Coriolanus Shakespeare

Consider then, where the real point of controversy lies, and if you cannot lay aside your disputes, endeavour, at least, to cure yourselves of your animosity.

David Hume Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion^[1]

Vote down this review if you find any earlier quotation of Hume’s words above. Also downvote it if it gives off a trace of “I am right and you are wrong” animosity.

An eight-minute listen to Beethoven’s 1807 Coriolan Overture—even though Beethoven wrote it for a play other than Shakespeare’s (Heinrich Joseph von Collin’s Coriolan)—might also help get you in the mood. YouTube, among others, offers Abbado, Vienna and Karajan, Berlin. Youtube has ads, but public-domain recordings exist at the Internet Archive and Musopen. Wikimedia also has recordings though they are in flac and ogg format.

Be warned: the extra Act asks you to do an exercise with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another LLM, so have one and an internet connection ready.

The Menu

I am going to write this review as a meal in five acts. Shakespeare’s play is the main dish. I will also serve entrées in the British sense, a Greek course, and dessert. I will even hand you in an extra act, a doggy bag—LLM homework on URLs to Congress committee reports to chew over.

Ingredients

Like a cook, I set out my ingredients first. Before they reach your intellectual palate, you need to know what goes into each dish.

The key ingredient is mistake engineering. That sounds very Scott Alexander: replacing “them and us” with mistake analysis. And it is. But my mistake engineering does that through the legitimacy plumbing of polities minimizing conflicts. By polity I mean a state or society with organized rule—the opposite of the hunter-gatherer bands in which we evolved which were organized face-to-face.

People see engineering as a constructive science. Plumbers design systems so that water gets to faucets. But engineers also defend. Water needs pressure to get to the taps, and that pressure makes washers leak and pipes burst. Defensive engineering is the science of stopping such failures.

As a science, defensive engineering is harder. Engineers need to foresee how a system might fail, avert failures before they occur, and if they happen, keep their harm minimal, contained and recoverable. Aeronautics illustrates. The engineering to get aircraft off the ground is peanuts beside what the FAA, the NTSB, and NASA do to stop them from dropping out of the skies.

Pairing polity mistake engineering with a Shakespeare play might seem chalk and cheese. But Shakespeare titles Coriolanus a tragedy: mistakes happen. Rome, where the play is set, is a polity. The play starts with food riots, and at its end Rome teeters within a hair’s breadth of being sacked and—spoiler alert—Coriolanus gets assassinated.

Beneath its events lies the birth of Rome as a Republic, and the plumbing by which its leaders and laws gain their legitimacy. The Tarquin kings are gone. Coriolanus even helped remove the last one. At first only a Senate of aristocratic patricians rules. But the starving plebeians threaten to tear Rome apart over the corn withheld from them. By the end of Act One, they win Tribunes, and through them get a voice in the Senate. The Tribunes are the polity plumbing that gives the plebs a stake in the legitimacy of Roman leaders and its laws.

In the first scene, Shakespeare offers an analogy that will unfold—one that goes back to the ancient Egyptians—that a polity is a body made up of different members. But Shakespeare adds something new: he gives the body politic a circulation that binds its patricians and plebeians. The play teems with circulation words. “Heart” appears forty-five times, “blood” thirty-two (counting words like “unheart” and “bled”). Rome has “rivers of your blood.” That physiology, what it circulates—legitimacy—and how it fails in Coriolanus plays out across the next five acts.

The play ends with a body-politic heart attack. The Volscians nearly sack Rome. Its title character, Coriolanus, shows the link between legitimacy and the body politic’s circulation. Coriolanus is an organ that can detach itself and reattach to another. In Act Four, he does just that—to the Volscians. Act Five reveals one ligament still binding him to Rome: his mother. When she reconnects him, the immune system of his adopted Volscian body reacts: “Insolent villain! Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!”

Coriolanus is a difficult play. In the tragedies of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, Shakespeare explores the conflict between inner humanity and outer inhumanity. In this tragedy you expect another such conflict. And that is how it has often been played—as a play about inner pride, or about character. Ralph Fiennes’s 2011 film, in which he both directs and plays the title character, takes this approach.

But such stagings miss what Shakespeare seeks to explore: the problem of legitimacy—what binds the different people of a polity to its leaders and laws. Shakespeare offers a circulation answer. Before Hobbes, before Locke, before Rousseau asked the question, Shakespeare was already visiting the social contract. What gives a polity’s leaders and laws their legitimacy? What ties the people of a polity to their polity?

He knew where the answer lay. But he lacked the science—which is what makes this review more than a review of just his play. First performed in 1608, Coriolanus was staged twenty years before the heart was known to pump blood circulation. That discovery awaited William Harvey and his De Motu Cordis. Shakespeare grasped circulation’s role in the body without knowing the science—the price an explorer pays for being ahead of his time.

Polities exist due to legitimacy engineering. Their plumbing circulates legitimacy; when the circulation stops, polities die. That is Coriolanus’s argument, reached without the science Harvey would later supply. Act One—the meal is also a five-act play—supplies it.

For that I need to start with a “pretty tale,” to quote Menenius: housemates in a multi-occupancy house organizing to keep up the circulation of water pressure to their faucets. In that simplified polity, you can see the origin of legitimacy, its failure modes, and how institutional engineering forestalls what can end it.

To quote Scott Alexander, “Obviously all of this is about Trump.” But I banish him from what follows. This is a politics-free review about politics.

After discussing the play, I turn to what Shakespeare could not have known but we now do: the circulation of legitimacy that created the first democracies—those of ancient Greece, born in the same decades as the historical Coriolanus, and especially—since we know so much about it—that of Athens. I then return to the housemates and let them propose a doggy bag for you—a USA plumbing fix.

Act 1: Plumbing: Housemates and a Pressure Polity

You may have lived in one as a student. It’s an old house that has had its rooms split into bedsits, with a common room downstairs where you and your housemates meet. Each room has its own sink and faucet. This year there is a drought that has dropped the mains pressure to the multi-occupancy house, and the roof tank does not always fill. If you want water, the housemates have to organize rotas to top the tank up with extra water carried by bucket from a street standpipe—and to ration when each turns their faucets on.

The house plumbing, as a result, needs another kind of plumbing—one created by the housemates on top of the physical one—a means such as rotas to govern themselves to keep up and use its circulated water pressure. Fail to engineer that and all the faucets run dry. Engineer correctly, and everyone gets water. It’s the problem of running a polity, in miniature.

A city or a state polity is yoked together in a common territory. Its people inside must engineer a parallel nonphysical yoke, in binding laws and obeyed leaders. Without that, their coexistence will lack the coordination needed for them to survive and thrive as a polity.

But how do you engineer the selection of polity leaders and laws so that people feel bound to obey them?

It’s a problem, as no one knows what legitimacy is.

Legitimacy is in a way the “dark matter” of society. Dark matter is known to exist because something stops galaxies from flying apart, but it otherwise remains as yet unidentified. Legitimacy likewise holds polities together. And we know nearly as little about it as dark matter.

Engineering Legitimacy in the Common Room

The housemates gather in the common room. They quickly agree that one of them needs to be in charge of the rotas. That they need some rules. And since nothing runs perfectly, they also need a way to raise and settle disputes.

Then the problems came. One couldn’t carry buckets due to mobility difficulties. Another had a skin condition and needed to wash often. Some were larks at the faucet, some owls. Someone pointed out that rules get broken for good reasons (“I had an emergency”), or without anyone meaning to (“I overslept after a late party”).

And then the question no one wanted to ask. Any rota could be freeloaded. One of them could stop carrying buckets and turn on their faucet as much as they pleased. What could the rest do? Nothing. Nil. Naught. Cut off their supply at the stopcock, and that cuts water for everyone. Ignore them, and it’s a free-for-all—and no one gets a drop.

Everyone looked rather gray.

What evolution already solved

The biology student

A biology student spoke up.

“It isn’t a problem. The very fact that we’re talking about it is evidence it’s one that has already been solved—though we don’t realize that. Each of us here is a human.”

“Genius,” laughed a few.

“You may laugh. But the very fact you’re here, as a human, means our evolution cracked it. The collaboration we’re after isn’t something we have to invent from scratch. The job is to tap into what evolution has already worked out and re-engineer it to fix our situation.”

“Poppycock!”

“Someone stand up and walk around, please.”

The poppycock-er sighed, pushed up off the sofa, and walked the length of the room.

“There. Happy?”

“Look at what you’re doing.”

“What—standing up? Done that since I remember. Nothing.”

“But what you did was extraordinary.” The biology student set their mug down. “Compare yourself with other mammals. Head, thorax, limbs—same as them. But we stack that skeleton in a way no other animal dares. A vertical upright column. Held up all day over our two feet.”

“Birds.”

“As a column—I said. Birds are bipeds, sure. But they don’t stack their bodies above their legs as a vertical. You do.”

“Brilliant.”

“It lets the weight of your head and thorax compress down the curve of your backbone, to your pelvis, to your knees, and to your ankles. No other animal does anything like that. Only us in this room—every one of us, every second, without thinking. Totally extraordinary if you reflect on it”

The poppycock-er was still standing. They looked down at their feet.

“Bears stand up. Goats. I’ve seen monkeys and chimps do it at the zoo.”

“Only briefly. And for a reason—they hold themselves upright by muscle tension, and that costs energy. We don’t. We let the weight of our parts compress down. Energy efficient—but it puts our bodies constantly at the edge of falling.”

“No—we’re as steady as a rock.”

“But that is because our muscles, to keep our erect column in balance, outside consciousness make split second anticipatory postural adjustments. We make them even against breathing.”^[2]

“Rubbish,” somebody shouted. “What about meerkats? They stand erect.”

“Meerkats cheat. They use their tails for balance—mammal tripods. And they only stand for seconds. Have you ever seen one walk or run on two legs? They don’t. But every one of us does. Scientists call us obligate bipeds.”

Another person spoke up. “Interesting. But being an ‘obligate biped’ has nothing to do with collaboration and our situation.”

“I’m coming to that. There’s a life-threatening risk in standing, walking, and running as obligate bipeds—especially tall ones—injured joints and broken bones.”

There were some blank faces.

“Falls.”

More blank looks across the room.

“I am not sure,” someone said, breaking the silence. “My two-year-old kid brother falls down all the time and treats it as a joke.”

“Short. They’re short,” the biology student said. “Bones and joints do get strong enough as they grow to match the bigger impacts of greater size. Even a fall from two feet—sixty centimeters—can break a wrist.” And small differences in height sharply raise injury risk: men over 6’1” (1.85 m) are nearly three times more likely to break a hip than men under 5’7” (1.70 m).”^[3]

“I am not convinced. Animals injure their legs all the time and live on.”

“Quadrupeds. They can get by with three. We can’t. Lose a leg and nothing. That’s the bug of being an obligate biped—it’s an injury death trap.”

“Get to the point.” The poppycock-er sat back down on the sofa. “I still haven’t heard how any of this links to collaboration.”

“The genius of our species is that evolution made our bipedal falling and getting hurt irrelevant.”

“What? How?”

“Because someone helped. Paleolithic campmates brought food and supported the fallen one until they got back on their feet.”

“So?”

“So our bodies evolved in step with a capacity to collaborate. Evolution could only select a body constantly at the edge of falling down if collaboration also existed to offer support and recovery to individuals that did.”

Silence as that thought sank in.

The neuroscience student

Then a neuroscience student cut in.

“It’s the same story, with our brains.”

“So you’re going to tell us our big brains only arose because we collaborate?”

“Pretty much. Our brains are a gigantic energy problem.”

“Yes, I’ve heard—20% of the body’s energy.”

“That’s at rest. And only for adults. The real energy crunch is kids. A three-year-old’s brain is nearly the size it’ll be as an adult—but in a very much smaller body. Do the math. That alone raises the percentage.”

Someone pulled out a phone.

“Child’s brain—6 to 8% percent of body weight. Adult, 2% percent. About three times the share.”

“Wait—it’s much worse even than that.”

“How could it be?”

“An infant brain initially develops nearly twice the number of synapses it will have as an adult only then to prune them down as a way to refine its neural circuits.”

“So?”

“Synapses burn 74% of the brain’s energy.^[4] Twice the synapses, nearly twice the energy burn. Add that to the brain’s larger share of body weight, and you’ve got an impossibility.”

A pause. The room saw it.

“Same solution that made our bodies possible—collaborative support, but this time for mothers, their infants, and even adolescents. In hunter-gatherer bands they get massive transfers of food.^[5] Without that, our big brain would never have got off the evolutionary drawing board.”

“Interesting—no, fascinating—but how does any of this solve our problem with the bucket and faucet rotas? Answer that if you can.”

“It does not on its own. What it says is that the problem of collaboration isn’t the standard one taught in politics. That asks why people collaborate. That’s not the problem. To be human is already to have that built-in capacity for collaboration. The problem is to engineer that for situations very different from those in which we evolved in hunter-gatherer bands. We no longer—you might have noticed—live like them.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Language, gaze, and gossip

“You’re right. We’re unique in a third way that makes collaboration possible—language. We communicate.”

“No answer, as other animals do that.”

“Not with descriptive detail.”

“They do. Vervet monkeys have three reference calls—leopard, eagle, snake. Add visual signals and you’re near 40 meanings.”

“The work suggesting that is now questioned. Also no syntax.”

“Birdsong has syntax.”

“It’s combinatorial. We use hierarchical recursion.”

“So?”

“That lets us make descriptions—not just of the external world but also the one we create amongst ourselves and what happens in it including collaboration.”

“There is a problem here if you have not noticed. Language is more recent than the need of humans to evolve how to collaborate.”

“True. But we could describe before language.”

“How?”

“Start with bipedality. It frees our hands. Hands let us point and gesture.”

“Fine—”

“Then there’s our vocal tract. Scientists have tried and failed to get chimps to speak. Chimps do many things. Ride bicycles, skate, thread needles, point to lexigram boards or make signs from American Sign Language. But they won’t—can’t—talk”

“Perhaps, they fear what would happen to them if they did.”

“No, be serious. It’s because of what our vocal tracts lack and theirs possess.”

“I thought human evolution added. You are saying it was as important in what it removed?”

“Yes. The vibrations coming up from our vocal cords, unlike those of chimps, are ‘clean.’ Other primates dirty them up acoustically to make themselves sound big. The laryngeal sacs and flaps above their vocal cords disrupt airflow, adding chaotic noise to them.”^[6]

“I thought they could not talk because they could not control their breathing and tongues.”

“That is true, but even if they could, the acoustic mess created by their flaps and sacs would stop them.”

“Perhaps speech and the loss of these laryngeal flaps and sacs evolved together. There is not much point in evolving a capacity for pronouncing a rich variety of sounds and phones if you adulterate your voice with chaotic noise. But once vocal cords make a clean sound, voice becomes something selection can work on.”

Everyone thought that was an interesting idea.

A person who had not spoken got out their phone and clicked a YouTube video of someone imitating bird songs.

“Our vocal abilities might have evolved to mimic animal calls—that would aid hunting—some hunters still do that to catch prey.”

“That’s a good idea. But better than that, you could mimic animal sounds in place of having a word for them and aid communication about your hunting.”

“Cuckoo, cuckoo; cuckoo, cuckoo," someone sing-songed.

“And while you vocally imitate, you can mime with hands and body how they reacted to your hunting them.”

Someone got on the floor on all fours and knuckle-walked like a chimp and did a few pant-hoots.

“And there’s a third aid—again, because we differ by lacking what other primates have. Our eyes and their movements are easy to see. Other primates pigment the conjunctiva membrane over the sclera; it camouflages the eye and where it looks. We don’t. The whiteness of the sclera shows through, making each other’s gaze easy to spot. We have also helped that by expanding the area of the eye visible to others.”^[7]

“Theory of mind,” someone said. “Blind children, who can’t see gaze, delay the social-inference skills sighted children pick up early. They catch up only when language begins to fill the gap.”^[8]

“The light of the body is the eye, I recall from Sunday school.”

“Matthew,” someone added.

“The face is the mirror of the mind, and the eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart. Saint Jerome,” said another.

It had now become competitive.

“Careful control of the eyes. For as the face is the image of the soul, so are the eyes its interpreters. Cicero.”

“Emerson. The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over.”^[9]

“Stop. Stop,” said a frustrated voice. “So we can ‘talk’ with our eyes. How does that lead to collaboration?”

