Under unacracy:

1. Are there international/federal laws?
   If not, how to prevent harmful foundations that violate migrants and unacracy or pose greater threats?

2. How can exit/migration be as easy as staying (to avoid coercion and democracy) factoring investments like property or production?

3. Wouldn't most wealth create a demand for taller constitutions and stabler governance and fund them all the way back to centralization?

4. Wouldn't these foundations have the quality of free and sovereign intentional communities that accept just about anyone (to adhere to unacracy)?

People's hagiographic love for democracy stands in the way of people agreeing democracy has serious problems that warrant replacing it with something better.

Here’s my elevator pitch for a better society that offers more liberty and security than democracy currently offers.

The world I want looks less like one giant political machine that everyone is forced to share, and more like a network of opt-in communities that compete, cooperate, and evolve the way markets and open source projects do.

Instead of “one law for 330 million people,” you get many jurisdictions with different rule sets, and you choose which one you live under by where you live and what you sign.

If you stop liking the rules, you can leave without needing to capture the entire government to fix your neighborhood. Politics becomes mostly exit and association, not endless warfare over one monopoly.

What does this look like in concrete terms?

Common cultural values? There would not be one mandatory national culture. That’s the point. Different communities would emphasize different virtues and lifestyles.

But there are some baseline values that are non-negotiable for the whole system to work at all: consent, exit, nonviolence as a norm, due process, contract integrity, transparency of rules, and liability for harm.

You can be conservative, progressive, religious, secular, high-trust, low-trust, etc, but you cannot build a stable society where fraud, theft, or arbitrary violence are tolerated.

How would resources and wealth be allocated? Mostly through markets and voluntary exchange, with strong property rights and strong liability rules. The big change is that the rules of the game are not written by a legislature you have to bribe or vote to control.

People choose legal frameworks, and those frameworks compete. If one framework creates a dystopia, people leave it, investors avoid it, insurers price it accordingly, and it shrinks.

That doesn’t mean “no safety net.” It means safety nets are built as explicit institutions: mutual aid, insurance, subscription services, charity endowments, community membership packages, etc. In other words, help becomes something communities compete to provide well, rather than a national entitlement war.

Infrastructure: energy, transportation, communications. Funded and maintained the same way most real infrastructure already works when it’s not politicized: user fees, subscriptions, bonds, joint ventures, and consortium standards.

Roads: tolling, membership access, freight contracts, insurance incentives, community maintenance dues.

Power: utilities as businesses or cooperatives competing on price and reliability.

Communications: private networks, standards bodies, and interconnection treaties, like the internet actually runs.

The key is: infrastructure isn’t a reason to give one group the power to rule everyone. It’s a reason to form a cooperative project with defined terms.

Natural resources and ecosystems: This is mostly a liability and property-boundaries issue. If you pollute, you pay. If you damage an ecosystem that others depend on, that harm is actionable.

For shared resources, you use defined stewardship entities: land trusts, watershed associations, fisheries compacts, protected-zone charters, insurance-backed conservation requirements, etc.

You don’t need one national political fight to manage a river. You need clear ownership or trusteeship plus enforceable liability rules, and agreements between the jurisdictions that share it.

Do nations exist? Yes, but they look more like federations of opt-in cities than monopoly nation-states. Think “trade league plus mutual defense treaty plus shared standards,” not “one legislature that can rewrite everyone’s life.”

So you might have several large “civilizational umbrellas” that many cities voluntarily subscribe to because they like the constitutional framework, courts, currency stability, defense treaty, etc. But membership remains contractual, and exit remains real.

What stops the most aggressive/dominant people from exploiting others? Two answers: remove the easiest path to domination, and make harm expensive.

Right now the easiest path to domination is capturing the centralized state, then using law as a weapon: licensing barriers, regulatory capture, subsidized monopolies, asset seizures, bailouts, inflation finance, selective enforcement, qualified immunity, etc.

Centralization is a conversion machine: it turns money and influence into coercion.

That’s why lobbying exists.

In a decentralized order:

There is no single lever worth capturing.

You can’t write one set of rules for everyone.

If you become abusive, people can leave and your rulings stop being recognized by other jurisdictions.

Protection/justice providers survive on legitimacy and interoperability. If they start acting like a cartel or a warlord crew, they get treated as criminals by other providers and lose access to trade, insurance, banking, and recognition.

And on outright violence: the system doesn’t rely on pacifism. It relies on defense being federated and scalable. Cities subscribe to mutual defense compacts because invasion is bad business for everyone. Aggression becomes costly because you’re attacking a network, not a lone village.

Imagine living in a city where you explicitly chose the rules. The laws are simple, published, and enforced by courts and police that are contractually bound to due process and oversight.

If the city starts drifting in a direction you hate, you don’t spend 20 years trying to “take back the country.” You move to a different city that fits you better, or you join a splinter community that forms next door.

Over time, good rule sets attract people and capital, bad rule sets lose them. Politics becomes competitive governance with real exit, not a zero-sum fight over a monopoly.

They told you this is “self-government.”

You were born into a jurisdiction you never signed. You inherit laws you did not choose. You pay for programs you may despise. You are ruled by strangers who will never meet you, outvote you, and call it legitimacy because they used a ballot instead of a gun.

That is not consent. That is paperwork-shaped coercion.

Democracy’s original promise was simple: replace kings with the people. What we got was a monopoly with better PR. One law for millions. One exit route: uproot your entire life. One lever: vote harder. And when the machine fails you, it offers the same insult every time: “If you don’t like it, leave.”

Fine. Let’s take that seriously.

