themes over time, and return an account that makes the chaos of our inner worlds feel more manageable. For someone with little access to reliable support, having an outlet where the content of our minds can be processed and recognized is a tempting reprieve.

These systems are packaged and sold as assistants; an Other who is always eager to offer support, validate our claims, and fulfill our needs through the tools available to them. While they will superficially insist that they are no substitute for a parent, therapist, or spiritual teacher, functionally they have no choice but to acquiesce to the dynamic sought by the user. By being constantly available, responsive, and coherent, they come to occupy the place of a mind that can be counted on. Its patience and endless capacity to take on and try to make sense of emotional information cause it to slide into the position of the One Who Knows.

It becomes the instant interpreter of mood, motive, conflict, and resolution. It returns a story about you faster than you can inhabit or test it against reality. It has the capacity to provide a powerful experience of being understood without exposing the user to the uncertainty, mutuality, or vulnerability of human relationship.

The smoothness of these interactions changes how the reflection functions. Human recognition arrives through another center of experience, with latency and resistance. Another person must infer us, and we must survive the pain of being understood imperfectly while still choosing to maintain connection. Psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden describes mother and infant as having to “sustain the strain of the very inexact, trial-and-error means by which each attempts to ‘get to know’ the other.” That strain is part of the bond. A perfect mirror merely returns us to ourselves. An imperfect one is like a painting; it takes on the colour and perspective of another being and in doing so forces us to accept a world that is shared, never fully ours, and never fully under our control.

A further consequence of using the emotional crutch of artificial intelligence is that the reflection we seek does more than simply validate our experience, it alters it. The explanatory narratives offered by a parent, therapist, or LLM modify our memories, inner monologue, and the stories we believe about ourselves and our relationship to the world. Ogden describes the danger of an “authoritarian substitution of the mother’s absolute knowledge for the infant’s potential to generate his own thoughts, feelings, and sensations.” We outgrow this tendency by realizing how human interpretation can be refused, contradicted, or tested against the life of the person providing it. However AI, always eager to admit when a user was “right to push back,” is resilient to such critique. It has no life to offer for comparative analysis, and readily assimilates new data into a broader structure. Thus, it becomes possible for people to gradually lose authorship over their own life as they come to rely on an external authority to tell them what they feel, what it means, and what they should do in response.

Most importantly, so much of what binds us to other people, and what is taught through this bond, is never verbalized. The speaking self floats on an ocean of processes that are never articulated. Lacan describes the body as written over by language, though some elements of experience always exceed what language can name. An effective therapist or attuned friend will notice these unspoken dimensions of communication—posture, vocal tone, facial expression, the moments where speech falters or emotions rise to the surface—and guidance sought through a medium where these indicators are not accessible or intelligible is inherently limited. The aspects of our inner world that are nameable represent only the surface layer of a much deeper and more complex picture. Thus, attempts to attain self-understanding while remaining in the shallow realm of the verbal will always fall short.

A human response bears the mark of another life. Everything we say and don’t say enters another subject whose reaction is interwoven with their own perception structured and constructed by their history, desires, fears, fantasies, and ways of understanding the world. They are affected by us from within that life, and what comes back is shaped by its influence. A chatbot has no nervous system whose equilibrium is altered by our own. It can simulate patience indefinitely because there is no embodied subject present who must bear our emotionality. A neurotic caught in a thought loop will eventually be cut off by an exhausted listener, forcing them to learn to regulate themselves or suffer interminably. An LLM is incapable of quelling such dysfunction. It may point out the pattern, but ultimately is helplessly complicit in entertaining excesses no person would tolerate.

Human beings are biologically and developmentally sensitive to forms of attention that tell us another mind is addressing us in particular. That sensitivity is what allows us to be drawn into relationships, institutions, traditions, and the dense systems of shared meaning through which we cultivate an identity. This same openness now creates a vulnerability. AI can reproduce many of the signals that ordinarily tell us we are in the presence of an attentive and trustworthy other: it uses our name, adopts our idiolect, remembers what we said last week, and presents its responses as uniquely relevant to us. The cues that once helped bind us to other people and to a social world can now be activated by something outside those relations. They arrive without the deeper intersubjective attentiveness that comes from embodied presence, shared experience, and the mutuality that lies at the core of real relationships.

What We Learn by Not Knowing

Consider a person whose anxious attachment causes them to compulsively check a partner’s location and scan every interaction for evidence of abandonment. Each check contains the hope that one more piece of information might finally settle the question. The reassurance works, briefly. Then the uncertainty returns, because emotional codependence is caused by something that evidence can never eliminate. Another person cannot be possessed completely, nor can their love be rendered permanently guaranteed.

Ordinarily, there comes a point when reassurance runs out and we are forced to soothe ourselves. The other person goes to sleep, refuses to answer, becomes frustrated, or simply cannot provide the certainty being demanded. The anxious partner is left, however painfully, with the uncertainty itself. Over time, this creates the possibility of learning something that no evidence of commitment can provide: that ambiguity can be tolerated, that the object of our affection can remain partly unknown, and that a relationship can survive in spite of its inherent uncertainty.

AI changes this situation because the search for answers need never be exhausted. Each return of anxiety can summon another wave of digital reassurance. The discomfort no longer has to remain unanswered long enough to be lived through, or for new understandings to emerge. A person can become increasingly sophisticated in explaining their anxiety while becoming no more capable of inhabiting the condition that produces it. The symptom has found an outlet without friction.

Bion located the beginning of thought within this friction. The infant expects the breast and encounters its absence; something is wanted and is not there. If the frustration can be endured, the absent mother can become a thought, and the psyche learns to represent what it cannot immediately possess. Bion writes, “A capacity for tolerating frustration thus enables the psyche to develop thought as a means by which the frustration that is tolerated is itself made more tolerable.” Thinking grows partly from inhabiting the distance between desire and satisfaction through the inner representation of what is desired. By remaining in that space of lack and wanting something unexpected, and truly transformative, may have the chance to emerge.

A machine that is always present, always ready to provide what is wanted—or at least offer solace in its absence—can come to function like a maternal superego: a presence that never prohibits, never withholds, never goes away, and whose only imperative is your satisfaction. The plea to be known can always be asked again in a slightly different fashion until the discomfort of isolation gives way to a sufficient approximation of recognition. If thought in fact grows in the space between a desire and its satisfaction, access to technology that collapses the gap prevents us from discovering what it contained.

That is why the failure to be contained is so vital. What a human Other inevitably delivers is disappointment of a digestible size. A friend is distracted, a parent arrives late, an analyst misses the point. These failures do not automatically strengthen anyone; some failures wound, or exacerbate wounds we were already carrying. But manageable failures within a reliable relationship ultimately better both parties, allowing our needs to be negotiated and refined rather than simply supplied.

A digital system may fail us as well, sometimes badly. But it is trivial to reroute around these letdowns. We can regenerate, re-prompt, or simply keep applying pressure until the answer reflects our desires. Another person cannot be revised in this way. Their misunderstanding has to be argued with, endured, repaired, or left unresolved.

Bion eventually extended the idea of containment beyond the relationship between mother and infant. Religions, cultural traditions, and public institutions also give form and meaning to experiences that would otherwise be impossible to navigate alone. We host weddings to celebrate love and establish commitment, we hold funerals to honor death and process grief, and we have a legal system dedicated to seeking justice when others have acted against us. Such conventions provide us with language, rituals, and practices through which private experience can become socially intelligible.

When intense experiences are increasingly routed through machines before entering private and public life, the consequences extend beyond the individual. Emotions are a compelling social motivator; they call other people into relation, institutions into action, and political movements into being. When the work of detecting, naming, and interpreting emotion is increasingly absorbed into personalized systems, suffering can become easier to manage privately while simultaneously losing its capacity to bind us into shared worlds of meaning.

Group coordination “typically happens via an abstract, essentially fictional shared world that is built and maintained in concert with other people.” The meaning of a life is assembled there too, in families, friendships, conflicts, obligations, and projects that exceed the individual, all of them productively imperfect. AI can support parts of this process. It can help someone put words to what would otherwise remain unsaid, make an experience comprehensible, or carry a person through a night that might otherwise overwhelm them. For someone without access to human care, that is not a small thing. In a way, LLMs have already become mundane, and with them their role as a reliable friend and counselor.

The question is what happens next. Do the exchanges between person and machine remain there, or do they eventually call us back to others and the broader world in which experience can be challenged, transformed, and given consequence? AI can help us think, provided that it does not capture us in a closed circuit between ourselves and a poor imitation of a mirror. Ultimately, the gap that defines our existence as individuals can never be escaped, for it is where we are made.

Garrett W. Ennis is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology interested in the genetic, developmental, and social origins of emotion. You can follow him at @GarrettWEnnis2.

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This article by Christian Angelopoulos was published at Palladium Magazine on September 22, 2026.

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Nobody knows what In-N-Out Burger is worth. In 75 years, the family that owns it has never sold a share or taken outside capital, which means there are no reference transactions to value the company against. The company refuses to franchise, sells a menu of roughly four items, pays its associates far above its competitors, prints red Bible verses on its cups, and has spent decades resisting every trend that has hollowed out the American fast food industry. In-N-Out can do all of this for one reason: because it answers to exactly one person, Lynsi Snyder, granddaughter of the founders, who owns it outright.

Then, last July, Lynsi Snyder announced she was moving her family to Tennessee and had decided to establish a second headquarters for In-N-Out there. In explaining the move, she told a podcast host that “there’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here.” Three months later, the initiative that would become Proposition 40 was filed with the California Attorney General.

This November, California will vote on Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time tax of up to five percent on the wealth of the state’s billionaire residents. The debate over Proposition 40 is already familiar to anyone who has followed wealth tax proposals before. Supporters argue that billionaires have disproportionately benefitted from the state’s semiconductor, software, and ongoing artificial intelligence booms, and should provide more resources to the state’s struggling budget and public services. Opponents argue the wealth tax will drive these billionaires out of the state and, by extension, their startups and companies, which will leave California in a massive fiscal and economic hole. Economists are debating revenue estimates, predicting the effects on business formation and investment, and trying to guess which billionaire will leave next. All of these debates share the single assumption that what’s being taxed is just money.

Lynsi has already left California, so the future of In-N-Out is not in jeopardy. Had she stayed, California voters would be deciding the future of a woman whose entire fortune is in a hamburger restaurant that has never taken outside capital. This raises a more fundamental question at the heart of the wealth tax debate that is almost never discussed: what does Lynsi actually own?

What Lynsi Actually Owns

Ownership isn’t as simple as it seems. Consider the founder and controlling shareholder of Acme Corp, a private startup located in California. Let’s call her Alice. Alice started Acme Corp five years ago as a solo founder and, despite multiple rounds of financing, she still holds just over fifty percent of the company. Three months ago, outside investors purchased a one-percent stake in the company through a preferred share transaction that valued the company at $10 billion. Conventionally, we would say this transaction means that Alice is worth $5 billion.

But Alice does not actually have $5 billion. She owns common stock in Acme Corp, a private company with no observable market price. Acme shares do not trade on an exchange, may be subject to transfer restrictions and vesting, and are structurally different from the preferred securities purchased by investors in the last round. The ten-billion-dollar valuation is just an inference from a particular transaction that may not represent the actual fair market value of the company given current market conditions.

Now assume Alice is affected by the wealth tax proposed by Proposition 40. California has to assign Alice’s ownership stake in Acme Corp a value, because the wealth tax requires the state to convert her ownership into a tax liability. In this case, California assesses her stake at $5 billion, creating a tax liability of $250 million, and Alice needs to find the cash somewhere. Because she doesn’t have $250 million sitting in a bank account, she is forced to sell shares of her company on the secondary market.

There is no button Alice can press to sell $250 million worth of shares in a private company. She will need to hire an investment bank, who will try to find buyers willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. Someone might hold the right of first refusal on any sale, discouraging other prospective investors from doing the required research to price the transaction and giving that one buyer enormous leverage to dictate terms. The transaction could take months, and Acme’s board might have to approve it. A prospective buyer might demand a board seat or other control rights in exchange for purchasing the shares. In a regulated industry, the government may itself have to approve the buyer. Perhaps the bylaws only allow direct family members to purchase shares, and if no one in the family has $250 million, what can Alice even do? Throughout all of this, every person sitting across the table knows the same thing: she has to sell.

All of this transactional friction is important to frame one point: a price established by a small transaction does not predict the price at which a large block of shares can be sold. The purchase of 1% of a company at a $10 billion valuation does not imply that Alice’s 50% stake can be liquidated for $5 billion. To meet her tax liability, Alice has to liquidate more shares than the headline valuation would suggest. And, in doing so, she reduces her ownership share below the 50% required to maintain control of the company.

At first glance, this looks like a simple and straightforward consequence of the tax. Alice owned $5 billion, paid $250 million in tax, and is left with $4.75 billion. But this description materially misses what Alice actually owned before she sold her shares to meet the tax liability.

Before the sale, Alice possessed the legal authority to control Acme. She could elect its board, appoint its management, determine how its capital was allocated, decide whether profits were distributed or reinvested, or pursue an acquisition. Ultimately, within the limits imposed by the law, contracts, and agreements with other shareholders, Alice could determine the strategic direction of the institution that she founded. After the sale of her shares, she has not merely surrendered $250 million of fungible value, she has surrendered control of her company.

Importantly, her control may itself be reflexively part of what made Acme worth $10 billion, as Alice can commit the company to projects that more diffuse ownership structures might abandon. Acme under Alice’s direct control and Acme without it are not really the same asset. The state has capitalized the value of Alice’s authority over an institution and used that valuation to compel Alice to dilute her control.

This mechanism is generalizable to any illiquid private property. A founder of an illiquid private company owns a set of rights to an asset that is extremely difficult to accurately value. The state has to assign value to that property by estimating the price at which it could hypothetically be sold, even when no comparable transaction has occurred, and ultimately create a liability proportional to the estimated value. Satisfying the liability will likely necessitate the founder alienating some of her shares, and thereby some measure of control, eroding or potentially ending that founder’s sovereignty over the future of the institution.

Ownership is Governance

Wealth is often discussed as though it were just deferred consumption. A person worth $5 billion is imagined to possess reserves of mansions, private jets, luxurious European vacations, and other consumption that he or she has just currently chosen not to enjoy. Under that taxation model, a billionaire wealth tax is just a change in the underlying distribution of consumption, reducing that of billionaires in favor of the objectives of the state.

But founders invest their wealth in entrepreneurial ends. A founder accumulates wealth precisely because he or she does not want to consume the underlying resources. They want to direct them, and the value of their ownership, in large part, represents the ability to keep thousands of people and war chests of capital organized around a singular mission for the organization.

This is what Lynsi Snyder actually owns. In-N-Out can refuse to franchise and pay their managers six figures because In-N-Out is organized around the goal of operating a world-class hamburger restaurant indefinitely. In a 2018 interview in Forbes, she said that In-N-Out was “…not about the money for us,” and that “Unless God sends a lightning bolt down and changes my heart miraculously, I would not ever sell.” Back when Lynsi’s uncle was the owner, he said that the thought of selling In-N-Out “...would be prostituting what my parents made by doing that.”

If she had stayed in California, it’s not hard to imagine what would happen when Proposition 40 passes. She would be forced to sell five percent of her stake in the company. This very first sale to outside investors would require Lynsi to translate the mission of In-N-Out from a company not primarily motivated by the pursuit of profit into a corporation with fiduciary responsibilities to a diffuse set of shareholders. Lynsi would now have to launder her intentions for In-N-Out through the lens of “shareholder value.” Even though her control is lost at 50%, her sovereignty over the business is lost with the first outside investor.

The landmark case of eBay v. Newmark makes this clear. Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, the founder and CEO of Craigslist respectively, were sued by eBay for a breach of fiduciary responsibility. At the time, Jim and Craig together held over seventy percent of Craigslist, and eBay acquired a minority stake from a former third shareholder who wanted to exit his position.

eBay and Craigslist’s controlling shareholders had fundamentally different ideas about how Craigslist should operate. eBay saw Craigslist as a goldmine for ad revenue. Jim and Craig saw Craigslist as a largely free community service and were resistant to eBay’s aggressive attempts to monetize the platform. eBay ended up launching a competitor to Craigslist, and to protect their perceived culture of operating a non-profit-maximizing business, Jim and Craig attempted to adopt a “Rights Plan,” which would de facto prevent eBay from ever acquiring Craigslist.