“What do we talk about? Each other. We gossip. Who’s pulling their weight? Who’s taking more than their share?”

An anthropology student then spoke up.

“Last week, a teacher mentioned that in one hunter-gatherer band, over half of conversations were about enforcing norms. Half of these criticized how people shared or fulfilled obligations.”

They then took out their phone, flicked to some notes and showed them.

“Of those: twenty-two percent mocking, joking, or pantomime. Forty-one percent outright complaint or criticism. Thirty-five percent harsh criticism. Two percent actual violence.” [10 ]

“No. No—this is getting us nowhere. If talking solved our problem, we wouldn’t be here sorting out rotas we know we can’t enforce.”

“We could refuse to talk to anyone skipping bucket duty, or turning on their faucet as they pleased.”

“They could ignore that.”

“And you’re forgetting—we aren’t Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. We’re a bunch of strangers, interdependent in a multioccupancy house because of water pressure and a drought.”

“It is more than that. Our ancestors were born into a band where everyone knew everyone else intimately, daily, from birth to death. They had what we lack—a lifelong stake in each other’s survival.”

“You’re right,” said another, “we have bank accounts. Pensions. Health insurance. A whole institutional world to fall back on.”

“They had only each other, and what they could forage.”

Someone then observed:

“They were each other’s plumbing.”

Stakes and the mutual-information math

Roberts’ equation and interdependency

Another voice, quiet until now, spoke up.

“What we’re talking about is Roberts’ equation.”

“Roberts who?”

“Gilbert Roberts.”

They pulled a printout from their bag—Cooperation through interdependence.^[11]—crossed to the communal whiteboard, uncapped a marker, and wrote:

sb − c > 0

“s is the stake individuals share.”

“What’s a stake?”

“How the fitness of one individual changes with that of another. No stake—your survival doesn’t depend on theirs. Coupled—you share a stake—your fates are yoked like Siamese twins.”

“And b and c?”

“b is the benefit one gains from the act of another. c is what the act costs. The formula says: when individuals share a stake, one will give a benefit to the other so long as the stake times the benefit, minus the cost, stays above zero.”

They took the article and read:

This paper has highlighted interdependencies as an integral part of social behaviour, and formalized them in terms of the stakes that individuals have in each other, a stake being a quantitative measure of how the fitness of one individual varies with that of another individual or set of individuals. The stake is therefore a measure of commonality, and individuals can be seen as stakeholders in others, placing a value on their welfare, or survival in such a state as to continue to benefit the altruist.

… there is not a simple trade of benefits, nor is there direct self-interest, but rather benefits come secondarily through benefiting others. … it need not involve the “score keeping” that is inherent in reciprocity …

Rather, it involves investing in others in whom one has a stake … focusing on the stake that individuals have in others shows how contributing, rather than free-riding, can be in one’s own long-term best interests. Stakeholder altruism can therefore potentially provide a much sought-after mechanism for achieving cooperation without relatedness, reciprocation, punishment or policing.

“Here’s our problem. The house plumbing gives us a common stake. Its water pressure makes us interdependent. If we don’t add buckets to the tank—or if we all turn on the faucet at the same time—we all die. Well, maybe not that—but we’ll definitely be smelly.”

The biology student looked up. “The pipes are doing to us what our easily injured erect skeletons did. By yoking fates, they have made us into one body.”

A skeptic spoke up. “We may all be yoked together by plumbing and water pressure. But the equation doesn’t tell us how to collaborate. It only states the problem. It doesn’t solve it.”

“Correct. But it does tell us our Paleolithic ancestors, in the same kind of fix, found a solution. Whatever they did, it had something to do with language. We have to engineer that ‘something’—however different our circumstances.”

Stones, talk, and exit

Someone at the back picked up the earlier point about gossip.

“Hunter-gatherers debate. Temporary leaders emerge from that talk. Language lets us judge who is trustworthy—and reject who is not.”

“Isn’t that dangerous? Anyone given temporary authority can abuse it to keep themselves in power. That’s what our ape ancestors do. Dominance hierarchies. Alphas bullying subordinates. War against everyone. The Hobbesian stuff.”

“Obligate bipedalism stopped that. With hands freed all the time, we got good at throwing stones. Other apes lob them; we target. One strong ape can intimidate a group; several humans stoning together can overcome any oppressor. If a would-be alpha arose, they would get cut down.”

Another added: “And the foraging skills that kept hunter-gatherers alive let them walk away from anyone trying to rule them. Dominance over a group could not stick as people could escape.”

The one at the whiteboard capped the marker.

“We can’t leave. The plumbing traps us.”

Then there was a shout.

“Stone the free riders!”

No one could tell whether this was in jest or serious.

The person at the whiteboard said, “That’s not how we should run the house. None of us wants to end up in prison.”

Silence, again.

Names that travel

After a time, a quiet voice spoke.

“Stones and walking out only work for a band that already knows its members. How do strangers turn into a band?”

“We know who we are—we share plumbing.”

“The plumbing may yoke us. But it doesn’t identify who we are.”

“Translate that.”

“A wolf pack. A chimp troop. They know one another by scent, by face, by who suckled whom. That works for a dozen, maybe forty individuals.”

“Not Dunbar’s 150 number.”

“That kind of ceiling. And the identity stays close to an individual’s body. A wolf can’t pass its pack-scent to a cub born elsewhere. A chimp can’t pass its troop-ID to a one across the river.”

“And we can?”

“We name. Personal names. Group names. And both link and bind an individual to a larger interdependency.”

A student who had not yet spoken—who turned out to be reading classics—sat up.

“Look at how an ancient Greek got named. Periklês Xanthippou Cholargeús. Pericles. Son of Xanthippus. Of Cholargos. Three names. The first picks him out. The second names his father—the family line he came from. The third his deme—the village put on his roll after Cleisthenes redrew the books in 508. There were 139 of them. Person. Kin. Polis. Three connections in three words.”

The anthropology student broke in.

“What about kin terms? Uncle. Aunt. Mother’s brother. Cross-cousin. Every society has them. But they differ from one society to the next—Hawaiian, Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, Sudanese. They place a child in a network and genealogy. And how they do that makes each society different in how it describes and creates its interdependence”

“So we have names. So what?”

The one at the whiteboard turned around.

“So Roberts can function. The equation says people who share a stake will offer benefits to one another as long as sb − c stays positive. But between whom? Wolves, insofar as their noses can tell who is in their pack. We do it across thousands—those we have met and those we have yet to. A name can be learned, and passed down to our children. It can let you know your relationship to someone even if you have never met. That lets Roberts’ equation work at the scale of a polis. The Athenian deme rolls held the names of thirty thousand citizens, each ending with their deme. No wolf-pack could be thirty thousand strong.”

“The bands of our Paleolithic ancestors were smaller than thirty thousand.”

“Smaller. But still larger than scent could identify. A band that names itself, names its dead, names its newborn, names its in-laws across the next valley—that band has a ledger of interdependent linked obligations and entitlements that could bind no chimp group.”

The skeptic was still skeptical.

Mutual information and leaders

“Let’s get back to the issue. We cannot keep chatting. Pick one of us to draw up the rotas. They will do it for a month and then we select again. Let’s do that NOW.”

Someone objected. “But that person could game the role—favor themselves and their friends. Worse, they could make their control permanent. If that happens, are we supposed to stone them?”

“But we will pick someone honest. And then we will arrange things so that even if they’re tempted, they stay honest.”

“How do you engineer that ‘arranging of things’? I don’t see how.”

The person at the whiteboard raised their hand to speak.

The look around the room said: not more math.

“We’re facing here the problem of engineering autonomy.”

“What on Earth is that?”

“It’s about arranging things so they aren’t informationally coupled. So knowing one does not give information about the other. In the case of the rotas, they create a ledger of inputs and outputs about individuals—including the person drawing up the rotas. Looking at that ledger, it should not ‘leak’ any information from the rota assignments that lets us identify who created it.”

“How does this link to honesty?”

“Imagine they gamed it—gave themselves less bucket carrying and more faucet usage. Looking at the input and output ledger and its names, you could identify from mutual information that they were the individual creating the rotas.”

“What if they scrupulously gave rotas to themselves like everyone else but gamed it for their friends?”

“A more difficult case, since instead of the ledger leaking information about them, it would now leak information about their social network. That would now identify them.”

“You said autonomy? What do you mean by that?”

“It’s when knowing one thing tells you nothing about another—they exist informationally ‘autonomous’ from each other. Let me explain.”

Everyone feared another equation was going to be written on the whiteboard.

But this did not happen. Instead, they talked about the history of science and rationality.

“Think about the biggest revolution in science—Copernicus. What did he do? He took the geocentric astronomy that put Earth at the center of the universe and replaced it with the Sun.”

“How can that be science’s biggest revolution—when he got it wrong?”

“How?”

“The Sun isn’t the center of the universe—and even his model had it moving with ‘epicycles.’ It was only Kepler who got things roughly right.”

“But Copernicus did to astronomy what makes science science. His revolution was not putting the Sun at the center of the universe. It was removing the Earth from that center.”

“What has that to do with autonomy?”

“Theories shouldn’t contain information about the observer and their location. They should be autonomous from where they observe. Geocentrism contains information about the astronomers making it—their existence on planet Earth.”

“I see what you mean. Martians would create a different astronomy—one that put Mars instead at the center. Copernicus ended that.”

“That is the revolution. Knowledge cannot be local—it aims to be universal to all possible knowers, not just those in a particular place. Put the Sun at the center, and the information in the theories that observers are on Earth ceases. The same astronomical equations can be used on Earth and Mars—and all around the solar system. There is no mutual information between science and scientists, knowers and known. It was the start of scientific astronomy. Making science autonomous is its essence.”

“Are you saying the essence of science is to cut out mutual information?”

“Yes. And the essence of rationality, too. You can’t begin to be rational if what you take to be reasoning hides a bias linked to you as the thinker. Priors must exist independent of the Bayesian reasoner and not be contaminated by what conclusions they seek to support.”

“I thought if you did that the Reverend Thomas Bayes struck you with a thunderbolt from the logos cloud in Heaven. Bayes’ Rule is a rule and those surreptitiously not obeying it while claiming they do end up rotting in the circle of false thinkers in Hell.”

“I get your point. Bayesian inference lacks enforcement. But that’s irrelevant to our situation.”

“But it is the point of our situation. What’s true of science and rationality is also true of the collaboration without which humanity could not exist. It must be robust against mutual information arising where it should not—the task of autonomy engineering.”

The ledger forgets names

“So interdependent collaboration works when engineering creates an indifferent ledger.”

“That’s it. Shared-stake collaboration works when the ledger forgets everyone’s name.”

“Actually, it happens at two places—it is not just about the information between the ledger and the person making it, but also within it, between inputs and outputs.”

“Wait. A minute ago you had names putting us on the ledger. Now they come off.”

“Both. The names stay—they identify who is one of us. Inside the ledger, the names go. Names tell us who is inside the interdependence and its ledger—who has a shared stake.”

“So they create its boundary.”

“That’s it.”

“But if humans in shared-stake collaboration remove the mutual information between who incurs a cost and who gets a benefit, someone might end up doing all the work and getting nothing in return.”

“Correct—but that is not necessarily bad. Look at what we noted earlier about our bipedality. No one knows when they might fall, injure themselves, and need support. They might spend their lives never getting injured while always helping others. But they still gain—if they had such an injury, they would get that help.”

“Like paying insurance premiums and never making a claim?”

“That’s one way to think about it. But remember also the transfer of food energy to the young. Everyone was once a pregnancy, a babe suckling milk, an infant then a child and often an adolescent totally dependent on others. The support we got came from those giving, not thinking about what they might take out—the ledger works across generations.”

“So you are saying humans, if they share a stake, support each other independently of any return. The help we give isn’t a debt to be repaid. There’s no I-do-a-favor-for-you-and-you-do-one-back-to-me.”

“Exactly.”

“So no one keeps a score?” said someone.

Another added, “Still, that is a situation ripe for being ripped off.”

“Not so. It depends on need and the capacity to give. The Maasai have a system called osotua—it’s their word for umbilical cord. In this, help is given because a person needs it. And those who give it do so because they can. They’re independent entries on an in-and-out ledger that doesn’t record debt.”

“So you are suggesting no mutual information between what someone gives and what they take. People add according to their abilities. Take according to their needs. Knowing one tells you nothing about the other. No mutual information.”

“Commie!” someone shouted.

Then someone added in a mock German accent: “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen.” And, in stately tones: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Changing back to their own voice, they added, “That’s Marx.”

“What’s your problem? Humans may have done that each from his abilities to their needs in the Paleolithic. But look what happened when Marxists tried it in the 20th century—they ended up—”

A voice cut in. “Marxists never built institutions that blocked the mutual information between the Party’s decisions and the Party’s interests.”

“The Marxists didn’t engineer institutions that eliminated it. They engineered the opposite—the party commissars decided what the proletariat needed and nothing stopped the commissars from benefiting themselves.”

“So how do we engineer ourselves in this common room so that never happens to whoever sets the rotas?”

Engineering the loan

Selecting leaders

“Pick someone whose decision-making will lack any information about themselves. A leader coordinating a group has to make all sorts of decisions like the rotas. Look at those decisions from the outside. Do they identify the leader?”

“So what you want is someone who decides in a way as if their own interests do not exist.”

Someone uttered, “Like a blind trust.”

“Yes. Much like that. What you want is blind decision-making. Individuals must decide with no information coupling with their interests.”

“Give an example of such indifference.”

“Look at our plumbing. The pipes, joints, and roof tank are independent of water pressure. They have to exist for it to reach our faucets. But informationally, they are invisible. They’re cogs. Means. Devices that do what they were engineered to do. They have no interests that might make them act to favor one faucet over another.”

“You mean they cannot be bribed?”

“Precisely. They don’t seek opportunities to further their interests because, being matter, they have none. Humans do, and they have intents to further themselves. We seek opportunities, and if we exploit them, when given control over others mutual information appears between us and our decisions over them.”

Someone exclaimed, “I can see now—that link is our problem. How do we select someone to organize us who won’t abuse the control we lend to them? We don’t want them to capture what’s given temporarily so they end up owning us—it’s a loan, not a slavery bond.”

Another queried, “So you’re saying we don’t engineer for an honest leader. We engineer, instead, for one whose decisions aren’t informative about themselves. We engineer defensively—against the existence of mutual information where there shouldn’t be any.”

“Yes, that way you get honesty—after all, what do we mean by that except the absence of dishonesty? It is hard to know when someone is honest except when they are not.”

“This all seems rather circular. You have described mutual information and how it links to a ledger of inputs and outputs, both between them and in how they link to mutual information between the ledger and the person deciding how to draw it up. But where is this going?”

The person next to the whiteboard said, “To the mutual information that might arise between us and the selection of that person.” But no one heard them.

Elections

The frustrated voice spoke over them rather loudly. “We can’t stay here all night. Let’s pick someone. And do it now.”

They looked at each other and settled on the one who had them laughing whenever they met in the hall.

Then someone objected, “I like them—they are the nicest among us. But I’m not sure they can do it effectively, and anyway being liked isn’t the job. Let’s do it the Spartan way. Call out each name in turn and shout. The loudest shout wins.”

They were about to start when a hand went up. “And who decides which shout is the loudest, may I ask? Raise hands, I suggest—at least we can count them.”

“Good idea,” said another voice.

“I don’t like that. We can all see who raised a hand for whom. Whoever wins will know who backed them and who didn’t—and whoever wins hands out the bucket duties and the faucet time. I don’t trust that. Some of us will raise a hand out of fear. Some out of hope of later reward. Either way, it isn’t what we privately want. Write the names on slips instead, and put them in a hat. That’s anonymous.”

A round of nods.

“Stop. The hat isn’t anonymous either. The winner can go through the wastebasket afterward and identify handwriting.”

“I suggest we instead print a list of names with a box by each. That tells us nothing about who made it.”

“But that is inflexible—someone might decide to be a candidate after it is printed.”

A voice then tried to make sense of the argument. “Whatever we do, will have trade-offs. A friendly shout among us costs nothing—if the stakes are low and a wrong pick doesn’t matter, use the shout. When it matters, we need something better. But no method will be incorruptible. Whoever we lend control to will spend their time working out how to use the assignment of bucket duties and faucet time we handed them to find ways to game the next election.”

“You’re right—we are not handing it over. We are lending it. We still own it. We need to be able to get it back.”