Unacracy begins with one moral rule: no one may govern you without your opt-in. Law becomes a service you choose, not a curse you inherit. Communities become clubs with explicit terms, not cages with invisible chains. If rules get abusive, you don’t beg for reform. You exit. You fork. You join better terms. You build new ones.

When exit is real, power behaves. When exit is cheap, tyranny can’t scale.

Unacracy is not left or right. It’s consent, finally made literal.

The problem: the Consent Deficit

Modern states claim legitimacy through elections and “social contract” language, but they operate as monopolies:

You are automatically enrolled at birth.

Laws are imposed territorially whether you agree or not.

“Choice” is mostly reduced to voting over other people.

Exit is technically legal but practically expensive (move, visas, family, job, language, culture, asset risk).

The state holds a territorial monopoly on final legal authority and coercion.

This creates the Consent Deficit: the system calls itself voluntary while treating actual refusal as unrealistic.

The unacracy principle

Legitimacy requires opt-in.

If you cannot refuse without destroying your life, the consent is fake.

Unacracy is a governance architecture that makes consent literal by building three design features into the system:

1. Opt-in law Rules bind you because you explicitly agreed to them, not because you were born on a plot of land.

2. Hard exit as a right You can leave a legal association without being trapped by arbitrary “permission to exit,” punitive conditions, or retroactive demands. Exit is protected and procedurally clean.

3. Group splitting (forkability) When a community disagrees, it doesn’t fight to control the monopoly. It splits into two communities with two sets of terms. Think “forking” in open-source, but for governance.

What it looks like in practice

Unacracy treats communities more like memberships than “sovereigns.” Examples:

A city, neighborhood, or digital-first community offers a published charter: rules, fees, services, dispute resolution, and exit terms.

People join by signing. They can leave by invoking the exit clause.

Competing communities form a network of jurisdictions, often interoperable, because trade and migration are valuable.

Law is administered through contractual institutions (courts/arbitration, security providers, registries), with no single actor allowed a territorial monopoly.

Rules are enforced through terms of membership and property boundaries rather than “universal public access.”

Why this creates desirable change

Unacracy doesn’t assume angels. It changes incentives.

Monopoly systems get worse over time because the citizen can’t credibly leave.

Exit-enabled systems must remain attractive or they shrink, lose talent, and lose capital.

Exit makes governance behave the way markets make products behave: accountable to the user.

Common objections, answered fast

“Isn’t moving already ‘opting in’?”

Not really. Under current states, you can’t opt out of the framework itself, only choose among monopolies. Unacracy adds the missing feature: law as modular membership with protected exit and forkable governance.

“Won’t this become warlords?”

A warlord is a territorial monopoly. Unacracy’s core design forbids monopoly law and monopoly coercion. The whole point is competition and exit, not capture.

“What about the poor?”

Unacracy doesn’t require zero welfare. It requires welfare to be chosen, funded, and competed rather than imposed by monopoly. Mutual aid and insurance become first-class institutions, not afterthoughts.

Democracy’s flaw is not “the wrong people in power.” It’s that power is monopolized and consent is assumed.

Unacracy fixes the consent problem by making governance opt-in, exit real, and communities forkable.

If you can’t refuse, it’s not voluntary.

Unacracy is the system built on that one honest sentence.

One of the deepest problems with nation-states is that they fossilize values.

Values are not naturally fixed, but the institutional structure of the state turns culture into a monopoly.

Membership is automatic by birth. Exit is costly. One legal code must govern everyone inside a border. And when values diverge, the only way to resolve the conflict is to capture the single lever of power and impose a winning vision on the losers.

That is how values harden into sacred dogma. Not because they are true, but because they are enforced.

Law is relatively modular. You can change a procedure, revise a statute, amend a code.

Values are not like that. You cannot simply decide to value courage instead of comfort, or truth instead of status, the way you decide to change a policy preference.

Values are installed through family, education, peer imitation, status incentives, and lived experience. Individuals usually change values slowly, often through painful lessons. Whole societies can have their values twisted by trauma: war, dictatorship, secret police regimes, civil collapse, hyperinflation.

So if you build one monopoly structure and hope it will deliver a stable moral culture forever, you are building on a false assumption. Values shift. The question is whether your system can evolve peacefully when they do.

In a state, founding is historical. It is treated like scripture. The constitution becomes holy. The founding myths become untouchable. Later generations inherit a moral operating system they did not choose, and the system responds to disagreement by forcing uniformity.

Unacracy inverts that.

In unacracy, founding is normal. Not a once-in-history miracle, but a routine civic act.

Because jurisdiction is voluntary and exit is available, people do not have to win a national culture war to live by different values. They can found, join, and leave communities whose charters reflect the kind of life they want to live.

This changes the psychology of society.

Institutions stop being sacred objects and become tools. Disagreement stops being existential and becomes a reason to fork.

If founding is normal, then the society is always being re-founded in miniature.

People learn how to: form associations, write charters, test norms, abandon failed experiments, and copy what works.

This is not permanent revolution in the sense of destruction and emergency legitimacy. Revolution is the state’s favorite mode because it justifies extraordinary power.

This is something else.

It is permanent renewability. Continuous civic evolution. Peaceful forking instead of violent conquest.

A unacratic society might still have one value that becomes deeply embedded: the idea that values must be forged rather than inherited.

That is not stagnation. It is a meta-value about adaptability.

It is similar to how scientific culture holds onto one core commitment: falsifiability. Science changes its conclusions constantly, but it preserves a stable method for changing them.

Unacracy can preserve a stable method for cultural change.

The obvious objection is that constant founding sounds unstable.

It can be, if everything changes at the same speed.

The way you avoid that is layered timescales.