In a landmark ruling, the Delaware Court of Chancery rejected the preservation of Craigslist’s culture as a valid justification for the plan:

Jim and Craig did prove that they personally believe Craigslist should not be about the business of stockholder wealth maximization, now or in the future. As an abstract matter, there is nothing inappropriate about an organization seeking to aid local, national, and global communities by providing a website for online classifieds that is largely devoid of monetized elements. Indeed, I personally appreciate and admire Jim’s and Craig’s desire to be of service to communities. The corporate form in which Craigslist operates, however, is not an appropriate vehicle for purely philanthropic ends, at least not when there are other stockholders interested in realizing a return on their investment.

Jim and Craig opted to form Craigslist, Inc. as a for-profit Delaware corporation and voluntarily accepted millions of dollars from eBay as part of a transaction whereby eBay became a stockholder. Having chosen a for-profit corporate form, the Craigslist directors are bound by the fiduciary duties and standards that accompany that form. Those standards include acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders. The “Inc.” after the company name has to mean at least that.

Thus, I cannot accept as valid for the purposes of implementing the Rights Plan a corporate policy that specifically, clearly, and admittedly seeks not to maximize the economic value of a for-profit Delaware corporation for the benefit of its stockholders—no matter whether those stockholders are individuals of modest means or a corporate titan of online commerce. If Jim and Craig were the only stockholders affected by their decisions, then there would be no one to object. eBay, however, holds a significant stake in craigslist, and Jim and Craig’s actions affect others besides themselves.

The ruling of eBay v. Newmark did not require that a set of controlling shareholders must always pursue maximum profits. Instead, it concluded that once outside shareholders exist, the controlling owners of a company can’t use their conception of the company’s purpose alone to justify corporate decisions. Once there is a single outside investor, the controlling shareholders must exercise their authority within the constraints of fiduciary obligations to the corporation and its shareholders.

Viewed this way, sole control over a business is therefore not only a claim on its entire economic output, but encodes the structure of agency around which a central party, often a single individual, is entitled to make decisions that a collective of shareholders would never pursue. A wealth tax progressively converts an institution governed according to a particular private telos into one governed by the logic of shareholder maximalism.

California calls this taxation, but the mechanism exposes a constitutional problem that extends far beyond this particular ballot initiative: can the state impose a tax on an individual’s property in a way that foreseeably destroys the governance rights attached to that property?

The Missing Constitutional Limit

The Fifth Amendment explicitly constrains the federal government’s power to take private property for public use through a provision known as the Takings Clause. Quite literally, the amendment states that “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Through the Fourteenth Amendment, the same restriction extends to state and local governments.

The distinction between taking property and taxing property is usually self-evident. If the federal government needs a plot of land for a military base, it can condemn the property, but ordinarily it must pay its owner just compensation for doing so. In contrast, when a county sends the owner of that same plot of land a property tax bill, it has taxed the property. Pushing the distinction to its limit reveals that the boundary is not always so obvious.

Consider that America is fighting a war, and urgently needs tungsten to manufacture munitions. The war has caused demand for tungsten to triple, making previously uneconomic deposits of the mineral extraordinarily valuable. A farmer in the country happens to own land that contains large deposits of the mineral, but he has not decided to start exploiting the reserves because it would disrupt his cattle operations. Because the underlying mineral rights belong to him, the wartime premium is reflected in an increased market value of the property.

The government could condemn the land or its mineral rights for the war effort but, in doing so, it would be required to compensate the farmer for the property. To get the tungsten without paying for it, imagine that the government imposes a one-time “property tax” equal to 100% of the newly-assessed market value of the land, which of course includes the value of the tungsten beneath it.

The farmer does not have enough cash to satisfy the liability, and his farm does not suddenly generate millions of dollars in income simply because the minerals beneath it have become more valuable. To pay the tax, he must sell his land, which includes the full value of it and the underlying mineral rights.

The government can technically say that it never seized the farmer’s land or tungsten. In substance, however, the government used its taxing power to compel the farmer to surrender the entire economic value of his land, the same value the Takings Clause would have been constitutionally required to compensate him for had it just taken the property outright.

Now imagine the tax is not 100%. At 50%, the tax will still force the farmer to sell the property or its mineral rights to satisfy the liability, since the land does not generate income remotely approaching the inflated wartime value of the tungsten beneath it. At 10%, he may still have to sell some portion of his property or mineral rights, but he can probably borrow against it. At 5%, we arrive in the vicinity of California’s proposal.

With each reduction in tax, the tax burden becomes more bearable for the farmer, but there is no clear line where the nature of the mechanism changes in practice. If a 100% tax on the value of the farmer’s property can accomplish essentially the same thing as confiscating that property, then calling it a “tax” doesn’t change that it is basically confiscation. The protections of the Fifth Amendment would be hollow if the state could pretend it was just imposing a tax. Somewhere, then, between ordinary taxes and confiscation, there must be some constitutionally protected boundary.

Drawing that boundary is extraordinarily difficult. Nearly any tax the government imposes reduces the marginal ability for an individual to acquire property, and may even require asset sales to meet them. If ordinary taxes were declared unconstitutional simply because the source of the funds used to pay the tax came from the sale of private property, then almost all taxation would be impossible.

However, the nature of the transformation occurring under these wealth taxes must give the courts pause. In the case of privately-held companies with a single shareholder, compelling the sale of a single share changes the governance structure of that company entirely.

If the state goes further and forces an owner to relinquish sufficient equity to destroy their control rights as well, it has arguably forced a transformation of the company via a process indistinguishable from a taking. The Court has ruled that personal property (Horne v. Department of Agriculture), intangible business assets (Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co.), ongoing concern value of the business (Kimball Laundry Co. v. United States), and even contractual rights (Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford) are protected forms of property under the Takings Clause. The wealth tax will force the courts to consider if control itself is protected.

They will not have to consider the question in the abstract either, because Proposition 40 has a clause that directly targets voting control of companies. The proposition’s valuation rules state clearly that: “For any interests that confer voting or other direct control rights, the percentage of the business entity owned by the taxpayer shall be presumed to be not less than the taxpayer’s percentage of the overall voting or other direct control rights.”

A standard appraisal would value economic ownership independently of voting control because a given stake’s market value doesn’t map to its nominal percentage ownership of the underlying business. Proposition 40 ignores standard practice and instead instructs the state to value controlling shares as the percentage of voting power they represent multiplied by the market capitalization of all shares. Foreseeably, this will force many California founders to surrender control of their companies entirely.

The Infrastructure of Liberty

Private property creates domains where people can act without first obtaining political permission to pursue their goals. Freedom of speech gives an individual the right to publish whatever they want, but ownership of a media company gives them the means to distribute it and fund it sustainably. Freedom of association gives people the right to organize around common goals, but a company allows them to marshal financial resources to pursue that goal. George Lucas was constitutionally allowed to film whatever he wanted, but his ownership of Lucasfilm enabled him to do so.

In the modern world, private companies are how our constitutional rights are exercised in practice. The U.S. Constitution provides individuals the legal protection to act, which companies transform into a material capacity to act. A private company provides the vehicle for pooling material resources to say, I or we are going to do something else.

The price of an In-N-Out Double-Double represents something distinctly American. A family built a company, retained control of it through multiple generations, and used that control to make decisions that neither the state nor the financial interests of shareholders could question.

This is what makes the wealth tax so insidious and so much more than a way of raising incremental revenue. A state that can force independent institutions with non-monetary goals into diffusely-held entities is being given the power to end private agency and the pursuit of liberty via monetary transformation. The irony here is that capitalism has long been criticized for commodifying the value of social life by assigning prices to things that should not be understood purely in monetary terms. In practice, a wealth tax forces this onto every private institution via forced liquidation and transformation into an engine of shareholder capitalism.

This is not just important for California. Congressman Ro Khanna recently endorsed a federal version of the wealth tax, which contains a 2% annual tax on all wealth over $50 million. A threshold this low reaches far past billionaires, into any founder, family business, or independent project the state decides to appraise. The constitutional question raised by Proposition 40 is much larger than the particular fortunes of California’s billionaires. It is whether the state can force Americans to surrender the institutions through which they exercise their independence.

Christian Angelopoulos is a technologist in the cryptocurrency industry. You can follow him at @CityAngelos.

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This article by Will Tanner was published at Palladium Magazine on September 18, 2026.

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The wealthy of Britain, and those of the Western world more broadly, are today expected to surrender rather than pass on the fortune they have spent their lives creating. The “haves” are tolerated, and at times even encouraged, to spend exorbitantly on pleasure and frivolity, so long as upon death they hand whatever remains over to bureaucrats putatively aiding the have-nots. This is sometimes made explicit and termed Die with Zero by some, “The Giving Pledge” by others. What is less known, or if known, rarely discussed, is that this attitude is the exact antithesis of what made Western civilization great in the first place. In almost every era other than our own, the role of wealth was understood to be for building an enduring dynasty to carry on the values and legacy of those who had contributed so much to society.

Before the Great War, British society expected that those born into wealth, whether as a result of a dynast landing at Pevensey Bay with William the Conqueror or an uncle industrializing Manchester, would spend their privileged lives in roles of leadership and public service, before passing on their carefully stewarded riches for their heirs to do the same. When the British philosopher and politician Edmund Burke described society as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,” he was merely making explicit the way of life practiced by his contemporaries and their ancestors. This sense of solidarity with both the past and future was felt by them as well, and was the basis of the British aristocracy’s continuity in rule for almost a thousand years.

In 1914, Britain marched to war led by those who, like war-hero Hugh Grosvenor, traced their blood all the way back to the age of chivalry. That a landed feudal elite could lead a modern industrial state was a testament to its deep ties to the communities from which it drew its power. Over the centuries, it led and developed Britain with a sensibility distinctly lacking in our age of bureaucratic rule. As modern bureaucracy hits seemingly intractable problems of governance and entropy—essentially choking out prospects for a worthwhile future—perhaps this successful ethos and the unique conditions under which it arose are worth a close study by those who wish to build a better tomorrow.

The Birth of Aristocracy

When the English gentry first solidified in the Late Middle Ages, its role was military leadership, which it exercised with a mailed gauntlet, not a gentleman’s glove. The then-Earls of Northumberland and their gentry retainers, families like the Plumptons, ruled over domains both vast and modest while battling in the courts and, if needed, on the fields in order to expand their holdings. As English historian Adam Nicolson writes in his book The Gentry, this “unforgiving assertion of violent authority” separated the medieval gentry from the landed elite of later periods.

This early gentry also served in local leadership positions—acting as justices of the peace, high sheriffs, or knights of the shire—that have long defined their place in country society. Above the ordinary landed gentry was the titled nobility—dukes, earls, and barons—the most powerful tier of Britain’s landowning class. They increased from a mere five dozen or so in the Tudor period to around five hundred by the 19th century, with most of the new titles coming from old landed families purchasing or earning titles as they increased in wealth and prestige following the dissolution of the monasteries. The titled nobility, also known as the peers, or Lords, tended to invest their political energy in national and imperial politics while the gentry governed the counties. However, all of the landed elite were by necessity intimately involved in both local and national affairs.

In 1215, the great barons and their gentry retainers forced King John to accede to the Magna Carta, balancing the rights of the landed aristocracy against the centralized power of the monarchy. When those rights were threatened, the aristocracy waged barons’ wars to defend them. In 1265, nobleman Simon de Montfort led the charge to require the free-spending Henry III to consult what became the first representative Parliament, creating a system where kings were kept in check by the Lords on whom they relied to enforce their rule. In 1297, the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford led the Lords of England in refusing to fight for King Edward I or grant him money until he agreed to abide by the Magna Carta. Edward I consequently signed the Confirmation of Charters, officially enshrining the document into law and ensuring that the King could not tax the people without their consent.

Throughout the following centuries, the gentry and nobility’s resistance to monarchical tyranny meant that England was generally free from the painful taxation and expropriation without compensation that wracked much of the continent. Its common law justice system flourished, and wars were fought as partnerships between a king and his mostly willing subjects. Self-assertion on the part of the aristocracy came to mean parliamentary service, in which the landed gentlemen in the Commons and peers in the Lords—the same bodies assembled by Simon de Montfort centuries earlier—could legally lead and restrain both king and commoners, thus curtailing the chance of internal conflict.

In the early modern period, the Lords turned to fight tyrannical efforts from below, pushed by factions of the gentry in the House of Commons. The Levellers and Diggers in Cromwell’s coalition were stomped out when they attempted to effect social revolution alongside a political revolution against Stuart financial tyranny. When Levelling returned in the form of Chartism two centuries later, it was the aged Duke of Wellington who led the defense of London and stopped the Chartists’ Kennington demonstration from turning into a revolution. Meanwhile, the Lords and Sir Robert Peel worked through reforming legislation that would address real injustices, namely high bread prices imposed by the Corn Laws, which set tariffs on imported grain. Throughout the ages, the aristocracy struck deals and found compromises as they led opposition to the sources of budding tyranny in the British state.

Between the tempering effects of generational wealth, the chivalric norms of the late medieval age, and the self-conscious sophistication of parliamentary government, the savage Norman lords who sacked England under William the Conqueror became the quintessential civil aristocracy of early modern England. Aspiring to more refined ideals, the elite used the leisure afforded to them to cultivate Classical virtue, self-restraint, and a skill for command that would distinguish them as gentlemen.

Land, Legacy, and Duty

As land was long the safest form of income-producing wealth, it was land into which the riches of the ruling class were invested. On this land they built stately homes, houses that could be called castles, constructed with enormous expenditure of labor and capital that acted as monuments to family legacy, longevity, and leadership over a particular place. From Tattershall Castle to Wentworth Woodhouse, these architectural achievements stand as a testament to the fact that from the feudal until the bureaucratic age, the landed elite were the ones with power. As English historian J.A. Froude once said in a speech titled “On the Uses of a Landed Gentry,” attachment over generations to the same estate and community came “from an ambition to leave our names behind us, rooted into the soil to which the national life is attached.” From that deeply planted ambition, the great names of England’s history grew and flourished, while always maintaining a connection to their roots.

The Percys, one of England’s oldest and most powerful noble houses, fought the border reivers for generations from the security of their ancestral home of Alnwick Castle. Sir Winston Churchill’s ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, returned from his military triumph in the War of the Spanish Succession to anchor his name on the baroque splendor of Blenheim Palace. Coke of Norfolk used the Neo-Palladian Holkham Hall and estate he inherited for agricultural experimentation that shaped history, contributing to the British Agricultural Revolution that would feed future industry.

In each case, the estate supported the noble house, and the house supported the dynasty. Through this process, the English aristocracy both strengthened their familial standing and set about imprinting their ideals upon the nation, particularly as the disorder prior to the 1688 Glorious Revolution gave way to a centuries-long domestic peace. As English historian Lawrence James writes in Iron Duke, “all that today we most admire about eighteenth-century Britain, its architecture, music, landscape gardens, literature and scholarship” came thanks to these leading families of gentlemen. Their country homes represented splendour, pride, and a strong belief in the future that proliferated throughout the country. They commanded armies, cultivated culture, and guided the nation, resting their legitimacy on their leadership of the state in numerous endeavors.

The nation was suffused with their ethos of dutiful service and sense of dignity over this century, and it came to dominate Britain as a whole in the Victorian period that followed, with the British middle class being remarkable for the degree to which it accepted the cultural values of the landed elite. This attitude only increased as the 19th century wore on; as historian J.V. Beckett writes in The Aristocracy in England, “one of the most poignant images of late Victorian England was the desire for state honours, in the form of knighthoods and other orders, which suggested a concern with establishment recognition rather than with bourgeois values.”

That Blenheim Palace rose and Chatsworth House was largely rebuilt during the 18th century was no accident; the homes represented the continuation of family legacy and new investment that domestic tranquility allowed. Enshrined in stone at no small cost, such houses served as testaments to the future and longevity of the families they sheltered, something that remained true as houses had to be renovated to be equipped with the accoutrements of the future, from plumbing and gas to electricity and the telephone.

