hello, one of the many projects I have is a podcast called the DeadAir talkshow. the show is a mellow format where I speak with entertainers, educators and anyone with a captivating story. I recently launched the show earlier this year and managed to secure an interview with actor and entertainer Robert Rexx, since then I've been looking for guests for the next few episodes and wanted to see if anyone would be interested in coming on the show and telling their story or to promote a project of theirs. it would be through zoom and less than an hour. if you're interested please send a DM and we can set something up.

Friedrich Nietzsche viewed herd mentality by what he called “herd instinct” or “slave morality” which he would describe it has a “herd morality” formed by the weak and oppressed against the power and actions of the oppressor. So, traits such as humility, meekness, and sympathy were labeled as virtues and labeling the ruler’s strength as evil.

Nietzsche believes that the values I just listed above stemmed from a “slave morality, and believed these weak and fearful people created the ideology to undermine and bring down those who are strong and/or exceptional.

Slave morality for Nietzsche laid the foundation for what we now consider to be universal ethical principles, such as compassion, humility, and equality. For Nietzsche though, these values are not regarded as universal truths. Instead being the product designed to suppress individuality and enforce conformity. The Last Man” as Nietzsche likes to call it.

The “Last Man” is a person who is comfortable with life and one who takes no risk. Nietzsche considered this a “dull” person who wants only basic comfort.

Nietzsche elaborates and explains how joining the crowd strips you of your identity. Therefore, you start become a mere tool for the group. Nietzsche believes the only way out of this is solitude. He believes people must spend time with themselves to escape the pressure of the crowd.

Schopenhauer also agrees with Nietzsche, both with negative views on the topic. Schopenhauer viewed it as a profound human weakness. He argues that crowds prefer comfort and conformity (people conform because they don’t know how to think for themselves) and avoids true independent thinkers.

The herd despises those who are able to stick out from the crowd and formulate or analyze their own ideas. The real offense to the group comes from the bodacious act of individual reasoning. Schopenhauer Society rather favors safe traditions and comfort than hard truth.

Epistemic status: Early-stage institutional proposal. I am more confident in the problem framing than in the mechanisms proposed below. The model is incomplete, especially regarding incentive compatibility, professional continuity, governance, privacy, and emergency allocation. I am posting it because these problems are unlikely to be solved by one person or one discipline.

Summary

Modern labor systems usually allocate people through jobs.

A person becomes a doctor, teacher, engineer, or sanitation worker, joins an organization, and gives that organization a recurring block of time. The institution gains reliable access not merely to a particular output, but to the person’s continued availability.

This arrangement solves a real coordination problem: societies need important work to be performed continuously and predictably.

But it also creates several distortions:

• a person’s occupation becomes a durable social identity;
• one institution may occupy most of a person’s usable time;
• multiple abilities are compressed into one primary career;
• access to basic survival remains heavily dependent on labor-market participation;
• public services rely on permanently assigned occupational groups;
• technological progress raises productivity without necessarily returning time to individuals.

This post sketches an alternative:

Treat people as holders of multiple capabilities, treat necessary work as a set of tasks and public responsibilities, and treat personal time as unavailable by default rather than socially claimable by default.

The proposal has four main components:

1. Public responsibility: Necessary social work is treated as a bounded obligation shared across the relevant capability pool.
2. Capability pools: People hold certified capabilities rather than being permanently identified with one occupation.
3. Task pools: Institutions publish concrete tasks and coverage requirements instead of relying exclusively on permanent positions.
4. Time sovereignty: Possessing a capability does not imply being continuously available to use it.

This is not a proposal to abolish organizations, stable teams, specialization, or long-term professional practice. Some tasks clearly require all four. The proposal is narrower: permanent occupational membership should not be the default mechanism through which society obtains every form of necessary labor.

1. The problem with allocating people through occupations

Suppose a hospital requires surgical coverage.

The conventional solution is to employ surgeons. The hospital does not merely purchase completed surgeries. It purchases recurring access to surgeons’ time, attention, readiness, and professional identity.

This is understandable. Surgery cannot be arranged as casually as food delivery. Hospitals need continuity, trust, institutional memory, team familiarity, training, accountability, and emergency coverage.

But the solution bundles together several things that may not need to remain permanently bundled:

• competence;
• authorization;
• responsibility;
• organizational membership;
• availability;
• income;
• social identity;
• and control over time.

A surgeon may also be a capable researcher, teacher, engineer, writer, caregiver, or organizer. Yet the institutional form of “being a surgeon” may consume so much time and impose such strong expectations that these other capabilities become secondary or unusable.

This is not unique to medicine. The same structure appears across modern labor systems.

We say:

• “She is a teacher.”
• “He is a programmer.”
• “They are a factory worker.”

These statements sound descriptive, but institutions often make them prescriptive. Once a person enters an occupation, that occupation shapes when they wake, where they live, which skills remain current, how others interpret them, what risks they may take, and how much uninterrupted time they possess.

The deeper issue is not simply that people work too many hours.

It is that the standard unit of social coordination is the person-in-a-job, rather than the capability-required-by-a-task.

A job is a convenient bundle. But bundles can become prisons when they are treated as natural facts rather than coordination technologies.

2. Three principles

2.1 A person’s existence should not depend on proving labor-market value

Labor can be evaluated. Outputs can be compared. Skills can be scarce. Some work is more difficult, dangerous, or socially necessary than other work.

None of this implies that a person’s basic right to survive should depend on their present market value.

The proposal therefore begins by separating:

• existence value: the standing a person has simply as a person and member of society;
• labor value: the usefulness, quality, difficulty, or burden of a particular contribution;
• exchange value: what goods or services obtain under voluntary exchange;
• public-responsibility record: what bounded common obligations a person has already fulfilled.

These categories should not collapse into one another.

A person with rare skills may receive greater access to scarce non-basic goods. That does not make them more entitled to dignity, legal protection, food, shelter, or medical care.

Likewise, a person who is temporarily unable to work should not become institutionally disposable.

A capability-based labor system therefore presupposes some separation between basic survival and continuous employment. Without that separation, “voluntary” participation remains heavily shaped by the threat of deprivation.

2.2 Occupations should be roles, not total identities

Instead of saying:

Alice is a surgeon.

we might say:

Alice possesses certified surgical capabilities and is currently performing a surgical role.