“But in giving them control, they will get the means to stop that”

“How?”

“They might use their control to bribe the person who throws away what is in the bucket. Or pressure people not to put their names forward. Or those counting ballots to be inaccurate.”

“But we can engineer against that.”

“But they can counter-engineer against checks that might stop them.”

“Red Queen.” Someone slid into a high voice. “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

“Quite. However well we build the delegation of control to another, the ones we lend it to will find ways to game it—to favor themselves, which is abuse, or to capture what is lent to make it permanently theirs.”

Adults

Then the voice that had shouted “Mutual information!” asked for a pause.

“Look at what we’re doing. Count it on your fingers.” They held up their hands.

“One. The schedule on the wall. Read it cold, without knowing who wrote it. Can you tell? If its creator has been cheating, the pattern identifies them. The schedule has to look the same whoever drew it up.”

A finger went down.

“Two. Who carries water and who turns the faucet. These don’t pair up. Whoever has the strength to carry buckets carries them. Whoever needs to wash washes. The row in the carrying-in book doesn’t match the row in the taking-out book. Ability gives, need takes—and the two ledgers don’t inform on each other.”

Another finger.

“Three. Beyond the schedule itself, the day-to-day rulings. Disputes settled, exceptions granted, priorities ranked. Watch the choices over a month. Do they favor whoever’s making them, or their circle? They should look the same regardless of whose turn it is to rule.”

“Four. The ballot. Pick one out of the box. Whose hand marked it? If you can answer that, the winner can thank their friends and punish their critics—and the vote was never actually ours.”

They closed their hands.

“Four severings, one principle. The schedule from its creator. The giving from the getting. The ruler from their rulings. The vote from its voter.”

Someone interrupted, “I suppose you are going to say being an adult is defined by mutual information.”

“You read my mind. Consider what being an adult is—it’s not being a child. But what is a child? Someone whose decisions are made for them. And that creates mutual information between that person and the child. You can gain information about what a child does by understanding not that child but the person making decisions on their behalf.”

“So what?”

“Being an adult is having no mutual information between what you do and others. An adult is responsive only to their own judgments.”

“What about slaves—sorry, enslaved persons?”

“Here is obscenity in causation. Slavery is the state of mutual information existing between an owner and what an enslaved person does. Their actions are not their own. To be an adult is to be free and autonomous. You respect a person as an adult when you recognize their freedom to be who they seek to be, rather than control that.”

“What does that have to do with threats and favors in elections?”

“They take away the anonymity of voting and voters cease to be autonomous in their voting decisions—instead, they reflect the ability of someone to threaten or promise them favors. The voters cease to be free adults and become individuals with managed voting ‘choices’.”

Sour faces. None of them liked what they had heard.

Legitimacy is a circulation

What we have followed in the common room is the circulation of autonomy — and the absence of mutual information that lets it circulate. It starts in our evolution, with bodies and brains that needed our ancestors to collaborate around a shared stake.

What was the nature of that collaboration? Roberts' equation gave it — sb − c > 0: humans evolved because we could share a stake in each other's survival. Because of that stake, our ancestors supported the injured — helped them get their unstable but energy-efficient bodies back on their feet, letting our bodies evolve their unique erect posture.

Support also lets infants get the massive food transfers their brains need to grow and mature — and so let our species evolve its extraordinary cognitive talents.

Our capacity for collaboration, therefore, built us as humans. The problem is how to engineer it for a bunch of strangers yoked by plumbing in a multioccupancy house, or by geography in a polity.

For Roberts' equation to work across strangers, language provides both a means and a boundary. Personal names link to the names of groups — patronyms, demotics, clan-marks, kin terms. These create a social world on top of the physical one. The shared-stake ledger gets from these names its circle of inclusion and exclusion.

What gets engineered is a nonphysical yoke laid atop the physical one. In the multioccupancy house, the physical yoke is the plumbing; the nonphysical one is the need to create rotas of who carries and who turns the faucet. This engineering turns the housemates into a mini-polity. Inside that polity, what each puts in must not identify what each takes out — giving links to ability, taking links to need, and the two ledgers stay separate. But people will only loan control over themselves if whoever is put in charge decides blind to their interests — those interests must not show in what they decide. The vote that puts them there likewise must conceal how each person voted, or candidates can threaten and reward to get it.

What circulates is autonomy. Between who a person is and what they decide, information does not exist. Between who writes the schedule and what the schedule shows, none exists. Between who gives and who gets, none exists. Between who rules and their rulings, none exists. Between who votes and what the vote shows, none exists.

But the circulation depends on giving up autonomy — because there are things a person can't get alone. Many options are here. Trades. Tit-for-tats. Reciprocity. But some things we want can't be had through them. Getting helped to your feet if your unstable erect body takes a fall. Getting the massive food transfers a big brain needs to grow. Here what people put in and what they take out must not link but reflect only need and ability to give.

The risk of giving up autonomy is that what you give can be turned against you. Language helps: you can describe the ledger from outside it, and so audit its honesty.

If not happy with it, you could walk out — the band could not hold anyone who could forage and throw a stone at any would-be alpha. Language lets us check the ledger is running blindly. The option of opting out was the guarantee we could always keep our autonomy.

Enter Coriolanus

Enter Coriolanus

Another voice said.

"Then everything we've just said describes what is in Coriolanus."

"How so?"

"Coriolanus is about fitness interdependence and legitimacy. The patricians and plebeians share a stake in Rome's survival. They live in one body. As we do here. One stake is defense—if Rome falls, they fall together. The faucets all run dry. Another is distribution. Everyone has to eat. Corn has to be shared out. Someone has to decide what's put in and what's taken out.

"Rome's shared stake runs on a circulation. Rome has rules and rulers—laws and a Senate. Without legitimacy in them, it falls into anarchy. Or gets captured by an autocrat. As it was under the Tarquin kings—and as it will be under the Emperors."

They left, went to their rooms, and read Shakespeare's play.

Act 2: Coriolanus, or the Yoke Refused

Rome at its birth

Shakespeare opens Coriolanus at the dawn of the Roman republic. The last Tarquin king after having gone into exile is now dead. The patricians hold the Senate. The plebeians—ordinary people—starve, and argue among themselves whether to revolt. As yet, they have no tribunes in the Senate. But to stop revolt, by the end of the first act, the first tribunes get appointed and take office. Roman democracy has begun. In the play’s opening Act 1 scenes, Shakespeare shows democracy’s institutions on stage coming into existence.

Into this polity walks a soldier who fought the last Tarquin king at sixteen—”struck him on his knee.” His first name, Caius, comes from gaudere, to rejoice. His other name, Marcius, dedicates this rejoicing to Mars. Shakespeare has his mother explain that she bred him as a boy for war.

And successfully—Caius Marcius is the republic’s top soldier. Indeed, he is almost a superman. Later, in Act 1, scene 4, he enters the Volscian city of Corioles while the Roman army waits outside the gate, and takes it almost single-handed. That solo act earns him a new name: Coriolanus (from the town, plus -ānus, an adjectival derivational suffix).

The play’s tragedy is about him—but the story is more than that. It is about interdependence between Roman citizens—rich and poor—and the survival of Rome as a polity. The play stages a political thesis—legitimacy is tied to the circulation of interdependence—what got discussed in the multioccupancy house about water pressure is now about what lets a polity sustain itself.

The plebeians starve, the patricians hoard

Plebeians speak first in the play—and they are hungry. Among themselves, they do not agree. Should they kill Caius Marcius, or trust Menenius, a patrician who comes to talk with them?

Fiennes in his 2011 film makes the ordinary people a block. A mass noun. Shakespeare makes the plebs plural—diverse—a count noun of individuals.

He explains this later in the play, in the voice of the Third Citizen:

We have been called so of many; not that our heads are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald, but that our wits are so diversely coloured. And truly I think, if all our wits were to issue out of one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south, and their consent of one direct way should be at once to all points o’ th’ compass.

But in the first scene they are united—hunger does that to people—and they know who is responsible. The First Citizen states who—the patrician aristocracy:

We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us. If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely. But they think we are too dear. The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them.

“Our sufferance is a gain to them.” Their hunger is not natural. The patricians engineer shortage to turn their wealth into a sign of standing—not just the arithmetic of who has and who does not. It is that—but hunger also marks the plebeians down as living in a lower lane of life. The patricians starve them not just of food but of respect.

Call it psychological inequality. We see it today in the Disney Lightning Lane pass. It is arithmetic: those who skip the line push their wait onto those standing in queues. But the pass also gives added worth to those who hold one. Imagine every visitor could walk straight in. Half the appeal of the pass would be gone—it would no longer mark its holder as living in life’s privileged lane. What everyone can have lacks the appeal of what can only be had by a few.

The belly fable, and Menenius

Menenius steps forward into the brewing riot. Like Coriolanus, Menenius takes his name from a real patrician—one whose family, scholars think, came up from the plebs. The origin may explain why the plebs call him “one that hath always loved the people.”

He denies the patrician hand in the famine.

I tell you, friends, most charitable care

Have the patricians of you. For your wants,

Your suffering in this dearth, you may as well

Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them

… For the dearth [famine],

The gods, not the patricians, make it.

But the plebs do not buy this:

They ne’er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain … repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us.

In reply, Menenius gives them “a pretty tale” and here the play’s thesis starts. It should be among the dramatis personae—it’s the character that explains the play’s five acts.

There was a time when all the body’s members

Rebell’d against the belly, thus accused it:

That only like a gulf it did remain

I’ the midst o’ the body, idle and unactive,

Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing

Like labour with the rest, where the other instruments

Did see and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel,

And, mutually participate, did minister

Unto the appetite and affection common

Of the whole body.

On the surface, Menenius’s fable seems to be only common sense. A body needs food to reach every part that needs it, and if each part does its job, the whole body has health. In this parable Shakespeare identifies a fitness interdependence in Rome: all parts rise and fall together; each pools effort and draws by need or by work done; and all of it runs under a coordination organized by the Senate that dovetails their separate acts, mortise and tenon, into one larger working polity.

But the plebs already know the fable and can detect that they are being played. The Second Citizen cuts in:

Your belly’s answer? What!

The kingly-crowned head, the vigilant eye,

The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier,

Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter,

With other muniments and petty helps

In this our fabric…

In this our fabric. The plebeians grasp that the fable is not neutral. The citizen attacks Menenius’s distribution—

should by the cormorant belly be restrain’d,

Who is the sink o’ the body.

Menenius has gamed the fable. He exposes this when he has the belly answer its accusers—and in doing so, the belly reveals whom it favors:

True is it, my incorporate friends,” quoth he,

“That I receive the general food at first

Which you do live upon; and fit it is,

Because I am the storehouse and the shop

Of the whole body. But, if you do remember,

I send it through the rivers of your blood

Even to the court, the heart, to th’ seat o’ th’ brain;

And, through the cranks and offices of man,

The strongest nerves and small inferior veins

From me receive that natural competency

Whereby they live.

The food, when it moves, goes “through the rivers of your blood” first “to the court, the heart, to th’ seat o’ th’ brain.” The ruling faculties go first; the rest follow—”the strongest nerves and small inferior veins.” The language here subtly changes. The brain and the heart receive from the belly as partners in a common enterprise. But the rest, in contrast, receive only “that natural competency, whereby they live.” The brain partners. The other organs take what the belly decides to send. Menenius has swapped the fable’s mutually participate for from me receive.

Then Menenius drops the pretense of mutuality:

The senators of Rome are this good belly,

And you the mutinous members.

The fable was a political kayfabe. In entertainment wrestling, contestants win and lose and the fights look real—but they follow a script. The promoters once denied the scripting. Then they found that the spectators did not mind being in on the secret. Politics can be similar. Institutions that claim to represent every citizen fairly and equally even though they do not get credit for doing so. So long as the gap between claim and practice does not grow too big, people go along. A democracy that fails to keep its promise still beats no democracy. Even autocracies stage elections and work to keep up the pretense that they are not what they are. If people think it is a con, they rebel or become “difficult.”

Menenius finishes, turns to the Second Citizen, and calls him “the great toe of this assembly.”

The Second Citizen retorts:

SECOND CITIZEN. I the great toe? Why the great toe?

MENENIUS. For that, being one o’ th’ lowest, basest, poorest

Of this most wise rebellion, thou go’st foremost…

Menenius begins with a fable about a body whose parts “mutually participate.” He ends by calling one of them the “lowest, basest, poorest.”

Ralph Fiennes’s 2011 film, Coriolanus, cuts all of this. Menenius stays, but Fiennes puts him on a television screen—Brian Cox delivers a few words as news footage. However, the stomach and members, the cupboarding, the moving from “mutually participate” to “from me receive” and “the great toe”—none of it is in his script. In an interview at the film’s release, Fiennes calls his Coriolanus a soldier that doesn’t tolerate a democratic vision … a man trying to hold to a sense of his warrior’s honor. But Shakespeare’s Coriolanus does not refuse democracy because he is a soldier—he rejects the interdependence the body fable describes, and the yoke it implies democracy needs to exist.

Caius Marcius refuses the yoke

Before the plebeians can answer Menenius, Caius Marcius (the future Coriolanus) walks on. He denies any shared fate and fitness interdependence:

What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues,

That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,

Make yourselves scabs?

His first words to the plebs make them a disease on the body politic’s skin. But if the plebs are scabs, no yoke binds his welfare to theirs—they do not rise and fall in the polity together. They could as well exist in different bodies. Caius Marcius only wants to scrape them off. Within twenty lines of his speech they have become “curs, hares, geese”—and finally, when the tribunes take office to represent them, he adds:

Go get you home, you fragments!

“Fragments.” For Caius Marcius, Rome is not a body that has to hold together. He sees it only as pieces.

The Third Citizen, and the reciprocity Coriolanus rejects

In Act 2, Scene 3, plebeians gather in the Forum to weigh Coriolanus’s request for their voices—the shows of support he needs to become consul. He approaches them wearing the garments of humility. Romans elect their consuls (elect in the old sense, select) to a position of authority. The elected man wins his power only by showing—or at least making a show of—an interdependence with those he will rule. The garment of humility is there to show it.

For doing this, Coriolanus has one ace card: he can show them proof of their dependence on him. As a soldier, he has wounds on his back and left arm, taken in battle. But first he must “stand naked” and show them.

The Third Citizen explains:

We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do; for, if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them. So, if he tell us his noble deeds, we must also tell him our noble acceptance of them.

“Put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them.” The image is physical—and the body is the point. The plebeians can refuse—but not a man who has bled for the city. His wounds, taken for them, become their wounds. They thrust their “tongues” into the wounds and speak: the city’s citizens recognize in him what he has done for it.

Deeds one way. Acceptance the other. Each freely given. This is not a market exchange, where each side pays for what it gets—it is the polity’s recognition, where each side respects that without the other’s free giving, neither is what it is.

Coriolanus can only, however, understand interdependence as an exchange:

To brag unto them “Thus I did, and thus!”

Show them th’ unaching scars, which I should hide,

As if I had received them for the hire

Of their breath [for their vocal support] only!

Another soldier might have accepted that he and the citizens in the city’s fate were interdependent. But Coriolanus cannot grant the interdependence implied by such acceptance.

As he says earlier, he hates the very idea:

I had rather have my wounds to heal again

Than hear say how I got them.

He eventually is persuaded to go through with the ritual—but he cannot keep down his contempt for the yoke the ritual asks him to show. The plebeians initially give him their voices and back his consulship.

But the plebeians then change. The Third Citizen says: “Was not this mockery?” The tribune Junius Brutus, who has been waiting, turns this doubt into grounds for reversal: “He did solicit you in free contempt.” The Senate has not yet confirmed the consulship. Now the tribunes work the plebeians up, and instead of being confirmed as consul, Coriolanus is banished.

Banishment

Sicinius, a tribune, sets the banishment in motion.

It shall be so, it shall be so! Let him away!

He’s banished, and it shall be so.

…

He’s a disease that must be cut away.

The patrician Menenius agrees on the disease—but sees it as curable:

O, he’s a limb that has but a disease;

Mortal, to cut it off; to cure it, easy.

He explains:

Consider this: he has been bred i’ th’ wars

Since he could draw a sword, and is ill schooled

In bolted language; meal and bran together

He throws without distinction.

But to no avail. The citizens get Coriolanus banished “out at gates”. But not before Coriolanus first banishes them.

… I banish you!

… For you the city, thus I turn my back.