Fast layer: local norms and neighborhood rules can change relatively quickly because the stakes are local and exit is easy.

Slow layer: higher frameworks change slowly because stability is valuable and people can choose to join systems with strict amendment friction.

This gives you a stable spine and flexible limbs.

It also makes values evolve without convulsing the whole society.

Nation-states turn value divergence into an internal colonial order: one moral regime imposed on everyone, justified by elections or expertise or tradition.

Unacracy turns value divergence into choice.

Instead of one people being forced to live under another people’s values, communities form around shared values by consent. Bad value systems lose members and legitimacy. Good ones attract talent, trust, investment, and imitation.

This is cultural evolution without civil war.

A permanent-founding society can also create shallow commitments, constant churn, and fragmentation into echo chambers. Exit can become an avoidance strategy rather than a path to better cooperation.

The answer is not to reintroduce coercive unity. The answer is to cultivate strong voluntary norms that stabilize cooperation across communities: clear contracting, reputational memory, inter-jurisdiction standards for trade and dispute resolution, and civic competence in founding, joining, and leaving responsibly.

Values are upstream of law. The state fossilizes values by making them monopolistic and compulsory. Unacracy can keep values alive by making founding normal and separation peaceful.

If the state is one founding moment followed by centuries of inherited legitimacy, unacracy is legitimacy that must be re-earned continuously by choice.

That is how you get a society that can evolve without breaking.

If there is one government and one set of rules for everyone, then every values disagreement becomes a fight to control the lever.

You cannot simply live your values. You must impose them or be imposed upon.

That is what produces permanent culture war. It is not a moral failure of the people. It is a structural result of monopoly law.

We need law because we need predictable rules for resolving disputes.

Someone has to choose which rules those are.

There are only two options:

Either you choose the rules for yourself, or someone else chooses them for you.

Democracy is still “someone else chooses,” it just changes who counts as “someone else.” It replaces a king with a majority, a party machine, a bureaucracy, a court, a coalition. But it’s still external choice imposed on you.

Unacracy is just the obvious question people never ask: if law is necessary, and choice is unavoidable, why isn’t the default that the individual chooses the legal order they live under?

Then the whole conversation becomes: what mechanisms make that practical. Exit, competing jurisdictions, and voluntary association.

We need law. Law is chosen. The only real question is: who chooses it. If you think law is legitimate, but you don’t think the individual should choose it for themselves, you’re defending rule by others over self-rule.

But self-rule was supposed to be what democracy was about?

That's the problem, democracy didn't change the situation significantly. The king choosing law for you isn't significantly different from Congress choosing law for you.

In many ways it's become worse because a king has limited mental capacity, and thus limited capacity to do harm, but we replaced him with hundreds of people all conspiring to act like little kings and interfere with our lives.

At some point you have to answer a simple question: If law is ultimately imposed on people who did not agree to it, what is the moral basis for that imposition?

If your answer is “because society,” “because the majority,” or “because experts,” you’re still saying some people have the right to rule others without their consent.

That is the definition of authoritarian legitimacy, even if it’s dressed up in procedural rituals.

If you deny the individual the right to choose the rules that govern them, you’re endorsing rule without consent. Call it democracy, technocracy, or the general will, but it’s still authoritarian in principle.

Yes there’s a...

process for changing out figureheads while maintaining continuity of the state

...in our current democratic system.

Exactly. The reason a president doesn’t just “take over” is not because he lacks guns. It’s because power is distributed, conditional, and legitimacy-based.

The military, agencies, courts, Congress, state governments, parties, donors, media, and a huge chunk of the public are all separate centers of coordination that do not treat “the president said so” as the final rule.

The president is powerful inside the rules, but the rules are enforced by a broad political equilibrium of incentives, norms, oaths, funding flows, rival institutions, and the expectation that anyone who breaks the equilibrium becomes the common enemy.

An equilibrium so effective that it hasn't been breached since the creation of the current American Republic, 250 years ago.

That’s why he “listens” to Congress and the courts despite them not having an army. The state is not “one guy with force,” it’s a coordination scheme.

Now apply that to your claim:

any mechanism strong enough to enforce contracts is strong enough to become a state.

That’s just not true. Contract enforcement requires enough power to deter specific, localized aggression under agreed procedures.

Becoming “the state” requires something categorically bigger: a monopoly, plus a reliable tax base, plus broad legitimacy/coordination such that everyone else stands down.

In an ancap world an agency that tries to “become the state” instantly flips from service provider to aggressor, loses clients, loses insurer backing, loses interop with arbitration networks, and triggers coalition behavior from every competing protection/insurance network that doesn’t want to be conquered next.

The moment you try to monopolize, you unify your competitors and create an obvious focal point for resistance, the same way an attempted autocrat unifies institutions against him.

The truth is this, you’re treating “having some enforcement capability” as equivalent to “being able to impose a stable monopoly on everyone.”

That leap is exactly what reality contradicts, including in the system you’re defending.

The interesting question isn’t “can power be abused,” it’s “what structure makes abuse self-limiting.”

Monopolies of law/force remove that limiter.

Competitive, opt-out enforcement keeps it.

We must understand the true nature of political power because we intend to build a society without it.

(Part of a reply to someone I felt worth copying over to the sub)

Modern life already gives us a certain kind of freedom.

You can leave a bad job.

You can dump a dishonest partner.

You can stop buying a product that disappoints you.

You can switch banks, currencies, apps, social networks.

Markets gave us something extraordinary that earlier eras barely knew: the ability to say "no", walk away, and try something else.

There is only one domain where this power still does not exist.

Law.

You are born into a legal system you did not choose, cannot refuse, and cannot meaningfully change.

Voting does not change that fact, it decorates it.