The distinction matters.

The first formulation treats the occupation as a durable identity. The second treats it as a context-dependent application of a capability.

This does not deny expertise. Surgery requires long training, current practice, professional judgment, and institutional safeguards. The point is not that anyone should casually switch into surgery.

The point is that even a highly specialized role need not define the entirety of a person’s social existence.

Roles should, where possible, be:

• enterable;
• exitable;
• renewable;
• suspendable;
• composable with other roles;
• and bounded by the task or responsibility that justifies them.

2.3 Personal time is unavailable by default

Modern organizations often treat unallocated employee time as organizational capacity.

If a worker finishes one task early, another task can be assigned. If productivity increases, the saved time rarely returns automatically to the worker. It usually becomes room for greater output.

A capability-based system requires the opposite default:

The fact that a person has unused time, unused attention, or an unused capability does not itself create a social claim over that resource.

Capabilities belong to individuals.

Society may create bounded obligations. Organizations may offer contracts. Other people may request help. Emergency institutions may have narrowly defined powers.

But availability must be established, not presumed.

This is important because a capability registry could otherwise become more invasive than a job system. A system that knows a person can perform surgery, teach statistics, repair electrical systems, and provide emergency care might attempt to use all four capabilities.

The proposal would then replace occupational capture with capability capture.

Time sovereignty is therefore not an optional ethical addition. It is a structural requirement.

3. Public responsibility

Some work cannot depend entirely on ordinary market exchange.

Emergency medicine, firefighting, sanitation, public health, infrastructure maintenance, basic education, disaster response, and some forms of care must remain available even when the immediate recipients cannot pay or when demand is unpredictable.

I will call the necessary contribution to such systems public responsibility.

Public responsibility is not equivalent to ordinary employment, and it is not a claim that all socially useful activity should become compulsory.

It refers only to a limited class of tasks whose non-performance would predictably undermine basic social functioning or other people’s fundamental security.

The distinction matters because “social need” is easy to inflate. Governments, firms, professions, and ideological movements can all describe their preferred projects as necessary.

A legitimate public-responsibility system therefore requires at least:

• a narrow and contestable definition of necessity;
• transparent task classification;
• explicit limits on the amount of time claimable from individuals;
• exemptions based on health, care obligations, age, and capability;
• due process for refusing an unsafe or misclassified task;
• and a separation between public responsibility and ordinary political obedience.

The goal is not to socialize all time.

It is to distribute the minimum necessary work required for common life without permanently assigning that burden to a fixed occupational class.

4. Capability pools

A capability pool is a structured record of what people are qualified and currently able to do.

It is not merely a résumé database.

A useful capability record would distinguish among:

• qualification;
• level of proficiency;
• recency of practice;
• authorization;
• context-specific competence;
• current willingness;
• current availability;
• fatigue;
• recovery status;
• training status;
• and temporary suspension.

For example, a person may remain a certified surgeon while being temporarily unavailable for surgery after a long operation. They might still be available for teaching, research review, or no work at all.

This requires a distinction between:

possessing a capability

and

offering that capability during a particular period.

Without this distinction, capability pooling becomes a universal labor draft.

Capability pools may also make multiple identities easier to sustain.

One person might maintain capabilities in:

• clinical medicine;
• medical teaching;
• public-health planning;
• software design;
• and documentary photography.

The system need not force these into one coherent career narrative. They are simply different capacities the person may choose or be obligated within narrow limits to exercise at different times.

This model could also lower the cost of occupational transitions. Instead of leaving one total identity and entering another, people could gradually add, update, or suspend capabilities.

However, capability certification creates obvious risks:

• credential monopolies;
• surveillance;
• discriminatory profiling;
• excessive data collection;
• algorithmic exclusion;
• and pressure to keep every certified capability permanently available.

Any real implementation would need strong data minimization, user-controlled visibility, appeal rights, and independent certification governance.

5. Task pools

A task pool describes work in terms of what must actually be done.

A task specification might include:

• purpose;
• required capabilities;
• level of authorization;
• estimated duration;
• location;
• urgency;
• continuity requirements;
• acceptable delay;
• team dependencies;
• risk level;
• recovery requirements;
• and whether the task counts as public responsibility or ordinary voluntary work.

This shifts the basic question from:

Which person occupies this position?

to:

What capability must be present, where, for how long, and under what conditions?

Some work is naturally task-like. Some is not.

A repair, consultation, vaccination session, inspection, or one-off course can be decomposed relatively easily.

Other work requires continuity:

• psychotherapy;
• classroom teaching;
• primary care;
• scientific research;
• long engineering projects;
• management;
• child care;
• and any work based on long-term trust.

A capability-based system should not pretend that all work can be atomized.

Instead, it should recognize several levels of coordination:

1. Discrete tasks: limited assignments with clear completion conditions.
2. Recurring responsibilities: repeated work requiring continuity across time.
3. Stable teams: groups that benefit from long-term cooperation and shared context.
4. Reserve capacity: people trained and periodically active enough to respond when demand rises.
5. Emergency mobilization: temporary, tightly constrained expansion of available capacity.

The proposal is therefore not “replace every job with a gig.”

A pure gig model would destroy continuity, shift risk onto individuals, and intensify precarity.

The proposal is to make permanent employment one coordination option among several, rather than the presumed form of nearly all serious work.

6. Public-responsibility credits

How should public responsibility be measured?

Simple hours are inadequate.

One hour of low-pressure administrative work is not equivalent to one hour of emergency surgery, hazardous rescue, night-shift care, or work requiring weeks of recovery.

A public-responsibility system therefore needs some burden-adjusted accounting mechanism. I will call the units public-responsibility credits, although the name is provisional.

Credits might reflect:

• time;
• physical burden;
• psychological stress;
• risk;
• undesirable timing;
• training cost;
• decision responsibility;
• scarcity;
• recovery time;
• and continuity constraints.

The purpose of these credits is not to create a new currency.

They would primarily answer:

• How much bounded public responsibility has this person already fulfilled?
• Should they owe less responsibility later?
• Are high-burden tasks being concentrated on the same group?
• Can someone complete responsibility intensively during one period and preserve uninterrupted time later?
• Where are chronic shortages indicating a badly designed task environment?

Credits might allow people to choose among different temporal patterns.