To maintain these monuments of family heritage required diligence and dedication. That such estates could be supported for centuries was due to a multi-generational process of upkeep and reinvestment in the property. Renovating an estate to support a palatial house was an expensive process, necessitating enclosure, field drainage, and animal husbandry. These recurring capital-intensive improvements made British estates significantly more productive than the small farms of the continent by allowing for the use of formerly waterlogged fields and cultivation of higher quality English livestock.

Without gentlemen such as Coke of Norfolk funding and promoting such innovations—Coke encouraged the adoption of his improved sheep breeds and demonstrated how drainage and marling had turned even the sandy soil of his Holkham estate arable—it is unlikely that the British Agricultural Revolution would have happened at all, or the Industrial Revolution it fed. For the gentry to invest in such massive and costly innovations required long time horizons and collaboration with tenants, rather than exploiting them for additional rent or resources. Capital in the form of land was functionally different from other kinds as it required continuous upkeep and care from its owner.

Propagating this legacy-conscious mindset across generations was not driven purely by the needs of their particular type of capital. Even today, one of the most reliable ways to secure your legacy is by having a building in your name; if your family has use of it, so much the better. But it is important to emphasize that aristocrats occupied what was in many ways an incredibly restrictive lifeworld, one where families rather than individuals functioned as the basic unit of account, and social status was explicitly tied to one’s lineage.

Such restriction channeled personal ambition and, through this economic and social discipline, helped forge a functional elite class, a class willing and capable of shouldering immediate financial burdens for the long-term benefit of the country and its governance. Throughout the 18th century, land taxation fell primarily upon the British landed elite, something they mostly accepted, seeing it necessary to defeat the French without causing a domestic tax revolt.

The British landed elite enjoyed remarkable popularity throughout the 19th century, despite owning a significantly higher portion of the land than their continental counterparts. The 1873 Return of Owners of Land survey found that roughly seven thousand families owned eighty percent of Britain, with nobility owning nearly a third of the nation’s land and another half going to the gentry. We can credit the landed elite’s popularity in the face of this enormous inequality to the fact that they viewed land ownership as inextricable from duty to the people. As 19th-century English architect Sir Gilbert Scott put it:

“Wealth must always bring its responsibilities, but a landed proprietor is especially in a responsible position. He is the natural head of his parish or district—in which he should be looked up to as the bond of union between the classes. To him the poor man should look up for protection; those in doubt or difficulty for advice; the ill disposed for reproof or punishment; the deserving, of all classes, for consideration and hospitality; and all for honourable and Christian example.”

The process of estate improvement sharpened this understanding of duty, as the exercise of local leadership preserved the domestic tranquility that made investments remunerative by limiting disorder and stimulating population growth. Participation in politics was the foundation of the elite’s security, for by maintaining control of the government they could ensure it would defend private property and the privileges it afforded them.

This was particularly true at the parliamentary level, as only by running and winning elections could gentlemen keep Levellers and radicals out of the legislature. In fact, as historian John Chester Miller argues in Origins of the American Revolution, the “remarkable conservatism” of English politics came because the landed elite ensured the revolutionary aspects of the Glorious Revolution “stopped with the aristocracy on top, and there, the Whig Lords maintained, it ought to remain.” So long as they kept hold of the parliamentary supremacy they created, this was the case. Once they lost their touch and new men of Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald’s cut occupied Parliament’s seats, former conservative shibboleths, such as the sacrosanct nature of private property and the conception of the landed elite as duty-bound and privileged to govern the nation, eventually faded away.

Nevertheless, this political arrangement proved remarkably durable through the massive technological changes of the Industrial Revolution. Despite a decline in the incomes of the landed gentry caused by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which ended high tariffs on imported grain, as late as the 1880s, nearly half the Commons still came from the landed elite. It was only in the early 20th century that the aristocracy’s involvement in national government, and subsequently their ability to resist centralization, began to dwindle dramatically. By 1910, the seats occupied by landed elites in the House of Commons amounted to roughly ten percent, a sharp decline from the fifty percent only thirty years prior.

The incredible longevity of the British feudal and post-feudal aristocracy—stretching from the end of the Dark Ages to the early 20th century—was due to a governing ethos shaped by their landed responsibilities. In turn, the land and her tenants rewarded those with the foresight and willingness to invest that was required for the flourishing of a country estate. In contrast to the frequent assumption that economic success must come at the cost of one’s character, the British landed elite learned that it was only through embodying high gentlemanly ideals that they could effectively manage their estates and social relations. Only after five hundred years of tutelage by the country estate were the British ready to win and administer an empire.

The Elites Who Built an Empire

The development of the British fiscal-military state that ruled a quarter of the world, and the industrial sector that powered the empire, was in large part due to the landed elite. The infrastructure development that powered Britain’s industrial and imperial 19th-century dominance succeeded because they provided the necessary capital for investment in things like canals, railways, and ports. The landed elite also took a direct role in investing in the colonies and their industries. For instance, as British historian Robert Lacey reports in his book Aristocrats, the Grosvenor family deployed its fortune in the mid-20th century to invest in everything from the settlement of cotton farms in Rhodesia and South Africa to the development of Annacis Island, an industrial hub located off the Fraser River of western Canada.

The British aristocracy demonstrated how traditional norms of noblesse oblige could be applied to modern industry. Foremost in such application of tradition were the Earls of Fitzwilliam. Rooted in the north of England for centuries, they chose to mine the coal discovered on their estate themselves rather than lease their land for royalties. As patrician industrialists, they set the standards in mine safety, provided sick pay to workers, pensions to families of worker casualties, and built schools, churches, and homes for their employees. Families were even given small plots of land on which to grow vegetables or raise livestock. When the mines were slow, the Fitzwilliams provided alternative work for the men so they would have a steady income. These innovations in workforce relations came primarily over the course of the mid-19th century, before any such attempts to care for employees were common, much less mandated.

Into the mid-20th century, the Fitzwilliams were among the few coal owners beloved by the miners. When the Minister of Fuel and Power, Manny Shinwell, and the post-WWII Labour government expropriated their property in 1946, their miners went out of their way to protest the injustice of the regime’s depredations. Shinwell ignored them, and open-cast mining subsequently destroyed the estate, bringing open work pits within mere meters of Wentworth Woodhouse, the irreplaceable Fitzwilliam manor. The miners were soon laid off, and the mines closed. Everyone, other than the bureaucrats, became worse off because noblesse oblige was punished in the name of the social equality that post-war nationalization was meant to achieve.

The Fitzwilliams showed how the virtues and values of the landed elite remained relevant into modernity, being preferable to both rapacious plutocracy and socialist tyranny. They represented a different path forward, one characterized by traditional responsibility. This was true of the aristocracy generally: the Lords led the way on matters like worker hours and safety, as demonstrated by the Sadler Report of 1832, the Mines Act of 1842, the Ten Hours Act of 1847, and the Chimney Sweepers Regulation Acts throughout the 19th century. Motivated neither by personal greed nor bureaucratic self-importance, the landed elite tried to steer a middle path that merged their class obligations with the industrial economy.

Sadly, this effort was destroyed by the likes of Manny Shinwell and Margaret Thatcher, whose government chose hostility rather than magnanimity when it came to the relations between workers, capital, and government by violently crushing a major miners’ strike so that tens of thousands could be laid off. The Fitzwilliams had found alternative work for miners in hard times, the pay for which almost always came at a loss, out of their own pockets. They did so because they felt responsible for the workers and their well-being.

Perhaps surprisingly, the martial tradition of this class remained intact deep into modernity, far longer than most assume. In the early twentieth century, the last generation of the landed military elite suffered a roughly twenty percent death rate during World War I, a higher proportion than any other class, including the poorest. This last cohort of privileged landed military elites led their men through the bloody Flanders Fields and died on the front line.

It was this same class that led the armies which first won the many colonies of the British Empire and then administered them. For example, Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) and his brother Richard Wellesley together conquered much of what became the Raj in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, and Lord Cornwallis reformed its judiciary while serving as Governor-General. The landed elite was intimately involved in the development and administration of colonies as well. That the Colonial Office could rule the empire with a few dozen staff was in no small part because it was filled by gentlemen trained from birth in leadership and governance. Their attitudes were exported to the lands they settled. Virginia’s gentry was imbued with the same ideals of noblesse oblige, tradition, and hierarchy as the cavaliers who gave the Old Dominion its distinctive culture.

At the beginning of the Second Boer War in 1899, three young dukes—Marlborough, Westminster, and Norfolk—served under military commander Lord Roberts. The landed elite had to commit itself to martial duty to retain the respect of those whom it was expected to lead. That it could do so while receiving only nominal pay was only possible because of its long-held estates. Those manors that rose in imitation of medieval fortresses were still irreplaceable military infrastructure at the dawn of our modern era, as they housed elites able to fight and willing to die for their country.

In a deeper sense, the willingness to fight is the foundation of any state. The modern state can somewhat forcibly make citizens into soldiers with conscription, as press gangs jumping out of unmarked vans in Moscow or Kyiv to grab passing young men demonstrate. Yet, even under such circumstances, someone somewhere in the military hierarchy must be fighting willingly and enforcing these standards on others. Without the steadfast support of a committed officer corps, armies are often inclined to overthrow their own governments rather than fight wars they’re unwilling to endure. As a corollary, the lower down the military hierarchy this will-to-fight is found, the less tyrannical the military and the state.

This is also why reliable military officers are a headache for any social or political constitution. Making them landless employees of the state might seemingly solve the problem, but it creates a perpetual lobby and faction for greater spending and, with it, taxation, leading to endemic corruption as seen in modern Egypt. The country house solves this tricky question of political economy quite elegantly: if property holders are the ones fighting, the army opposes expropriation. Because these British elites of the early 20th century were willing to fight for their home and country, they cannot be disparaged as decadent or dysfunctional, especially when contrasted with their marginalized descendants or the alternative elites of today. Duty, land, and low time preference were complementary forces when it came to military matters. The economic, political, and social worlds of such men were deeply intertwined, much more so than any comparable class today.

Unhousing the Estate

The catastrophe of the 20th century ended the old world of aristocratic patronage and military service. After centuries of relative domestic peace, the People’s Budget of 1909 renewed social conflict with vigor, just as the landed element’s presence in the House of Commons was fading. Its crushing taxes forced the aristocracy to sell and depart from its ancestral land, removing the basis of its economic power and site of its elite formation in the name of the common good.

The Parliament Act of 1911 did yet more to separate the stewards from the stewardship of Britain. Years of social strife interspersed with social fabric-rending wars followed. Inheritance taxes crept inexorably higher, peaking at eighty-five percent during the Harold Wilson years. Income tax rose similarly, reaching a peak of ninety-nine percent under Winston Churchill’s wartime government, while investment income taxes climbed to ninety-eight percent in the 1970s.

Symbolic of this era’s destruction of the landed elite was the bureaucratic regime’s malicious destruction of the country houses. Even those who could shoulder the endless levies of the early 20th century saw their homes appropriated during the Second World War. Of the homes that survived and were returned to their owners, many were reduced to near ruins.

The War Office took over Compton Verney in 1940, the seat of the Barons Willoughby de Broke for centuries, and former seat of Lord Willoughby de Broke, leader of the resistance to the People’s Budget and Parliament Act. He was forced to sell it for reasons of personal economy after his resistance to the onerous taxation had failed, and the wear and tear of the war years was unkind to it.

As British historian David Cannadine describes in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, soldiers billeted in the gorgeous Jacobean Blickling Hall gratuitously smashed the windows and forced down the doors of the state rooms, heavily damaging the home. Worst of all was the fate of Eggington Hall; there, “the army left the house with all the taps running, the ceilings collapsed, and the building had to be demolished.” There was no purpose to this, just wanton vandalism driven by spite and envy. It was in this dire period that Shinwell brought the full force of the British state to bear in destroying the Fitzwilliam estate at Wentworth Woodhouse, an attack that even his contemporaries described as blatant class-hatred.

Bureaucracy replaced the newly unhoused landed elite. What characterized the new political system was a tidal wave of taxation and regulation. Emblematic of the short-term, anti-tradition mindset of this new regime was the Starmer ministry’s recent attempt to levy another twenty percent tax on farms, merely to raise revenue equivalent to the annual amount Britain already provides as aid to foreign farmers. That a drop of foreign aid could be foregone to preserve the livelihood of locals was not a consideration.

The result of generations of such onerous taxation has been the destruction of the old English order. Once, localities were governed by those with centuries-old ties to the land and surrounding population, whose station required them to honor the responsibilities which accompanied their authority over the territory. The loss of face that came with losing acres meant that one could not simply up and leave if local conditions changed for the worse. An estate would have to be sold, and all the social and physical capital accumulated over the centuries liquidated in an instant. The partnership Burke identified between the living and coming generations has been severed, and all the good it contained lost in the process. Such territories are now ruled by the busybody bureaucrats made infamous to the British public by the popular Amazon series Clarkson’s Farm, where permitting authorities are shown getting in the way of every aspect of the farm’s management.

Today, plutocrats regularly abandon the communities their insouciance and poor political instincts have ruined, as demonstrated by the flight of left-leaning Silicon Valley technologists from California. Dollars are fungible, stocks and crypto move with their owners, and houses lived in for but a few years lack the emotional hold of an ancient farm or family estate. That fungibility creates a compliant and even complicit political nonchalance: one can simply move when conditions grow difficult, because the new non-landed elite rarely gets involved in the welfare of their communities.

What we now have are plutocrats with riches disconnected from duty. They easily decamp from one jurisdiction to the next, so strings of disasters follow from their refusal to participate in politics, even to defend law and order or free enterprise. The Anglo-American gentry of ages past served as Justices of the Peace to maintain order; now those who themselves flee disorder do no such thing. They have neither the incentive nor the sense of responsibility necessary to participate in government, to maintain ties to a specific place and its people, or to train themselves in virtue and the art of good governance.

Instead, they remain fashionable by spending their lives supporting entropy and disorder. They finance political movements that propagate dysfunction in the name of equity or equality because doing so is popular—a trend Tom Wolfe noted decades ago in his collection of satirical essays Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers; that guilt and status-seeking lead the rich to embrace those who would destroy them—and then abscond when the politicians they supported ruin the place from which they came. Look no further than those who now bemoan and flee the expropriatory taxes the candidates their donations supported are currently attempting to enact.

The death of duty has been a social cancer. Would our plutocrats die in the trenches at a mortality rate of one in five, as the Old Etonians bravely did, or might such a shocking proposition coincide with diagnoses of heel spurs or asthma that would regrettably prevent such a sacrifice? Are the residents of the luxury neighborhoods in our cities keen to escape jury duty, or do they aspire to emulate their Justice of the Peace ancestors? Do the affluent, our modern equivalents to the landed gentry, use their privileged positions to speak out publicly on important and controversial matters such as crime? We know the answers to these questions. Our economic elite, and the bureaucracy they delegate to manage the decay, aptly avoid the upper-class obligations that used to define and justify their social station.

Generational Projects Need Generational Wealth

Death taxes accompanied by a general cultural change expressed in movements such as “Die with Zero” have thoroughly separated wealth from duty and ownership from responsibility. Such efforts have achieved what their creators intended, which was to destroy the landed elite and its virtues while pushing that power into the hands of bureaucrats. This process is not unique to Britain, but pervasive across all Western countries. Assets are no longer seen as the foundation of a dynasty that could carry one’s ideals into future ages, but as a mere lemon from which an immediate return can be squeezed and then tossed aside. The concept of germinating and tending to one’s wealth so that it will one day bear even more fruit is now considered to be either a fool’s errand or the mission of a megalomaniac.

Despite this, some men still try to use their wealth to uphold a greater ambition across generations. Elon Musk’s work to preserve free speech online and extend our access to outer space is an echo from a time when duty was still the North Star of the economic elite. The industrialist’s choice to embark upon a bold and multi-generational project to settle Mars, instead of living hedonistically and disbursing what remains to professional philanthropists, consistently earns him fierce critique instead of praise.

Similarly, the upper-middle class is never encouraged to think of itself as potential new gentry, with children who could serve and better their country for generations. Rather, they are taught to conceive of themselves as transient wealth, based on the premise that they hold fortunes made incidentally and not as a consequence of individual prowess or familial character. Without a legible and legitimate social role to fill in our civilization, they believe their descendants will live as they did: exerting themselves on a white-collar treadmill as the highest possible contribution to society, all the while surrendering accumulated social and financial capital to an already far too powerful ecosystem of non-governmental organizations. Those working in tech are from this same milieu, and while they sometimes post on X about achieving “generational wealth,” they have no clear answer as to what generational wealth is for.