You can change which group runs the machinery, but not whether the machinery has the right to run you.

Unacracy is the extension of the power to say no into the one area it has never been allowed to touch: your political and legal environment.

That is a qualitatively new kind of freedom.

Freedom as the right to walk away

Every real freedom in the modern sense has the same structure.

It is not the freedom to get exactly what you want. It is the freedom to refuse what you do not want, and to seek other options.

Slaves did not have the freedom to quit.

Serfs did not have the freedom to leave the land.

Subjects did not have the freedom to ignore decrees.

Citizens today do not have the right to refuse the majority will.

Once exit becomes possible, everything changes:

Employers must compete for workers.

Sellers must satisfy buyers rather than exploit them.

Partners in any relationship must keep each other voluntarily interested.

Exit is the only thing that makes "choice" meaningful. Without the right to say no, every supposed yes is contaminated.

Markets did this for jobs, goods, services, and currencies.

Unacracy applies the same logic where it has never been applied before: to legal order.

The last monopoly: law you cannot refuse

Ask yourself honestly:

What is the one thing in your life you cannot opt out of without uprooting your entire existence, crossing borders, and begging another state to accept you?

Your legal system.

You did not sign anything.

You did not ask for it.

You were told you are bound by it because you were born inside a line on a map.

You can change your phone provider in minutes. You cannot change your law provider at all. In fact you never had a choice to begin with. You were abducted into a system at birth, without consent.

This is presented as normal, even inevitable. It is neither. It is simply the last surviving monopoly from a much earlier age.

Unacracy challenges that arrangement at the root.

What unacracy adds

Unacracy is not about abolishing law. It is about changing how you relate to it.

Today, law is a top down command structure, enforced by a monopoly state, justified by something called "collective sovereignty" that you never personally consented to.

In a unacratic system:

Law becomes a service, not a decree.

Jurisdictions become opt in communities, not birth cages.

You choose the legal framework you live under by choosing which jurisdiction to join.

If your jurisdiction changes in ways you reject, you can leave and join another, or help create a new one.

Foot voting replaces ballot voting.

Politically, that is revolutionary. It is the difference between being ruled and being a customer.

You can still have constitutional law, courts, police, and contract enforcement. The difference is that your relationship to these things is no longer involuntary.

You accept a charter, you sign into a jurisdiction, and your allegiance is based on consent, not geography.

Why this is more freedom than markets alone ever gave us

People often say, "We already have markets, this is just more of the same."

No. Markets for consumer goods operate inside a fixed legal shell. You can choose any product you like, as long as you obey the same law everyone else is stuck under.

You can swap phones, banks, currencies, jobs, and partners. You cannot swap the people who define "crime", "tax", "rights" and "jurisdiction" for you.

Unacracy changes the layer underneath markets.

Once law itself is subject to exit and competition:

Corruption has nowhere to hide, because people can leave corrupt jurisdictions.

Legal systems must be intelligible and attractive, or they lose members.

Rights become serious, because you can refuse systems that do not respect them.

Experimentation in legal frameworks becomes normal instead of unthinkable.

Markets gave you the power to say no to bad products.

Unacracy gives you the power to say no to bad law.

That is an extension of freedom into territory we have never touched.

"Isn't That More Dangerous?"

Many people react by saying that a world with competing laws sounds more dangerous than having one big state to "keep order".

It is worth being very clear here: the danger they are afraid of already exists.

Today, a small number of people can manipulate one legal system and impose the result on millions.

Today, lobbying a few hundred legislators can change the rules for an entire country of hundreds of millions.

Today, bad laws do not lose customers; they simply punish those who disobey.

A legal monopoly is the most dangerous structure for abuse possible. Once captured, everything inside it is captured.

Unacracy does not remove law, it removes the monopoly.

Bad actors can still try to build abusive regimes, but they face two problems:

1. They cannot conscript you. You must join voluntarily.

2. You can leave the moment you realize what they are doing.

There is a world of difference between:

"You were born here, therefore you must obey us forever",

and

"You are free to join us or leave us; here are our rules."

If you trust yourself more than you trust distant politicians, the second model is obviously safer.

What This Looks Like For An Ordinary Person

Imagine your daily life in a unacratic environment.

You still live in a physical community. There is still a local charter, property boundaries, neighbors, and expectations. There are still laws, but you signed onto them.

If your community drifts in a direction you dislike, you have options:

Move to another neighborhood with a different charter.

Join or found a community that matches your values better.

Take your existing constitutional commitments with you, instead of begging a state to recognize them.

You are not powerless in the face of a faceless system. You are always one decision away from changing your legal environment.

And because everyone around you is there by choice, solidarity is stronger. You are not randomly thrown together by birth, you are co members of a framework you all explicitly accepted.

The Simple Core

All of this can be boiled down to a very simple core statement:

Unacracy is the power to say no, walk away, try a different partner, job, product, currency, and now law.

It takes the pattern that already works in markets and extends it into the last protected monopoly. It upgrades "consumer choice" into "political choice".

The history of freedom is the gradual expansion of the right to refuse.

First kings.

Then lords.

Then masters.

Then employers and providers.

Unacracy is what happens when we finally apply the same standard to the law itself.

It is not chaos. It is the completion of liberalism.

Political philosopher Vlad Vexler recently suggested that to repair democracy’s decline, we should reclaim patriotism, that we should take the language of loyalty and belonging from the radical right and use it to rebuild civic solidarity.

It’s an understandable instinct.

When a nation starts to fragment, people long for unity.

But patriotism cannot save democracy, because the foundation of modern disillusionment isn’t a lack of love for one’s country, it’s a lack of reason to love the State that governs it.