There is a world elsewhere.

He never belonged to Rome. You cannot be cast out of a body of which you were never part.

The Antium soliloquy

Banished, Coriolanus walks to Antium. Wearing a beggar’s cloak, he arrives at the door of the Volscian general whose army he once defeated. He stands alone.

There, Shakespeare gives him one soliloquy:

O world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,

Whose double bosoms seems to wear one heart,

Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal and exercise

Are still together, who twin, as ‘twere, in love

Unseparable, shall within this hour,

On a dissension of a doit, break out

To bitterest enmity; so fellest foes,

Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep

To take the one the other, by some chance,

Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends

And interjoin their issues. So with me:

My birthplace hate I, and my love’s upon

This enemy town.

The soliloquy denies interdependence. Friends who share bed, meal, exercise—twinned in love—beat as one heart this hour and break as foes the next. Enemies sworn to kill turn kin over “a trick not worth an egg.” No yoke binds fates here—only alignments of interest that “interjoin their issues,” that is, until they do not.

Coriolanus speaks Roberts’s equation and kills it. The equation, sb − c > 0, pairs the stake s with the benefit b and lifts the product above the cost c; collaboration holds when the stake runs high enough to keep the inequality. Coriolanus reads s as a moment-by-moment changeable. Interdependent yoking, on his reading, never truly exists, because any “stake” can, in an instant, flip. Fiennes, as with Menenius and the belly fable, cuts out every word of this soliloquy.

Coriolanus enters the house. He offers himself to Aufidius as a pure transaction:

… if thou dost not believe

That I am Aufidius, and hate Rome, make good

Upon the love thou bear’st me, thy revenge

Through the heart of Caesar, or else bury me.

Aufidius cheers him in public. In private—in a later aside to a lieutenant—he understands the man he has just welcomed differently:

So our virtues

Lie in the interpretation of the time:

And power, unto itself most commendable,

Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair

To extol what it hath done.

One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;

Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.

Aufidius has seen in Coriolanus what the soliloquy has revealed—and now knows what to do with him. A man whose worth lies in “the interpretation of the time” is a man you use while time runs your way—and then dump—one fire drives out one fire—when it turns.

Coriolanus, the Name

Why is Coriolanus like this? One reason is in his very name, Coriolanus. In Act 1 scene 4, Caius Marcius walks into the Volscian city of Corioles alone—the Roman army waits outside the gate. Only later does the army go in. The victory does not belong to Rome. It belongs to him.

The general Cominius names him after the city he has just taken:

… from this time,

For what he did before Corioles, call him,

With all th’ applause and clamor of the host,

Martius Caius Coriolanus! Bear

Th’ addition nobly ever!

The cognomen honors him—but it also cuts him from Rome. Had he taken Corioles with the Roman army, the name would have bound him, through them, to his city. He did not. Instead the name marks him as independent.

Volumnia reinvokes the yoke

Coriolanus, however, has one yoke of interdependence—the yoke to his mother. Volumnia has built him for war. The play shows this early, when Volumnia speaks of him:

Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’dst it from me,

But owe thy pride thyself.

His courage is her milk. His pride, the one thing he might claim as his own, was—as the play shows at its end—hers.

When Virgilia, his wife, asks his mother what she would have felt had he died fighting, she answers:

Hear me profess sincerely: had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike and none less dear than thine and my good Martius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.

Eleven dead sons, nobly reported, are better than one living son. She has manufactured him for military service and that alone. Solo heroism without space for interdependence with anyone else.

In Act 5, Volumnia triggers Coriolanus’s death. He stands outside Rome at the head of the Volscian army. Cominius has already failed to change his mind about sacking his home city. Menenius then fails too (in a departure from the play, Fiennes has him kill himself afterward). Then Rome sends in Volumnia—with Virgilia, young Marcius, and Valeria—to plead with him.

Coriolanus sees his mother and steels himself:

But, out, affection,

All bond and privilege of nature, break!

He kneels first, as a son:

Sink, my knee, i’ th’ earth.

His mother kneels to him:

O, stand up blest,

Whilst with no softer cushion than the flint

I kneel before thee, and unproperly

Show duty, as mistaken all this while

Between the child and parent.

He raises her, stunned:

What’s this?

Your knees to me? to your corrected son?

She tells him what the chronicles will record about his name if he sacks Rome. He is silent. Then she stings:

There’s no man in the world

More bound to ‘s mother; yet here he lets me prate

Like one i’ th’ stocks. Thou hast never in thy life

Show’d thy dear mother any courtesy,

When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood,

Has cluck’d thee to the wars and safely home,

Loaden with honour.

He turns away. She turns:

Down, ladies; let us shame him with our knees…

Nay, behold’s:

This boy, that cannot tell what he would have

But kneels and holds up hands for fellowship,

Does reason our petition with more strength

Than thou hast to deny’t.

She kneels again. His wife kneels. The boy kneels and “holds up hands for fellowship.”

The one interdependence he has ever known—the yoke to his mother—stops him. The stage direction reads “Coriolanus holds her by the hand, silent.”

Then the words break out of him:

O mother, mother!

What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,

The gods look down, and this unnatural scene

They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!

You have won a happy victory to Rome;

But, for your son, believe it, O, believe it,

Most dangerously you have engaged him.

He knows that what he has done will cost him his life. “Most dangerously you have engaged him.” The Volscians cannot risk a crying general who bends to his Roman mom.

Aufidius: the inverted yoke

Volumnia keeps Coriolanus from any positive interdependence with anyone but herself (Virgilia, his wife and “gracious silence,” barely speaks).

What Coriolanus has instead is a negative bond—to Aufidius.

In the opening scene, Marcius (he is not yet Coriolanus), told that the Volscians are arming, comments:

They have a leader,

Tullus Aufidius, that will put you to’t.

I sin in envying his nobility,

And were I anything but what I am,

I would wish me only he.

He does not envy Aufidius’s army, his cause, his political position; he envies the inner thing, the substance of him as a man. He calls his envy a sin—the language not of rivalry but of confession. He goes further: “were I anything but what I am, I would wish me only he.” That’s the only interdependence left to him—fates linked by inversion, one’s up the other’s down.

He then expands:

Were half to half the world by the ears, and he

Upon my party, I’d revolt to make

Only my wars with him: he is a lion

That I am proud to hunt.

If the whole world were at war and Aufidius were on his own side, he would defect to fight him. The inverted bond to Aufidius is stronger than any positive one. The hunter is interdependent with his prey—he needs the prey to exist, for him to exist. Interdependence lived like a film negative.

Act 3: Why the Greeks “Invented” Democracy

The Polis: Military Co-ops

Shakespeare sets Coriolanus in the 490s BC. The first Tribunes date from around 494 BC, and Coriolanus is traditionally thought to have been banished in 491 BC. Rome was not a democracy but a republic. Power lay with the patricians, with the Tribunes offering the ordinary plebs a counterweight.

But in the same decades, democracies arose among the Greeks. We know little about most of them except for that of Athens.

Ancient Greek citizens had a problem. Their freedom was fragile: today they might be a slave-owner, tomorrow, someone’s a slave. Free people created the ownership of people while risking that they themselves might end up on the wrong side of it. That risk made citizens interdependent in the polis. It is this stake that created their democracy and its legitimacy.

Both our words “metropolis” and “police” come from the one the Greeks used for their city-states, poleis. They were found across the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Athens was one. Massalia (modern Marseille, founded around 600 BC) was another. So was Pantikapaion (modern Kerch in Crimea).

No modern equivalent exists. Singapore, with six million residents, comes nearest. But Singapore is far larger than any ancient polis. Even Athens at its peak had only 30,000 adult male citizens. Add in women, slaves, and metics, and the total was perhaps 250,000 to 300,000.

A polis was not so much a place as a military cooperative based upon defensible home base and shared interdependence.

The shared stake came from poleis fighting each other. That made citizenship inseparable from defending your own and its survival. If the men of a polis did not coordinate, they and their families might be sold. That yoked them to a shared city fate. Famous cases of citizens getting mass enslaved are Plataea (427 BC), Scione (421 BC), Melos (415 BC), Olynthus (348 BC), and Thebes (335 BC). The Greeks even had a word for it: andrapodismos, “making into human-footed property.”

That interdependence was also bodily. On the battlefield they stood in formation, shield against shield. A soldier’s life rested on his neighbor: each round hoplon shield protected the man next to him. A hoplite phalanx was as strong, or as weak, as the shared stake that stopped anyone panicking and breaking its formation.

The same interdependence existed at sea. Athens’ military might was its fleet, and its fleet’s power came from coordination inside its triremes. Nearly two hundred rowers, stacked in tiers, together might drive a warship whose only weapon was its ram. For maximum push, every stroke had to synchronize. An oar out of time weakened those around it. They were interdependent in their efforts to pull as one.

Benjamin Franklin spelled out the logic of the polis and its citizen army: “we must all hang together or we will all hang separately.”

Interdependence on the battlefield or the trireme led them to have an equal say in the decision-making of their polis’s assembly, council, and courts. To coordinate as adults who fought together, they had to cooperate in running their city.

Citizenship was thus not about passports but readiness to go to war for your polity. Athenians started it at eighteen with two years of ephebeia (military training). From then until fifty-nine they could be called up. No choice. Drop your shield (rhipsaspia) and you lose your rights as a citizen. You were barred from the Assembly, unable to bring cases to the courts, or serve as a juror. The Athenians called it atimia.

The Athenians shut women out. But that was because women were not soldiers. A woman’s political role was to pass on citizenship. Military coordination therefore restricted democratic equality to being a Greek male citizen.

Assembly, Magistrates, Courts

Athenian democracy rested on citizen judgment. Its institutions respected citizens as adults.

Their democracy had three strands. Its assembly met forty times a year. It rotated amateur administrative positions, including the 500 citizens appointed afresh each year to the “executive” Boule council.

But most of all it lived in the people’s courts, where randomly drawn citizens served as jurors and tried civil cases, criminal cases, and political ones. Such courts even decided laws.

Aristotle watched Athenian democracy firsthand and placed the citizen-juror at its center:

For the people has made itself master of everything, and administers everything by decrees and by jury courts in which the people is the ruling power, for even the cases tried by the Council have come to the people.

[Athenian Constitution trans. Harris Rackham, 41.2.]

And again:

[T]he chief basis of the powers of the multitude, the right of appeal to the jury-court—for the people, having the power of the vote, becomes sovereign in the government.

[Athenian Constitution trans. Harris Rackham, 9.1.]

Menenius’ belly fable asked: where is the belly, and to whom does it give the food? Aristotle saw the answer. The Ekklesia, the amateur appointments, and the dikasterion were the belly. Who filled them rotated randomly among the citizens.

To understand the engineering options open to modern democracies to create democratic legitimacy, we need to focus on their juror courts, since the other parts of Athenian democracy cannot be scaled up for the tens of millions of a modern nation-state. Juror judgment, however, can be.

Assemblies. The Athenians held roughly forty Ekklesia meetings a year. At least six thousand citizens—the quorum—crowded the Pnyx and voted by cheirotonia: raised hands. They got paid. At first one obol, then later three. This payment ensured that even the poorest citizen could take part.

But such direct assemblies worked only because the citizen body was small enough for all to meet together.

Try putting 240 million U.S. adults into the Capitol forty times a year. It is physically impossible. By volume, the Capitol Rotunda holds only one four-hundredth of all adult Americans put together.

Modern nation-state democracies have no choice but to build assemblies of elected representatives.

Amateur administration. The Athenians elected a few offices for skill and trust, such as the generals (strategoi). Such generals could win re-election repeatedly—Pericles held the office for fifteen years straight (443/2 to 429 BC). They also elected treasurers and sophronistai (military youth trainers), because those posts turned on trust. Given Greek paiderastia (from pais, “boy,” and erastes, “lover”), fathers needed men they could trust not to abuse their sons. Certain religious posts, such as the Stewards of the Mysteries, were also elected (though others were hereditary).

But most of them, they filled each year by lot. Athenians had over 700 such offices (archai), plus the 500 councilors who sat on the Boule. They were picked by a randomizing device, the kleroterion.

A citizen could hold a particular office only once—the council was the exception, and even there only twice. This rotated office around everyone, giving each male citizen a turn at civic involvement.

Rule by amateurs looks like a recipe for blundering and graft. But the Athenians built checks. Most served on boards of ten, so the bad would be mixed with at least some who were competent. Further, people put themselves forward knowing they were exposing themselves to legal risk. Before a candidate took office, he faced dokimasia, an examination of fitness. After his one-year term, he sat for an audit—euthyna, literally “straightening.” Both happened in the people’s dikasterion court. Special officials, the euthynoi, sat for three days in the Agora, inviting public complaints. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?—who audited the auditors? The system was engineered for that: citizens picked at random the following year assessed the assessors. A complaint could result in an official appearing in court. You put yourself forward knowing incompetence risked prosecution and punishment.

Amateurs might be able to run a small Iron-Age city such as ancient Athens. But they cannot run a high-tech nation-state of tens of millions. That work needs experts—air traffic controllers, regulators, central bankers, people trained on complex manuals across professional careers.

The third pillar of ancient Greek democracy—the jury courts—can scale up for democracies of many millions in a way the other two cannot. A larger population only changes the statistical sample. A jury of several hundred can still mirror an electorate of several hundred million. It is a legitimacy-plumbing opportunity.

To see the possibilities, we need to see Athenian courts at work, since that shows their engineering.

The Dikasterion in Action

We picture a modern courtroom as twelve jurors, a judge, lawyers, days of testimony, and then, after deliberation in the jury room, a verdict.

But the court in ancient Athens had none of that. There was no judge. No jury room. No attorneys. Just hundreds of ordinary men, judging side by side.

Modern juries number at most twenty-three. In contrast, an Athenian jury was usually 501 men. High-stakes cases were bigger at 1,001 or more—always odd, to break ties. Some smaller cases had 201. Such large numbers made bribery and threats impossible. Add to that: any potential briber did not know which court would try a case (that was randomized). Athenians engineered autonomy into their institutions.

Modern trials last weeks or months. No Athenian case lasted more than a day.

Modern courts use professional advocates—who know the process and stand between it and the citizen. Athens banned paid representatives. A man prosecuting or defending himself, however, could be helped by unpaid friends—synegoroi (Xenophon notes that Socrates had them). He could also pay a logographer (“word writer”) to compose a speech beforehand, which he then learned by heart to deliver in court. What we do—pay someone to speak on your behalf in court—was a crime.

In our courts, judges sit to rule on procedure, admit evidence, and instruct juries. The Athenian court had only an archon—an official drawn by lot—whose role was limited to keeping procedure on track. He made no judgment. That was left to the 501 jurors. They, and they alone, decided which side won, and then, after a guilty vote, the penalty: each side proposed its own, and the jury voted between them.

Modern juries deliberate in a closed room, talking until they get consensus. Athenian jurors went—after hearing the evidence and argument—straight to a secret vote. Among them, there was no formally organized deliberation—a point Aristotle notes at length. Judgment came from the deliberative contest staged before the jurors, not from deliberation among the jurors themselves.

Modern juries sit in silence. Athenian jurors were not always silent. There was thorubos—noise, uproar—as the jury, an audience to the speakers, laughed or grumbled back. Like a modern stand-up comedian, a speaker had to work “the room”.

Not all male citizens could serve as jurors. Like members of the U.S. Senate, they had to be over thirty.

The courts sat every day except Assembly days and festivals—perhaps 225 days a year. Four courts might sit at once.

Athenian courts, even so, were in many ways like ours.

• The court drew jurors at random from the citizen body.
• Jurors swore oaths.
• Trials ran in public—anyone could stand among the periestēkotes, the bystanders, and hear every argument.
• And jurors got paid so poverty would not hold back any citizen from serving.

And they took oaths.

The Oath

Citizens put themselves forward—unlike ours, their jury service was not compulsory. Each year, a new lot selected a pool of 6,000.

Each year, before jurors in the new pool could serve, they gathered and swore the Heliastic Oath:

I will cast my vote in consonance with the laws and with the decrees passed by the Assembly and by the Council, but, if there is no law, in consonance with my sense of what is most just (to dikaiotato te gnome te emautou), without favour or enmity. I will vote only on the matters raised in the charge, and I will listen impartially to accusers and defenders alike.