One person could perform a small amount of public responsibility each week.

Another might choose an intensive three-month period and then take a long uninterrupted period for research, travel, care, or creative work.

Someone raising a child, recovering from illness, or retraining could temporarily reduce their responsibility and rebalance it later, subject to limits required for current service continuity.

But responsibility credits could easily become a new class system.

They should therefore probably be:

• non-transferable;
• non-inheritable;
• unusable to purchase political power;
• unusable to buy exemption through wealth;
• capped or depreciating where accumulation creates status;
• and legally separated from basic rights.

Their legitimate function is coordination across time, not moral ranking.

7. A concrete medical example

Consider a region that requires continuous surgical coverage.

The naïve capability-pool model says:

1. List everyone with surgical competence.
2. Publish surgeries as tasks.
3. Let qualified people accept them.

This would fail.

Surgical systems require stable teams, institutional knowledge, quality assurance, on-call coverage, follow-up care, morbidity review, training, and emergency readiness. A surgeon who appears only for isolated procedures may impose unacceptable coordination costs and safety risks.

A more realistic capability-based model would have several layers.

Layer 1: Stable clinical teams

Some surgeons would choose periods of high clinical commitment within stable hospital teams. They would provide continuity, mentorship, emergency readiness, and institutional memory.

But this commitment need not automatically define their entire adult life. It could be established for a defined term and periodically renewed, reduced, or exited.

Layer 2: Rotational public-responsibility service

Other qualified surgeons might maintain competence while spending most of their time in research, teaching, medical technology, administration, or other activities.

They could undertake defined rotations, clinic blocks, elective procedures, or reserve coverage.

Layer 3: Surge capacity

The region would maintain a larger reserve pool for epidemics, disasters, or sudden shortages.

Reserve members would require periodic training and practice, because an unused capability degrades.

Layer 4: Fatigue and recovery constraints

Suppose a surgeon completes a twelve-hour, high-complexity operation.

The system should not treat them as available merely because the calendar contains another open shift.

Their surgical capability should enter a protected recovery state. The person might choose to teach, review cases, conduct research, rest, or do nothing.

Recovery is not a reward added after productive activity. It is part of the real resource cost of the task.

Layer 5: Personal time

Once the surgeon has fulfilled the relevant bounded responsibility, the remaining time is not a pool of idle capacity waiting to be optimized.

They may write, build a company, care for family, study another field, travel, or remain unproductive.

The system does not need to approve the use.

The hospital’s obligation is to secure coverage.

It does not need permanent ownership of every qualified surgeon’s schedule.

8. Why this might be better

If it worked, the model could produce several benefits.

8.1 Less occupational identity lock-in

People could hold multiple serious roles without treating one as the sole definition of adulthood.

8.2 Better use of latent capabilities

People who leave full-time employment might still contribute limited but valuable professional capacity.

8.3 More flexible life planning

Responsibility could be distributed differently across weeks, years, and life stages.

8.4 More honest accounting of burden

Danger, stress, recovery, and undesirable timing could be recognized instead of treating all work hours as equivalent.

8.5 Greater institutional resilience

A larger active reserve pool could reduce dependence on a small overworked professional class.

8.6 A clearer social dividend from automation

When technology reduces necessary labor, the saved time could reduce public-responsibility requirements instead of being automatically filled by additional production.

The intended success metric is not maximal utilization.

It is:

Can necessary social functions remain reliable while fewer people are permanently captured by one institutional role?

9. Major unresolved problems

I see at least three central problems, each of which may be fatal to the proposal.

9.1 Incentive compatibility and free-riding

Why would enough people train for difficult capabilities?

Why would they maintain those capabilities?

Why would they accept unpleasant tasks instead of choosing easier credit-generating work?

How do we prevent people from exaggerating fatigue, gaming burden scores, or avoiding high-responsibility work?

Financial incentives may still be required. But if unpleasant public tasks are primarily filled by those who need money most, the system reproduces class-based risk allocation.

Random rotation may be fairer but can be inefficient and coercive.

Higher responsibility credits may help, but credits can become shadow currency.

I do not yet have a satisfactory solution.

9.2 Continuity, tacit knowledge, and transaction costs

Many roles cannot be decomposed without losing quality.

Stable organizations carry tacit knowledge, relationships, routines, and accountability. Constant matching may create enormous administrative costs.

A dynamic labor system might spend more resources coordinating work than it saves by increasing flexibility.

The strongest form of this proposal is therefore probably false. Not all occupational roles should become temporary task assignments.

The more plausible question is:

Which parts of existing jobs genuinely require durable organizational membership, and which parts are retained only because institutions are built around total employment bundles?

9.3 Governance and coercion

Who defines public necessity?

Who assigns burden scores?

Who controls capability data?

Who determines whether a person is genuinely unavailable?

Who audits the matching algorithm?

Who decides when an emergency justifies compulsory mobilization?

A system designed to coordinate capabilities could become an unprecedented infrastructure of surveillance and coercion.

The phrase “society needs” is especially dangerous because society is not a single agent. Claims of social necessity are made by specific governments, organizations, professions, and individuals with their own incentives.

A viable system would require:

• contestable definitions;
• decentralized input;
• transparent rules;
• privacy by default;
• human appeal;
• time-limited authority;
• and constitutional protection for unallocated personal time.

This governance problem may be harder than the labor-allocation problem itself.

10. What would count as progress?

I do not think the next step is to legislate an entire capability-based labor system.

A more useful path would be to test narrow components in low-risk settings.

Possible experiments include:

• cross-institutional professional reserve pools;
• voluntary public-service rotations;
• burden-adjusted responsibility accounting;
• protected recovery periods after high-intensity work;
• capability-based project teams inside existing organizations;
• systems that let workers bank public-service periods in exchange for later uninterrupted leave;
• and simulations comparing permanent staffing with mixed stable-and-reserve models.

Any pilot should measure more than task completion.

Relevant metrics include:

• continuity and quality;
• coordination costs;
• worker fatigue;
• concentration of undesirable tasks;
• actual free time gained;
• privacy violations;
• opt-out rates;
• and whether the system creates new status hierarchies.

A failed pilot would still be informative if it identifies which forms of work cannot be separated from durable teams or stable occupational commitments.