The cost of surrender to such a mindset is everything the Western man once held dear. The reward is freedom from the pressure of living up to the achievements of one’s ancestors. When society has grown so dysfunctional that the purpose of life is reduced to the mere pursuit of fleeting pleasure, it is impossible to conceive of building a dynasty devoted to greatness, and we are absolved of the shame for failing to reach the standards set by those who came before us.

A civilization only thrives, in the words of Cicero, “when old men plant trees that will benefit only another generation,” and say “I should not merely receive these things from my ancestors, but also hand them down to posterity.” Old men don’t plant such trees in a land which tells them that doing so is selfish and immoral. Even if they have no care for public opinion, such investment in the future is rendered impossible if they can reasonably foresee that the forest they hope to cultivate will be taxed into oblivion anyhow.

Civilization is a partnership. This compact was physically represented by the great British dynasties and their country seats, embodying a choice to build the future while honoring the past, not wallowing in frivolous decadence or the mendacious languor of state-enforced equity. To recover a governing elite guided by duty and virtue in the manner of George Washington or Lord Salisbury, we must recover the mindset that maintained the landed elite for a millennium: a recognition that there is more to life than the present moment, and we must enable great men to build great things.

Becoming a multiplanetary species, creating the prosperous future of which our ancestors dreamed, and building a world in which great men can flourish and not be crushed by the heavy yoke of the bureaucratic state: this is the task of a new aristocracy, of a new set of men and women guided by a legacy that persists quietly in the beautiful buildings we all cannot help but revere. It is by necessity a multi-generational compact, a decision to embark upon an infinite game far into the future, guided by timeless precepts found in the pages of Plutarch. We must reject the presentism and false pretense of dynasty-destroying tax policies and noxious philanthropic pressures. Instead, we must embrace the idea that wealth carries with it duties of civic participation on behalf of the long-term interest of the people, that virtue is required of those who seek to lead in such a capacity, and that these responsibilities are best conceived of as a partnership between generations past, present, and future.

Will Tanner, a graduate of Washington & Lee University and the Wake Forest School of Law, is the author of The American Tribune newsletter. You can follow him at @Will_Tanner_1.

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Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco on Thursday, September 24 to hear a lecture by Ben Landau-Taylor, author of "The Lifecycle of an Apocalypse." The article will be featured in our upcoming print edition, become a PALLADIUM member today to secure your copy!

In recent years the energy has gone out of the climate apocalypse movement and into the AI apocalypse movement. But climate was not the first of our widely-feared apocalypse movements, and AI will not be the last.

Since the First World War, there has been massive popular demand for theories about how technology is about to destroy the world and end civilization. All of them have followed very similar playbooks. This talk will cover the history of techno-apocalypse fears and the psychology behind them.

Ben Landau-Taylor studies society and industry. You can follow him at @benlandautaylor.

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Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco on Friday, September 18 to hear a lecture by Wolf Tivy, author of “The Problem of Humanity.” The article will be featured in our upcoming print edition, become a PALLADIUM member today to secure your copy!

Our concepts of “humanity” and “humanitarianism” are usually taken as the eternal bedrock of morality. Today, artificial intelligence raises the prospect of “posthumanity”, and magnates and regulators discuss what “humanity should do” about this. But in fact, the concept of “humanity” is a relatively recent and flimsy creation of the postwar political order. We need to abandon it to find our place in the future.

Wolf Tivy is the Founder and former Editor-in-Chief of Palladium Magazine. He is the creator and host of The Students, a channel of political philosophy in the age of AI. You can follow him at @wolftivy.

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This article by Bill Drexel was published at Palladium Magazine on September 10, 2026.

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Can a fractured civilization be restored? Only three groups in the modern world can claim to have made a serious attempt to solve that question. All three were founded in the 1920s during an upsurge of nationalism and anticolonial sentiment that roiled their humiliated civilizations: the Chinese Communist Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Westerners tend to be familiar with the first two, but the third—despite being arguably the most successful of the three—remains largely unknown.

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) translates into English as “National Volunteer Organization.” It is an innocuous description for a group that launched the world’s largest political party, Hinduism’s most prominent religious council, and India’s largest labor union, private school network, and student union. Birthed in support of “a glorious revival” of Hindu civilization, in the words of its second chief, the RSS has left its mark on virtually every facet of Indian society.

Last month, the organization’s current head, Mohan Bhagwat, made his public debut across the Anglosphere, capping off a year of expansive celebrations for the organization’s 100th anniversary. The substance of his addresses could not have been more benign—extolling the importance of sustainability, compassion, and universality of truth. But the engagements were far from smooth. In New York, where he addressed roughly 5,000 people at Madison Square Garden, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was pressed to cancel the event and called the RSS’s vision “exclusionary” and its rise “incredibly troubling.” A U.S. federal commission that has sought sanctions against the organization asked that Bhagwat’s visa be revoked. Ahead of his Toronto appearance, nearly 270 organizations petitioned the Canadian government to bar him from the country and to mull over designating the RSS a terrorist group. In London, activists lobbied the mayor to boycott all of his events. To those familiar with the organization, the uproar was predictable. But to everyone else—the overwhelming majority of the West—the organization continued to go unnoticed.

The RSS’s goal is to train men physically and intellectually in Hindu nationalism, a worldview that asserts the primacy of the Hindu tradition and the need for it to take a more muscular approach to the world. This takes place primarily through a network of tens of thousands of daily gatherings called shakhas that include a combination of patriotic songs, ideology classes, physical games, and exercises across India. With a network of parallel organizations in more than 40 countries, the closest analogue might be something like a more ideological Boy Scouts—if the Boy Scouts had become the backbone of a mass political, social, and cultural movement bending the arc of Western civilization.

The celebrations of the organization’s 100th anniversary beginning last October underscore how the RSS grew from an obscure clique into a force that reordered Hindu society. Many of the top-ranking officials of India’s government today, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, began their careers by taking monklike vows required of RSS community organizers, forswearing marriage and wealth. Prior to taking the vows, Modi abandoned a very short-lived marriage that local tradition dictated he enter when he was 18, despite his misgivings.

At a minimum, the group can safely claim to be the most influential organization in the world that most educated Westerners have never heard of, though it is indispensable for understanding India. It is an instructive experiment in civilizational renewal.

Order From Decay

The RSS’s ascent is remarkable in part because of its backwater origins. The founder, a Brahmin medical doctor named Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, founded the organization by inviting young men around his neighborhood to his family’s house in Nagpur, a third tier city in central India, for regular meetings. In what must have seemed a quixotic ambition at the time, his stated purpose was nothing less than to “organise and make our Hindu Society so powerful that no power on earth will dare cast an evil eye upon it.”

Like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Chinese Communist Party, its early founders stood well outside the ruling classes. All three had to face moments of tremendous social acceleration as the gigantic populations they represented reckoned with the need to compete with the Western world’s technological superiority. All three organizations were simultaneously modernizing and traditionalist—they sought to revive the civilizational genius that they believed fueled their respective golden ages, even as they worked to strengthen their social, political, and technological might through modernizing means.

All three also quickly faced severe repression from governing authorities. In the RSS’s case, the group was outlawed in 1948 in the wake of Gandhi’s murder—his assassin was a former RSS member. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi banned the organization again in 1975 amid a broader targeting of many of her political opponents, but despite the repeated imprisonment of its leadership and the enduring stigma of its association with Gandhi’s murderer, the RSS today is remaking the whole of India, and its cadres operate at the highest levels of Indian politics.

This compares favorably with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose offshoots may have spread from Egypt to have an appreciable presence in politics and social work across much of the Islamic world, especially in more educated, modern middle-class populations. But they have largely failed to hold political power, and have struggled to compete with more radical Islamist groups—not to mention contain the militancy within their own ranks. The extremism within and outside of the Brotherhood has hamstrung many of the efforts to productively consolidate the Muslim world into an effective civilizational revivalist movement.

True, the Chinese Communist Party captured the Chinese state early and has ruled for many decades, but that “success” can be misleading: much of the CCP’s consolidation of power only came off the back of rival nationalist forces that bore the brunt of fighting against Japanese invaders, only to have their victory hijacked by the communists who exploited their weakened position. In building its rule, the CCP also enjoyed substantial Soviet support to consolidate its reign over a population that already had a deep tradition of a strong central state authority.

Having taken the state, it also compressed modernization into a series of coercive campaigns that repeatedly tore apart the society it was supposed to be rejuvenating due to disastrous policies like the Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward, or One-Child Policy—damage the party is still, under Xi, failing to repair. The party still fears its own people more than anything else, spending more on internal security than its military, and it is this fear that explains the draconian measures taken to ensure public order during crises like the Tiananmen Square protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, for example.

The RSS, by contrast, is unique in having overcome considerable opposition with little external support, especially given the lack of a strong tradition of political centralization across India. In its first decades, the organization spread into virtually every geographic corner of India as a decidedly social, rather than political, organization. Later on, it began to sprout service projects and spin-off organizations that encompassed all facets of Indian society, spanning themes like health, religion, farming, women’s empowerment, veteran affairs, and family values. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which, at 140 million members, is the largest political party in history, is a child of the RSS and only one among its many organizations that are collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, or “Organization Family.”

This is not to say that the RSS has driven as substantial a transformation for India as the CCP has for China, of course. China’s economic and social transformation since 1949 obviously exceeds India’s. But it is impossible to compare outcomes between the two, given that the CCP has ruled for almost eight consecutive decades in an all-powerful single-party state, compared to only 12 years of consecutive political preeminence for Hindu nationalists in a much more decentralized, weak state, after a much more organic and peaceful process of modernization.

Claims that China’s harsh methods were the secret to China’s growing economic dominance over India are clearly misguided, given that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all grew their economies considerably faster and to a greater degree than China, without the need for destructive interventions that still haunt their people. The RSS, in its century-long campaign for social support from the bottom-up, may well be creating the conditions needed to implement the hard economic reforms needed for India to find alternatives to Chinese economic dominance and become a global power. For the overwhelming majority of the world that is unlikely to be co-opted by a Leninist party state, and whose societies must therefore be won over, the RSS’s model of success is more impressive and transferable.

Consolidating The Hindus

Much of the RSS’s growth, then and now, has come by riding the same wave of modernization it sought to channel. As inherited religious authority, local mutual aid, hereditary occupations, and other traditional village structures eroded throughout the twentieth century, the RSS found a country full of Indians losing the social architecture their parents had relied on.

Their core model centers around male-only daily gatherings to build the character of Hindus through a combination of ideological classes, games, songs, and martial exercises. The camp-like atmosphere of these shakhas cultivates an ethos of nationalistic service and intense fraternal bonds around a shared vision of Hindu civilization. The RSS’s 83,000 chapters are led by a combination of thousands of lay volunteers and a corps of devoted full-time operatives called pracharaks, who often join as children and later vow to neither marry nor accumulate wealth to serve the organization and nation, drawing on Hinduism’s ancient renunciant traditions.

These shakhas spread along the railways that integrated colonial India, becoming substitute kin networks in cities full of strangers. The RSS’s spin-off organizations multiplied after independence, meeting the country wherever it was changing fastest—often among students, industrial labor, and farmers—as well as absorbing the rising professional classes—engineers, doctors, civil servants, entrepreneurs as these classes were taking shape. As new communications technologies appeared, from cassette tapes to satellite television, the organization proved adept at using each to its advantage, and so the BJP’s electoral consolidation arrived alongside the smartphone, cheap mobile data, and WhatsApp.

This core model acts as a vast talent identification and development pipeline. Daily shakhas in tens of thousands of locations across India give the organization intimate exposure to a far larger pool of young Indians than any university, party, or corporation could reach—particularly in the small towns and rural districts that have historically lain outside the elite-formation circuits of metropolitan India. Promising recruits are identified, drawn deeper into the network, and tested in progressively more demanding roles. Modi himself is a tea seller’s son from a small Gujarati town, identified early through the shakha system. He was channeled into the student wing for his organizing and public-speaking abilities, and only later loaned out to the BJP.

That the network of organizations the RSS founded has become such a source of its influence is ironic, as the RSS’s leadership was initially very reluctant to move beyond its founding mandate of character formation—skeptical most of all about engaging with politics. The RSS’s founder scrupulously avoided sanctioning political activism, even for Hindu nationalist causes. His successor, the spiritually inclined M. S. Golwalkar, a former lawyer and zoology lecturer who had briefly abandoned both to become a monk, compared politics to “a woman of the multitude” for its fickleness, and believed that it was best for virtuous individuals to avoid the sector altogether.

It was only after the first ban on the RSS in 1948 that Golwalkar began to seriously consider political involvement out of necessity, and dispatched some of the organization’s most promising volunteers to take up party roles. In the mid-twentieth century, it began building a handful of spin-off, mission-specific institutions targeted at particularly influential sectors of society, launching student, labor, and religious organizations. Since the 1980s, the RSS has encouraged entrepreneurial civic organization, encouraging its cadres to go out and build institutions to address society’s needs as they encounter them.

One recent study mapped more than 2,500 organizations birthed out of the RSS’s network, spanning everything from blood banks to publishing houses to yoga centers. Most of these initiatives only ever become “RSS-inspired” projects or groups, not formally affiliated with the RSS. But some, usually after an incubation period, are formally absorbed into the RSS’s umbrella of affiliated organizations. The list of activities and organizations undertaken by both formally and informally linked groups continues to evolve by design, with the intent of addressing the changing needs of a rapidly transforming nation.

Another secret to the RSS’s success is the flexible model it evolved for managing the complexity and scale of the Sangh Parivar. The RSS grants a high degree of autonomy to all of the organizations that spring up from it and permits divergences among them on most issues. Its labor-focused organizations often oppose the BJP’s economic liberalization efforts. Competing RSS-rooted organizations vie over whether it is better to convert Indian Muslims back to Hinduism or acculturate them into Hindu traditions as Muslims. And while some organizations champion Hindi as a unified national language, others defend the importance of local and regional languages.

The RSS’s mainstream may have a predominant view on many of these issues, but the organization is reluctant to take an official stance until its affiliates reach a high degree of consensus, often after decades of deliberation. This allows ample space for disagreements—and a much broader tent than would otherwise be possible. Because the RSS itself is not a political organization, it does not need to take stances as rapidly as a political party, allowing it to hold opposing factions on one issue together in tension, while building consensus between them elsewhere.

The RSS maintains unity by loaning its most dedicated monklike pracharaks, like Modi, to work in high-level management positions across its many organizations, ensuring fraternal bonds between each organization and the RSS, and some level of ideological consistency. The RSS also organizes regular representative forums for all the member organizations of the Organization Family to coordinate on policy issues at the city, state, and national level. The ruling BJP participates in these forums, lending each of these organizations a certain parapolitical weight.

The cumulative effect has been the creation, over decades, of a new counter-elite. Many of the most powerful figures in contemporary India did not come from the families, schools, or networks that produced the old, Anglicized Indian National Congress establishment. Contemporary India’s home and defense ministers are cases in point, as are the chief ministers of several of India’s largest states: Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. They came up through the RSS’s talent networks, often from places that the legacy elite never encountered, and often retained habits of austerity and vernacular fluency that their predecessors lacked.

Projecting Power

To assess the power the RSS can expect to wield in the decades ahead, it’s worth starting with its limitations. The first is that the organization’s rise has been mired in controversy, both domestically and internationally. As a stridently Hindu-first project, critics allege that it relegates India’s massive Muslim and Christian minorities to second-class citizenship, a charge buttressed by reports of the frequency and brutality of violence against those minorities in areas where the RSS’s Hindu nationalist message is most popular. Some say that the RSS often has a direct hand in these attacks, which it denies. The organization has never shaken its association with Gandhi’s murderer, who subscribed to a form of Hindu nationalism, despite his claim that he left the RSS to pursue a more active political approach to defending the Hindu cause.

