August 22, 2026
The way that we let things get to where they are is simple enough.
Power flows from producers adding value. Control adds value when customers buy value.
People with weapons take a cut by seizing some control, which also gives them some power. These people fight amongst themselves. The immediate victors are the people who are the most ruthless.
In time, and at mortal risk, producers, and ultimately also customers, fight back and partially succeed at clawing back some power and control.
People with better-organized weaponry propose a compromise: elect representatives. Representatives will specialize in making the informed choices that will better-secure people's rights. Many good choices by representatives will follow once customers just make simple, infrequent choices to vote into office good representatives.
People with better-organized weaponry still have weaponry, after all, so customers sign on. Some producers go on adding value.
Other producers, though, seek to seize some control. They pay people who have weapons.
Time marches on. Producers add more value. Customers live better, so they often fight back less. People who have weapons seize more control. For the producers who seized some control, paying people who have weapons keeps getting more expensive.
New intermediaries emerge: people who control the people who have weapons. Controlling the people in this intermediate layer lets producers seize control in a way that's less expensive for these producers.
That's where we are now. Pharma exerts strong control over Fox News, Fox News exerts overwhelming control over Republican voters, and Republican politicians control key choices that affect people's rights.
Pharma, Fox News, and the Republican Party each include people whose money gives them control over their overall organizations. Incredibly, all of these key players are right now committing democide killings.
This starts imperceptibly, with simple exercises of intellectual superiority. Valuable drugs can justify costly discovery science and costly clinical trials, and pharma and government managers want these as protection, so pharma researchers start out with significant disadvantages. Since the researchers trust that their new products will improve people's lives, they apply their considerable skills to making sure that their new products will demonstrate enough safety and efficacy to be approved by pharma/media/politician-controlled regulators.
In the same way that pharma people advance into their places in the overall social web implicated in the killings by developing value-agnostic specialized skills, so do media managers, media talent, politicians, regulators, healthcare bureaucrats, and healthcare providers. Most all of these people likely see their role as small, think their scope to act independently is limited and therefore their power is limited, and feel intensely pressured to act in the ways the social web clearly rewards and to not act in the ways the social web clearly punishes.
But together, these individuals are the principal and likely the sole killers who increased excess deaths by 35 million and decreased births by 230 million over a mere 6 years, and who may have already caused further increases that haven't been seen yet in heart disease, cancers, and other diseases.
The lynchpins blocking effective opposition, and by doing so empowering everybody in the social web to kill with impunity, have been Fox News and Republican Progressives.
Older people got conditioned to leaving broadcast TV on, where it pushed out continuous, attention-grabbing feeds of attractive people, slick graphics, and clickbait feature articles. Now, these older people are aging out.
But younger people are similarly susceptible to newer instruments of control. Crony money buys lots of users' attention on new social media and on much ostensibly-independent new news media. Cronies in government-run schools and in government-influenced schools misuse copious blocks of time across students' childhoods and young adulthoods, misleading students and in addition leaving students ill-prepared to learn and analyze for themselves. Cronies keep diverting people's attention using addictive substances and other enticements.
Once the current oldest generation is out of power, what comes next is not at all as automatic as some young people visualize it will be. We need to adequately understand this social web and focus our actions on the right opportunities.
The way to improve things in the future is simple enough. See the figure.
We must move the control of our governments from cronies' Fox News and Republican Progressives to a good party's voters.
A good party will have a party name, party declaration, party constitution, and party laws that will limit the party, leaving the grassroots in charge. It will be optimized for selecting candidates who will use their constitutional powers against others in governments, limiting governments, increasing freedom.
The figure shows the ways control will become different. Our current domination by cronies-through cronies' Fox News, and from there through Fox News's Progressive-majority Republican Party-will be ended by a good party.
Cronies will always be with us. But once we have built a good party, the cronies will have to all crowd into the Democratic Party.
People crave freedom and its manifold benefits. Whenever constitutionalist candidates manage to bypass cronies' control over voters' information, people do quite well at choosing politicians who increase freedom. The cronies' Democratic Party refuge, even if some Republican Progressive politician-refugees manage to insert themselves into there, will soon get relegated by voters to permanent-minority status.
Many people worldwide have been killed already by cronies' and collaborators' 21st-century democide.
Victims can't be brought back to life. Punishing everybody who was responsible throughout the whole social web can't be made to happen. Punishing the politicians, who were the killers who had the most power and the gravest duty, won't happen at the scale that's due. Punishing past killers wouldn't prevent new killings from emerging.
The key to preventing new killings is to proliferate system components that robustly protect freedom. We must create Constitution-like charters that limit at least one party; state, county, city, and neighborhood governments; legislative houses; and at least one competitor in each sector in which other organizations impact freedom.