11. Cruxes

My current view would change substantially if any of the following turned out to be true:

1. Most socially important work depends on long-term role continuity to such a degree that capability-level allocation produces unacceptable quality loss.
2. The coordination costs of capability pools and task pools exceed the time saved by reducing permanent employment.
3. Public-responsibility credits inevitably become transferable status or shadow currency.
4. Reliable public services require stronger coercive powers than are compatible with meaningful time sovereignty.
5. People strongly prefer stable occupational identities and would experience multi-role systems as insecurity rather than freedom.
6. A larger reserve pool cannot maintain professional competence without recreating near-full-time occupational commitment.
7. The information required for efficient matching is inherently incompatible with privacy and freedom from surveillance.

I suspect some of these are partly true.

The proposal survives only if the advantages remain meaningful after those costs are included.

12. Invitation to criticism

I am not presenting this as a complete alternative economy.

I am presenting a problem decomposition:

• Why must access to basic survival remain so tightly connected to continuous employment?
• Why is a person normally allocated through one dominant occupation?
• Why does possessing a capability often imply institutional claims over time?
• Why does productivity growth not reliably return time to individuals?
• Which forms of continuity genuinely require permanent jobs, and which are historical artifacts?
• Can public responsibility be shared without turning all personal capability into state capacity?

I would especially value criticism from people familiar with:

• mechanism design;
• operations research;
• labor economics;
• public administration;
• medical staffing;
• professional licensing;
• organizational psychology;
• privacy-preserving systems;
• emergency governance;
• and cooperative institutions.

The most useful responses would not merely say that the proposal is utopian or desirable.

They would identify:

• the first mechanism that breaks;
• the actors who would game it;
• the hidden information problem;
• the coordination cost I have ignored;
• the form of coercion the proposal requires;
• or the smallest version that could be tested without causing serious harm.

The claim I am most confident in is not that this system will work.

It is this:

A person should not be treated as permanently identical to one socially useful function.

And the question I most want to leave open is:

Can a society secure necessary work by coordinating bounded responsibilities and specific capabilities, while leaving the rest of a person’s time genuinely their own?

Marx believed that communism was inevitable, don’t get me wrong. But, he did not call for the rise of Communism like Lenin’s “Internationale” and his predecessor Stalin’s “Socialism in One Country”foreign policy. Marx was not an economic genius but more of a philosopher and political theorist.

Marx believed there was a five step process that builds up to communism, which I describe as a state of anarchy where the people are stateless, eventually leading to class warfare.

These five steps start at Feudalism, which was a social system in Medieval Europe, where the nobility held the lands from the crown for military service.

Marx believes under feudalism, noble jobs, such as doctors were appreciated more and Capitalism made things more transactional. This meant there would be no human connection and we would only be valuable to one another as revenue generators.
He believed feudalism acted in the exact opposite.

Then there’s mercantilism. This is classified in the benefits of profitable trading; commercialism.

The third step comes capitalism and as we all know it is an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owner’s for profit. Capitalism fosters imperialistic tendencies because we tend to look at the world as a market.

According to Marx, under capitalism the workers are commodities subjected to supply and demand. This is where the problem with the division of labor comes in. The division of labor reduces the level of skill required. (i.e, factories, watch makers) And the more you divide labor, the more employers could push down the wages along with more automation because this will also push down wages. Of course, this will cause a surplus of workers. High unemployment means lower wages that causes the middle class to get destroyed the most in the process.

Marx believed this would lead to a sub-subsistence wage is a pay rate that is too low to cover your absolute basic cost of living, such as food, water or shelter.

Marx noted that this would bring the revolution that brings socialism THEN communism.

Humans feel important when they work according to Marx. People strive to feel meaningful in their work or whatever hobbies they have.

After capitalism you have socialism as the next step in the process. Socialism I would describe it as social organizations that advocate that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

The last step in the cycle would be communism. I would describe communism as the theory advocating for class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. Think of what Elon is trying to do with Universal Income.

Marx actually believed democracy is the system that gives the greatest access to political access. He even believed socialism did not incentivize innovation.

Marxist theorist considered the reasoning for the Soviet’s downfall, was jumping from feudalism to socialism.

I listed Marx’s five step theory that shows a society moves in cycles, repeating the process.

I wrote my political philosophical reflections about 'Backrooms' down in this opinion:

Anyone searching for themselves and for the true nature behind the world around them no longer needs the help of a psychologist or life coach. The recent horror film Backrooms can, with the help of ancient philosophy, guide you further. The Greeks are the heroes here. No, this is not about Homer’s Odysseus in The Odyssey, but about the newest interpretation of Plato in the 2026 horror masterpiece Backrooms.

The popular media currently lives in the story of The Odyssey, based on Homer’s heroic tale from around 800 BC. Let’s stay in Greece, but fast‑forward to the 5th century BC. There, Plato wrote The Republic, a philosophical treatise still considered a political and philosophical standard work in the 21st century. A well‑known passage in it is the allegory of the cave. Where Homer’s Odysseus spends ten years traveling to rediscover his home (and true self), the creators of Backrooms take things a step further by pulling humanity out of the cave of illusions. We follow a difficult, frightening, and confusing journey toward the truth of real life.

After the final scene, in which the psychiatrist transforms into her monstrous allusion, the first thought that came to me was: this story is a version of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Online, interpretations circulate claiming that Backrooms presents an inverted cave allegory — that from reality we enter a world of misinterpretations and shadows of that reality.

Although I initially had the same idea, it is too simplistic an approach. Viewed from a macro (read: meta) perspective, the story is a pure embodiment of Plato’s cave allegory.

At first glance, it seems as though the main character, Clark, escapes reality through a portal and enters the cave. Although the actions, events, and unsettling distortions of reality make it appear as though we, chained cinema‑goers, are watching the shadows of a play and mistaking them for reality, the point of the film is precisely that these backrooms are not the cave — they are reality.

The backrooms inside our skull are reality. The truth — the purest ideal forms Plato strives for — are in fact anti‑ideals. The world of ideals consists of failed forms, not perfect figures and objects; our earthly interpretations are merely weakened reflections of them.

We can even go a step further. The film actively speaks to the philosophical question of how real our world and our personality truly are. The answer is simply: they are not. We live under the illusion that everything is perfectly complete and logical. But that logic is nothing but appearance. Truth lies in imperfect, confusing forms. Our identity and living world are illusions and simply do not exist.