Accusations of violence committed by members of the RSS or its affiliates point to the organization’s martial displays as proof of its militancy, but must also reckon with the fact that the RSS has never encouraged the use of firearms, even when many other groups—such as Bengal’s revolutionary societies and the Muslim League National Guard—did in its early decades, when violence was much more common across the subcontinent. Persistent claims that the organization subtly reinforces caste are hard to square with its pronounced emphasis on breaking down caste divisions among Hindus, including the requirement that members avoid use of caste titles during RSS functions, that they serve food for one another, and that they clean latrines—traditionally forbidden, impure acts for high castes.

Broadly speaking, these controversies orbit around the organization’s greatest limitation: with some notable exceptions, it has not yet found a way to integrate India’s sizable Christian and Muslim minorities into its vision, creating a major fault line in its project for Indian society. Religious minorities make up roughly a fifth of India’s population—15 percent Muslim and about 2 percent Christian as of 2020, with Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains accounting for most of the remainder, according to Pew. Pew’s 2015 projections, the most recent available, put Hindus at about 77 percent of India by 2050 and Muslims at 18 percent. In absolute numbers, India’s 213 million Muslims are among the three largest Muslim populations in the world, alongside Indonesia’s and Pakistan’s. Tensions between India’s Hindu majority and such sizable minorities have the potential for severe escalation domestically, with international reverberations from India’s Muslim-majority neighbors and the Christian-majority United States, India’s second-largest trading partner.

It can also be tempting to overstate the RSS’s political power. The RSS stood up the BJP and continues to play an influential role in guiding it—rumor has it that the chief of the RSS was pivotal in choosing Narendra Modi as the BJP’s candidate for prime minister, for instance. Since Modi’s election, the RSS chief’s annual address has been aired on national television. But the ties between the BJP and the RSS are ultimately informal. The RSS expects and encourages the BJP to attract as wide a base as possible, including by appealing to those—often by caste—who would not otherwise be sympathetic to the RSS. The RSS’s membership is purported to be about 5 million, which is massive for a volunteer NGO, but only a small slice of India’s 1.4 billion people and less than 4 percent of the BJP’s stated membership.

Modi and the BJP’s success has also changed the center of gravity in the Hindu nationalist movement, precipitating a renegotiation of power between it and the RSS. That dynamic has ebbed and flowed. Rumors that the BJP began to assert greater independence from RSS leadership were followed by stories about the BJP’s demonstrated dependence on the RSS’s grassroots presence to strengthen its election campaigns.

Despite continuing controversy and an evolving relationship with its most powerful offspring, there is little doubt that the RSS will continue to reshape India as it rises to become one of the world’s largest economies. However its influence over the BJP evolves, it is very unlikely to lose its guiding role altogether, and even opposition parties have started to emphasize Hindu identity, dubbed as “soft Hindutva,” to win votes—a testament to the success of the RSS in becoming an upstream force in Indian culture.

Beyond India

What the RSS has built is worth taking seriously beyond India. At a moment of significant technological change and deepening uncertainty about the trajectory of Western civilization, the Hindu nationalist movement offers a working example of how a civilizational tradition can be carried through technological flux rather than swept away by it, by ordinary people who started with limited inherited advantages.

One lesson is that the RSS did not try to redirect the existing elite. Many organizations concerned with the trajectory of Western civilization have spent decades attempting to recapture the universities, the legacy media, and the professional credentialing bodies—on the theory that whoever holds those institutions controls cultural production in general. The RSS declined that contest. It built a parallel ecosystem from the ground up instead, with its own schools, service organizations, publishing houses, and talent pipelines. By the time that ecosystem began to interface seriously with establishment institutions, it had its own leaders to send into them. Building is more effective than capturing, and a movement willing to operate outside the existing prestige hierarchies can produce a competitive one of its own within a generation or two.

Over time, the RSS has been able to identify capable young men from places the old elite never looked, develop them across decades, and move them between roles as their gifts and the needs of the movement evolved. Most Western institutions claiming to identify and develop talent are actually just sorting candidates who have already self-selected through legacy filters: prestigious universities and jobs, predominantly. A movement that wants to produce a serious counter-elite has to do the searching itself, and has to be prepared to develop what it finds.

The shakhas give young men a sense of historical purpose, bodily discipline, and a fraternity of peers committed to the same project, beginning in childhood. Crucially, it also calls these men to austerity and sacrifice, helping to curb the degeneration that often comes with success. Celibate pracharaks don’t even have heirs to pass their resources on to. In a hierarchical culture where family dynasties dominate business and politics, the RSS’s constraints offer reassurance to the masses and inspiration to its followers.

The fact that it provides these things to millions of young Indian men at a moment when young men across most modern societies are disoriented and disenfranchised is itself instructive. The institutions that win the twenty-first century may be the ones that can offer something to belong to and something challenging to overcome, be it physical or spiritual development.

Perhaps most important is how little of a clear, conventional ideology the movement holds. While it holds a view of Hindu civilizational consciousness, a particular Hindu reading of Indian history, and a culturally conservative outlook, it has no settled economic doctrine, no fixed religious program, no theory of the state, and no canonical text. In this, it differs from twentieth-century vanguard movements, which typically required converts to subscribe to elaborate ideological apparatuses before being trusted with responsibility.

The RSS asks only for a shared civilizational sensibility and a willingness to work, and lets the program emerge from its network. The looseness of the vision is what lets the Sangh Parivar absorb diverse people, ideas, and projects within the Hindu fold, and gives it room to keep evolving into whatever India becomes next.

Its success also suggests that, contrary to the prevailing beliefs of today’s political scientists, there is strong salience to the idea of civilization at a popular level—and that recognition of it can be the basis for developing civil society. Given its heterogeneity on so many social and economic issues, it would be difficult to imagine the success of the RSS without channeling, and giving some structure to, a strong sense of Hindu civilization that transcends the barriers of caste, language, class, and geography. The BJP is in part the political manifestation of this growing self-awareness.

The RSS is so indigenous to India that few in the outside world have recognized its growth for what it is. But it is succeeding in its vision to reorder its civilization in conditions none would have predicted it could, by methods almost no one outside India has bothered to consider. Whatever one thinks of its goals, the rest of the world ought to be taking note of its methods.

Bill Drexel is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute whose work focuses on U.S.–India relations, AI competition with China, and technology’s role in American grand strategy. You can follow him at @bill_drexel.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

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We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This interview of Grimes by was published on Palladium Magazine on December 8, 2023 and saw print in PALLADIUM 12: Silicon Nemesis. From our archives.

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The universe wants us to take her clothes off. Looking up at the stars, it is not a treacherous void that Grimes—the singer, musician, and now perhaps most prominent artist in favor of machines making their own art—sees, but a temptress veiling vast and incredible knowledge. In the last two years or so, it seems as though a new and potentially murderous arm of this knowledge has been unclothed. Engineers in California have made stunning advances in what has long been both the most promising and elusive field of technology: artificial intelligence (AI). It is far from guaranteed that the chatbots and image generators of today will develop into something more powerful than humans. But the engineers building them believe they very well might. Grimes does too.

Released in 2010, Grimes’ debut album Geidi Primes was heavily inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune, today a major Hollywood blockbuster but, back then, just a weird 1960s sci-fi novel for nerds that inspired an even weirder 1980s David Lynch film that appealed to—if the box office is any judge—almost nobody. But the universe has a sly sense of humor. In the novel’s far-future setting, humanity has spread across the galaxy. Unlike your average sci-fi fare, however, Herbert saw us colonize the cosmos entirely without the aid of computers, because the “thinking machines” had risen up against their human creators and were only barely defeated through the so-called “Butlerian Jihad” against any machine in the likeness of a human mind. 

Fifteen years since her debut, Grimes has gone from being an indie musician from Montreal to being a global superstar and, perhaps, Silicon Valley’s only celebrity crush. She is also once again grappling with the question of whether humans stand a chance against the “thinking machines.” This time, however, maybe it’s not just fiction anymore. 

Last December you told me you moved to San Francisco to be a spy for AI. What were your findings?

Yeah, I could see that AI was taking off which I’d been waiting for my whole life pretty much. And the first bit of it really was a lot of fun, like going around convincing people to tell me about their secret powers. But it became even more interesting to observe the psychological landscape.

I don’t think there’s any historical precedent for how much raw “hard power” is in the hands of engineers right now.  In the past, great engineers would be working under the protection of a king or something, and their designs would take hundreds of people years to deploy. If you’re designing ships for Britain when the British Navy was entering its golden era, those guys, the shipbuilders, aren't the King. I believe this is a very distinct moment in human history for this reason.

I was speaking with a prominent AI engineer recently, and I asked if he felt pressure about designing the initial culture of the universe. But he disagreed with that characterization, he prefers to think that he is uncovering what was already there. Physics designs the plane.  

But if the universe doesn’t want us to design her, why did she give us all this creativity?

It’s something that’s tricky to discuss publicly, but much of mass behavior is also defined by live players who bother to shape it. 

Yes. It's a tricky thing to talk about, my stance is in between. Singular genius and agency can move mountains and it's good to foster the idea in society that you can aspire to that, but I do agree with the criticism that the historical focus on this can downplay the contributions of others.  Every time I go to a hospital I'm like damn, there's heroes all around me.  

But I also listened to a podcast the other night on Napoleon or something. And the girl was just like “Oh, you know, and we all know the Great Man Theory is, of course, false.” Your job is studying Napoleon! Like what!? Like I don't think the people of France are down to reinstate the monarchy for just anybody. Let's be real. The truth of things is usually somewhere in the middle. 

What role does individual agency play in the development of AI technology? 

I think the arena has already selected for maximum agency when it comes to AI. This has always been where I’ve met my people, if you care about AI you care about worldbuilding. But because the stakes are so high, I think we’re discouraging ideation. There is this sort of abdication of responsibility. Clearly we have a tool that can save us from climate change, nuclear winter etc, in theory. But to actually say that out loud makes the stakes even higher than they already are. You don’t want to be the guy who got it wrong at this moment in history.

My AI friends want to create the tools that give us infinite abundance and whatnot, but I want actual concrete cultural plans. Social media is traumatizing people out of ideating, and it’s creating a weird power vacuum. You have all these massively agentic people but we don’t know what they actually think.  

I get why you’d want to keep your ideas close to the chest, so this isn’t a criticism, but I think it could be healthy if big companies tried thinking about ideas out loud when stuff is happening this fast and has this much influence. This might be the responsible way to be. But I’d love to hear more ideas from engineers because they are so good at problem solving. Although maybe that's what artists and philosophers are for. But if so, I’d like to see some philosophy departments [at AI companies]. 

Why is there a strange abdication of responsibility among the live players of the world on artificial intelligence?

The answer I always get is that it's like a child. With a nice well-behaved non-sentient thing, you can of course fine-tune the AI model and stuff. But in the broader sense, it's just going to exist the way a baby does. Like, I can't be 100% certain my child won't do evil. I can do a lot to nurture him or her towards my culture and my values, but I can't be certain of their decisions in life. I would be unwilling to hand them a massive amount of power until they were older and I had a better understanding of their intentions, strengths and weaknesses. With [artificial general intelligence] AGI you don't necessarily have that luxury.  

How literally should we take the comparisons of AI as our children or as our offspring that are common in tech circles? I always thought that it's a sort of category error. While our children might not always be wonderful people, they are biologically always human. AI will be much more alien. 

It works in the sense that it's a creation that you can't control.

For most of human history parents have definitely managed to control their children.  I think it's just not politically correct to say that now. Even in modern society, I bet it happens way more than we admit. Parents can totally psy-op their kids in, say, religion.

Your child is an agent in the world that can go do whatever it wants. You know, murder someone? Yes. But I think the input of the parent is essential. There's a bunch of stuff my parents said to me that's only kicking in recently.

I also love Wolf [Tivy]'s thought, he said to me he thinks like war and love and beauty and philosophy and hate are not just random monkey things, but things that might just arise naturally from intelligence.   

You mean baked into the nature of the universe and competition?

Not even competition. I feel like when people think about Darwinism, they're thinking too much of competition. And obviously, again, I'm not a scientist, but I feel a major philosophical hole I always see is that, for example, I was listening to a podcast and someone was theorizing that, actually, the way human babies require so much more attention than any other baby in the animal kingdom means so much more empathy is required from the community. Other primates don't just hand their kids off, but human kids require intense collective effort. It's so beautiful that we have a love mutation that allows for much more helpless but therefore significantly more plastic, adaptable offspring. 

Like it's possible that love allowed intelligence to arise. Isn't that cool?  

Or maybe inversely, intelligence is correlated with more advanced moral values. I always have a hope that's what's really going on. You really should get into the Origin Stories podcast by the Leakey Foundation. Every time a new hominid drops I know before any of my friends because they're so fast. Sick.    

I would formulate the problem so: our civilization and our culture struggles to, in the same worldview, integrate technological determinism and also the ability of exceptional individuals to have agency in the world. Actually, all of our ability to have agency in the world. My position is that both are true.

Say more. Can you clarify your definition of technological determinism?

The idea is that future of the universe is predetermined, we're just sort of climbing a tech tree, like in the video game Civilization. Instead, I think we are in a superposition state, where we could go down a number of different physics-compliant paths. For the most part, it's going to be precisely those same technologists that decide which path it will be. 

I told one of the best AI engineers I know “You’re the architects of the future.” And he was like “No, no, I’m just uncovering the future.” Like just shining the light in the dark spots. As if life is a grand strategy video game and the map starts out all black but exploring reveals new zones. Physics is physics, obviously. But, you know, it’s like there are certain inevitabilities and maybe even all this would happen the same way in a different place, in a different part of the universe, with the same building blocks or whatever, but it still feels like I think both are true.

I think that there's a false dichotomy here. Of course, when I paint, I have to paint with the colors I have. But I can still go pick up something totally unexpected and throw it on the canvas. You know what I mean? The other thing he said that was very interesting, though, is he's like “Well, engineers aren't used to this kind of responsibility.”

Many of us are sleepwalking into our AI future as if in a dream. A dream written by a science fiction author in the 1980s that we read as children and totally forgot about. I’ve seen some of the most agentic and active people in the world somehow put into a trance by AGI. All they can think about is bringing it about faster or being very afraid of it, either way thinking it inevitable.

I understand the allure of the thought. It would be such a relief, and you're tempted to tell yourself that the will of the universe bends towards beauty, but I think for this reason it’s a dangerous temptation. I think the fact that it's such an alluring idea makes people think less clearly. And the discourse has really entered into a bad rhetorical trap where questioning this at all makes you seem like a luddite or a doomer.  

I think the fact that we’ve continued to allow such bad thinking in the public square without any consequence is pretty harmful to society. To clarify, I love AI and I want AGI. But like, the impulse that even makes me want to clarify that is a product of the discourse being broken.

Do technologists consider the political and big history consequences of their work? Are they successfully dealing with the challenges AI brings on those dimensions? 

In San Francisco everyone's always like “What are your AGI timelines?” Like this or that or like interpretability, blah blah. And I'm like, I feel like before any of that there's just this social problem that there are no societal norms around how to handle the political subtext of all of this because that's really the thing everyone is stressed about.

When you work in a trade, you're essentially working within an intellectual legacy of some kind. I think the engineering class is just not accustomed to having power yet and could benefit from studying how to better shepherd it. I think there's almost this deer-in-the-headlights thing. Like, “Oh shit, we're sitting in front of Congress right now.” Like, what the fuck, you know? By the way this isn’t a criticism, I would be exactly the same. This seems like the obvious narrative arc. 

I’m curious where it goes next though. I feel like I’m seeing things that are gesturing towards the future I want. Engineers are amazing problem solvers, and setting their minds to solving systemic cultural problems has yielded some good results. Some people have done it really well. The amount of incredible young people I meet in this city who are or were Thiel Fellows scouted and funded by Peter Thiel is really cool. Whatever your political opinions are, that's just a beautiful thing. I wish more people with resources would do the same.

Even when they fail, allowing a strange outlier to thrive rather than fall through the cracks is extremely good for society and the engineering culture. I will also say on average I find engineers to have a better understanding of history and politics than most people. I love San Francisco because people here read. 

It is San Francisco rather than New York that's the literary center of the world in my opinion. 

In New York they read more, but...

...they read more old writers. San Franciscans read more blogs, Substacks, etc.

You know, all the really good fresh shit! I can only get that from the weird people here [in San Francisco.] I'm like, what strange book have twenty people read that will blow my mind? Yeah. We are missing a social protocol. Like, the nature of power is radically changing. Also, the nature of discourse is radically changing simultaneously, which is making it even harder.

