Set artificial intelligence (AI) loose on dense documents and winding email threads, and it cuts through clutter like a hot knife through butter. Applied at scale, AI could modernize old bureaucratic structures within four years. Because government is the peak of bureaucratic inefficiency, it will become the primary target for AI’s heat-seeking mission to destroy time-sucking exercises that look like work but produce nothing, leaving three paths for our future: (a) government uses AI to better serve the public; (b) government resists AI, only to be bypassed by hyper-efficient alternatives; or (c) government seizes the AI toolset to consolidate power for greater totalitarianism. All signs point toward the third outcome.
Government is a vector for control technologies rather than capacity enhancement. Incentives are misaligned because there is no price signal, and personal accountability is diffuse if not absent altogether. The product is the organization itself. And so, predictive surveillance, automated narrative enforcement, resource allocation, behavior modification, and centralized planning with vastly better tools than Stalin’s will seek to extinguish expansionary truth-seeking, human sovereignty and excellence, beauty and monumentality, and self-reliance grounded in particular peoples. Bureaucracies rarely deploy new tools to diminish themselves. The highest-probability path for AI is absorption into a KGB 2.0.
Creedal nationalists are preparing this path. The impotent, recessed soul of the conservative fashions a creedal architectural system so he may sit back to receive its automatic deliverables. He treats America as abstract propositional ideas severable from ethnic, cultural, or historical substrate, severable from any metaphysics or ideals. Most importantly, he treats America as severable from the personhood of its sovereigns. This strange brand of creedal egalitarianism is a political strategy of empire: a flattened landscape where differences, superiorities, and excellences must be destroyed in the name of reducing the human condition to its lowest common denominator in order to trawl up as much taxation territory as possible. A creedal nationalist is a leveler in a different suit.
Reducing a nation to a creed is the act of swapping the map for the script. The map is the territory: the embodied, directional reality of a particular people, their history, demographic and phenotypic substrate, transmitted habits, aesthetic and spiritual orientations, and the civilizational telos that orients action across generations. The script is the abstract set of propositions, liberty, equality, rights, detached and universalized. When the script replaces the map, wayfinding becomes impossible. The nation loses any coherent sense of what it is optimizing for beyond the immediate metrics or preferences of state managers.
America is presented as a disembodied cogito floating independent of history and human nature, a propositional container for an ideological franchise open to all subscribers. The body Americans are asked to forget is the messy, particular, extended reality: Indo-European frontier culture, Anglo-Protestant settler culture, English common law traditions, the deeply entrenched aesthetics of European Enlightenment inheritance filtered through specific folkways, religious assumptions, demographic realities, and generations of practice that actually sustained those ideas. The body includes the earth, the inherited institutions, and the ethnic and cultural preconditions required for high-trust self-government. All of these are the self-evident features of aristocratic, inegalitarian American sovereignty culture.
Propositions are instantiated, transmitted, and preserved across generations within a specific human substrate. They do not float free but are embodied in habits, families, education, religion, and social capital won in bloody conflagration and generational struggles by particular peoples. Creedal nationalism ignores that shared propositions rest on pre-rational bonds of trust, memory, and kinship, and turns the nation into a rootless administrative proposition. Real nations are rooted in metaphysical ideals for a distinct people, the sovereigns. A shared sense of purpose should help spiritually enroll a people who share those bonds into greater expansions of Freiheit and the Pursuit of Happiness. These bonds are not infinitely scalable. Administrative systems behave as though they are. The error is not merely philosophical. It determines what forms of capital survive.
When you own something, you protect its capital value. Creedal nationalism violates private property capitalism. Our ancestors have a property interest in our work, psychological and spiritual idealism, family architecture, cultural betterment, aesthetic excellence, and the development and custodianship of physical plant. America constitutes the world’s first bourgeois revolution, a revolution of individual sovereignty. The tradition of private property is not geared for one generation to consume its production, but for production to outlast one generation’s limitations. We build for our children and community’s posterity.
“All men are created equal” is a rhetorical device directed at a king declaring individual kingly sovereignty among nobles. Not a leveling down of a king, but a raising to greater exceptionalism among Americans to approach the world in aristocratic ways. This includes treating one’s estate like a fiefdom for bequeathment to one’s own kin and all the subterranean capital assets which precede this. No feature of the capital stack is evenly distributed; they are not distributed at all in fact, nor are they instantly portable. They are formed within individuals over multiple generations in exertions of kingly power. The creed of the individual as sovereign is driven by the individual as a node who carries a large part of the civilizational star chart, patiently and arduously forged by ancestral benefactors.
