Underthrow

Subscribe and support us at Underthrow.org. Her utopia is impossible. His golden age is gone. What if neither the future we imagine nor the past we remember is available to us? To see why, consider a window. You’ve heard of the Overton Window. It’s the range of ideas the public will tolerate at a given moment. Inside it are the policies a politician can propose without losing the next election. Ou...

Subscribe and support us at Underthrow.org Something’s not right . You’ve felt it. Maybe at a dinner-table conversation that went cold over politics. Maybe scrolling at 2 a.m., wondering why everyone seems furious, and nobody seems happy. You’re not imagining it. A civilization in decline shows symptoms like a sick body. And ours is running three fevers at once. The first is ressentiment . That’s...

Subscribe and support us at Underthrow.org - Nearly every time someone complains online about a crazy medical bill, it goes viral. We’ve all been there. Invariably, people in the comments say the same thing: This is what happens when you leave healthcare to the free market. It’s a tidy tale. The villain is greed, the cure is government, and the case for single-payer is closed. There’s just one pro...

Subscribe and support us at Underthrow.org -- A quick quiz. No wrong answers, just interesting results. What is the proper role of government? Pick the answer closest to your gut: * The Helper. Government ought to solve social problems and help people. * The Guardian. Government should make moral laws, preserve tradition, and keep order. * The Referee. Government should just protect your rights to...

Human Respect Labs presents: “The Spell That Made Everyone Good” —a short animated parable on force, freedom, and the power of human respect. Please watch and share so we can make more! Got a creative project idea about human liberation? Visit Human Respect Labs to see if you qualify for funding. There once was a city both ancient and great, Whose greatness gave way to a terrible fate. The city of...

Subscribe and support Underthrow.org -- Something strange has happened to the American economy. Ask people whether life has become less affordable, and you’ll probably hear the same story. The middle class is disappearing. Wages can’t keep up. Our parents had it better. Everything costs too much. Slivers of that story are true. But then you encounter a chart like this one from the Master of Killer...

The Lindsay Clancy case is resurfacing a fresh debate about mens rea and actus reus —that is, the guilty mind and the guilty act. And it’s running along the same lines it always has. Was she evil, or was she sick? Prison, or hospital? You know how this goes. One side says it was a choice. The other says the choice was made for her, by her wiring, her childhood, or her biochemistry. Prosecutors bui...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org Picture this : You walk into your local grocery store in New York City. You load up your cart with fresh produce, milk, and coffee. You get to the register, and the total drops by thirty percent. Sounds like a dream, right? Well, if the city’s democratic socialist contingent has its way, this isn’t just a dream—it’s the new order. Their plan? Have the city o...

Subscribe and support us at Underthrow.org -- Look at this yard sign . Pause the video if you need to. Surely you’ve seen it before. For those listening, it reads… In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter. Women’s Rights are Human Rights. No Human is Illegal. Science is real. Love is love. Kindness is Everything. Recently, I casually mentioned my assessment of this sign: “Dumb talking points”...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org -- I was having a conversation with my wife recently. “When you say you want to create a consent-based society,” she said, “what do you mean?” I replied that I want all human relationships in that society to be consensual, not compelled. We went round and round for an hour. I didn’t get very far in persuading her. To most people—my wife included—the very ide...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org. I don’t care much for politicians. Most of them are just the bosses of a legal mafia. But there are a few exceptions. My current Number One is Javier Milei of Argentina. But first, a trip down memory lane… In 1913, an Argentine bricklayer earned more than a French one. Buenos Aires had electric trams before most of Europe. The phrase “rich as an Argentine”...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org You’ve seen the open letters. “Tax me more,” they say. Billionaires at Davos standing with hands over their hearts, pleading with governments to take more of their money. How noble. Here’s what you won’t find: extra canceled checks at the US Treasury. The federal government accepts voluntary donations and has done so for over a century. That means billionair...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org “Freedom is good for design,” wrote a man who knows what it means to be unfree. Adrian Bejan grew up in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu—a regime that believed it could plan a society as an engineer bolts together a machine. Every factory, farm, and loaf of bread was dictated from the center. The plan was total. The plan was correct. The plan was, in Le Corbu...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org Have you ever been to the doctor’s office and thought they were doing more harm than good? In 1847, a Viennese doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something that should have been impossible. At Vienna General Hospital, there were two maternity clinics. One was staffed by midwives. The other by doctors and medical students—the best-trained men in Europe. Bu...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org Here’s an important question to sit with: When government power and corporate power fuse into a single control structure, what’s left for the rest of us? Most people try to answer with politics: Vote harder. Protest louder. Or wait for that “constitutional moment” that never comes. I want to offer you a different answer. It’s called subversive innovation, an...