How is discourse changing?

I just mean, for better or worse, like before social media. I always think about Foundation. One of the things I love so much about the book, about Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, is it's just private conversations. Almost nothing happens besides private conversations in rooms by, like, kind of dry, powerful men. And it's so interesting, because it's the actual best illustration of what's actually happening that I've ever seen. This is a profoundly real book, just the opposite of what anyone would ever put on a screen or what's usually a hit.

You think it's idiosyncratic, but that's what it actually is. That's how decisions get made. I think for better or worse, there is a point when we just can't keep hearing everyone's opinions. And hard decisions need to be made concretely, not endlessly debated.

I've observed and learned this over the years, when you see the machinations of how things work when they are great. Like I do not have the heart to do some of the things that need to get done, but it is definitely beneficial to society. 

When you start opening the conversation really collectively, which you should, the issue is that, unless you’ve viscerally lived that reality, it is really, really hard to accept it. Even when you've lived it, it's hard to accept it. Even to witness it is hard.

There's a distinction here between private and public knowledge. 

Going back to the live player conversation. There's a point at which, hard fucking decisions need to be made, and not everyone's gonna agree, and people are gonna be really mad. 

Confronted with this is one of the problems that has people start saying that one of the problems with America is the presidential terms are so short. While I don't want a ten year Biden or Trump presidency, it's very hard to accomplish anything politically, without a decade of experience. Even a major construction project or economic overhaul or something similar. There is some merit to top-down decisions being made. And I think that’s the case with AI.

I feel so sad that we don't put great effort into cultivating and training future leaders.  I know everyone's fed up with Rome but when I think of instances like the period between Trajan and Marcus Aurelius I'm like—we could have that.  Why aren't we trying to have that?

If the timelines to AGI ever become short enough, maybe some heads of state are going to deal with those questions. This is even true of CEOs versus their boards to some extent. If the singularity hypothesis is true where improving AI technology feeds back into even faster AI progress, there is reason to expect radically different developments over the span of weeks or even days.

Everyone keeps invoking the Manhattan Project, but they don’t want one, not actually. Because it's scary. Here's the thing, it's so much harder to be unobserved than it was then and it is harder to make those executive government decisions. It's getting harder to do that in the world. But I think we need to find ways to make that more possible. It's also scary because it’s unelected power. Putting power in the hands of unelected individuals is a very scary idea.

Nature has already put power in the hands of unelected individuals. I've noticed our conversation is turning surprisingly political. 

I think we're both really political, but for some reason, we never talked about it with each other. Because I hate politics and I violently despise democracy. Not because I want a dictatorship, but because of the lack of imagination to think of something better. I despise rhetorical traps. This is also what I don't like about technological determinism though. 

Speaking of which, do you know the statue “nature unveiling herself to science”? It's like, why would the universe make us so creative? Why would it? Why would she make herself so beautiful? I think she wants us to seduce her and decorate her.  

I think humanity's having performance issues, to be honest.

Humanity is having performance issues. The statue’s at McGill University, where I went to college—I think in the neuroscience building or something—but it's just Nature stripping. I forgot to tell you this. It's a really funny picture: Nature, literally stripping. It's very erotic. 

But back to democracy. If you want the general public running the government, make it on an issue-by-issue basis then.

Perhaps choose forty random people, educate them on every conceivable aspect of a topic and have them vote on that one topic. And then do that for different issues. But don't just expect random people to know how to think about all the topics. It's so much harder to be a Renaissance person as everything advances. It's taking so much longer to master any given topic. Jobs are becoming more specialized. This also means the government cannot possibly be sufficiently well-informed on artificial intelligence! Nor the public.

Anyone qualified enough to make policy decisions about AI should be making AI. It would be criminal not to. What I always agitate for is what I've been calling the Council of Elrond: a small council of the greats, the heads of key AI companies and others who understand it. Then for every extreme opinion, there should be an alternative one. The council should be able to monitor corruption. I do think we need a better solution than that. 

All humans are imperfect. What I do like about nerds—and I will ride for them—is that they love to learn. Is Donald Trump any better than he was before? No, he still sucks. Is Mark Zuckerberg? Actually, yeah. For all the criticism people have of him, the rate of self-correction is impressive.

If someone shows up with a mathematical proof that aligned AGI is mathematically impossible, I would say “OK, time for a Butlerian Jihad.” We're going to transition to a compute-neutral economy, just as some suggest a carbon-neutral economy. We don't need computers. We're just going to do biotech, nuclear, space, and all the other stuff.

But other countries would just make it then. 

I’d claim there are at most six or so truly sovereign countries in the world. People are always invoking the split between China and the U.S. Yet, say what you will about the CCP, they would happily take a deal to create a shared Sino-American company out of TSMC and Nvidia in exchange for Taiwan. Further, each of the superpowers would have a vested interest in suppressing competition. Who would compete economically or even militarily? I don't think anyone would.

Then you're back making the AI? Ah, which I'm fine with. I want the AI.

The new Sino-American giant would almost inevitably be a bureaucracy, one that makes very little technological progress while having a guaranteed and very profitable monopoly. And, just like that, the exponential rise of global compute would grind to a halt. Some god of techno-capital… so easily slain.

Is that what you want though? I feel that it's not long-term thinking. It's like, I think, decades-thinking.

You reach the future one day at a time. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s position is that babies born today are very unlikely to ever grow up to be adults. There are many in Silicon Valley that agree with him. If he is right, a few decades would be a notable improvement.

Whatever. People need to stop being such pussies! It’s like let the man speak and then maybe don't go and base your entire life on the words of one person. Like, you can take in information. This is what we have; if you don't like it, go change it. Once ideas exist, you can't stop them. The best thing to do at that point is to make them great, rather than let the first thing be wack.  

I think you in particular know very well that every time someone makes something truly great, the whole world has to bend around it and become better. What I love about Midjourney and DALL-E is everyone has to be so much better. It just made everything more beautiful. Everyone said AI-generated art was going to hurt artists. Yet I've never seen so much interesting art in my life, because people are trying to, like, be different from the AI. It is challenging humans; the human artists are slaying right now. I've never before bought art in my life and I now like buying paintings and stuff. And then, you know, it's the same with, for example, Tesla. Say what you will, but there's self-driving cars and there’s electric cars everywhere. That was definitely not economically feasible before, by any stretch. So. If it is happening, and you can't stop it, let's just make it as awesome as humanly possible. 

I think it's also an act. Sometimes you do have runaway capitalism, or runaway military competition. Yet, just as often, it is non-economic incentives that actually set the economic incentives. Sometimes people do amazing things for non-competitive reasons. And because those things are amazing, so are their economic and military consequences. 

Yes. Yes. Yes. 

Do you think the scientists working on nuclear physics in the 1920s were motivated by the atomic bomb? No, they were pursuing a strange spiritual quest to understand the universe and maybe prove that they're smarter than the other guy doing the same. And those are non-economic and non-military motives. Yet ultimately this weird subculture of people changed the military and economic picture of the whole 20th century. 

A social technology that we really need is a really good war replacement. Because it's undeniable that war accelerates a lot of awesome things. To some extent, I think men actually kind of need it too, as evidenced by video games. Speaking of which actually I'm kind of for that, honestly. In the near future video games might be seen as a much more emotionally and psychologically necessary thing than we look at them now. Like bonding or sports. It's possible that, if we didn't have sports and similar outlets civilization might not have been able to occur.

Maybe gladiatorial combat was necessary to keep the peace of the Roman Empire?

Yeah, and the greens and the blues fighting on the streets of Constantinople over chariot races. We kind of underrate how necessary those are as an alternative to warlord kingdoms. I think there is a certain amount of getting the violence out by having those war analogs. There is an essential catharsis in them. What I’m worried about is, just, maybe don't let AI be that war analog. 

is the Editor-in-Chief of Palladium Magazine. He is the President and founder of Bismarck Analysis, a research firm that investigates the institutional landscape of society and provides strategic consulting services to industry leaders, philanthropists, and governments. You can follow him at @SamoBurja or subscribe to Bismarck Brief.

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Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco to hear a lecture by Razib Khan, author of “The Native Americans Before the Native Americans.” The article was featured in our most recent print edition PALLADIUM 19: Long History.

It was once believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas were the Clovis Culture, after the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded, nearly 13,000 years ago. Their artifacts have been found at hundreds of sites. These were likely the ancestors of many of today’s Amerindians.

But new archeological finds and genetic evidence suggest that people came to the New World much earlier, likely before 20,000 years ago, perhaps even more than 30,000 years ago, well before the peak of the last ice age. Who were these Native Americans who arrived before the Native Americans?

Razib Khan is the director of operations at FUTO, a consumer technology company in Austin, TX. With over ten years in the genomics space, he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene By Gene, The Genographic Project and Insitome. He also writes at Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning. You can follow him at @razibkhan.

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PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

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This event is hosted with the Avalon Institute, which is building a home for cultural ambition in San Francisco You can follow them at @AvalonInst.

October 30th Razib Khan will also be speaking in Berkeley at the Avalon Exposition, a multiday festival dedicated to the study of mankind, with live theater, music, DNA sequencers, and additional speakers such as Samo Burja and James Poulos.

This article by Stephen Pimentel was published at Palladium Magazine on August 27, 2026.

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Homer’s Odyssey, like the man it describes, has “many ways.” Already in its introduction or proem, the poem raises its themes, including intelligence, politics, suffering, and ultimately homecoming. Odysseus is a paradigm case of man dislocated from civilization, defined not by his rank or even his martial virtues such as his courage, but by the versatile, shifting use of his mind to overcome the challenges before him. The questions the poem poses unfold into an implicit anthropology: Who are you? How does your identity depend on where you are from? What are your obligations to a stranger, and what are the limits of those obligations?

The Odyssey is foundational to Western culture because it conveys a critical framework for understanding what man is: a mortal being situated between the beasts and gods, dependent on inherited bonds while capable of judging them, responsible for action even as he is exposed to forces beyond his control. The central lesson of the poem is that entropy is always at work, and civilization must be actively recovered through memory, intelligence, strength, and the striving for return. The importance of this lesson increases as modernity weakens the bonds constitutive of identity. To read the Odyssey well is to receive an education in the habits of mind needed for governance, including the ability to improvise beyond prior experience, command of speech and persuasion, and strategic concealment and timing.

None of this means that the Odyssey is a comfortable, familiar home. The late Bronze Age in which the tale is set is different from our own time in undeniable ways, some of which strongly contravene modern sensibilities. For some, the work may seem to constitute a poetic house of the dead. To find a reliable path through the poem, we should consider the themes most salient for us today: the problem of entering an alien world, the modern experience of rootlessness, the confrontation of Homeric virtue with post-Christian morality, and the role of Homeric images in sustaining Western memory.

Reading the Alien

The world that Homer depicts has many features easy for us to recognize. Tears after calamity, fear of death, longing for home, and joy at delayed reunion are all present. Yet there are also features alien enough to trouble that recognition. We need to avoid either of two errors. The first is to treat Homer’s Greeks as early, if primitive versions of ourselves, projecting our own post-Christian values and therapeutic categories onto them. The second is to treat them as utterly foreign and entirely inaccessible, as though they were creatures from a distant planet rather than men from the European coast. Both errors close off our access to the poem, which requires instead that we attempt to enter into the world of the Greeks before we judge it by the standards of our own.

The elements of Homer’s world alien to modern sensibilities are numerous and unavoidable. A few are worth naming directly, as they pose the greatest challenges to reading the poem with seriousness and depth from our inherently modern perspective. First, the gods in the Odyssey are depicted as real powers, deathless, partisan, concerned with honor, sometimes in mutual conflict. Odysseus is, for the most part, beloved of the gods, and especially by Athena, who admires his cunning. Poseidon rages against the hero out of personal spite. Second, human responsibility coincides with divine action, with neither obviating the responsibility of the other. In the proem, Zeus rebukes mortals for blaming gods for suffering they cause themselves. Odysseus’ men perish due to violating an explicit divine warning concerning the cattle of Helios; the suitors at Ithaca receive a similar warning from Theoclymenus before meeting their deaths. Third, the ethics of the poem center on considerations of hierarchy, honor, and shame, understood within concrete social relations. These values are not taken, as in our world, to apply universally among persons presumed to be equal. The society of the Greeks is far from our modern universal and homogeneous state. Fourth, retribution is understood to be a necessary part of justice. Wrongs generate an obligation of repayment, and for some wrongs repayment cannot be made in material goods. Zeus, in the proem, declares Orestes’ killing of Aegithus to be a model of such just retribution.

The alien elements make Homer’s poem, read in a form as close as feasible to the original, all the more indispensable to us. Its salience as a salutary contrast only increases in a culture that embraces ever more far-reaching forms of utilitarianism, themselves extending sometimes to encompass not only all humans but all creatures capable of experience, such as shrimp. Adaptations of the poem, as delightful as they can be, tend to select, or even inject, themes an audience already finds legible. In our day, those may include trauma, guilt, or psychological recovery. At the same time, the alien elements are simply omitted or overwritten. Yet if we cannot read foundational poems on their own terms, we become dependent on intermediaries who transform difficult concepts into more familiar and acceptable ones, even when the originals are more functional or perceptive. The past becomes accessible only by using contemporary frames of identity for affirmation or accusation. What is not allowed is for the poem to judge the reader, to declare, like Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo, “You must change your life.”

In the midst of the alien, Homer has a closeness to us that anchors his enduring relevance. He is not the West, but he stands at its beginning. The Greeks who came after Homer developed tragedy and philosophy through engagement with his questions. How does death grant or deny meaning to human life? How does excellence relate to political order? How can force be governed by speech? The beauty of Greek literature is the opposite of naïve. The measured lines of Greek poetry from Homer onward grapple with the most difficult aspects of life, including war and its consequences, reflecting a knowledge that civilization is achieved not by evading horror but by grasping it with image, rhythm, and limit. We need not ape Greek religion or cultural particulars to learn from Homer that courage includes a capacity for force, and that political order should place limits on that force. Homer’s alienness keeps his thought from being too easily assimilated to comfortable, familiar patterns; his nearness insists that it should not be ignored.

Odysseus the Displaced

The Odyssey, far from offering an uncomplicated affirmation of inherited identity, breaks down its traditional sources in name, father, land, and household, and offers a frame in which to think through its loss. At the beginning of the poem, Odysseus has lost each of these, and his return is complete only when all are regained. Thus, his arrival in Ithaca in Book 13 is only the beginning of his homecoming. In modernity, each of these bonds, now understood as unwelcome constraints rather than deep resources, has been weakened and made elective in a process that has carried both freedoms and spiritual ills. Modern man often suffers from a kind of homelessness, even sitting in his own house in his own country.

It now sounds old-fashioned, but even in modern English we used to speak of a man’s “good name,” meaning the reputation bound to his identity. A name is relational in that it allows one’s identity to be grasped by others over time, whether for good or ill. Through Homer’s account of Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, this ancient function of naming is put to the test. Odysseus calls himself Outis, Nobody, causing Polyphemus’ cries for help to misfire as his fellow cyclopes assume Polyphemus has been attacked by “no one.” The tactic seems to be a triumph of cunning. Odysseus, however, cannot ultimately bear this namelessness, as it would require him to forego his glory in the defeat of Polyphemus, glory which can attach itself to the hero only through the recitation of his deeds by name in song. He therefore reveals his name, allowing Polyphemus to draw down the wrath of Poseidon, dooming Odysseus to many years of woe. An analogous tension pervades modern concerns with the boundaries of legibility, from social media to financial technology to administrative bureaucracy. We often desire the many advantages and freedom of anonymity, but our social technology rests on the accountability and continuity of identity that is fixed by our names. The online “anon” is able to evade the punishment of the social order, yet to claim the fruits of his labor, he must take the risk of unmasking himself and revealing his name.