Ephialtes at Thermopylae captures the internal actors who, through ideology or status, open the gates. He is like Cypher from The Matrix, betraying Zion for the comfortable simulation of steak and status, preferring the managed illusion of universal creed over the heroic triumph of preserving embodied continuity. Ephialtes, Cypher, and other creedal-types are the accomplices to an Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the instinctual substrate is supplanted by a compliant plantation cosmology. By severing mind from body and creed from people, the “true” meaning of the creed is continually redefined in a linguistic shell game. Access is rationed through education, media, and bureaucracy. This process produces alienation from one’s own instincts, family transmission, aesthetic intuitions, group attachments, and metacognitive integrity. The American is demobilized, becomes more governable, more likely to subordinate vital self-assertion to abstractions. It pathologizes strength, particular loyalty, hierarchy, and embodied excellence while elevating abstract equality, pity, and civic passivity as the highest virtues. Insidiously, this enmeshment prepares for the discarding of the mind in order to extract body-labor under the new terms, work, taxes, absorption of inflation, demographic replacement, and cultural concession. Taxes are not what you pay for a civilized society. The price is far higher.
This cultural and biological asset-stripping transforms a nation into a Ricardian cash-crop plantation. The United States today is the primary exporter of two cash crops: high-trust culture and hydrocarbons. The commodity of high trust is exported in the form of Treasury bonds, the dollar, and other financial products, while the hydrocarbon trade always accompanies the military-industrial complex and war-fighting. Both are immensely over-hypothecated. The exorbitant privilege of infinite debt monetization is in fact an exorbitant burden on Americans of supplying high trust to an infinitely low-trust planet. American military power ensures the privilege of guaranteeing energy to a deindustrializing EU and a militarizing CCP, both of whom see the sovereign American as enemy number one, while low-trust globalist managers – not heartland principals – reap the transaction fees.
Heidegger described that the prevailing state of technology enframed Man’s worldview. The knowledge bases contained within “-isms” are extensions of this technological enframing. They are their own discrete large language models. Like the technological substrate itself, the “-isms” also reach obsolescence. The “-ism” is dead, and we killed it. Their vocabularies, once levers for navigating the future, become tools of censorship in a regime of exponential acceleration where entire industries can transform within a single year. Structures that rely on them will not survive. There will be no cash for clunkers. It is the American way of Manifest Destiny to reforge obsolescent creeds from ever more archaic and primordial mythos.
Every healthy civilization transmits more than information. Persian families often keep the works of Hafiz on their living room table and consult it in important life moments. The young people of America must feel the soul of the nation. They must know that their forebears had souls dedicated to them. They must feel the heroic nature of their forebears in the brickwork, down every lane, in every mountainside. They must believe that the world has been enchanted, and that they are the rightful heirs to the enchantment. They must be attuned to an invisible fecundity which lives in beating hearts, not floating in an abstract ether of a severed mind.
The most potent thing we can do at a moment of transformation is to send forward this enchantment and fecundity and depth, unencumbered, as the base layer of transgenerational national capital formation. More wilderness, more sagas, more symphonies. Fewer abstractions. A young person owns a powerful armament when he meets life knowing of his own superiority, his own exceptionalism, and the grave charge by which he has been honored. He retains superior composure and possesses more care for his people. He possesses a dignity he will not cheat. His nation is not the product of a fraudulent scrivener, but an estate he imbues with his own fecund abiding and excellence.
Preserving humanism in the coming onslaught means frontierism. Valorizing the initiative-taker and encouraging young Americans to do enchanting things that bring meaning to the forefront as a primary human ingredient will skyrocket in economic premium. The embrace of Man as the powerful, agentic co-creator of the cosmos preserves civilizational orientation when technological change occurs too rapidly for new “-isms” to form. It is the courage of the heroic sovereign which retains Man’s humanistic intactness. Americans have always been a frontier people, expanding across seas and prairies and even more powerfully into the Technosphere. We must exhaust ourselves imbuing young Americans with maximum courage, maximum expansionary exploration, the maximum of heroic ideal and creative sovereignty, with the unapologetic ideology of inequality, heroic idealism, and Manifest Destiny, the true locomotive forces of America and the West. The sky is empty. They are the hands of fate. They are the frontier model.
Ross Calvin is a designer and entrepreneur.