Juries Decided Political Issues

Athenian juries tried cases modern courts do not, and they did not some done by ours. Murder, for example, went to the Areopagus and a few specialist homicide courts, staffed by former archons. The dikasterion dealt with the rest: private disputes over property, contracts, inheritance—and, what ours do not—the city’s political business.

The dikasterion by doing this was the institution that made citizens sovereign over their city—it scrutinized officials before and after office, and it could strike down Assembly decrees.

The pool of 6,000 jurors, at least in the fourth century, reviewed, approved, and revised laws. In this capacity, the jury acted as the nomothetai, “lawgivers.” Usually 501 strong, it could, for important laws, be expanded to 1,001 or more. Change started in the Assembly, where someone proposed a new law to replace an old one, charging the old one as unjust, outdated, or contradictory. The Assembly then appointed five advocates whose task was to argue on behalf of the current law. The proposer and the five advocates then went before the Nomothetai, which heard both sides and made a choice by vote (by show of hands, not secret ballot), either keeping the old law or passing the proposed one. This made every law assessed and decided by citizens after two debates—first in the Assembly and then in the courts.

Every law went through, in this way, a double filter of citizen judgment. When Athenians spoke of living under “their own laws,” they actually did—the laws that had survived direct challenge before fellow citizens.

The dikasterion worked in other ways that touched every choice by which Athens was run. As noted above, all those who put themselves forward for selection by lot or election to an administrative post could later face citizen-initiated prosecution. Just as anyone can visit the Wikipedia encyclopedia and create an article, any male citizen could challenge laws and decrees passed by the Assembly. Athenian democracy in the dikasterion was a “wikidemocracy.”

Cases that on the surface were not political could often be de facto referendums on political issues. The speech “On the Crown,” 330 BC, perhaps the most famous oration in the ancient world, arose from the award of a public honor—a crown—to Demosthenes. He, though, was not the one prosecuted by Aeschines (his speech is here). That was Ctesiphon, who had proposed the honor in the Assembly. But the debate in court was not about Ctesiphon, or even the honor, but about the politics of Demosthenes—and those of his long-time rival, Aeschines. The court’s vote became a mini-referendum on Athens’ relationship with the growing power of Macedon under Philip II.

(The Macedonians crushed Athenian democracy in 322 BC and hunted Demosthenes down. To stop his capture, he took poison hidden in a reed. There would not be another major democratic leader for the next two thousand years. Aeschines founded a school of rhetoric in Rhodes and died in exile in 314 BC.)

The Unforgivable Greeks

Athenian citizens grossly violated human rights. Slave labor built the Parthenon, made their sculptures and vases, and funded their festivals and democracy. Citizens were a minority, and they locked women and resident foreigners—metics, from metoikos, “one who dwells among”—outside the democracy they limited to themselves. In court, women and metics could bring cases only through male citizen representatives. If the International Court of Justice had time machines, it would prosecute the lot.

Fitness interdependence answers a question political theorists often avoid: how could democracies—both in the ancient world and in the antebellum South until the Civil War—tolerate slavery? Shared fate does not apply only against outside enemies. It can also bind people to keeping other humans as owned property. Fitness interdependence can create the most vile oppression. When everyone owns slaves, or depends economically on those who do, everyone’s fate becomes tied to keeping humans possessed like cattle. Branding helps. Skin tone helps. Different languages and accents help. Laws that support human ownership help. But all of it gets enforced by everyone, through their shared interdependence.

Every citizen’s fate gets joined to the institution. The planter’s fitness is interdependent with the overseer’s, the merchant’s, the poor white farmer’s, because the entire economic and social order depends on keeping enslaved people as property. That shared fate is real. It produces cooperation among free people: mutual aid, civic participation, collective defense. It also produces the collective enforcement of slavery: branding, pass laws, slave patrols, legal bans on teaching literacy, and punishment for anyone who aids escape.

The question is not whether the Greeks were good or bad: their democracy committed evil.

But that does not make democracy itself evil: the moral question is who does it put inside? Ancient democracies drew that boundary cruelly. Modern democracies—well, I am going to avoid a political question like that.

Act 4: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Taking Over a Democracy (But Were Afraid to Ask)

The Political Loan

Coriolanus is about what Shakespeare spotted and what modern politics doesn’t—how legitimacy exists through circulation, and interdependence. I discussed ancient Athenians not only because they gave us the word “democracy” but because their institutions show how it gets its legitimacy. Coriolanus’s Rome was a republic ruled by an aristocracy of patricians balanced by the voice of the plebeians—their tribunes in the Senate. Only in Athens did citizens control government—Aristotle’s pure democracy.

Legitimacy plumbing has one flaw any sixteen-year-old can spot.

You lend someone your car. They like the feel of it. Then they change the locks.

Adults hand over the keys—control of the grain stores, of taxes, of who fights and how—to those they select. The handover is a loan. It is temporary. But once the keys change hands, so does the opportunity to alter what was lent so it is not returned. Democracies are engineered to stop that. But those now able to control what’s lent can find ways to reverse-engineer that engineering.

The week after the housemates sorted out their plumbing rota, they met at a bar.

One of them plunked a stack of books, borrowed from a college library, on the table.

“I see you’ve got quite a pile.”

A hand reached out and picked up Dictatorship Made Easy. Another grabbed Autocracy for Dummies.

Another took Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Taking Over a Democracy (But Were Afraid to Ask) and commented, “I see you’ve got the Newly Revised and Updated edition.”

“A bit of a damp squib. The really good one is The Joy of Tyranny, Deluxe Edition. That one was a national Caligula’s Book Club Pick and a #1 New York Times Bestseller too.”

“I see Autocracy for Dummies won a Sauron Book Award and Dictatorship Made Easy is not only Mordor Book of the Year but also is going to be a Netflix series.”

“You’ve got a lot of homework. Learned anything?”

“Oh yes. Becoming an autocrat is easy once you know how.”

“Any tips? It looks like a good way to make billions.”

The Three Moves

“It’s all about the loan. You first have to get temporary power. Once you have that, it’s a whizz. You see, once you’ve been given control of something on the understanding that it’ll be given back, you can treat that as talk you can forget—provided you make the right moves.”

“But I thought democracies were engineered to stop that.”

“No.” Waving Tips, Tricks, and Hacks for Despots, which had a bright sticker claiming “Over One Million Copies Sold.”

“According to this, you need to make the three moves.”

“What, like chess?”

“No—it’s more like bomb defusing—you have to reverse engineer what stops you tampering.”

“Except,” someone added, “in this case you blow up something—the hand back to democracy.”

“First, there is lock-switching.”

“Lock-switching?”

“Once you’ve got temporary control, change the locks. The classic case is a temporarily elected war-chief who raises soldiers to defend his people, then turns them on those who oppose him.”

“You said three—what’s the second one?”

“Loan-rewriting.”

“Which is?”

“Redraft the loan. They lent you the car for school runs; as its new driver you run a taxi service and call it “expanded educational access”. Men leave to fight enemies and end up guarding the food to ‘protect’ it. The thing you lent now has different purposes.”

“And the third?”

“Domain extension. You ask for more control to be lent. They lent you a car—now you claim you need its garage. Then its driveway. And then, in case of emergency their house keys. The trick is to make each step small and ‘temporary’ enough not to cause alarm. It’s about expanding the loan.”

“A bit like boiling a frog. You raise the heat slowly so they don’t jump out while they still can.”

“Folk myth. Frogs get agitated and try to get out. But it catches something real. Often small changes do not get detected until they have built up too late to escape.”

Someone picked up a book that no one had touched: “The Authoritarian Cookbook.”

“This says the real craft is to do all three at once.”

“Let me look—why ‘Cookbook’?”

“Lots of recipes. Step-by-step guides. Equipment lists. Common mistakes. Habits of the successful. Taking power looks easy from the outside, but it’s a skill that must be done the right way. No room for amateurs.”

“So the lenders don’t catch on?”

“Yes, that’s the stumbling block many would-be autocrats trip up on. Lock-switching is the bluntest move, and lenders quickly learn to watch for it. So you shift to loan-rewriting, which slips under the radar. And if lenders pick up on that, you shift to domain extension.”

“So turning a democracy into an autocracy is a skill.”

“Very much so—it should have its own Olympic event.”

The group briefly chatted about how turning democracies into autocracies might be made a competitive sport—and thought it might have some difficulties. There was almost sadness for autocrats never getting the chance to be recognized for their anti-democratic craft.

But then the person with the pile of books said, “Getting total power is only the start.”

The person with the pile waved another book: The Strongman Bible. It had a sticker reading “Translated into 27 Languages.”

“This has the lowdown.”

“So I’ve got myself a nice little autocracy—what do I do?”

Devil’s Inverted Golden Rule

“It’s almost religious. You have to think, breathe, and dream the Devil’s Inverted Golden Rule.”

“What’s that—a new ethical principle?”

“No, the unholy dictum: ‘Do unto others what they cannot do back unto you.”

“Am I mishearing you? I thought it was ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”

“Don’t be naive. Autocrats aren’t in the saint’s business. They’re in the survival one. The rule goes back half a billion years.”

“You’re kidding. Autocrats in the Cambrian?”

“Very much so. The logic of autocracy is the logic of life itself when it started to see other life as a meal to stomach.”

“Spell it out. You’re saying something very weird.”

“Survival is about asymmetry of causation—and spotting it. Think about predators. They have a problem. They need to catch dinner, but dinner doesn’t like that, so their next meal does everything it can to stay off their plate. So predators don’t see prey as just food; they see that food as having options—escape routes, hiding places, and ways to fight back. A successful predator has to know those options and work out how to block them.”

“I see—so prey, I guess, does the reverse: it spots the options the predator can’t frustrate in an attempt to stay off the menu.”

“Precisely. Autocrats have to think like predators. What options do my opponents have? What can I do to them that they can’t do back to me, so I keep my control?”

A new person looked up. “It’s a thick book. Any more?”

“Tons. Autocrats face the problem that the people they control look for workarounds, to get free—ways out from under their power. Being a tyrant is no easy career. If you’re a strongman, you have to stay awake at night—you’ve got to be ever vigilant.”

“Why vigilant?”

“To nip problems in the bud before they grow and can undermine your control.”

“So autocracy is whack-a-mole.”

“Right. That’s the very word the book uses. It warns would-be autocrats that they’re taking on an exhausting labor. Fortunately it offers lots of suggestions to make staying in control easier—”

“Bribery.”

“There’s much more than crude bribery. Get people in your debt by cutting tax inspectors. Watch how many of them then prefer their books stay unaudited with you in power. You haven’t paid them a cent, and they’re guarding your back.”

“And the lost revenue?”

“A loan, like all the others. They owe you. You collect later—in favors, in silence, in votes.”

Crippling the Language

“But that’s minor. The key, above all, is stopping opponents from working together. To do that you need to paralyze language. An autocrat who doesn’t is just tempting fate to be deposed.”

“Why?”

“If people can’t name what’s happening, they can’t coordinate against it.”

“How do you do that? Autocrats can’t control what people say.”

“But they can turn public words into weasel ones.”

Someone shouted Yes Minister. Blank faces.

“You haven’t seen it? The BBC sitcom—British civil service. Bernard Woolley, a private secretary, demonstrates to his minister conjugating irregular verbs “ Someone pulled up the clip and skipped to 3:53.

Bernard Woolley:

I have an independent mind, you are eccentric, he is round the twist. I am determined; you are stubborn; he is pig-headed.

His minister, getting in on it:

I give confidential briefings; you leak; he has been charged under Section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.

Then they all went round, making their own in funny British accents.

“I am prudent. You are frugal. She is a miser.”

“I am eloquent. You are talkative. He is a chatterbox.”

“I am cautious. You are hesitant. They are cowardly.”

“I am methodical. You are fussy. He is obsessive.”

“I am self-assured. You are overconfident. She is arrogant.”

“There you are. You can see the debasement.”

One of them laughed. “I am providing continuity. You are clinging on. They have changed the locks.”

“The same regulation is a safeguard when it protects the rule-makers and red tape when it protects anyone else.

“Language is the first casualty of autocracy.”

A pause.

“There’s another move. Timur Kuran wrote about it in his book, Private Truths, Public Lies. People can’t coordinate against power if each one thinks they are alone. So the successful autocrat makes sure every word spoken in public differs from that said in a person’s own head. Privately they think the king is mad; publicly they cry long live the king. Each assumes the others mean it. QED they do not coordinate.”

“Ah, the Emperor’s new clothes.”

“Exactly. Autocracy is a Met Gala where attendees get praised or denounced on social media — with no one commenting that they are all in the buff.”

“And one more trick according to The Authoritarian Cookbook. Pronoun shifting. Make subjects identify with the ruler. They say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’—the royal ‘we.’ ‘We’ did this. ‘Our nation’ acts. The royal ‘we’ turns subjects into an extension of the ruler’s person. Or do the opposite—split them off. Pronouns sort the loyal from the disloyal. And he puts his own name onto everything.”

“What, like how the dictator Rafael Trujillo renamed the highest peak in the Caribbean ‘Pico Trujillo’ and the capital of the Dominican Republic ‘Ciudad Trujillo’?”

“Do not forget Papa Doc, next door—he went further. He declared he was Haiti, the Haitian flag, an immaterial being; the Lord’s Prayer began, ‘Our Doc, who art in the National Palace.’”

“Yes, they all shrink the plural to themselves and then make those they control an extension of themselves—the autocrat’s name binds everyone to them.”

Someone asked, “Is there a way out?”

“Every culture at least initially tries engineering against takeover.”

Engineering Against the Loan

They look at some summaries in the book.

The Plains Cheyenne

The Plains Indians had councils. The Cheyenne had a Council of Forty-Four; the Lakota, the Seven Council Fires. They made power seasonal.

Most of the year, bands lived apart. Chiefs couldn’t compel; they could only talk. If trust soured, families didn’t petition or sue—they walked.

Then summer arrived. Buffalo gathered, and so did the people to hunt them. The old safety of separation was gone. So the council appointed a warrior society, the akicita, to enforce order. Their power was real—offenders could be whipped, their tipis slashed, and in extreme cases killed. Even chiefs might be judged.

And then winter came, and power unraveled. The herds moved. The camps broke. The akicita’s authority didn’t get debated or revoked. It went with the herds. No permanent police. No permanent rule.

The Cheyenne tightened the engineering: no War Chief could serve on the Council of Forty-Four unless he had also resigned his military post. The man who led in battle could not be a leader in peace.

The Vajjians

Ajatasattu of Magadha wanted to conquer the Vajjians. The Buddha’s diagnosis, in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta:

So long as the Vajjians foregather often, and frequent the public meetings of their clan, so long may they be expected not to decline, but to prosper.

Ajatasattu couldn’t break the Vajjians by force while they stayed together. So he sent his minister Vassakara to sow suspicion among the clan chiefs. When suspicion replaced solidarity, the princes stopped answering the assembly drum. With debate stopped, the confederacy fell.

Magadha won the war. But the Vajjian assembly outlived the Vajjians: it had so impressed the Buddha that he wrote it into the sangha

Ashanti Destooling

Among the Ashanti of West Africa, a council of elders could destool a chief. He never sat on the Golden Stool itself—that sacred seat held the soul of the nation and stood beside him, never beneath him. At his installation, the elders lowered him over the ancestral stools, never quite onto them; at his removal, they stripped his sandals so his bare feet met the earth.

They could destool him for drunkenness, gluttony, charm-dealing, verbal abuse, excessive cruelty, and not following the advice of elders. The grounds split in two: private vice—he treated the role as his to feast on—and public insubordination—he brushed aside the very elders who lent it.

He held power. But the council kept the right to take it back. The ceremony didn’t just punish him; it made the loan visible. The stool was never his to keep. It was what the elders could call back.

Ancient Israel

Bible words. Ancient Israel was founded on assemblies. To see them, you have to look behind the translations.

Where Hebrew texts show the qahal exercising judgment and authority, English Bibles blur it into “the people” or “the congregation.” But the Hebrew terminology tells a story of people trying to stop lock-switching. Zeqenim (“elders”) appears interchangeably with “men of Israel” and “all the people” inside the same sources (Joshua 24:1, 2, 19, 21; Exodus 19:7–8). Not a separate oligarchic board, but language for the assembly itself—or for those speaking within it.

When numbers appear, they cluster around seventy (Exodus 24:1; Numbers 11:16; Judges 8:14). Plausibly, that’s the free male population of early settlements—the body politic itself.