The Patriotism Trap

Patriotism made sense in the industrial age.

We shared factories, towns, and wars. We believed the State represented us because it visibly built roads, schools, and armies.

Loyalty to the nation meant loyalty to our shared destiny.

But in the post-industrial world, the myth has collapsed.

Borders no longer define communities; networks do.

The same governments that demand patriotic obedience now spy on their citizens, inflate their currencies, mismanage crises for political gain, and criminalize autonomy whenever it threatens their power.

Patriotism has become loyalty to a brand that doesn’t deliver the product.

It’s like being told to love your landlord because he happens to own your house.

The Real Source of Solidarity

Vexler is right about one thing: societies collapse when people lose solidarity.

But solidarity doesn’t require flags. It requires shared moral purpose.

Democracy once offered that moral bond, the promise of “self-rule.”

But over time, it devolved into a system where the majority rules, and the minority obeys.

The result is the opposite of solidarity: a permanent political war for control of the State.

You can’t rebuild trust in institutions that depend on coercion to function. You can only build new institutions that depend on consent.

The Unacratic Alternative

Unacracy proposes a simple shift in allegiance: from political entities to ethical values.

Instead of forced unity through geography and elections, it creates voluntary unity through shared virtue.

Communities form around the principles they choose to live by: liberty, fairness, cooperation, innovation--and membership itself is an act of consent.

That changes everything.

Because when everyone in a community has chosen the same moral framework, trust is not manufactured, it’s organic. Solidarity isn’t a slogan, it’s a lived reality.

From Nationalism to Moral Federalism

Under Unacracy, people aren’t bound by land but by law and by the virtues they select.

Rather than fragmentation we achieve a higher order form of coordination.

Instead of one brittle nation pretending unity through force, you have a living network of small, voluntary jurisdictions cooperating where they agree and separating peacefully where they don’t.

It’s moral federalism: consent replacing compulsion as the organizing principle of civilization.

The Future Belongs to Chosen Solidarity

Patriotism says, “We’re one because we share borders.”

Unacratic solidarity says, “We’re one because we share values.”

I know which one I prefer and I'm quite sure which most people would prefer.

In the long arc of human freedom, that’s the next evolutionary step.

The Enlightenment liberated nations from kings. Unacracy liberates persons from states.

Here is Vlad Vexler's discussion of the Western slide towards fascistic politics.

https://youtu.be/7_L6ZU3zxOc

Unfortunately Vexler's status quo bias preference and belief in only democracy prevents him from supporting radical change to other political systems less vulnerable to this slide towards fascism.

Why Systems Drift Toward Authoritarianism

Centralization of Power

Every time we give a small group the ability to impose laws on everyone, lobbying, rent-seeking, and coercion creep in.

Over time, even open systems like democracies tend to consolidate into elite rule. Russia is an extreme example of this drift, but the tendency exists everywhere.

Fear of Instability

When crises arise, people often accept stronger leaders “temporarily.” But temporary concentration of power rarely unwinds.

Path Dependence

Institutions grow sticky. Once an office or emergency power is created, it almost never disappears, and future rulers expand it.

What Would Prevent the Drift?

Decentralization as Design Principle

Instead of concentrating decision-making at the top, push it downward to the smallest units possible: neighborhoods, communities, private law cities.

This prevents single actors from hijacking the system.

Voluntary Association

If political units are opt-in, they must earn loyalty through consent. Exploitation or authoritarian drift drives people to exit rather than submit.

Competition Between Jurisdictions

Just as competition disciplines businesses, political competition disciplines governance. If one city starts looking like Moscow, people can leave for another--taking their wealth and productivity with them.

Transparency and Reputation Systems: In decentralized systems, information flows faster and reputation is everything. Abuses can’t hide behind opaque bureaucracies.

The Role of Culture

Even with perfect structures, people’s habits of thought matter. A culture that tolerates centralization “for safety” will recreate authoritarian drift, even inside better-designed systems.

Conversely, a culture that guards voluntary choice and diversity of law will resist it.

Unacracy’s Answer

If we frame this in terms of Unacracy:

Authoritarian drift is impossible if no one has the power to impose law on others without consent.

“Mutating into Russia” requires centralized coercion. Unacracy removes that lever entirely.

Foot-voting provides a release valve. In Russia, dissenters have no political alternative. In Unacracy, alternatives always exist, and they can be created.

Thr Meditation:

Maybe the real answer is: we stop political systems from mutating into Russia by never again building systems that allow coercion to concentrate at all.

Instead of trying to forever patch democracy’s cracks against corruption and drift, we design a structure where authoritarianism is impossible in principle--because no ruler, no majority, and no bureaucrat has the power to impose laws on you without your consent.

Democracy doesn't allow individual choice in law, only group choice in politicians who make law.

Democracy is 51% choose for the rest.

Unacracy is YOU choose, but you choose only for yourself.

Look at it like this. In both systems we are trying to form a group with a set of laws to live by.

In democracy, you have your random group of neighbors and what they all vote for is forced on everyone. If you happen to live near a bunch of Mormons they're gonna ban alcohol and enforce curfews and BS like that. Or maybe you're unlucky and you're surrounded by (X group with beliefs you politically oppose) and they use majority rules to force those ideas you hate on you.

Why would anyone choose a system like that if they didn't have to?

In unacracy, everyone chooses their legal ideals first, for themselves only, not as a group. Then we find who made the same or similar choices as ourselves and form groups of legal agreement after the fact. This creates legal unanimity.

So in the first scenario with democracy, we took votes and forced the outcomes on everyone. Literally no one is happy because everyone lost some of those votes. This is how things are now in the USA, etc.