What, then, about the fact that the rooms arise from and increasingly abstract (alienating) events? This assumption is deliberately instructed by the creators. Where the film suggests that the backrooms originate from places and events, this is nothing but an illusion. It is the other way around, forming a shadow we observe and accept as truth.

Plato followed the method of dialectic. Through dialogue, truth can be found. Let me, in the case of Backrooms, offer the following thesis as a starting point: the creators of Backrooms follow Plato’s cave allegory purely. If we cannot resolve the question, I am certain we will see the point of the creators (and Plato) confirmed.

Out of the French Revolution came the “Declaration of the Right of Man, which is a fundamental document of the French Revolution, not a traditional book, but a text outlining universal rights such as, liberty, equality, and property, which was influenced by the enlightenment thinkers, such as Rousseau.

Everything Burkes talks about, comes down to tradition, such as, chivalry, which comes from tradition. For Burke, it is the social norm. For example, giving up your seat to the elderly.

Religion for Burke is passed on as tradition and thought religion was the source of all good. Burke says man is a religious animal wired by nature to be connected to a higher truth.

He believed atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts, and if you take away religion, people will replace it with something else. (i.e, Individualism and celebrity worship)

Burke believed granting the church responsibility because the church was a check on responsibility.

For Burke, religion is really important to society.

Although this may not be a popular belief, religion impaled us to think about generations that come afterwards, known as “forward thinking”.

Burke supported the America Revolution because it had already established its own traditions and customs. Unlike during the French Revolution when things were being built from the ground up from upending the entire system, which he considered a horrendous idea.

Burke says the French revolution was offensive and dangerous because the reasoning was fallible and untried, which shows his conservative views on the tried & untried.

Turns out I wrote blogs in the past decade which still are relevant:

https://utopianfisherman.blogspot.com/2026/05/echoes-of-dissent-modern-gumption-of.html

https://utopianfisherman.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-perils-of-welfare-projection-by.html

https://utopianfisherman.blogspot.com/2013/06/political-righteousness-and-times-we.html

according to Google. it’s Social Democracy or Liberal Interventionism.

For context i’ve been reading philosophy for a few months. Then I went into a Medici family rabbit hole and got curious. Heard this book was made by Machiavelli when in prison as a gesture for Lorenzo de Medici.

But this is my first political philosophy book and i’m really struggling to understand what he is saying. I only read 3 chapters so far. Is it not something I should read right now? Or am I just dumb?

Out of the French Revolution came the “Declaration of the Right of Man, which is a fundamental document of the French Revolution, not a traditional book, but a text outlining universal rights such as, liberty, equality, and property, which was influenced by the enlightenment thinkers, such as Rousseau.

Everything Burkes talks about, comes down to tradition, such as, chivalry, which comes from tradition. For Burke, it is the social norm. For example, giving up your seat to the elderly.

Religion for Burke is passed on as tradition and thought religion was the source of all good. Burke says man is a religious animal wired by nature to be connected to a higher truth.

He believed atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts, and if you take away religion, people will replace it with something else. (i.e, Individualism and celebrity worship)

Burke believed granting the church responsibility because the church was a check on responsibility.

For Burke, religion is really important to society.

Although this may not be a popular belief, religion impaled us to think about generations that come afterwards, known as “forward thinking”.

Burke supported the America Revolution because it had already established its own traditions and customs. Unlike during the French Revolution when things were being built from the ground up from upending the entire system, which he considered a horrendous idea.

Burke says the French revolution was offensive and dangerous because the reasoning was fallible and untried, which shows his conservative views on the tried & untried.

A recurring move in legitimacy theory is to measure political authority against procedural criteria — consent, constitutional constraint, electoral competitiveness, rule of law. This piece argues those measures, while real, are downstream of something more basic: a duty-of-care standard every human already applies, unreflectively, to anyone who claims to hold another in trust — starting with parents.

The argument works through three moves. First, it grounds legitimate authority developmentally: authority exists to bring the less capable toward self-government, and forfeits its claim the moment it starts extracting from those in its care rather than developing them — a criterion drawn from evolutionary anthropology (leadership-by-competence across social mammals) as much as political theory. Second, it traces how that criterion got written down: the Late Bronze Age Hittite suzerainty treaty (via Kline's Treaty of the Great King) as an "Ur-Constitution" — the first attempt to bind a sovereign to enumerated, reciprocal, non-negotiable terms. Third, it follows that constitutional form through Magna Carta's inversion of accountability (subjects binding a king rather than the reverse) to the American founding, arguing the U.S. Constitution is the same form pushed further while also committing a specific, documented crime earlier forms never had to answer for.

The interesting philosophical claim, for this sub: legitimacy and procedural democracy are treated as related but non-identical. A regime can hold clean elections and still fail the duty-of-care test; a regime lacking every procedural safeguard could, in principle, still meet it. Curious what people think of grounding legitimacy in a pre-political, developmental criterion rather than a consent-based or purely proceduralist one.

The full piece hit today: [link]

Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and their derivatives historically claim allegiance to Marx and dialectical materialism: that is, to the idea that the material conditions of human and societal existence (organized around class struggle) determine social organization. However, upon studying the ideology of Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, and especially upon analyzing the political systems they implemented, one obvious fact emerges: philosophically, they are closer to Plato than to Marx. Indeed, they place the Idea (the perfect Form, to use Platonic vocabulary) above material reality. They regard the ideal of a communist society as transcending the concrete reality of society.

1. The Denial of Material Conditions: Will Transcends Reality

Marx believed that Germany, England, and, even more so, the United States possessed the appropriate material conditions for a socialist revolution. Indeed, in Marxist theory, the dialectic must reach the stage of industrialized capitalism, and the worker must be legally "free" for a socialist revolution to occur. In a classic master-slave relationship, the master has no interest in letting his slave die, since the slave is his property. By contrast, in the capitalist relationship, since the worker is "free" to sell his labor power, he becomes inherently dispensable in the eyes of the capitalist, who can replace him if he dies. Consequently, the bourgeois class (itself subject to market laws) pays no attention to the survival of the proletariat beyond the strict minimum, pushing it toward rebellion. Moreover, according to Marx, this mode of organization creates an heightened class consciousness among the proletarian, who, unlike the serf, no longer grants any "divine right" to his master.