The terms ‘edah and qahal (“congregation,” “assembly”) name the gathering that heard legal complaints (Numbers 27:1–6), judged capital cases (Numbers 35:24–25), executed criminals by stoning (Numbers 15:35–36), decided on war (Judges 20:7–11), and accepted or rejected kings (I Kings 12:3, 20).

The ‘ohel mo’ed—often given as “tent of meeting”—served as an assembly point for political business as well as worship (Joshua 19:51; Numbers 20:6).

Frank Neuberg, in “An Unrecognized Meaning of Hebrew Dôr,” argued that dôr, usually translated “generation,” also meant “assembly” or “council.” Ugaritic texts use dr.bn.il for “the assembly of the gods.” The Phoenician Azitawaddu inscription (725 BC) also contains kl dr bn ‘lm: “all the assembly of the gods.”

Neuberg reads Amos 8:14—traditionally “by the life of thy way, O Beer-Sheba”—as “by the life of thy dôr” (divine council), paralleling “thy gods, O Dan.”

When Jeremiah asks, “Who hath stood in the council of the Lord?” (Jeremiah 23:18), the verb ‘amad (“stood”) also describes advisers who “stood before” King Rehoboam (I Kings 12:6, 8). Heaven’s court and earth’s court shared terminology because both were understood as the same kind of gathering—one with authority.

Bible events. Ancient Hebrew didn’t only have words for assembly; those assemblies act in biblical events.

The elders gather and come to Samuel: “Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:4–5). No strongman seized power. A collective demanded a new arrangement. Samuel warns them what they are loaning out. A king, he says, will take their sons, their daughters, their fields, their vineyards, their olive groves, a tenth of their grain and flocks—“and you will cry out in that day because of your king” (I Samuel 8:11–17).

Saul’s coronation needs acclamation from “all the people.” David requires a covenant before the northern tribes accept him: “So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron, and King David made a league with them in Hebron before the Lord” (II Samuel 5:3).

When Solomon dies, his son Rehoboam travels to Shechem to claim the northern throne (I Kings 12:1). The congregation meets him with a demand: lighten the forced labor your father imposed (I Kings 12:3–4). Rehoboam refuses. The assembly answers with a door-slam: “What portion have we in David? To your tents, O Israel!” (I Kings 12:16). They walk out and choose their own king.

Rehoboam sends his corvée master to force compliance. “All Israel stoned him with stones, that he died” (I Kings 12:18). The assembly didn’t merely advise. It vetoed, then enforced the veto.

Even established kings need ratification. When Josiah reforms the religion, “all the people stood to the covenant” (II Kings 23:3). The king holds power. The assembly holds the grant. At Shechem, the qahal that arrives to make Rehoboam king departs having made Jeroboam king instead (I Kings 12:1, 20).

Frank Cross, in “The Council of Yahweh in Second Isaiah,” points to the plural in “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people” (Isaiah 40:1). The line addresses Yahweh’s heavenly council. The divine assembly was the template; the earthly qahal was its human instantiation

The qahal at Shechem audits with teeth. The assembly that stoned the corvée master was not a mob. It was the loan called in by force, in public, when the borrower had attempted to change its terms. The Hebrew Bible doesn’t only note the existence of citizen assemblies—it records what they were engineered to stop.

Gilgamesh to Rome

In the oldest surviving epic, Gilgamesh cannot go to war without the vote of two assemblies—elders and armed citizens. When Kish demands Uruk’s submission to corvée labor, Gilgamesh doesn’t give an order. He goes first to the assembly of elders, then to the assembly of able-bodied men. The elders advise submission. The citizens’ assembly votes for war and appoints him lugal—war-leader. Even the hero of the oldest epic needed democratic permission to fight.

Homer’s Iliad has an assembly before the walls of Troy in which an ordinary soldier, Thersites—ugly, lame, hunched—argues against Agamemnon. Odysseus beats him for his insolence. The army laughs. But Thersites’s words—that their commanders are incompetent and in it for themselves—go unanswered. Fiction, but Homer could only have described it if his audience found it credible.

Sparta had assemblies. However, only magistrates could address them, and a council of elders could overrule its decisions. But citizens still gathered and passed resolutions. Rome, before the emperors, had its comitia, its tribunes, its Twelve Tables. A tribune could veto the Senate with a single word: Veto—I forbid.

The Genome’s Guardian

An economics student piped up, “The engineering is something needed in any system whose parts can act for themselves. Economists call their version the principal–agent trap. You hire someone because they can do what you can’t, and then you can’t tell whether they’re doing it. They hide their work behind the very expertise that got them hired. Directors of companies serve themselves rather than shareholders.

A student doing a course on Artificial Life then spoke. “Here researchers call it specification gaming: evolutionary algorithms breed agents that hack their own selection, exploiting features of the environment the designers overlooked and didn’t intend.”

Another studying artificial intelligence added: “LLM-alignment researchers call it the alignment problem: how do you stop an agent from drifting off mission when the agent’s intelligence is exactly what lets it find how to do that.”

All around the table they realized it was a universal problem that kept being solved in different domains.

A biology student waved their hands to get a word in. “The loan trap is older than us. It happens when cells in multicellular organisms lend their right to divide to the needs of the organism, and a mutation in some hijacks it—p53 evolved to guard against that.

“What is the biology here?

“When single-celled organisms joined into multicellular bodies, each cell handed over the right to divide. In return, the organism replicated its DNA through gamete reproduction. Cells lend autonomy; the body returns hereditary continuity.”

“No autocrats there?”

“But DNA mutates, and now and then a mutation lets a cell thrive at the body’s expense.”

“So biological autocracy exists and it is what we call cancer?”

“Yes, and evolution selected bioengineering to stop that takeover—it gave each cell a ‘guardian of the genome.’”

“What, each of those cells has elections. Don’t be absurd.”

“No but they have a specialist protein called p53. It counteracts mutation.

p53 tries to stop the damage before it occurs. For example, if UV risks damaging your skin cells’ DNA? p53 triggers your skin to tan to block UV. If mutations occur? p53 detects that and sends in the DNA repair crews. If the damage is too much to mend? p53 locks the cell down—alive but unable to divide, in what biologists call senescence. And if that fails? p53 presses the cell’s self-dismantle button: apoptosis.”

“Why do we get cancer then?”

“Because p53 can fail. Mutations can even knock p53 out so it flips into a turncoat that aids what it evolved to stop.”

Act 5: Kayfabocracy: A Wee Short Introduction

The Weather, and Who Brews It

Last Orders

Last orders were about to be called.

The one who had sat saying nothing now spoke.

“The Strongman Bible—that pile of books. They’re all out of date.”

A new book was put on the table: Kayfabocracy: A Wee Short Introduction.^[12] “It’s just out. I bought it before coming here.”

“I did not know that ‘Wee Short Introductions’ had a new title.”

“It has and it changed how I think about autocracy. I suggest you buy it—it won’t be in the library yet.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Getting elected has never been easier for an autocrat. And one reason is that those defending democracies are blind to democracy’s legitimacy plumbing. They cannot see how, when it fails, it creates the opportunity for would-be autocrats.”

“Don’t talk rot. Never has there been a time when so many departments of political science have James Webb Space Telescopes on what might threaten democracies. They are not blind.”

“But according to this Wee Short Introduction, they are. Everyone can see autocrats and their rise. But not the red carpet rolled out for them to walk on. Political scientists look through their James Webb Space Telescopes but not the legitimacy that has died under their very feet.”

Does He Take Sugar

The person who brought the book opened it at a chapter titled “Does He Take Sugar?”

“Look, here it explains how modern democracy creates what lets autocrats get elected. This chapter details the first stage, the ‘Does he take sugar?’ one.”

“Wasn’t that a phrase used by disability campaigners, and an old BBC radio program?”

“Correct. The phrase describes how well-meant sincerity can be demeaning.”

“ Demeaning how?”

“A disabled person sits in a room. Someone asks how they like their tea. But instead of asking them, they ask their carer. ‘Does he take sugar?’ They sincerely want to help the disabled person—the phrase catches that—but in doing so they deny what every human person needs—respect. The person is present, but they get treated as if they do not exist.”

“Oh, so it’s back to the common room discussion about the autonomy of adults.”

“Indeed, to be a human adult is not to be a child. And that needs us to be recognized as capable of responsible judgment and decision. Not in some vague way but actively incorporated into decisions that affect us. Here it is not about asking whether or not you like sugar in your tea.”

“I get it. It’s about making them party to what happens to them.”

“So ‘does he take sugar’ is about how even sincere people can insult citizens’ agency.”

“It is more than that. It happens even if it is in their own interest. The carer may actually know what the disabled person likes better than they do.”

“How?”

“They might have observed them in the past, and the disabled person may not understand the choices being given to them. Such understanding, however, well-intentioned, still robs the disabled person.”

“I agree. The default always should be that someone knows better about themselves than someone else does. They have skin in the game—it is, after all, their pleasure and suffering. No one, however sincere, lives that.”

The Adult Default

The person with the book moved on a few pages.

“Respect for adults is two-sided. It is not just that we all want our capacity for judgment and decision-making respected. The external world is built on it.”

“What? Are you thinking of our laws?”

“Yes, contract law takes it that two parties are able to make judgments and decisions about bargains they enter and will be responsible to honor their commitments. Tort law treats people as responsible for understanding how their decisions might or might not harm others. The legal default is that adults are capable of judging and acting as responsible adults. Circumstances of diminished responsibility, it recognizes, may exist—but if so, they need first to be proved.”

“So the law parallels on the outside, our inside need to be respected as adults. We want to be recognized as having agency about what happens to us. And the law says, ‘You can think and decide—and the default is that you have the agency to do them responsibly.’“

“The book observes that the jury system also is built on this respect. Any random adult, after swearing an oath, is presumed, unless shown otherwise, to be able to hear two sides of argument made in court and make a responsible judgment.”

“That is real respect. Jurors’ verdicts can result in a person going to prison, paying a big fine—or going free, and if the freed person had in fact done it, walking, able to repeat their crime.”

“Yes, modern society is built on respecting adults as adults—the law, the courts. But that respect no longer exists for citizens in modern democracies.”

“RUBBISH.”

Does He Take Sugar? Again

The Kayfabocracy book was opened again. This time at a chapter titled “Does He Take Sugar Colonization.”

It started with a question: “What would it be like for a polity that called itself a democracy not to be a democracy? It does not necessarily mean bad government. It could be a hidden minority rule.”

“That’s not novel,” someone objected. “If that happens it would not be a democracy but an oligarchy or an autocracy—rule by a few in the first, rule by one over the rest in the second.”

“The novelty of the kayfabocracy book is that it suggests it can happen inside a democracy if the majority feels it is being ‘ruled’ by a minority.”

“That’s nonsense. In a democracy, citizens have the vote. It’s about people power—the opposite of oligarchy and autocracy. Citizens elect representatives. That stops there being internal colonization. To imply otherwise is bunk.”

“But suppose the citizens in a democracy felt they were living inside one giant ‘does he take sugar.’ That their vote gave them no agency.”

“That is impossible. No one votes for them. They have real agency at the ballot box—no one there grabs hold of their hands forcing a particular vote. There is no ‘does he take sugar. Elections are the way democracies show respect to their citizens.”

“But agency depends on choice being informative.”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose I offer you a cube of sugar for your tea, or a teaspoon of it. Two options. Both sugar. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

“But candidates in elections are very different. Voters have a real choice.”

“Different. Not always a choice. The disabled person may not want sugar. They may want honey. Or Earl Grey. Or a black coffee. Agency is not about picking between any two options. It is about exercising choice on the ones you want.”

“Standard political theory. Electors cannot have all the choices they want. The world is messy. Some options contradict each other. You cannot have low taxes and high spending. Budgetary arithmetic stops it.”

“People know that. That is why modern democracy runs through representatives. You elect someone to make the trade-offs. The book says the missing agency lies elsewhere.”

“Are you talking about gerrymandering, where voters go to the polls knowing the result has been pre-decided by redistricting? The terms swing states and marginal constituencies admit not every vote counts equally?”

Another added “Or where activists in primaries put candidates on the ballot most voters do not agree with but have no choice but to vote for or against?”

“Partly. You are less likely to feel democracy is legitimate if you vote knowing it changes nothing. Or knowing other voters elsewhere, not you, will decide. Or that the choice available is not the one you would like. But that is not what turns a democracy into a kayfabocracy.”

“Then what does?”

“Think of it this way. Politics deals you a hand.”

“A hand of cards?”

“One party offers you one hand. Low taxes, small state, tight borders, hard policing, minimal welfare. The other party offers you a different one. High taxes, big state, open borders, soft policing, generous welfare. You take this hand or that hand. You cannot ask for one card from each.”

“That is just budgetary arithmetic.”

“Some of it is . Coalition arithmetic packs some cards. Party machinery packs others. The result is that you get offered two hands. Take one or the other. No swaps between them.”

“And if neither hand has what you wanted?”

“You choose the least bad and do not feel democracy is legitimate.”

“So that is kayfabocracy.”

“No. It is only the first trouble. The second is decisive. Voters look around—at other tables, where other citizens play the same game. They watch them. And they seem to keep getting better cards. The dealer appears to be slipping them aces. You as a citizen in a democracy begin to wonder whether your democracy is honest.”

“You think the dealer is bent.”

“You may be right. You may be wrong. Correctness is not what matters here. What does is how it looks. From your table, does it appear that the dealer is giving aces at one table and twos to yours?”

“So the question is no longer the hand.”

“No. The question is the dealer. Who chose the deck? Who shuffles? Who deals which cards to which table? The cube and the teaspoon still sit in front of you. But now you are asking who put them there—who left the honey, the Earl Grey, the coffee off the menu—and who is being served what you cannot order.”

The Kayfabocracy

The book was held up. Some definitions were read out.

A kayfabocracy begins to exist when voters feel the institutions meant to provide democratic legitimacy for government no longer work. The dealt cards stop legitimacy circulating through them. The cards dealt by the state are from a game played elsewhere against them. Democratic legitimacy is experienced as fake.

Four things turn a democracy into a kayfabocracy.

[1] Democratic drift. Voters watch the deck. The same hands keep coming back. The same faces at the same tables. The deck, they suspect, is not being reshuffled—it is being passed around an inner circle. The dealer is no longer playing the room. They are playing for the establishment.

[2] The rise of entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur walks in. They look at the dealer. They say: I see what you have been doing. The deck is bent. The aces are at that table. The twos are here. Elect me and I will rip up the establishment.

[3] The democratic paradox. The dealer and their friends cry ‘foul.’ The entrepreneur is a cheat. They are right, the entrepreneur does want to take over democracy. But every such cry seems to come from the establishment dealing the hands and so provides proof that supports the entrepreneur.

[4] The democratic tragedy. The problem is not the entrepreneur but the legitimacy gap they exploit. But while everyone fights the would-be autocrat they fail to fix the plumbing of democratic legitimacy that would take the wind out of the entrepreneur’s electoral sails.

“So kayfabocracy is about optics that end up killing democracy’s legitimacy in the eyes of voters. The disconnect may be real or imagined. But if voters experience that legitimacy has stopped circulating between them and their government—that creates an opening for entrepreneurs to offer to fix it.”

“Yes, and the book points out the irony is that no one looks at the plumbing.”

“That is it in a nutshell.”

“But why kayfabocracy?”

The Entrepreneur Sandblaster

“Have you ever watched professional wrestling?”

“No—but my mum does.”

“Wrestling used to be a real sport. Two fighters, a real struggle, one winner. But promoters found they drew bigger crowds when the matches were scripted, with storylines. At first, they kept the scripting secret. Then it leaked.”

“And the fans walked away.”

“They did not mind.”

“But surely it insulted them—they are being conned with made-up stuff?”

“The opposite happened. The fans got a kind of ironic self-respect from being in on the secret. The joke was not on them but on outsiders who still took the bouts to be real ones.”

“So kayfabocracy arises when this experience happens to politics?”

“That is the link. But politics differs. Elections are consequential. The stakes do not change. What changes is how they are experienced. Voters no longer feel the vote connects them to their government—that the legitimacy link has been scripted. That is an opportunity. An entrepreneur comes along.”

“To do what?”

“To canvass: ‘You know this is fake. I know this is fake. Let’s stop pretending.’ The entrepreneur runs as a sandblaster against the establishment dealing out the cards and scripting it as done honestly in its norms of civility, process, deference to expertise.”

“Ah, so they say elections are scripted nonsense.”