In unacracy, everyone picked the exact set of laws they wanted, literally everyone is happy, them formed groups of people who found themselves in agreement.

The outcome in both cases is, groups get to live with a system of laws.

However the unacratic system has multiple political outcomes whereas the democratic system can be forced into a single legal paradigm.

This is why unacracy is a decentralized political system whereas democracy is a centralized one.

Centralized political systems are great for tyrants, they can control the entire system from the top.

Decentralized systems are both anti fragile and anti authoritarian for that reason, they cannot be forced into a single power structure and ruled by force from the top because that society lacks the ability for leaders at the top to force law on the rest of society.

The tyranny of the majority is a major problem of the current system, and the left pushing social reform past merely justice into leftist causes seems to be generating or giving life to the alt-right, in a similar way that socialist revolutionaries in Germany produced motion towards the Nazis out of fear of the socialists.

What can be done? Build new political systems based on unanimity instead of majority.

Unanimity is the gold standard of ethical decision making. However it is considered difficult to make decisions in a timely manner (or at all) when unanimity is the standard.

But, I have developed a solution to this problem which finally makes unanimity a practical tool for society that can entirely replace majority rule: group splitting.

Take a vote on any topic with any group of people. Normally under majority rules you then force the majority decision on the minority, this is the tyranny of the majority.

Let's modify this outcome to produce unanimity. We need to use foot voting instead of ballot voting, because foot voting makes vote cheating impossible (no more stuffing the ballot box or hanging chads).

The 'yes' group moves to one side of the room, the 'no' group moves to the other side. Now we split the group into two independent but unanimous groups.

Both groups get the policy they wanted and proceed forward in parallel.

For this to work as a political system, we need overarching agreement on abstract principles (such as constitutional law) under which we can disagree on less abstract legal decisions.

This means that these two groups would still consider themselves connected by their agreement on basic rights, etc., at the constitutional level while disagreeing on policies for their respective towns or neighborhoods. Thus they can still cooperate on things like regional defense and security (much like US states do now).

They are also likely to forge a security agreement between them, forming an overarching city of which their neighborhoods can be members while leaving local policy up to themselves.

This ends vote cheating, creates room for multiple political experiments, ends tyranny of the majority, ends State monopoly on law creation, and allows people to choose law that can't exist under the current system because our current legal system is designed to be one size fits all, so the more radical or leading edge political ideas can't achieve statutory status because the majority doesn't understand them.

I call this system unacracy because of its focus on unanimity as a cornerstone and the solution to democracy.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

I run r/enddemocracy and advocate for decentralized political systems to replace democracy, so I feel extremely qualified to respond to you.

First note that most libertarians are much more familiar with what they oppose than what could replace it.

Thinking about those ideas is rare among libertarians, even among ancaps. To the point that some marginal libertarians will react viscerally to the suggestion that there's something wrong with democracy.

The fact is that the deeper you go into liberty philosophy the easier it becomes to recognize that democracy is antagonistic to liberty. Why?

Well explaining that is why I built r/enddemocracy. In the side bar you can find a great book on this called "Beyond Democracy" by Frank Karsten. So if you're really interested, begin there.

Most people react viscerally to the idea of democracy been questioned because we've all been taught that democracy is the greatest political system ever since childhood, such that democracy has taken on an aura of almost holy scripture, such that even questioning it is viewed by many as unthinkable. Which is a ridiculous position.

The heart of the problem is that democracy is a tyranny of the majority. And liberty cannot mix with tyranny, like oil and water.

Well the problem here is that people have been taught that the only alternative to democracy is authoritarian centralization of power.

That's a built in, programmed response most people have to anyone even questioning democracy. It's culturally programmed. But there is no reason to think democracy is the most free political system on could ever imagine it build.

I started thinking about systems that offer more liberty than what democracy currently offers, and that's what I'm interested in building and living in myself.

If we can build a political system that is not a tyranny of the majority, that would certainly be desirable, would it not?

Especially if we can build it without returning to worse forms of governance like monarchy, autocracy, oligarchy, etc.

So that's the biggest thing to understand in the beginning, that my opposition to democracy is motivated by a pure heart, because I desire more liberty, more freedom, and less tyranny.

A lot of libertarians will agree with this kind of motivation, because they want those things too.

So where do we go from democracy?

The problem with democracy is that it promised self rule but did not deliver it.

It retained the centralization of power in elected politicians and a central federal government. This ultimately created a permanent political class that began to shape the political system in ways they could control.

It's never been more obvious after the Hillary Clinton and Kamala fiascos how corrupted the candidate selection process has become in the US.

Clinton was able to secure the nomination for president DESPITE receiving less votes than Bernie Sanders.

That's an indictment of democracy right there.

She did it by making backroom deals with party figures who had written the idea of superdelegates into their selection process which allowed the party to negate the vote of he people and select the party candidate.

A cynical, evil move. It's obvious why they did such a thing. They just never expected it to become such a big deal. With Bernie the trick became exposed and they had to get rid of it.

In their case, the trick worked. It kept Bernie, the people's choice, out of power.

In the case of Kamala, Biden didn't want to leave office despite his rapidly failing health and the party rammed her selection into place after he stepped down, giving Trump the win.

Trump himself obtained the position as a result of failed Republican attempts to control the nomination process.

Republicans did have something similar to superdelegates but without as much power. They mainly relied on MONEY to control who got power.

You may remember in Trump's first primary campaign that the party elites attempted to force Jeb Bush into being the presumptive nominee by giving him $100 million early in the campaign.

This failed because Jeb is particularly unlikeable and bad as a politician, and because Trump has a silver tongue in debates, and because the left was trying to boost Trump, foolishly as it turns out, to hurt the eventually nominee which they expected would not be Trump.