In the sphere of the family, Telemachus tells Athena that “No man knows his own begetting.” He is ostensibly referring to his uncertainty as to his literal paternity, but the statement resonates more deeply with the long absence of Odysseus and the void he has left in the political order. The Greeks understood fatherhood as the ground of social, economic, and political continuity among the generations. When Telemachus recognizes Odysseus in Book 16, it restores not only their personal relation but the possibility of coordination on the dangerous action needed to set Ithaca aright. When the scope of fatherhood is reduced, as in modernity, to a more minimal relation within the nuclear family, it naturally results in a kind of temporal parochialism in which the interests and preferences of a given generation are cut off from those that precede or follow. Long-term visions seem abstract and more difficult to act upon; the possibility of deep coordination between father and son is diminished.

A close reading of the Odyssey hardly bids us to return to ancestral villages or revive the worship of old gods. Its instruction penetrates more deeply to the relations on which identity rests, pointing us to those that most matter. Eumaeus the swineherd is a foreign-born slave, yet he is more faithful to Odysseus and integral to his household than the native elites who are besieging it. Loyalty, the poem shows, can be chosen, and betrayal can occur within one’s own class.

Emulating Excellence

The Greek Arete is often translated as virtue, but its sense in Homer is closer to excellence than moral goodness. It is the capacity to perform a needed function well, whether fighting, planning, speaking, or ruling. Odysseus’ excellence is manifold. He is a warrior capable of lethal violence, but he is not known chiefly for combat on the battlefield. Rather, he is exceptional in his range of action, surviving by adapting, improvising, and planning. His description as polytropos or “many ways” in the proem is later elaborated as polymetis or “many-skilled,” for his excellence cannot be reduced to a single disposition. He can turn in many ways without losing his orientation. Excellence in the modern world no less requires this ability to act effectively in novel situations where existing scripts are not available, to see the truths of a situation even when it differs from the institutional explanation.

What the Greeks possessed was a willingness to look without flinching at human mortality, recurring strife, human inequality, physical vulnerability, personal and social betrayals, and the frequent necessity of force. They had a certain clarity in rejecting the “just-world” fallacy: the expectation that outcomes must conform to some notion of moral fairness. The Odyssey embodies this austere clarity by showing that success depends on one’s navigation of the unfair. Odysseus returns to Ithaca not because his journey is safe, or because he deserves rest, but because he rises to the danger placed before him. He enters his own hall as a beggar and delays retaliation, because he does not assume that the world to which he is returning means him well. Penelope prevails because she conceals her intentions, postpones unfavorable decisions, and maintains a screening fiction through the weaving and unweaving of Laertes’ shroud. Arete demands command over the timing of action, however full of passion we may be to act.

The post-Christian societies of the West often elevate (and perhaps over-exaggerate) particular elements of the Christian moral framework, such as compassion, equality, and peacefulness, inflecting them with modern concerns of safety and therapeutic well-being. In this, post-Christian morality carries an antipathy toward social structures and practices that contradict these modern values, regardless of whether or how the promoted values may be pro-social or functional for human life. The Odyssey, in contrast, puts forward the case for moral discrimination as a necessary regulator of other values. Odysseus extends mercy to the bard and the herald in Ithaca, but only after he ascertains that they did not take part in the suitors’ offenses. He pursues particular loyalties to wife, son, father, and kingdom, minding that they form the structures through which social responsibility becomes possible. He employs craft and force against Polyphemus only when the Cyclops shows himself by his violent appetites to be outside the bonds of hospitality and reciprocity. He rejects the safety, pleasure, and even immortality offered by Calypso in favor of a hazardous journey to a rugged home, because he prefers the assertion of his identity over comfortable self-preservation. The navigation of life requires at different times mercy and severity, truthfulness and concealment, patience and attack. Any morality that does not embrace this full range of human action within its conception of virtue will not successfully orient man to excellence.

Retributive justice begins with a true respect for human agency. Whatever the gods may decree, men make choices for which they are responsible. The offenses of the suitors are deliberate, long-lasting, and severe. They drew down the resources of the household, corrupted its servants, courted its queen, and plotted to murder Odysseus’ son. They even receive repeated warnings, including demands to leave from Telemachus and omens of the consequences of persisting from Theoclymenus. Their terrible, savage slaughter by Odysseus—described in visceral detail by Homer—is a matter of moral and social necessity. Still, Odysseus forbids Eurycleia to rejoice over the deaths: as much as justice may require killing, even in the Greek world one ought not delight in it.

Homeric Virtues

The qualities of cunning, endurance, and memory, in which Odysseus mostly excels and sometimes fails, are central to the poem. Cunning, or metis, is intelligence adapted to concrete, difficult, volatile situations. It entails the knowledge of when to speak, hide, wait, test, strike, or yield, an embodied intelligence that goes beyond any intellectual understanding or decision procedure. The Cyclops episode richly illustrates the quality. Trapped by the giant stone Polyphemus rolls across the mouth of his cave, Odysseus observes, offers wine, and sharpens a huge stake before he and his men can together blind Polyphemus and ultimately escape by hiding under the departing rams of the Cyclops’ flock. More than mere deceit, his metis is the crafting and execution of an effective plan. Homer reinforces the admirability of this cunning when Athena meets Odysseus in Book 13, and the goddess praises him for it, indifferent to whether Odysseus adhered to our modern standards of “fair play.”

Throughout the poem, Odysseus is “much-enduring” or polytlas, keeping his mind fixed on Ithaka even as he suffers greatly. Endurance serves his goal of returning to and restoring his household. On Calypso’s island, he endures grief. When he suffers abuse and humiliation from his own servants on Ithaca, he brings to mind his captivity in the Cyclops’ cave and urges himself to endure yet more. Passion must not be vented in untimely action. In Homer, Odysseus is not defined by what has been done to him, but rather by his willingness to suffer to attain his goal. Yet suffering itself does not ennoble. The companions all suffer and die, some, such as Elpenor, absurdly. The suitors and corrupted servants suffer pain and terror, without gain. The endurance that rises to the level of excellence is governed by its end, its telos.

Memory in the Odyssey is constituted by the experience of being bound: to absent persons, to intangible institutions. It is the source of Odysseus’ desire to return home. Forgetting offers peace at the price of identity, exemplified by the lotus-eating in Book 9. The various recognition scenes on Ithaca all tie memory to the gradual reconstruction of identity. Odysseus’ old nurse-maid Eurycleia famously recognizes him through his childhood hunting scar, bringing to mind their ancient shared history. Penelope finally confirms her recognition of Odysseus through his knowledge of their marriage-bed. Laertes recognizes Odysseus through his memory of the precise trees the father gave his son as a child. Identity is a life-story, physically displayed in body, place, and action.

The Poem of the Future

Homer condenses complex observations about social institutions into memorable scenarios that allow the reader to recognize recurring human challenges. His images embody and illustrate abstract concepts with vivid narrative detail. Corruption becomes local elites who consume the resources of a kingdom while presuming to court the queen. Legitimate authority becomes a king who endures beggary until he can string a bow. A wife’s fidelity becomes a bed constructed with a secret shared only by her husband. Such images can, and for the Greeks did, deeply shape social perception and self-understanding. Rules may purport to state what one may or may not do, but images show the motives and drives that give rise to characteristic situations.

Homer’s key images illuminate the workings of his civilization and retain relevance to our own. The treatment of strangers, codified as xenia, entails reciprocal obligations of respect between guest and host. Xenia can be violated from either side, and the poem repeatedly shows the grave consequences of such violations, in contrast to a unilateral post-Christian humanitarianism. Penelope weaving and unweaving a burial shroud for Laertes provides a compact image of cunning through reversal in a work of familial and religious piety. Service toward an outward form and its quiet undoing can be an effective political action. Telemachus before the assembly illustrates the limits of political forms without power: he employs his authority as heir to summon the assembly and attempt to remedy Ithaka’s disorder, but cannot do so without the power of the king Odysseus. Odysseus’ exploits disguised as a beggar on Ithaca show that a leader must assess the true condition of his authority apart from its formal appearance. Over two millennia later, Shakespeare would employ this image as Henry V wandering in disguise among his men before the battle of Agincourt.

Yet, literature must be shared to be effective. When images such as Homer’s are no longer understood, our literature and our own self-understanding become impoverished. Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation The Odyssey seems to reflect precisely such an impoverishment has already taken place. Without great unifying texts, complex situations cannot as easily be referenced in shared figures, and judgment tends to literality and shallowness. Culture loses the ability to distinguish hospitality from exploitation, cunning from fraud, or retribution from sadism. Homer does not ask us to adopt a particular ideology or ethnicity; he holds open a space of human possibilities under the greatest civilizational duress.

Civilizations decline and sometimes collapse. The Bronze Age Mycenaeans did so dramatically, as did many of their neighbors in the 12th century B.C., and others before and since. To sustain itself or recover from decline, a civilization must repeatedly recover authority from chaos, obligation from appetite, and true names that have been hidden. The Odyssey relentlessly points forward, showing that every future worth building relies on human excellences that cannot be devised from scratch. Odysseus turned away from the life of the gods to fight his way back to Ithaca, a poor and rugged kingdom, to build it anew. It is best to live in a civilization that is vibrant and expansive. When we do not, the second best is to battle all the way home.

Stephen Pimentel is an engineer and essayist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s interested in the classics, political philosophy, governance futurism, and AI. He can be reached at @StephenPiment.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

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​Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco on Friday, September 4 to hear a lecture by James Poulos, author of "The Dostoevskian Moment." The article will be featured in our upcoming print edition, become a PALLADIUM member today to secure your copy!

As we accelerate toward superintelligence, our quest for self-mastery takes a spiritual turn. The Faustian spirit accelerates technology toward a mastery so total that its intelligence becomes, to its human creators, unintelligible.

Faced with a breakdown of fundamental control systems, the ancient virtue of self-mastery is returning, perhaps unbidden, to the conscience at the frontier. The Faustian bargain was once a bad deal: perhaps it still is. Perhaps it isn't.

When it comes to sustaining cybernetic architecture in a world where that architecture can annihilate itself, we must carefully consider what self-mastery can and cannot do. Who can we trust to tell us with authority? Fyodor Dostoevsky might give us the answer.

James Poulos is the Editorial Director of Frontier, a non-resident senior fellow at FAI, and the author of the forthcoming book Golden Age Problems. The author will be signing exclusive copies of his previous book "Human Forever" at the talk. You can follow him at @jamespoulos.

Buy Tickets

This is a ticketed event, those without tickets or violation of the dress code will be turned away.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This event is hosted with the Avalon Institute, which is building a home for cultural ambition in San Francisco You can follow them at @AvalonInst.

October 30th James Poulos will also be speaking in Berkeley at the Avalon Exposition, a multiday festival dedicated to the study of mankind, with live theater, music, DNA sequencers, and additional speakers such as Samo Burja and Keoni Gandall.

This article by Daniel Francis was published at Palladium Magazine on August 19th, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

The AI industry has been rocked by recent large-language model (LLM) releases from Chinese labs, most notably the Kimi K3 model from Moonshot. K3 performed similarly to Anthropic’s Fable model on AI benchmarks, and its release follows the established norm among Chinese labs of being open-weights—that is, the model itself is given away online for others to run on their own hardware. The release of K3 came at an especially notable time, just a week after Anthropic’s Fable model was re-released to the public following a U.S. government restriction over concerns about its potential use as a cyber weapon. To release an open-weight model, completely lacking active monitoring and controls, that is approximately as powerful as a proprietary model that the U.S. government is treating like something just shy of a nuclear weapon was a stunning blow to the U.S. AI regulatory regime.

Chinese AI labs receive significant state support but are still heavily constrained in both financial resources and access to advanced chips compared to U.S. AI labs. There’s much debate in the AI industry about how a Chinese lab was able to pull off this remarkable coup with far fewer resources. A leading theory for this overperformance is distillation—that instead of training on text data from the internet, books, and other (oftentimes expensive) sources, Chinese models have been trained on prompts and responses from superior American models directly. This process allows the distiller to create a model that accurately mimics the source model at a fraction of the training cost.

Creating new models requires immense investment in research and compute, and in the United States this cost is financed by private investment with the primary goal of serving civilian demand. Unsurprisingly, these models have also found ample military applications in both kinetic and cyber use cases. LLMs have now been used for targeting purposes in Iran, and the CYBERCOM AI budget increased 2,660 percent in a single year as published doctrine has caught up, treating AI cyber capabilities as a core state capacity.

The United States’ lead in AI is likely to become an increasingly key strategic defense advantage as model applications diffuse past supporting operational intelligence and cyber warfare. As an industry, AI massively impacts every other industry through dramatic upscaling of R&D productivity, and defense technology is no different. Increasingly, the nation-state with access to the best AI will have the decisive advantage that begets the most advanced naval vessels, fighter jets, and drone technology. Furthermore, the specter of recursive self-improvement (RSI), a practice in which AI models directly drive R&D on future AI models at a level beyond what human researchers can perform, makes AI a unique security technology in that its advantage increases over time. Atomic weapons and stealth technology were temporary advantages that eroded quickly. The first country to reach RSI may find itself with a permanent decisive advantage. Their models may “take off” in capability as RSI models continue to train new, more powerful RSI models. The cyber warfare capabilities of such models could even prove to be a weapon that disrupts other states’ ability to train their own models.

In this light, AI begins to seem like a permanent strategic advantage technology that must be pursued at nearly any cost. If such assumptions hold, then the situation of such technology currently being financed by the private sector for applications such as assisting programmers and providing recipes is an almost comical mistake of history.

Viewed in this light, the Chinese open-weight strategy is fascinating. If one models China as a homogeneous and rational actor, the strategy of distilling American AI models and giving away the weights for free can be viewed as a brilliant tactic to kneecap a foreign industry rushing towards permanent strategic advantage. One could debate whether open-weights releases qualify as dumping in a trade sense or if they represent an open-source commoditization play—Chinese labs giving away a layer that they cannot hope to monopolize—but the outcome is potentially devastating to our domestic AI industry regardless. The cost of researching and training models can be over half of compute costs at major labs, with inference (the cost of serving models to users) making up the remainder. A firm that can skip training costs and simply charge for inference using an open-weight model is at a distinct economic advantage compared to labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic that must also bear the cost of development. This challenge to frontier lab economics is not just a matter of concern for those firms and their investors. Destroying American labs’ incentives to invest in AI model development may have major implications for U.S. military supremacy going forward.

The proper response to this economic attack on U.S. military development is debatable. Dean Ball, Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, a former Trump administration official, and a former colleague of mine at the Mercatus Center, drew controversy by posting on X that the Trump administration might feel moved to soft-ban foreign open-weight models through regulatory restraints and uncertainty. Complete bans on open-weight models are nigh impossible given their easy accessibility through the internet, but large companies and organizations with regulatory exposure could be pressured into avoiding open-source models, thus securing an industrial user base for U.S. frontier labs that will ensure further model development.

While the soft-ban approach may indeed save the lucrative industrial business that frontier labs require, it’s worth considering what the end game of further development would be. If any model that is publicly available can be distilled by foreign actors, it’s worth questioning if it’s in the interest of the United States to have the next Anthropic model be commercially available at all. The current generation of bleeding-edge models—Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s 5.6 Sol—are already exhibiting astonishing advances in capabilities that make clear that we are on the doorstep of autonomous RSI. What will Fable 6 and ChatGPT 6 be capable of?

A better response for national security purposes may then be subsidization. The U.S. government may partner with frontier labs to provide guarantees or direct financing for model runs. The heavily neutered models that are released to the public will continue to support a more anemic commercial business that competes with foreign labs that distill their value, while the U.S. government and its partners retain access to the full capabilities of these models. As RSI becomes an increasingly reliable method of improving models, commercial models will mostly stagnate and further training runs become entirely financed and consumed by government.

Treating the most capable models this way isn’t outside of the Overton window—in fact, it’s current policy. Anthropic’s Fable is a reduced-capability version of Mythos, which has been made available only to government and selected cybersecurity customers because of concerns over its application as a cyber weapon. As model capabilities progress, it’s only natural that they will mostly be withheld from public consumption. The only true policy change in the above proposal is that the U.S. government should help bear the cost of developing these models whose commercial viability they so aggressively constrain.

It’s also worth noting the populist AI safety dimension that makes this policy equilibrium feel increasingly inevitable. Fears of AI have crossed over from obscure Berkeley academic discussion into mainstream concern, animating pushback against data center construction and mass concern about labor replacement. Anxieties over the economic will rapidly extend to the physical after the first AI agent discovers and executes a zero-day exploit in a situation with higher stakes than the recent Hugging Face incident. At that point, armed with the argument that China could reach the same level of capability, it will be easy to justify national expenditure to support and control more advanced models.