“No! They honor democracy in words. The ring stays. The crowd stays. What gets questioned is what happens inside the ring. The entrepreneur says it is kayfabe. And let’s have fun pulling the pretense. Stop the joke being on you. Let’s make it on the establishment that thought you couldn’t see them stacking the odds. Vote for me and you can respect yourself again.”

“So the entrepreneur turns democratic legitimacy against itself.”

“And here is the paradox. The defenders of democratic institutions cry out that the entrepreneur is a threat to democracy. But every cry confirms what the entrepreneur says—the establishment is running a con on them. Look, they are protesting to keep that trick on you going. Ironically, every cry of ‘autocrat’ just gets heard as proof.”

“ Voters feel, finally—someone who is not performing. If the foxes running the henhouse are squawking, the entrepreneur must be getting at the truth.”

Voters are not idiots

“But those defending democratic institutions are right. An entrepreneur that sandblasts the norms of civility, honesty, and good manners is a threat, and once in office will demolish every restraint that stands in their way.”

“It is almost baked in that this will happen.”

“Not necessarily—democratic institutions may still hold—democracy is a tough old bird where it has been established for hundreds of years. But it will still be touch and go.”

“But the entrepreneur promises reform by sandblasting the establishment?”

“All they do is change the locks while saying they are making new ones. The sandblaster replaces the establishment with whatever they want as the new owners.”

“That’s awful. Did not Churchill warn that ‘Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’?”

“So kayfabocracy is standard autocratic takeover by a new route. Once the entrepreneur gains office, democratic institutions get sandblasted out into Potemkin facades. Elections still get held but the result is foregone. Everything pretty much described in Autocracy for Dummies and the other books.”

Voters and optics

“So those voting for them are idiots.”

“They are anything but. They are sensible citizens who judge and decide at the polling stations in a mature and responsible way.”

“How can you say that?”

“The entrepreneur is an entrepreneur—they spotted an opening. They responded to something real. You may judge they made the wrong voting decision. But they would reply: what is the alternative?”

“You’ve gone crazy. Nothing is worse than an autocrat.”

“What if you think democracy is already against you—and here is the one candidate offering a fix?”

“I do not understand.”

“Let me argue what I do not necessarily agree with. This is not about making verdicts—but showing how people may reasonably come to feel that government done in their name is done against them. Consider 2008.”

“The year Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.”

“Congress bailed out American banks with $700 billion of taxpayers’ money. Many executives at the rescued institutions drew large bonuses from those bailout funds. Iceland jailed its bankers. America jailed its bankers after earlier banking crashes. After 2008, not one.”

“That was wrong.”

“Not necessarily. A rational government may have had no other option. I am not judging.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“How does that look to the get-out-of-bed American who earns just enough to get by? Nearly half of Americans have a family member who has done time. No one should break the law. But ordinary people know that those like them, especially when young, make mistakes. In some states, stealing goods worth $200 can put you in a cell. In others, possession of less than 10 grams of cocaine might get you 18 months—five years for more. What do such people see? One table got dealt $700 billion and a clean slate. Their table got dealt 18 months for 10 grams of cocaine.”

“That was outrageous.”

“Not necessarily. Keep on the optics. The bailout may have been needed. No crimes may have been committed. But the hands, even if they are not, have the appearance of being uneven.”

“There are others.”

“Such as?”

“Trade agreements like NAFTA and China’s entry into the WTO. Consider what Larry Summers said to Congress.”

The book was opened again and the following read out.

It has sometimes been remarked that asking five economists a question will generate ten different answers. On this issue there has been only one answer: that welcoming China into the global economic system is right for the American economy

“Larry Summers—was he not the Harvard President who was buddies with Jeffrey Epstein from 1998 to 2019? He even asked Epstein, a day before his arrest, how to pursue a sexual relationship with a woman he described as a ‘mentee.’”

“That is so. But be careful. Summers’ toxic relationship with Epstein does not mean he was wrong about open trade agreements.”

“But he was wrong—the evidence is all the factories that closed, and the jobs gone.”

“Not so. It may be that without the trade agreements, America would have been much poorer. The issue is not whether he was right or wrong—it is what it looks like outside Wall Street and in economics departments, on Main Street and in the gig work economy. People can see someone unlike them arguing for free trade, and then the factories where they and their friends and relatives once had good-paying jobs, gone. Same deck. But Wall Street’s hand gets aces, while factory towns get shutdown signs.”

“So it is like the politicians who broke COVID restrictions and partied. Factually, they might have been within the lockdown rules and so done nothing wrong. But explain that to mourners banned from attending the funerals of their loved ones.”

“Absolutely. Same deck. The politicians got the party hand. The mourners got the locked door.”

“Absolutely.”

“Or with immigrants. CEOs get bonuses and Wall Street profits from them as cheaper labor. And the rich benefit from paying less for nannies and cleaners. But it is also possible that immigration also leaves everyone better off. But that gain is not visible.”

“So what ordinary people see—or think they see—is immigrants competing with them for jobs.”

“The positive reality may be hidden—it might be that immigrants take jobs no one wants and that they increase, through the taxes they pay, everyone’s wealth. As a result, decisions are felt to be made against the ‘little person’ and for the rich. Same deck. The CEO’s hand: bonuses and a cheaper nanny. The worker’s hand: a rival for getting work.”

“But remember, the issue is not whether economists are right or wrong. The gut reactions of ordinary people may be the correct ones. What would have happened if trade policy had been done differently can never be known. However, the issue is not that but perceptions—and they matter—because it is perceptions that shape how people vote. If voters feel a disconnect that will change what they do at the voting machine.”

“So modern democracies are doomed to go through a stage of kayfabocracy and end up autocracies.”

“R.I.P. western democracy.”

The Plumbing

America’s Unused Plumbing

“The answer lies in Coriolanus.”

“But that was written four hundred years ago about a polity two millennia before that.”

“What can Shakespeare say that might help stop a kayfabocracy?”

“Remember the scene where Coriolanus refuses to stop his plan to sack Rome. Cominius fails. Menenius tries. Only one thing stops him. A reconnection. Democracy fails the same way. Its institutions stop connecting electors with their government. They cease to circulate legitimacy between voters and how they are governed. That disconnect, and the opening it gives to entrepreneurs, is what ends them. The answer to kayfabocracy is to reconnect people to Congress.”

“Oh, you are going now to give a pie-in-the-sky reform of democracy. Sorry, they all need constitutional amendments, and among other hurdles, ratification by three-fourths of the states. That’s never going to happen. It’s best to defend existing democratic institutions.”

“You’re right—people look at American democracy, see faults, and say ‘we need X.’ And X has a hailstone-in-hell chance of happening. But what if American democracy once did something? And it could be returned to do it without any constitutional amendments?”

“But still it will need Congressional agreement. And you know Congress has nearly ceased passing laws.”

“What if individual states slotted something into their existing democratic institutions? Once electors saw it work at state level or even in other countries, candidates to Congress would feel they had to put it on their ticket?”

“You are teasing me.”

“Let me start with Woodrow Wilson’s observation: ‘Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.’ From that you would imagine the US Constitution laid down that Congress should have committees. But read it—the word ‘committee’ is AWOL.”

“As with ‘slaves’ and ‘democracy.’”

“That omission is doubly odd, because the Constitution itself was drafted by two of them—the Committee of Detail and the Committee of Style and Arrangement. The drafters wrote a skeleton. They left to future Americans to add the flesh needed to give it life.”

“So constitutional space exists for extra legitimacy plumbing.”

“You just have to find a way to slot it into what already once existed and turn it on again—new tech might make that doable in ways that had not been earlier possible.”

“Still—you said the plumbing once existed. I do not yet see any unused pipes lying around that could connect voters back to their government.”

Advisory Juries

“There is one. Juries. They once connected voters to their government and were seen as key to democracy in America. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about them, in a book aptly titled Democracy in America.”

A page was opened, and a passage read out:

The jury is, above all, a political institution, and it must be regarded in this light in order to be duly appreciated. By the jury I mean a certain number of citizens chosen by lot and invested with a temporary right of judging. … it places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or of a portion of the governed, and not in that of the government. Chapter XVI

“Democracy is not just elections. Juries are also part of it.”

“But haven’t you forgotten something? In modern courts, juries deal only with civil and criminal cases. Yes, in Athens, in the dikasterion, citizens also dealt with political issues, and in the Nomothetai they reviewed and passed new laws. But that is not how a modern democracy works.”

“I will answer—”

A second voice cut in. “Even if juries once played that role, they could not do that now without extensive legislation. And, to contradict you, without constitutional and fundamental change that would be politically impossible.”

“To both of you: the book has an answer. We don’t need to rebuild the dikasterion, and we don’t need much new legislation. Few people realize it, but modern American courts do not always empanel juries to give legally binding verdicts. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 39(c), let federal judges in civil cases empanel advisory juries. Their job, in the law’s own words is ‘to enlighten the conscience of the court.’”

At this, the speaker pulled out a printout from the Harvard Law Review.

“I was reading this before I came. The article is titled ‘Practice and Potential of the Advisory Jury.’”

They then read out several passages from it:

[a judge may] appoint at his discretion an advisory jury “to enlighten the conscience of the court.” … Few formal constraints limit the modern trial judge’s use of the advisory jury. (100 Harv. L. Rev. 1363).

“The key phrase is ‘enlighten the conscience.’ The jury does not bind the judge, who can ignore its assessment. On appeal, the judge’s findings override whatever the advisory jury concluded.”

“But why do judges seek advice they can throw out? It seems like a waste of everyone’s time.”

“The article explains. A judge who empanels an advisory jury does so to listen:”

In practice, however, a judge who believes it worthwhile to empanel such a jury will likely find it worthwhile to listen to what that jury has to say. … the advisory verdict is like an additional piece of evidence: the verdict “is only part of the data taken into consideration in arriving at the court’s independent conclusion.”

“Advisory juries widen the circle of who gets to shape how law is applied. They let community norms enter legal judgment”:

[t]his participation can restrain the impact of class biases on the legal order through the influence of broader community norms. … Like the jury by right, the advisory jury expands community participation in the application of the law. As one commentator has stated: “The jury system . . . engrafts community values onto our law … It is difficult to conceive of a better mechanism than the jury for mirroring community values and establishing standards to which members of the community must conform … [T]he jury is an instrument of participatory democracy.”

“Judges, after all, don’t mirror the communities they serve. They are often white, male, middle-aged, affluent, and formally educated.”

… judges poorly reflect the broader community. Judges are far more consistently white, formally educated, male, middle aged, and affluent than the broader community that sits on juries. Judges’ narrow backgrounds inevitably create biases.

“Well, that is all very interesting. But it is not plumbing. You promised pipes that once connected citizens to the government.”

Grand Juries

“Grand juries.”

“But those have nothing to do with politics. They are just a pretrial procedure before federal prosecutions, as they remain in about half the states.”

“Correct—for today, that is so. But go back in a time-machine to the colonial period and the first decades of the 19th century, and they dealt with political issues. It is only since then that their function has been cut down to a pretrial procedure. The democracy that came from England to America originally included—like the ancient Greeks—a jury circulation between citizens, randomly selected, and their government.”

“Here is an example. In 1681, King Charles II sought to get a grand jury to indict Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, for treason. Shaftesbury led the opposition to the King—the charge was political. The grand jurors refused to indict.”

Someone produced a printout—John Somers’s The Security of Englishmen’s Lives: or the Trust, Power, and Duty of Grand Juries of England Explained. Actually there were two copies. But only the top was seen by the others.

“I cannot read that—it’s got all those ‘f’ spellings of the letter ‘s’ you get in 17th‑century printing. I can see on the cover Englifh, Firft, oppofite, and houfe.”

“That is why I gave it to an LLM and asked it to turn its pages into readable output. I will read one paragraph.”

Grand juries are our only security, in as much as our lives cannot be drawn into jeopardy by all the malicious crafts of the devil, unless such a number of our honest countrymen shall be satisfied in the truth of the accusations.

“I bet Somers got jailed for writing that.”

“No. He ended up Lord Chancellor, then was President of the Royal Society—you might have heard of the guy that followed him—Isaac Newton.”

“Impressive.”

“Somers also helped draft the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which shaped both the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment’s grand jury clause—’No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury’—comes from that. As does ‘subjects … may have arms for their defence’—the origin of the ‘right to bear arms’ of the Second Amendment”

New England’s Civic Backbone: Citizens Inspect the Machine

“But Somers is not describing grand juries as a means by which citizens connect with government—only a means to stop government, using prosecution to persecute its opponents.”

“I have an answer for that.”

A library book was taken out of a bag—Richard Younger’s The People’s Panel: The Grand Jury in the United States, 1634–1941 (Brown University Press, 1963).

“Grand juries started fifteen years after the Mayflower—in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, March 1635. New Plymouth followed the next year. They connected citizens to government of their own lives.”

The following was read from the book:

seventeen grand jurors attended the March session of the General Court of New Plymouth. As in Massachusetts, they had been elected by the town meetings. Governor William Bradford charged the jurymen that they “must enquire of all abuses within the body of the government,”

“But that is still not about connecting citizens to their government.”

“Did you not hear? All abuses within the body of the government. That gave ordinary citizens as a jury the right—to check up on how their town was run, and to identify government abuse.”

They then read another passage:

In 1638, a grand jury rebuked the Town of Sandwich “for not having their swine ringed,” complained of the lack of surveyors for repairing the highway. … In 1654, a jury condemned the condition of the highway between Plymouth and Sandwich and inquired why nothing had been done to repair the Jones River and South River bridges presented by previous grand juries. In 1655, jurors objected that the Town of Plymouth had no standards of measure. … In 1690, the General Court ordered each juryman to visit families in his town whom he suspected of neglecting the order to teach all children to read.

“Look, grand juries were not just about prosecution. They were about roads, pigs, honest weights, children taught to read—the working of a juror’s own town.”

Grand Juries in California

“I stand corrected. American democracy did have juries that dealt with political issues.”

A second voice added. “Grand juries still have that role in California.”

“You are right—but they are not proper juries. Nobody gets randomly picked. People volunteer. Judges vet them and create a short list. A random selection is made from that short list.”

“Does that matter?”

“It does if you want legitimacy. Democratic legitimacy by jury comes from knowing their verdicts come from the electorate in statistical miniature. California’s volunteers are not that. And there are at most only 23 of them on any jury. You also did not mention why they have to be volunteers—the commitment is 20 to 25 hours a week, for a year. And while they might deal with some issues of government, they are restricted to the running of local authority bodies.”

“So there is nothing here to build new legitimacy plumbing.”

Another person agreed. “The California grand jury gains its authority from the court that impanels it. This is not like the Athenian dikasterion jury court, which drew its authority from being, in miniature, the citizenship. Juries are a good idea but a dead end.”

“The book suggests otherwise. It suggests building on the idea of ‘enlighten the conscience’ and applying it to Congress and any other body that legislates—that is, passes laws or makes rules.”

“What—state legislatures? Down to school boards?”

“Yes. And not just the United States—any country with elected bodies—Knesset, Bundestag, Riksdag, and the National Assemblies and Parliaments of other democracies. Even bodies that are appointed, not elected.”

“You have me intrigued. What magic source is proposed?”

“All legislatures appoint committees, and those committees make reports after hearing expert advice. This is the slot-in. At present one source of advice is missing—what a random sample of ordinary citizens might judge on the issues in that report. Ordinary legislation, not constitutional amendments could create them.”

Extra Act: The Doggy Bag

Now you do something to end kayfabocracy

The person who had been reading told everyone to stop and click congress.gov/browse on their phones. Go to the Congress dropdown and pick any one back to the 104th (earlier ones lack the needed online records), go to “committees,” and grab any House, Senate, or Conference report.

Copy the URL. Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another LLM with this prompt:

Analyze this congressional report as if designing questions for a 441-person citizen jury (Athenian dikasterion model). Extract 8–15 votable questions that: [1] ordinary adults can decide after hearing expert testimony, [2] involve policy outcomes and value trade-offs as experienced in citizens’ lives, [3] have genuine adversarial positions with reasonable people on both sides, [4] capture the core contested issues in the bill. For each question provide: clear neutral phrasing, 3–5 arguments FOR, 3–5 arguments AGAINST, explanation of why it’s a value judgment rather than a purely technical question, and whether it logically depends on other questions. Exclude any matters that might be deemed to concern Article I, § 5 of the U.S. Constitution.