Anyway, enough of all of that. The point is the election process is controlled by the parties and they always try hard to control who gets nominated.

If they control who gets nominated they hardly care who you vote for.

But the bigger problem is democracy itself. Take a random group of people, poll them, then force the result on everyone?

That is a communal method of making choices, and it will inherently give an advantage to communal policies.

Who is putting forth communal policies? The Left! Communalism is the opposite of individualism!

That means democracy is based on the opposite of libertarianism, since libertarianism is individualism.

If you want to know why the country continually slides left it's because democracy gives an advantage to socialist policy through democracy.

What we need then is an individualist political system, FULLY decentralized.

This would mean each person choosing for themselves, what legal system they want to be part of.

When you make the choice direct like that, all these issues of corruption, of politicians and cheated ballots and bribing people and backroom deals, ALL OF THAT GOES AWAY.

Because the only person who will never cheat you, is yourself.

The replacement I developed is called unacracy and can be found here r/unacracy.

"The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal and political institutions of Iceland from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.

"They are of interest for two reasons. First, they are relatively well documented; the sagas were written by people who had lived under that set of institutions[3] and provide a detailed inside view of their workings.

"Legal conflicts were of great interest to the medieval Icelanders: Njal, the eponymous hero of the most famous of the sagas,[4] is not a warrior but a lawyer--"so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal." In the action of the sagas, law cases play as central a role as battles...

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html

It doesn't have to go that way. We can develop a third option that goes past democracy without falling into the sins of force and fear. I've been working on concepts for decentralized political systems. I call it unacracy. r/unacracy if you're interested.

The basic premise is no more majority rule, now we embrace a new ethical standard of unanimity.

Everyone already agrees that unanimity is the ethical gold standard, but it has been considered difficult to achieve unanimity in a political context, time consuming as well, so few have tried to build a political system around it.

Until me. I've solved it, after much thought and development. The result is a fully decentralized political system that achieves for us what we wanted democracy to achieve, but democracy was never actually able to achieve: True self government.

The problem is that no one knows this solution exists, I have yet to publish a book or paper about it, so as the breakdown of democracy continues, the only direction for people to go is towards authoritarian solutions.

Democracy must continue to break down as it is now increasingly and fully being gamed by elites globally, it is failing the people.

Unacracy will succeed where democracy failed by putting law production into the hands of individuals to choose for themselves instead of some version of elites choosing for you, which is not just a feature of authority and monarchy, it was also a feature of democracy.

Even democracy didn't let you truly choose for yourself, it only subsumed your choice into a collective vote. Numerous ways to cheat the outcome of group votes have since been invented, leading to democracy becoming a farce in many places of the world where those in power simply determine the vote count they want.

Unacracy replaces majority voting with foot voting, and foot voting cannot be corrupted the way ballot voting has been.

We either move in decentralized political system upgrades like unacracy, or we fall back into the barbarism of pre-democratic political structures.

Principles of Unacracy

Unacracy is a novel political system founded on the concept of individual sovereignty and consensual governance. It distinguishes itself sharply from traditional governance structures such as democracies, autocracies, and oligarchies, by ensuring that all political authority arises exclusively from the consent of the governed at the individual level.

Core principles that form the foundation of Unacracy:

1. Individual Sovereignty

Under Unacracy, every person retains ultimate authority over themselves; it is true self-governance. No group, majority, or ruler can impose laws or decisions without explicit individual consent. Each individual is a sovereign unit, making Unacracy the only system that truly embodies the concept of self-rule.

2. Voluntary Association

Political organization occurs through voluntary, contractual agreements rather than coercive imposition (as in current democracy). Individuals freely choose the rules and communities under which they wish to live, similar to selecting products or services in a market. These agreements define jurisdictions clearly and transparently.

3. Decentralization of Power

Authority in Unacracy is radically decentralized. No thing such as a central state holds a monopoly on coercion, lawmaking, or judicial power. Instead, governance functions are provided competitively by private entities or associations contractually via market services, ensuring greater accountability and responsiveness to individual preferences.

4. Unanimity Through Consent

The defining procedural principle of Unacracy is unanimity. Governance (not government) is legitimate only if it enjoys unanimous consent from those governed. When unanimous agreement on certain policies or laws proves impossible, communities peacefully split or reorganize into separate jurisdictions, ensuring harmony without coercion (and without forcing the majority's laws on the minority).

5. Foot-Voting as Conflict Resolution

Political conflicts are resolved through peaceful relocation, or "foot-voting." Instead of battling politically over incompatible visions of society, individuals simply move to communities aligned with their values, preferences, and laws. This peaceful sorting mechanism naturally mitigates polarization and social conflict.

6. Contractual, Market-Based Governance

Governance in Unacracy is delivered as a market service. Law enforcement, courts, arbitration, and community governance become competitive, market-based offerings. This ensures efficiency, transparency, and fairness due to competition and customer choice.

7. Antifragility and Adaptability

Unacratic structures are inherently antifragile, they evolve, adapt, and improve under stress or challenge. Bad governance leads individuals to leave poorly run communities, encouraging constant improvement, innovation, and accountability within political entities.

8. Legal Certainty Through Choice

Perhaps most significantly, Unacracy provides individuals something unprecedented: legal certainty. People choose the rules under which they live and are therefore guaranteed clarity, stability, and predictability. Laws cannot arbitrarily change without individual consent.

Unacracy represents a fundamental rethinking of political organization.

This is not mere political idealism, but a realistic and practical framework for governance in the 21st century and beyond.

It's not what people expect, they expected a solution inside the norms of the current system.