Greetings, young Socialists. I realize you probably racked up a lot of student loan debt getting to the point you wanna support the DSA. And who doesn’t like getting free stuff? Trouble is, free stuff starts running out. For example, on New Year’s Eve 1988, I got to visit East Berlin. It wasn’t pretty. And in 1989, I saw the wall come down on the evening news. So—at no charge to you—let me offer y...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org I would like to thank you, dedicated readers, for the feedback on Accountability Loops . Given your encouragement, I think Underthrow show listeners could use a dose. -MB My deddy used to say that the 11th Commandment is “Thou shalt have air conditioning.” When your thermostat is in good order, it reads the room, checks the target, and acts to close the temp...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org -- Imagine . A group of explorers finds an island no one has ever settled. They share a peculiar passion. They love a certain kind of game. They call it Cooperation—the art of working together, as effectively as possible, for mutual gain. So they plant a flag on the island. They name the place Coopertopia. And they send out a call: Come build with us. Others...

Subscribe and support us at Underthrow.org. For human beings , there are only two means of getting others to do what we want: persuasion and compulsion . Persuasion is peaceful. Compulsion is not. So, a principle surfaces: Given that compulsion deprives others of happiness, we shall endeavor to use persuasion in all of our human relationships. This is part of a philosophy developed by an entrepren...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org. Did you know that in developed countries, we have built the most educated, most liberated generation of women in human history? Yet women report being profoundly unhappy. Birth rates are collapsing. Most educated men say they want equal partners, yet feel a crushing pressure to out-earn them. Most women hold high standards for a potential partner even as th...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org The more we learn about the universe, the stranger things get. That’s because, when physicists follow their best theories all the way down—refusing to flinch or wave their hands—they arrive at two radically different pictures of reality. The first says there may be multiple universes, which means you could be one of uncountably many versions of yourself, bra...

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org Pick up your phone . How many apps do you have? Fifty? A hundred? You downloaded every one of them. Now imagine waking up tomorrow and finding only two. A red app. A blue app. The device insists it can run anything you want—but somehow, only red and blue are available. You can’t uninstall either one. You can’t install a third. Wouldn’t you want to return tha...

Every day, strangers are in your ears . They come through your phone, your television, your group chats, your feeds. They speak with conviction. They speak with urgency. They talk as if they are telling you the truth. Most of them are not—and not always lying, either. They are performing. The first step to thinking clearly in this century is learning to tell them all apart. There are ten major voi...

Support and subscribe at Underthrow.org. H.L. Mencken said it best : “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” The old satirist wasn’t just being clever. He was being precise. Here’s the thing: We elect representatives. But those representatives have a giant credit card. They have maxed it out and sent us the bill. We pay through taxation and inflation, but get almost no...

Subscribe and Support: Underthrow.org When it comes to generating content, the producer usually has to make a tradeoff. Staying on top of trends in the news cycle is good for clicks, but the cost is the loss of opportunities to deliver more timeless messages. Produce something evergreen, and you might offer a message humanity needs, but they’re not interested in hearing. Society’s profound need to...