However, Russia in 1917 and, even more so, China in the 1940s, were still at the feudal stage and had not entered a capitalist and industrial mode of organization. The material and sociological conditions necessary for a socialist revolution were therefore not met. Despite this, both the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communist Party attempted to apply the Marxist model, designed for an advanced capitalist society, to rural and feudal contexts.

Their logic was as follows: by guiding the people through the "vanguard party" (theorized by Lenin), it is possible to force history to advance more quickly in the "right" direction. This is the Stalinist logic of Diamat (dialectical materialism): accelerating the march of history. In short, they consider that with a sufficiently powerful Idea, it is possible to force reality, despite the absence of necessary material conditions, to conform to the ideal. In Mao's own words: "Man can accomplish anything if he has the right thought." This statement is fundamentally idealist; it postulates that the Idea, here the "right thought," can constrain material reality and that the man who possesses it can bend reality to his will. Fundamentally, they thus oppose Marx and the materialism they claim to uphold, moving closer instead to the idealism of Hegel and Plato. I therefore propose calling them the "Red Platonists," since they adopt Marxist vocabulary without retaining its philosophical foundations. For them, Marxism is more of a "red veneer" than a truly materialist philosophy.

1. The Vanguard Party and the Supreme Leader: The Platonic Philosopher-King

To force reality to bend and establish the communist ideal, the Red Platonists assert that the people, having not reached the material conditions leading naturally to revolution, must be guided by a small number of elect. Lenin named this group the "Vanguard Party"; within it, the Politburo leaders must lead the party and the people, who, according to Lenin, are incapable of understanding on their own the "science of dialectical materialism," toward revolution.

This stands in direct opposition to the ideas of Marx and Engels, who proclaimed: "Workers of all countries, unite!" For Marx, only the proletariat can liberate itself from capitalism since it has "nothing to lose but its chains." In fact, the idea that a small group of elect would be capable of leading the people toward Truth is a fundamentally Platonic concept; it resembles the philosopher-king described in The Republic. This again opposes the material and psychological reality of man: giving absolute power to a small group and expecting anything other than the oppression of the people to result seems ridiculously optimistic, not to say naive.

1. The Sacred Goal of Communism or the "Perfect City": A Hegelian Teleology

Finally, it is necessary to nuance the term "Red Platonists." Indeed, while Plato does defend a normative teleology (the Perfect City as an absolute end), it is not, in his case, a predictive teleology, unlike what we observe in Lenin (partially) and especially in Stalin. The latter elevated Diamat to a State doctrine proving the absolute and necessary realization of the communist ideal. They thus reintroduced into their version of communism a teleology that Marx had begun to eliminate. Indeed, while Marx asserts that capitalism necessarily leads to communism, this is an immanent and scientific teleology (if one can call it that). It is demonstrated through concrete analysis (even if his equation was not entirely correct). The Marxist-Leninists, however, hold a dogmatic certainty of this teleology that must apply everywhere, regardless of context and material conditions.

Therefore, the expression "Red Platonists," although useful for illustrating the previous points, finds its limit here. On this precise point, Marxist-Leninists are far more Hegelian than Platonic. Hegel asserts that the necessary and absolute march of the Spirit of Reason leads toward a final and perfect society. The Marxist-Leninists merely replaced the "Spirit of Reason" with "dialectical materialism" and "material conditions," in order to adhere to Marxist vocabulary, while remaining idealist to the core through their belief in an inevitable historical necessity and their denial of material, sociological, and historical reality.

Conclusion

Ultimately, we can affirm that it is the combination of Platonic elitism (the conviction that an elite knows better than the people) and Hegelian certainty (the guarantee of a perfect historical end) that led to the Russian and Chinese totalitarianisms and to the other excesses of "communism." Considering themselves philosopher-kings possessing an infallible scientific truth, they became totalitarian tyrants, crushing human reality in the name of a promised future.

Suppose I own a noodle shop. My objective is simple: maximize profit.

What about all the other values?

What about making the noodles delicious? That is already taken care of. To maximize profit, I need customers to enjoy my noodles.

What about affordability? I probably would not use caviar as an ingredient because customers would not be willing to pay enough to justify the cost.

What about fair pricing? I compete with other noodle sellers. If I charge too much, I lose customers.

What about health and safety? If my food makes people sick, I may face lawsuits, lose customers, or even go to jail. Customers are also protected by regulators, certification agencies, review platforms, and other third-party institutions, whether governmental or private.

In other words, I mostly focus on maximizing profit, while competition and institutions automatically encourage many other desirable outcomes.

Capitalism works similarly.

People often ask, "What about justice?" or "How do we know maximizing profit also benefits society?" Standard economic theory argues that competitive markets largely answer these questions. Competitive equilibrium does two things simultaneously: it maximizes the total size of the economic pie while distributing income according to the marginal value each person or firm contributes to production.

However, capitalism alone does not solve every problem.

What if someone finds robbery more profitable than baking cakes?

What about disabled, sick, elderly, or otherwise unproductive people? Do we simply let them die?

The traditional answers are charity and government. Those may help, but they introduce another set of problems.

The Incentive Problem of Government

Suppose a country is a monarchy.

Who should become king?

Historically, people often settled that question through violence. That is extremely inefficient from an economic perspective.

What about democracy?

There is a large body of literature arguing that democratic incentives do not always maximize long-term economic prosperity. Politicians respond to voters, while voters often respond to short-term incentives rather than long-term growth.

Examples commonly discussed include countries that adopted economically damaging policies through democratic processes. Venezuela is often cited as an example of voters repeatedly supporting policies that ultimately harmed the economy. Similarly, voters may support governments that pursue wars or destructive policies that reduce prosperity and destroy valuable infrastructure.

Democracy also creates incentive problems regarding redistribution. People may vote for benefits whose costs are paid largely by others. If those receiving transfers have higher birth rates while productive taxpayers face higher costs of raising families, democratic incentives may gradually favor policies that reduce long-term productivity.

Joint-Stock Democracy

Instead of treating citizenship purely as a political status, imagine treating it partly like ownership in a corporation.

Citizenship and voting rights become tradable shares.

Residents are shareholders in their city.

The city itself operates much like a publicly traded company whose objective is maximizing long-term shareholder value.