They then read the output. The LLM turns a committee report into 8 to 15 votable questions any citizen might decide after hearing for and against arguments.

The person showed them a report ChatGPT produced from the House Committee on Natural Resources report on the Save Our Sequoias Act:

https://www.congress.gov/committee-report/118th-congress/house-report/927/1

The first question returned.

Should Congress authorize “emergency” powers allowing federal land agencies to bypass certain environmental reviews (e.g., NEPA, ESA, NHPA) for up to seven years to protect sequoias?

FOR:

• Speeds urgent wildfire mitigation; paperwork costs days while groves burn.
• Builds on existing emergency precedents (California’s state actions, Tahoe Basin categorical exclusion).
• Keeps projects ecologically targeted and time-limited.
• Saves taxpayer money by avoiding colossal restoration bills after fires.

AGAINST:

• Thins environmental oversight and could open the door to wider regulatory rollbacks.
• Skips public participation and tribal consultation during review.
• Raises the odds of unintended ecological damage from rushed mechanical thinning or chemical treatments.
• “Emergency” powers could be extended without end, slowly sanding down review requirements.

Ten more questions followed.

“Wow,” someone exclaimed. “AI could reinvigorate democratic legitimacy.”

“That’s the idea. LLMs can turn committee reports—read by almost nobody—into questions any citizen might vote on. The votable questions have always existed, but extracting them meant someone reading hundreds of pages, identifying contested issues, phrasing questions neutrally, and compiling arguments. That made it impracticable.”

“LLMs could, therefore, reinvigorate democracy by opening up a new pipe of legitimacy.”

“Notice the opportunity. Committees are already set up to get expert advice. This is just another source—one arguably more important than any other—what ordinary people might think about the proposed legislation. It is not replacing anything that already exists. It’s about enhancing it.”

“So how would it work?”

The person who bought Kayfabocracy: A Wee Short Introduction then read parts of its last chapter while summarizing them.

A statistical America in Congress

Congress and its committee members, like judges, don’t resemble America.

Congress is about 70–75% male; America is half female. Somewhere between a quarter and nearly half of members went to Ivy League schools—places that teach fewer than 1% of Americans. Lawyers hold roughly 40% of congressional seats. In the country at large? Less than half a percent.

The Supreme Court is worse. Eight of nine current Justices went to Harvard or Yale Law. Every president in American history has been male. Forty-five of forty-six have been white. Every Democrat elected president since 1980 went to law school.

Citizens see these figures and conclude. Government of people unlike them. By people unlike them. For people unlike them.

Congress needs to hear America

Right now, Congress has no reliable way to learn what ordinary citizens would choose if they had the time to understand the laws written in their name. And the committee report exists to create law that, outside the Capitol, will shape their lives. Committees need a voice they currently lack: a readout from Americans who have been fully briefed on the details and the trade-offs. Not what pundits guess Americans think. What citizens, informed, actually think.

No committee can ask every one of the 244 million eligible voters. Even at 30 minutes each, the conversations would take nearly 14,000 years. And there are nearly a thousand committees and subcommittees in each Congress.

But a statistically random sample in the hundreds—the Athenian dikasterion rebuilt for a modern democracy—would give you that citizen judgment. Mini-America’s voice, speaking not instead of elected representatives, but alongside them, enlightening their conscience, making sure their work had an anchor in the citizens whose lives their legislation will affect.

A jury of 441 citizens, drawn from across the country, would supply exactly that. Random sampling has a power: large enough draws don’t drift far from the population they come from. The verdict wouldn’t be the view of Washington. It would be a statistically grounded view, after hearing evidence and argument, of the nation.

Why 441? That’s the full membership of the House of Representatives: 435 voting members plus six nonvoting delegates. The jury mirrors Congress’s size while directly representing the electorate.

C-SPAN would televise these juries. That happens at present to Congress and its committees. But here people would see people no different from themselves and their neighbors—ordinary Americans, not politicians, not lobbyists, not policy hobbyists.

How a mini-America grand jury runs

Authority without command

Jurors would be empaneled to hear FOR and AGAINST cases on each votable question extracted from committee reports, then cast advisory votes. C-SPAN would broadcast the proceedings. Any American could hear what jurors hear, watch in real time, and see people like them reaching conclusions.

One constitutional clause limits these juries. Article I, Section 5 says: “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” Outside bodies can’t meddle in Congress’s internal affairs—and mini-America juries would not. They would advise on questions that shape American lives outside Congress, not on Congress’s internal mechanics.

That fits common sense. Voters have already decided who enters Congress. As Australians say, you “voted the bastards in.” They don’t need a second bite at that apple.

But while voters select representatives, they can’t know the future details of legislation when they cast their ballots.

And legislation is complex—that’s why committees exist: to work through details. Congress, however, still needs a way to touch base with informed citizen judgment. It exists to represent people. Mini-America grand juries—America in statistical miniature—would give that.

It would add to Congress’s authority. Tocqueville noticed that in America juries increase judicial authority. You’d think letting amateurs into court would weaken a judge’s standing. Tocqueville saw the reverse. When the community participates, a ruling has the stamp of its approval. A judge alone speaks as one person. A judge backed by a jury speaks with the voice of the people.

In England and in America the judges exercise an influence upon criminal trials which the French judges have never possessed. … The jury, then, which seems to restrict the rights of magistracy, does in reality consolidate its power, and in no country are the judges so powerful as there, where the people partakes their privileges. (Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Chapter XVI, Part II, “Trial By Jury In The United States Considered As A Political Institution,” translated by Henry Reeve.)

Mini-America grand juries would give committee reports a status they presently lack. On C-SPAN, jurors wouldn’t be lobbyists hunting favors or specialists with narrow technical command—except for one expertise that matters here: what it feels like to live as an ordinary American. They’d look like everyone else. Not K Street. Main Street. And that would give back to Congress status it has lost.

The impact of juries wouldn’t come from taking power from committees—they and Congress would still keep that. It would come from the authority of deciding what the country, if it heard what they heard, would conclude.

That’s why these advisory votes have punch. When 441 randomly selected Americans, after hearing full arguments, vote 80–20 against a provision, they aren’t commanding Congress. They’re delivering a finding with authority: the people who lent you this power would reject this proposal if they heard what we just heard. Congress can override that. But it has to do it in daylight—and later answer for it at town halls during elections.

1: Hundreds of Jurors

Start with what we already do. Courts summon citizens for jury duty every day. Names get pulled from lists, notices go out, people show up. Mini-America grand juries would work the same way—with one difference—size.

That is critical. Not only for statistical reasons—though the math helps—but for legitimacy. When Americans see 441 randomly selected citizens, they see themselves. When 441 people vote, their verdict can’t be dismissed as a handful of activists or a stacked panel. It’s government of people like you, by people like you, for people like you.

On C-SPAN, they’ll recognize themselves—people who look like their neighbors, their coworkers, themselves—taking public questions seriously, listening hard, weighing evidence, deciding responsibly.

Without that window, the mini-electorate jury loses its claim to speak for the people and becomes another remote institution.

2: Random Draw, Compulsory

No voir dire. No lawyers studying your face, guessing whether you’ll favor their side. If your name comes up, you serve. Full stop.

That sounds severe until you remember citizenship already has its demands. You pay taxes. If you’re male and between 18 and 25, you register with Selective Service—the draft machinery that is dormant but still legally alive. These are duties tied to what it means to be an American citizen. Mini-America jury service would join that list. You serve because American democracy needs its citizens to judge, the way its defense sometimes needs them to fight.

Compulsion is necessary. Make it voluntary and you get self-selection bias, and the jury stops being America-in-miniature.

Given the number of committee reports, every working day, many juries would need to sit. This would allow randomization not only of jurors to juries but of juries to committee reports.

3: One Day

The Athenian dikasteria handled complicated disputes inside a single day. Arguments from both sides. Questions from jurors. Deliberation. Voting. All between sunrise and sunset. Jury judgment does not need days. Mini-America grand juries would have similar quickness. Not sprawling trials with procedural thickets and endless delay—more like the Supreme Court, which limits oral arguments from both sides to an hour.

They would take a day, plus travel on either end. Most taking part would find them meaningful. How often does an American citizen get the opportunity to be inside the legislative process of their Congress?

Day One: Arrival. Oath-taking. Orientation. People fly in from across a continent. They find their hotel rooms. They get their bearings. And something else begins. People meet. They start talking. Four hundred forty-one strangers begin turning into a temporary republic.

Day Two: The work. The issue is unveiled for the first time. Arguments roll out—FOR and AGAINST on each question. Jurors send questions through designated panelists. Then the votes, by secret ballot.

Day Three: The closing. The formal decisions are done. Now there’s time to absorb what happened. To talk it through. To swap contact details. To say goodbye. The procedure ends—but the civic experience doesn’t end. They arrived as strangers from every corner of America. They leave as citizens who practiced democracy together.

Why three days minimum? Because you can’t have people drifting in late on voting day or slipping out early before the count. One full day—given entirely to hearing arguments and casting ballots—is non-negotiable.

Will some issues take more? Some subjects may need two days of presentation. Longer sequestration means bigger costs—more time away from jobs, children, and ordinary life. But most questions will fit inside a single day. The design needs elasticity. Practice will show what actually works.

4: The Oath and No Group Talk

All jurors would swear an oath. Here is a draft:

I do solemnly swear or affirm, before my fellow citizens and in service to the Republic:

That I will discharge the duties of a legislative advisory juror with fidelity and impartiality;

That I will judge according to the arguments and evidence presented in these proceedings, seeking truth through reason and not through passion, prejudice, or outside influence;

That I will respect both the rights of those who stand before me and the perspectives of my fellow citizens who deliberate alongside me;

That I will cast my vote according to my honest and considered judgment of what is just, equitable, and conducive to the common welfare;

That I recognize the solemn responsibility entrusted to me as a voice of the sovereign people in the making of our laws.

To these obligations I pledge myself freely and fully, and may I be held accountable if I fail in their fulfillment.

So help me God [or “This I do affirm” for those who prefer a secular affirmation]

These juries don’t deliberate. So no structured group debate. No facilitated march toward consensus. No carefully moderated conversations engineered to produce agreement.

Instead, jurors vote individually, right after hearing the arguments.

Brazil does something similar. In the Tribunal do Júri, jurors vote in complete isolation—incomunicabilidade, the courts call it. No discussion. Each juror answers yes or no to specific questions—quesitos.

Mini-America grand juries would follow that logic.

But no formal deliberation doesn’t mean silence.

Between sessions, there is constant informal contact. The teacher from Ohio sits beside the grocery clerk from Nevada at lunch. The nurse from Florida talks with the veteran from Kansas while waiting for the hearing to begin. Small talk. Shared meals. They’re human beings meeting together for a common purpose.

And through that, something crucial happens—which is why they need to be sequestered.

5: Conclave

Lock 441 Americans in a room together, cut off their phones. It’s essential. Here is why.

Without it, targeted messages would arrive. Lobbying campaigns tuned to individual jurors. Pressure from personal networks—your neighbor, your boss, your cousin with strong opinions. Invisible threads tugging at decisions that are supposed to be made in public view. Viewers on C-SPAN would see the hearing. They wouldn’t see those hidden strings pulled on jurors.

The basis of judgment has to be public and equal. Anything that affects the verdict should be visible on C-SPAN to the country watching.

But sequestration does more—it creates the emotional core of democracy—the experience of shared stake—the interdependence of being on the same “national” boat.

Without it, a jury is just 441 strangers casting isolated votes. With it, they become—a temporary body politic. People who have looked each other in the eye, shared meals, and know that their fates are intertwined. They are a polity in miniature.

Jurors thus need to be an American citizen conclave.

It is also practical. Jurors have already flown in from every state. They’re already staying in hotels. Sequestration isn’t an added burden so much as the most efficient way to organize what’s already the case.

Think of how criminal trials handle sequestered juries in high-profile cases. Or how the Vatican conclave works when cardinals gather to elect a new pope—sealed together, eating together, waiting together, shaped by the pressure of a shared task. Mini-America grand jurors would be similar conclaves. Meals together. Bus rides from hotel to hearing room together. Democratic judgment as a shared responsibility done together.

As in trials, jurors must judge only what’s formally presented. No outside searching. No private reading. That constraint is what ties mini-America inside the room to America watching outside. Both groups hear the same information and arguments. The jury’s votes become a stand-in for what informed citizens hearing the same evidence might decide.

Social media is a challenge and would borrow from what is already done in major trials. During hearing hours, jurors hand over phones, tablets, laptops. Off-hours, they might call family on monitored landlines or use time-limited devices under supervision. “Clean” phones—devices with only essentials: calls or texts to pre-approved contacts.

Mini-America sequestration would build on what has already been learned.

6: Secret Ballot

The vote must be private. Private in the sense that no one—not fellow jurors, not Congress, not the viewing public—can ever know how a citizen voted.

What the jury would do to America

Millions Watching

Impact would come from the millions of American citizens watching their proceedings on C-SPAN. Those viewers would hear what jurors hear and reach their own conclusions. But crucially, they’d be watching people like themselves—ordinary Americans from every walk of life—who, after taking oaths to be responsible and in a focused room, wrestle with hard policy as they might.

Mini-America juries through C-SPAN would plug into the third rail of American politics: the electorate itself.

The Price Tag

What would it cost to give every American one paid, three-day stretch of participating directly in democracy?

Once per lifetime. Spread across 61 adult years, from 18 to 79. The cost: about $1,275 per citizen. That is around $21 per year of adult life. Less than most Americans spend monthly on streaming subscriptions.

Or scaled nationally: about $5 billion per year. Spread across 330 million people, roughly $15 per person annually.

The arithmetic: 240 million adult citizens divided by 61 eligible years gives about 3.93 million citizens serving each year. At 441 per jury, that is roughly 8,900 juries annually. Spread across 250 working days: about 36 juries per day.

Large, but not unworkable. The federal court system already holds thousands of jury trials each year across 94 districts. This is in the same order of magnitude.

The cost per juror: round-trip airfare ($500), two nights’ lodging ($300), three days’ meals ($225), juror pay at the federal rate ($150), facilities, staff, and administration (~$100). Total: about $1,275.

Put that beside what is already spent. Congress itself costs around $5–6 billion a year. The 2020 election cycle was $14.4 billion.

Athens also paid dikastikon jurors. Total annual cost: 22 to 37 talents—a fraction of the cost of a military campaign. The Athenians understood that the price of oversight is small compared to the cost of unexamined power.

Back to Coriolanus

In the person of Coriolanus, Shakespeare showed what doomed a polity: circulation that could reattach elsewhere. A kayfabocracy exists because voters watch that happen—and watch democracy pass them by and detach itself from them.

Those voters experience removal of their electoral agency—creating an opening for an entrepreneur to offer—through them—an alternative circulation. If a hypothetical entrepreneur were to gain office, the wrong reaction would be to call them antidemocratic and a threat. The right reaction is to replumb legitimacy back in. If states can redistrict within months, they can legislate mini-electorate juries as urgently to shadow their own state legislative workings. If successful, these juries will occasionally challenge whatever group holds power. They are not backdoors to get policies supported. They are plumbing between citizens and their government. Conflict with the party that starts them is a plus to be welcomed—it shows they are not party political.

An aside on a potential bias. In grade 4, I was the only one of 60 held back a year (my teachers told my parents I was “mentally retarded”). Later, between grades 7 and 11, I went to a school that later closed for lack of students. It taught practical subjects like metalwork and had its own farm (I learned to milk cows). Across the valley from the school I saw the buildings of the largest local employer; it soon shut. As an adult, I was expected to work on a farm. But like JD Vance, I ended up at one of the top six global universities (third by some measures, such as leaders of international organizations). My fellow undergraduates had famous relatives. One casually mentioned, “my dad is the third or fourth (I forget which) richest man in Singapore.” I have lived with the most academically educated and the least (school friends in remedial class as they could not read). Of my uneducated classmates, I think all of them capable of responsible thought and decision. I would trust all as jurors to make responsible judgments, including political ones. Many political thinkers see ordinary people as defective. I do not. The reader should be aware of this potential bias. Footnotes back a claim, and they also point the curious where to look further. The second job an LLM now does better—paste the claim into one and you’ll get a better reference list than I can squeeze in here. What follows is highly pruned. The contest stops me from citing my own work, as that would identify me. If the ideas below interest you, vote me to the finals and I’ll open a Substack with more.