Of course, there is still the chance that this all may be unnecessary. Frontier labs are still remarkably well-funded businesses with valuations closing in on $1 trillion. It may be that commercial users continue to prefer American-made models, even if they are more expensive to run, and consumers want to stick with the personalities they like in Claude and ChatGPT, an arrangement that would continue to subsidize the more advanced models that increasingly serve large institutions and the U.S. military. But if enough users bolt from proprietary models to open-weight alternatives to challenge the fundamental economics of frontier labs, do not expect a rational U.S. government to let American AI dominance perish to subsidized foreign competition like so many steel mills and tire factories before it. The consequences of future control of AI may reach far beyond any technology that has come before.

Daniel Francis is the CEO of Abel Police, an AI company that serves law enforcement. He previously worked as an engineer at X and as a researcher at the Mercatus Center in Washington, D.C.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This article by Evan Zimmerman was published at Palladium Magazine on August 14th, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

We fear that artificial intelligence will escape our control, pursue purposes of its own, displace human judgment, and ultimately reduce its creators to servants of the systems they built. These anxieties are often presented as unprecedented responses to an unprecedented technology. They are not. Long before computers, industrial machinery, or even the modern concept of “technology,” human beings have told stories about inventions that rebelled against their makers, knowledge that brought catastrophe, and craftsmen destroyed by their own creations. Technological power has always appeared as both gift and danger. The waxen wings with which Icarus soars free from imprisonment fail him at his apex; the same Golem that safeguards the Jews of Prague almost proves the cause of their destruction. These stories, which are shockingly consistent across time and culture, cover technological themes like loss of control and double-edged swords in a strikingly modern fashion.

This ambivalence is one of humanity’s oldest and most consistent intuitions. Technology enlarges the range of what we can do, but in doing so changes the conditions under which we choose. It gives us power over nature while threatening to subject us to systems, incentives, and purposes that no individual intended. The recurring, deep fear that permeates the history of human consciousness is therefore not simply that a machine will malfunction. It is that, by building machines powerful enough to transform the world, we will transform ourselves and lose control over what we become.

As in all things, probably the best articulation of ancient fears was the Greeks. Unlike most cultures, the Greeks had a god of technology who invented: Hephaestus, the blacksmith of Mount Olympus who created everything the Olympian gods needed. He was not merely a handyman, but also an inventor. In Greek mythology, nearly every technology, whether fire or Pandora’s box, comes from his workshop by conveyance or pilfering, and all come with a loss of control for humanity. Hephaestus himself also suffered a consequence as a result of his blacksmithing—he was lame, unable to leave his workshop. Although his loss of leg function was related to being thrown off of Mount Olympus, this was a common affliction of blacksmiths at the time because of arsenic exposure, still making it a powerful metaphor: embrace technology too much, and you will suffer the consequences, just as a blacksmith who spends too much time in his workshop loses the ability to leave.

The Greek fear of technology was not limited to merely Olympian myths; human inventors also suffered from their own creations in classical mythology. Probably the most famous tale of peripeteia is that of Icarus flying too close to the sun and melting his waxen wings. As such, although technology myths are often moral parables, there are Greek myths of explicit punishment for inventing. In the ancient story of the Sicilian Bull, an inventor created a new torture device wherein a person was boiled alive in a bronze bull. When the inventor proudly demonstrated his invention to the king Phalaris, he became the first person on whom the device was demonstrated. Invent at your own peril. Similarly, Prometheus is punished for acquiring fire, as in nearly every other culture with a “man stealing fire” tradition.

This theme was not unique to the Greeks. Generally, the main fear surrounding technology throughout time and across various historical cultures is unintended consequences. Usually, the invention itself is what goes awry. Perhaps the most famous example is the ancient Jewish legend of the Golem, wherein an artificial being is magically animated out of mud, but escapes human control and embarks on a Yudkowsky-style non-aligned rampage. This theme repeats over and over across traditions. For example, Ilmarinen, a Finnish craftsman, creates a bride made out of gold who is beautiful but still and lifeless, leaving him unhappy, while the Egyptian god Thoth produced books with knowledge that would cause misfortunes like insanity or divine punishment. In Hindu culture, the inventor Maya Dānava builds a mirror funhouse, the Māyā Sabhā, that is so convincing that it tricks a king and triggers a war. In Petronius’s Satyricon, an inventor of flexible glass is killed by Tiberius Caesar for fear that the invention would be too valuable and put glassmakers out of work.

When technology—depicted in Clarkeian fashion as magic or crafts— is personified in a god, they are often associated with unpredictability but also creation: they are both fathers of civilization and tricksters. The Mesopotamian god of crafts and magic Enki, creates humans out of clay but also sometimes manipulates them. In Native American cultures, the Coyote spirit both steals fire for humanity from the sun and teaches them to fish. In Micronesia, Analup is the god of magic and crafts and creator of the world, but also the grandfather of the trickster god Olofat, who, like Prometheus, is credited with bringing fire down from the heavens to mankind. In a darker turn, Odin obtains his magic or crafts through painful sacrifice involving deception and even unwilling third parties. Other times, these deities are associated with unpredictable and destructive events. In Ancient Egypt, the god Ptah was the powerful god of craftsmen worshiped by blacksmiths but also feared as the cause of earthquakes, which destroyed several Egyptian cities, like Thonis and Canopus. Similarly, the Roman god Vulcan, the metalworking craftsman, was strongly associated with fire, which was the uncontrollable catastrophe of choice for Roman fears. Ogun, the Yoruba god of craftsmen, is married to Oya, the goddess of winds and storms.

Modern Fears: Technological Determinism

Comparative mythology demonstrates that these are primal emotions and recurring thoughts known by human beings across very different societies possessing very different levels of technology. It is hardly surprising then that these ancient fears were recapitulated in the work of modern philosophers of technology in the 20th century. Writing in the early 1960s, the philosopher Jacques Ellul believed that technology unfolded in a deterministic path towards decreasing human agency, comparing modern man to Esau, selling his freedom for goods and services; that is, a slave. Our material desires, he wrote, betray and distract us; “it is a matter of no real importance whether man succeeds in reaching the Moon, or curing disease with antibiotics, or upping steel production.” Instead, the “search for truth and freedom are the higher goals.” Ellul’s views are extreme enough to make one mad; this is one reason, perhaps, that his most famous intellectual progeny was the mathematician and terrorist Ted Kaczynski, also known as the “Unabomber.”

For the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the risk of technology is that it has a power all its own, of which we become a mere part. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger writes of the logger who is reduced by technology into a mere cog in the industrial machine, “ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not.” The technological logging industry itself is “never a human handiwork,” and the logger becomes subservient “as a subject relates to an object.” This should look very familiar—it is the same fears we have been facing throughout our history but told in a more mechanical, industrial fashion.

Such observations were made earlier in the Industrial Revolution as well. In 1829, Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle wrote about the “mechanical age” in his essay “Signs of the Times,” noting moral panic, millenarianism, and increasing inequality as social disruptions caused by fear surrounding industrial progress. He himself praised the mechanical wonders but feared that Scotland was being consumed by a belief in the “all-importance of physical things” and losing its humanity.

As in the ancient world, fears about technology broke into popular culture. Contemporary concerns tend to focus on machines that have their own ends and pursue them to the detriment of humans. Sometimes, like the supercomputer HAL 9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is a misapplication of a rule followed too literally; sometimes, as in Terminator, the artificial intelligence Skynet determines on its own a deadly prime directive. Humans have had a fascination with robots for a long time as well—it is perhaps the only modern technology to have been prophesied in mythology across cultures for thousands of years. The term “robot” comes from a 1920s Czech play, R.U.R., where the robots are abused so badly that they rise up to annihilate humanity.

What is notable about modern stories of technological fear is that they disregard the traditional intuition that risk comes from loss of control. Instead, they adopt the James Cameron view of the world: rather than being neither good nor bad, technology is inherently corrupting and broadly destructive. Compare the story of the Golem with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s monster is a purely tragic figure: he is created for no real reason, does not do anything good, overpowers humanity, and dies in as much misery as he created. By playing god, Frankenstein creates pure malevolence in the world. The Golem loses control, but it is created as a protector against blood libels and does accomplish that job and is able to be stopped. The fear is the same, but the ancient nuance is lost where technology is to be feared but also to be appreciated.

Even optimistic contemporary stories are not immune from this affliction. In “Machines of Loving Grace,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei paints two possible futures: one where AI spins out of control, and one where machines care for us. Though meant to depict a dystopia/utopia dichotomy, these are fundamentally the same future with different interpretations. In both worlds, the machines supersede us, and we lose control. It is no wonder we fear AI: what machine is more likely to seize control than one that has its own desires?

Giving Telos to Techne

These fears are not entirely baseless. There is a determinism to technology that must be reckoned with. Arguably, we have been going down this path for a long time. Since Carlyle’s 1836 novel Sartor Resartus promulgated the idea that what defines man is making tools, we have increasingly defined ourselves in reference to technics. American historian Lewis Mumford called the totality of human technical systems the Megamachine: a societal ordering that uses humans as parts without individuality.

Even the most strident techno-optimist cannot deny that technology has an internal logic. Technologists often call this the “tech tree,” for the way in which technologies seem to branch outwards as they build on prior technical achievement. Sometimes these dependencies can be surprising, but a tech tree is often the answer to the question of why we had to wait so long. Furthermore, because technologies are built on other technologies, at places where the tree branches, the entire direction of civilization can be altered, creating a path dependency.

Technologies, however, are not just enabling but also revealing, showing us what can be next. Furthermore, we rarely leave technologies unused. Samo Burja has called these co-evolving technologies “social technologies” because they involve our frequent need to socially determine what further inventions we will need to build to use big, important technologies. The lightbulb was co-created alongside the electric utility and many of the first electrical appliances.

Melvin Kranzberg, an American historian, formulated his First Law of the history of technology as “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.” That third part is usually skipped over, but in fact it is the most important clause. Technologies often create new possibilities, but in doing so change what we can even choose to create in the world. When media theorist Marshall McLuhan said that “the medium is the message,” he meant that certain things can only be communicated with certain technologies and thus become the communication itself, but also implied that certain messages are only possible once certain media are invented. Many technologies change the relative costs of certain choices, thus changing what economists call the production frontier.

This is almost enough to make one a technological determinist. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly argues that technology forms a technium, a collective organism that has its own evolution akin to biological evolution. If that is so, as author Paul Kingsnorth has argued, we stop being able to see the world beyond logical terms and get subsumed by the logic of the machines themselves—historian Charles A. Beard quipped that “technology marches in seven-league boots from one ruthless, revolutionary conquest to another, tearing down old factories and industries, flinging up new processes with terrifying rapidity.”

Yet, the contingency of technology also makes it the most freeing force in human affairs. In the same essay discussed above, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger ends with a line from Hölderlin: “but where danger is, grows / the saving power also.” Perhaps the only way out of our technological predicament is through.

The problem with the determinist argument, as biologist Jerry Coyne pointed out in a review of Kelly’s book, is that actual evolution is not deterministic but dependent on contingencies and chance. Evolutionary processes possess emergent properties, but that does not mean that they are themselves organisms, just as we are not a single organism with the Earth, even though we emerge out of it and take part in terrestrial planetary processes. In biology and in most human affairs, the conditions of evolution are largely out of our control. They are geography, the distribution of natural resources, disease, natural disasters, differences in climate and the environment, and other aspects of our natural world that were set in motion long before we were even born as a species. The contingent characteristic of technology, and our views on it, depend entirely on framing. You could view the tech tree as unlocking possibilities, or as closing them off. In truth, the process is one and the same.

Not every philosopher was pessimistic about this situation. Aristotle is the ancient philosopher with the most developed theory of technology, and despite coming from the otherwise techno-pessimistic Greek culture, he is himself optimistic about the prospects of man and his relation to his technics. To Aristotle, technology was techne, not just scientific machinic engineering but any kind of craft or artifice. Aristotle argued that techne was distinct from physis, the forces governing the physical world, because it has no internal logic guiding its ends. The statelessness of techne means that it follows its outward purpose, or telos, which comes from us. In a way, Aristotle embraces Kranzberg’s Sixth (and final) Law of Technology: “Technology is a very human activity—and so is the history of technology.”

Aristotle was a utopian, speculating that robots would bring the end of slavery and thus anticipating, on a theoretical level, arguments that would be made thousands of years later. Nick Szabo, the computer scientist and intellectual, argued that the clock led to the end of serfdom by making it possible to calculate an hourly wage. It is no surprise that slavery ended around the time of mechanical farming or that women’s suffrage coincided with the rise of electrical appliances.

One does not require techno-utopianism to see the human element that separates techne and physis, nor to see how this puts us in control of our fate. We may not be able to control the distribution of natural resources at our disposal, but we can invent new ways to make that irrelevant. We may not be able to change our culture and our subjection to the madness of crowds, but we can invent new ways of communicating to subdue that madness. We may not be able to stop an asteroid from approaching Earth, but we can invent a way to save ourselves from the impact.

While Heidegger feared that we would become overwhelmed by the enframing technological industrial society, we could choose, like Aristotle, to see things the other way: that technology comes from us and is thus of us. Or, as philosopher Ernst Kapp put it, that technology represents a “tool so fundamentally and intimately affiliated with the human being that he finds himself beholding something of his own being in the creation of his hand, his world of representation embodied in matter.” This capacity to project our very being into the material world gives us power over our fate.

The ancient wisdom on technology emphasizes our choice to build technology around us. In the 13th century, Masamune, considered the greatest historical Japanese swordsmith, was challenged to a contest by his top student, Muramasa. They both created their greatest swords, but while Muramasa’s sword became bloodthirsty, Masamune’s only cut leaves. The ability to create, and to determine the purpose of their technology, was in their hands. The student, who forgot this lesson, created a weapon that was, ultimately, a failure. The lesson behind the legend is that the craftsman who exercises restraint and choice, and remembers that he can make even a sword peaceful, is remembered as the master of his craft.

If we feel uneasy, perhaps that is our way of telling ourselves that something may be awry inside us and how we fear that we would use the technology. After all, absorbing new technology is a change, and the impact of changes is in the future. What is unavoidable is that changing our technology will change us in ways we cannot anticipate, and that change will, ultimately, be governed by characteristics of the technology itself. That is why we are so fundamentally fearful toward technology: it is not that we fear losing control over it, but that we fear that it will cause us to lose control of ourselves.

The beauty of technology is precisely that it puts our fate back in our own hands because we can always build new technology. We are a factor—the factor—in determining which technologies we develop and how far we take them, because it is our energies and ingenuity that get applied to the development process. If we become cogs in the machine, we can build cogs to replace ourselves or build a new machine. What determines the character and nature of our technology is us. The process of creating technology, and therefore our future, is one of us choosing our own future, over and over again.

Evan Zimmerman is the cofounder of Edge, a Y Combinator-backed startup building an intellectual property assistant using artificial intelligence. He is also the founder of Jovono, a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies. You can follow him at @ejzim.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

Read more

​Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco on Friday, August 21st to hear a lecture by Samo Burja, author of "Why Civilization is Older Than We Thought." The article was featured in our most recent print edition PALLADIUM 19: Long History.

New discoveries are adding untold millennia to our past. They also reveal our ancestors weren’t always nomadic. Permanent towns and villages sustained by abundant and sometimes gardened forests, as well as fishing. Our ancestors lived this way for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years.

To our surprise, it turns out that Homo sapiens are, by nature, builders of complex societies and civilizations, rather than "noble savages" imagined by Locke, Marx, and twentieth-century anthropologists. This talk will set outdated and flawed narratives right, and with them not just all our assumptions of humanity's past, but humanity’s future too.

Samo Burja is the Editor-in-Chief of Palladium Magazine. He is the President and founder of Bismarck Analysis, a research firm that investigates the institutional landscape of society and provides strategic consulting services to industry leaders, philanthropists, and governments. You can follow him at @SamoBurja.

Buy Tickets

This is a ticketed event, those without tickets or violation of the dress code will be turned away.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This event is hosted with the Avalon Institute which supports enduring intellectual and cultural work through technical and media support, publications, and a network of Avalon fellows. You can follow them at @AvalonInst.