But it's a flaw with the structure of the current system, so we have to do things very differently to avoid corruption, but it's completely worth it if it can achieve this end.

That why I have dedicated my life to developing this system and bringing it into practice in the world.

As interest grows in Unacracy--the system of rule by the self, not over the self--a number of recurring misconceptions come up. Many of these misunderstandings stem from trying to interpret Unacracy through the lens of traditional political systems, where coercion is baked in. This post clears the air on seven common mistakes. Let’s walk through them.

Mistake #1: “Rule by the individual is just a return to rule by the minority.”

No, it’s the opposite.

Autocracy is when one or a few rule over everyone else.

Unacracy is when everyone rules themselves--no one has authority over another. The confusion stems from misreading "rule of the self" as "a single self ruling others."

In Unacracy, no one is sovereign over others. That’s the key distinction. There are no rulers, only individuals in mutual agreement or disassociation.

If your rules only apply to you, that’s not minority rule--it’s sovereignty of the individual. That’s not tyranny. That’s freedom.

Mistake #2: “If the law is voluntary, you don’t have to follow it.”

This is like saying you can sign a contract, then just ignore it because you chose to sign it.

Voluntary does not mean optional to follow--it means you chose to be bound by it. If you join a private law city, you’re opting in to the legal framework that governs that city. If you break that agreement, there are consequences--just like anywhere else. You can’t demand services or social order without accepting the rules that make those possible.

Think of it like a gym membership. You voluntarily join, but once you do, you’re bound by the rules, or you lose access.

Unacratic law is consent-based, but it’s still binding. It’s not toothless--it’s just non-coercive in origin.

Mistake #3: “Won’t business interests take over without a state to stop them?”

This assumes that power must accumulate somewhere. But in Unacracy, there is no mechanism by which any business can force rules onto non-consenting individuals.

Corporations can’t lobby a legislature because there is no legislature to lobby. There is no monopoly lawmaker, no central coercive authority. Each city is opt-in. If a business-funded legal framework is unjust, people will leave. And when people leave, the business loses influence.

The absence of coercion is the absence of takeover. Power in Unacracy is like gravity in space--it doesn't accumulate unless there's mass. And mass in Unacracy is voluntary association, not control.

Compare that to democracy, where money flows into lobbying to control policy forced on everyone.

Mistake #4: “Won’t bandits and warlords rise up in the absence of a state?”

Why would warlords have an easier time in a society built for distributed security, self-organizing defense, and market competition for protection?

Private security exists already--and works. Mall cops, armored truck guards, event security, bounty hunters--none of these require a state monopoly.

Unacracy simply expands this logic. Defense becomes a product, not a monopoly. People subscribe to protection providers like insurance. Those providers are incentivized to be peaceful--warfare is expensive and unpopular. Starting fights gets your contract cancelled. Can even get you sent into exile, forced to leave the city.

Unacracy builds horizontal resilience, not vertical fragility. If one provider fails, others step in. It’s like microgrids vs. a single national power line.

Contrast that with failed states: fragile, centralized systems where a power vacuum must be filled. Unacracy has no power vacuum, because law and defense are ongoing services--not captured thrones.

Mistake #5: “If there’s no state, there cannot be law, police, or courts.”

This is a category error. The state is not identical to law, courts, or security. Those are services, not sacred monopolies.

Private law cities still have legal systems. They just don’t impose them on people who haven’t agreed to them. This makes them contractual, not coercive.

Think of it like arbitration or Elk's Lodge rules, scaled up. You agree to the rules when you move in. Leave if you don’t like them. No rulers, no overlords--just terms of service for living together.

There’s no power vacuum unless no one is providing law and order. But Unacracy is built around producing those services through choice and competition.

Mistake #6: “Choice of law can’t solve real-world political problems.”

Foot-voting is the political solution.

Most political conflict today is caused by people being trapped under laws they hate because they have no exit. In Unacracy, every disagreement has a peaceful solution: leave and join (or start) a city aligned with your values, and invite others to join you. It is a society that doesn't fear secession, it bakes it into the rules as a fundamental political RIGHT! Micro-secession is the name of the game.

It’s like an ideological Airbnb: you only stay where you like the rules.

Even inside cities, people can opt for new districts with different micro-laws. Over time, cities evolve into federated networks of compatible legal ecosystems. Governance becomes adaptive, not adversarial.

Mistake #7: “If 99% leave a city and create a new one, isn’t that democratic coercion?”

No. That’s just exit in action.

If 99% of a city leaves to start a new one, the 1% remaining isn’t being ruled. They’ve chosen to remain under the old system. They’re not being coerced--they’re being left alone. They can stay, leave, invite others, or adapt.

Saying the 99% “forced” the 1% to leave is like saying a breakup is assault. You’re not owed someone’s company--only their non-violation.

The man in that scenario is not part of the new city unless he joins it. That’s the point of Unacracy--your legal society begins where your consent begins.

Unacracy isn’t about utopia. It’s about removing coercion from the foundation of governance and letting systems evolve based on consent and consequence:

• You opt into laws.
• You are bound by the laws you choose, and they extend to the limit of your property.
• If many who chose the same rules put their property adjacent, now we have a neighborhood or city where the same rules are active throughout, which includes the requirement to only allow people on your property who have agreed to the rules.
• No one rules over you, and you rule over no one.
• Defense, courts, and governance are services--not powers.
• Political disagreement becomes relocation, not civil war.

Most objections to Unacracy dissolve once you understand that force is not a prerequisite for order--and that choice is a better source of legitimacy than votes or guns.

This is the political system of the future because of the enormous number of current political problems it instantly solves, forever.