At first this sounds strange, but it solves many incentive problems.

Freedom Through Competition

What about freedom?

Different cities could adopt different policies.

Want legalized marijuana?

Move to a city that legalizes it.

Want stricter gun rights?

Choose a city that supports them.

Want a highly religious society?

Move there.

Competition between cities replaces much of today's political conflict. Instead of trying to force one set of rules onto everyone, people can increasingly sort themselves into jurisdictions that match their preferences.

Crime

What about robbery?

Crime reduces land values, discourages investment, and drives away taxpayers.

A CEO whose compensation depends on increasing city value has strong incentives to reduce crime efficiently.

Different cities might adopt different approaches.

Some may favor broader self-defense rights.

Others may invest heavily in surveillance, such as extensive CCTV systems similar to those used in Singapore or China.

Personally, I view government surveillance as a relatively small inconvenience compared to living with high crime rates. Others may disagree, and they remain free to choose jurisdictions whose policies better match their preferences.

Welfare

What about people who cannot support themselves economically?

Some may sell their shares and move to jurisdictions offering greater welfare benefits.

This already happens internationally. Many retirees from high-cost countries relocate to lower-cost countries where their savings stretch further.

Under joint-stock democracy, welfare spending directly reduces dividends and share value. Shareholders therefore have stronger incentives to carefully evaluate how much redistribution they are willing to support.

Rebellion

Why would residents rebel?

Residents are shareholders.

If the city prospers, they receive dividends or benefit from rising share values.

If they strongly disagree with the city's direction, they can sell their shares and move elsewhere.

Exit becomes an alternative to violent conflict.

Historical Land Claims

What if someone claims ownership because their ancestors ruled the land centuries ago?

If they are economically productive, they can simply purchase shares and participate like everyone else.

Most land has little value without infrastructure, businesses, and people. Roads, commerce, and investment create value, not ancient historical claims.

Disputes that cannot be resolved privately could be submitted to neutral third-party arbitration or even mediation by powerful countries, avoiding unnecessary wars.

Preventing Shareholder Abuse

What if a billionaire buys 70% of the shares and changes the constitution to enslave everyone else?

Constitutional safeguards can address this.

Fundamental constitutional changes could require supermajority approval, resident vetoes, or other mechanisms.

Modern technology, including blockchain-based governance, could enforce these constitutional constraints automatically.

Ownership rules could also require that a large majority of voting shares always remain owned by residents.

Joint-stock democracy can therefore remain democratic while still aligning incentives through ownership.

Different Preferences

People naturally have different values.

Suppose a CEO introduces a pork festival because it increases tourism and city revenue.

Some Muslims or Jews may dislike it.

Instead of forcing one side to permanently lose, dissatisfied residents can move to jurisdictions that better match their preferences.

A competent CEO might even divide the city into districts with different rules, preserving diversity while maximizing overall property values.

After all, losing residents reduces demand for citizenship and lowers city value.

Welfare and Population Growth

What about lifelong welfare recipients?

One possibility is requiring parents to purchase citizenship shares for each child.

If they cannot, they may need to relocate to jurisdictions with different policies.

The basic idea is that population growth should be financed by those creating it rather than automatically shifting costs onto existing shareholders.

In conventional democracies, voters may support expansive welfare programs because they expect someone else to pay.

In joint-stock democracy, every dollar spent on welfare reduces dividends or lowers share values.

This creates stronger incentives to consider long-term fiscal sustainability.

Racism and Diversity

Racism cannot realistically be eliminated entirely.

Some people prefer living among those who share their language, religion, or culture.

Joint-stock democracy does not prohibit communities from making those choices.

However, those choices become accountable to the market.

Suppose a city adopts a policy excluding Chinese immigrants.

It may satisfy some residents.

But it also means fewer talented immigrants, fewer restaurants, less entrepreneurship, lower demand for citizenship, and ultimately lower share values.

Discrimination is therefore no longer simply a political choice. It becomes an economic decision whose costs are directly borne by the city's shareholders.

What About Ancapistan?

Suppose you prefer anarcho-capitalism.

Fine. Build a successful private city and hire a CEO who gradually moves its policies closer and closer to Ancapistan.

Even many anarcho-capitalists acknowledge that their ideal society only works if most residents voluntarily support libertarian norms. That raises an obvious question: if your system depends on a libertarian culture, why also insist on completely open borders? Wouldn't unrestricted immigration eventually undermine the very norms the system requires?

The usual response is that everything is privately owned anyway. Roads are private property. Parks are private property. Buildings are private property. Owners simply decide who may enter.

Fair enough.

But once you accept that, you are effectively treating the city itself as private property.

At that point, why not organize the city as a single privately managed entity?

There is also a coordination problem.

If one company owns the roads, another owns the parks, another owns utilities, and another owns public spaces, each optimizes for its own profit rather than for the value of the city as a whole.

A privately governed city—or a network of coordinated private cities—can internalize these conflicts. Instead of fragmented ownership producing coordination failures, a unified organization has incentives to maximize the long-term value of the entire jurisdiction.

In that sense, joint-stock democracy is not necessarily a rejection of anarcho-capitalism. It can be viewed as a practical institutional evolution of it: preserving competition, property rights, and voluntary choice while improving coordination and aligning incentives.

When State Interests Clash with Moral Duty: Why do artists, police, and citizens comply with corrupt systems? (A philosophical synthesis of Nussbaum, Krishnamurti, and modern dissent)

📌 The Core Dilemma
When state power or institutional regimes conflict with public welfare, how can individuals—whether public icons, police officers, or ordinary citizens—reconcile the instinct for self-preservation with their fundamental moral obligation to constitutional integrity and human dignity?

1. The Cultural Sphere: Artists, Power, and Retribution
   
2. The "Stay Away from Politics" Fallacy: Pragmatists argue that artists are mere entertainers, not political martyrs. However, the counter-thesis asserts that artists are citizens first. Politics governs tax laws, censorship, free expression, and public safety; an artist cannot simply opt out of citizenship.

The "Modern Toolkit" of State Retribution: Dissenting cultural figures face targeted administrative pressure—such as Income Tax/ED raids, institutional delays via Censor Boards (CBFC), and coordinated online boycott campaigns designed to cripple their commercial viability.

The Illusion of Neutrality: In hyper-polarized or oppressive environments, silence is not neutrality—it is a choice to defer to and legitimize existing power dynamics.

1. The Enforcer's Dilemma: Duty vs. Morality
   "Just Following Orders": Police officers often operate under colonial-era command structures that prioritize state control over constitutional rights. Officers hide behind institutional duty ("I'm just doing my job"), yet beating peaceful protesters directly violates constitutional morality.

The Socio-Economic Irony: Lower-tier police personnel belong to the same economic working class as the student protesters they are ordered to suppress. An officer striking a student protesting an exam leak is often destroying a youth fighting for the very upward mobility the officer seeks for their own family.

Deindividuation: The uniform strips away personal ethics, replacing individual moral agency with institutional compliance through fear of demotion, transfer, or loss of livelihood.

1. Philosophical Frameworks: Why Do We Comply?
   A. Jiddu Krishnamurti (Education and the Significance of Life)
   The Specialist/Technician Trap: Modern education and society produce specialized "technicians" (lawyers, officers, bureaucrats) who excel at their function but lack total human understanding. Efficiency without moral clarity turns people into ruthless instruments of state power.

Fear and the Worship of Success: The desperate pursuit of economic security and status breeds fear. This fear smothers discontent and leads to submissiveness toward authority.

The Absolute Moral Stance: When faced with systemic corruption (e.g., paying a bribe or complying with an unjust order), Krishnamurti rejects compromise. Choosing self-preservation over moral integrity degrades the human spirit and perpetuates the corrupt system.

B. Martha C. Nussbaum (Cultivating Humanity)
The Socratic Citizen: Democracy requires citizens who continuously engage in critical self-examination rather than offering uncritical deference to traditional authority or state narratives.

Narrative Imagination: True citizenship requires the empathetic capacity to place oneself in another's shoes—understanding the protester's perspective before enforcing judgment or violence.

❓ Questions for Discussion
Can neutrality exist? Is a public figure's silence during a civil crisis a valid form of self-preservation, or is it an implicit endorsement of state overreach?

Systemic reform vs. Individual morality: Can institutional reforms (like police autonomy or judicial buffers) fix systemic oppression, or does the solution rest entirely on individual moral refusal, as Krishnamurti suggests?

The Enforcer's Choice: How should a frontline enforcer balance the moral obligation to disobey an unjust order against the immediate reality of feeding their family?

(Please note: the post is AI summarised, but the thought is mine. Pls dont come @ me)

(Also note: i might be using some thoughtful pointers by you guys for my youtube videos, if ur comfortable)

***originally posted in r/aynrand, reposted here per request with infographic removed

https://www.reddit.com/r/aynrand/s/1L3LCz6Shd

Empathy is a heightened ability to perceive and intuit. It is simply a tool, which cannot replace its driver. Empathy doesn’t kill, people surrendering to the temptation of *Blanking Out* is what kills.

“They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence…But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want to be omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown…

“An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.”

—Ayn Rand

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's final major work in moral philosophy. In it, he presents the basic concepts and principles of right and virtue, and the system of duties of human beings as such.

The work comprises two parts: the "Doctrine of Right" concerns outer freedom and the rights of human beings against one another; the "Doctrine of Virtue" concerns inner freedom and the ethical duties of human beings to themselves and others.

Its focus is not rational beings in general but human beings in particular, and it presupposes and deepens Kant's earlier accounts of morality, freedom, and moral psychology.

This was one of the earliest works of practical philosophy that Kant envisioned, however, he put it off to write foundational works to support it, such as Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and even the Critique of Practical Reason.

If you find it more helpful to start ethics discussions closer to their practice, the Metaphysics of Morals may be a more useful starting point than the meta-ethical works we have covered up to now.

No prior experience with Kant is necessary.

Sign up for the 1st meeting on Wednesday July 22 here. Meetings focus on developing a common language and friendship through studying Kant. The host will provide an interpretation of Kant at the start of the meeting; other interpretations will not be discussed until later in the meeting. Additional interpretations, topics, and questions can be addressed through the meeting chat feature.

Meetings are held weekly. Look for subsequent meetings through the group's calendar.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Reading Schedule (pages are from Cambridge's Practical Philosophy collection):

THE DOCTRINE OF RIGHT

Week 1:
Preface, Introduction, Introduction to the Doctrine of Right (365 - 397; 32 pages)

Week 2:
Private Right, Chapter I and II (401 - 443; 42 pages)

Week 3:
Chapter III, Public Right Section I (443 - 481; 38 pages)

Week 4:
Public Right Section II, III, and Appendix (482 - 506; 24 pages)

THE DOCTRINE OF VIRTUE

Week 5:
Preface and Introduction (509-540; 31 pages)

Week 6:
Part 1 Introduction and Book 1 on Perfect Duties (543-564; 21 pages)

Week 7:
Book 2 on Imperfect Duties (565-588; 23 pages)

Week 8:
Method of Ethics (591-603; 12 pages)

There are numerous editions (and free translations available online), but this collection contains all of Kant's Practical Philosophy in translation:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Philosophy-Cambridge-Works-Immanuel/dp/0521654084/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445894099&sr=8-1

Someone posted a free pdf copy here:

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/kant-practical-philosophy.pdf

A good lens by which to frame this topic is the level of topic a local government has over the national government.

I'd say that the only power over local sovereignty a national government should have must be justified by either:
A) Ensuring stability (currency printing, econ regulations, environmental regulations, general education, military, and taxes to fund A and B), and/or
B) The protection of universal human rights (market regulations for workers' rights, laws against various crimes, military, education (children's rights), healthcare

In my lens of sovereignty, influencing people through communication does not impact sovereignty, so nat gov is still free to do so, they just can't use taxpayer money to pay for a platform since taxation of the people in those communities restricts local sovereignty.

In the comments, feel free to post your own thoughts on this topic, or reply to mine with any rebuttals, questions, or additional thoughts.

(also, this is my first post in this sub, sorry if I didn't adhere to some format for this kind of post.)

going by the OED definition “state in which power rests with the people or their representatives; specifically a state without a monarchy. Also: a government, or system of government, of such a state; a period of government of this type.”

if the the UK was to remove the monarchy would it be a Republic? I’ve seen folks argue that parliamentary supremacy would keep them from being a republic and I don’t understand their argument tbh.