No Kings, No Gods, Just Minds

What We Can Do to Fight Back

This essay is a bit bolder than usual. But on a day like today—when people are gathering in the streets to say no to authoritarianism, to corruption, to the slow creep of control—I feel compelled to add my voice.

I believe deeply that we already have what we need to change this system. The knowledge is there. The people are there. Far more of us than them. What’s missing is only coherence—an architecture of thought to unify our scattered power.

I recently heard on a Gil Duran podcast, “The peasants of 17th century France could have told you that extreme wealth leads to insanity.” How true! And another line stuck with me too: “How easy it is to say enough is enough—and to raise hell.” History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. And right now, the rhythm is unmistakable.

My forthcoming book, The Dream of Matter, is about that rhythm—about the underlying structure of mind, meaning, and power that governs us whether we realize it or not. It’s a proposal for a new way forward. But today’s piece is something simpler: a reflection, a provocation, and maybe, the start of a new direction.

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The Rally Without a Compass

It’s the day of the latest No Kings rally. The air smells like sidewalk heat and sharpied cardboard. Someone’s chanting into a megaphone. Someone else is livestreaming. The signs say everything you’d expect: No Kings-Reist Fascism, Fight Truth Decay, America Was Built By Immigrants. And while I agree with the spirit behind every one of them, I can’t help but notice something missing beneath the noise and energy—something quieter but more essential.

We know what we’re against. But do we know what we’re for?

Because say what you will about the new conservative machine—they have a vision. Not just policies or talking points, but a detailed blueprint for reordering the country according to their values. It’s called Project 2025, and it’s more than a document. It’s a roadmap—a coordinated, technocratically detailed scheme for reshaping governance at every level. The troubling part? It’s coherent.

Project 2025 and the Machinery of Coerced Coherence

Project 2025, drafted by The Heritage Foundation and allied right-wing institutions, lays out a plan to centralize executive authority, dismantle federal safeguards, and rewire the institutions of civil society to serve a particular ideological framework. It calls for mass firings of civil servants, replacing them with political loyalists. It pushes for direct presidential control of law enforcement. It eliminates environmental, educational, and reproductive protections. And it wraps the entire project in a thin veil of Christian nationalist rhetoric.

But perhaps most important is what it reveals beneath the surface: a worldview that sees freedom not as potential but as a threat. A philosophy that views complexity as disorder, and the only cure as consolidation. It is a vision of coherence built not through mutual understanding, but through force. A nervous system under stress locking itself into rigidity—numbing feedback, restricting motion, and hoping the freeze will pass for function.

The Metaphysics Behind the Machinery

Part of why Project 2025 feels so dangerous is because it isn’t just a list of policies—it’s built on a metaphysical framework. One that may not be named explicitly, but shapes every decision it makes. A worldview where order is divine, authority is sacred, and the human being is broken without external control.

In this frame, truth is revealed, not reasoned. Freedom is not the capacity for self-direction but the obedience to preordained moral law. This metaphysics fuses Christian nationalism with authoritarian psychology. It views society not as a living, evolving system, but as a hierarchy to be enforced.

You can see it in the suspicion of secular institutions. In the war on science, education, gender, and plurality. In the desire to replace public service with loyalty, and pluralism with purity.

It is not policy masquerading as belief. It is belief hiding inside policy.

And what makes it coherent is exactly what makes it dangerous: it offers a total explanation of the world. It may be wrong, it may be repressive—but it makes sense on its own terms. And that’s what the left has yet to match.

Transhumanists, Theocrats, and the Forgotten Question of What a Human Is

Strangely, this authoritarian blueprint is being championed by two seemingly divergent camps: the religious fundamentalists dreaming of moral purity, and the transhumanist futurists seeking digital immortality. One invokes divine judgment; the other chases synthetic transcendence. Yet both converge on the same point: a desire to escape the messiness of being human.

What unites them is not their stated goals but their shared absence of curiosity. There is no serious inquiry into the nature of mind, freedom, soul, or personhood. No exploration of what it means to think, to feel, to change. The human being becomes a tool to be optimized or a sinner to be subdued. Either way, agency is stripped away.

A society that forgets what a person is will inevitably build systems that deform personhood. And the irony, of course, is that they call it order.

Why the Promise of Control So Often Succeeds

When coherence collapses inside a brain, we call it mental illness. When it collapses inside a civilization, we call it crisis. But what exactly is coherence?

Coherence is the capacity for a system—whether a brain or a society—to hold together across difference. It means that the parts, while distinct, are communicating. That feedback flows. That regulation and adaptation are possible. A coherent mind can make sense of conflicting ideas. A coherent society can negotiate diverse perspectives without falling apart.

It doesn’t mean harmony in the sense of sameness. It means relational integrity—a kind of internal resonance that allows change to be metabolized instead of resisted.

When that coherence is lost, chaos doesn’t always look like screaming. Sometimes it looks like shutdown. Like rigidity. Like overcompensation. Communication turns to surveillance. Creative energy gets redirected into managing dysfunction.

In times like this, authoritarianism feels strangely soothing. Not because it solves anything, but because it offers a kind of psychic relief. The sensation of structure. The illusion of unity. It provides the appearance of coherence, even if the underlying signal is scrambled. And we buy it, because uncertainty is hard to sit with.

History offers endless reminders of how fragile that illusion is. Rome froze its institutions until they ossified. Theocracies rose and fell on orthodoxy that couldn’t adapt. Revolutionary governments collapsed when their inner logic grew more brittle than the regimes they replaced. Any system that maintains unity by suppressing feedback eventually collapses under its own deafness.

The Progressive Left and the Problem of Fragmented Direction

In contrast, the progressive left often finds itself rich in compassion but poor in coherence. There is momentum, yes. There is moral clarity on many individual issues. But there is no comprehensive counter-vision. No Project 2030. No shared engine for integration.

To be fair, some efforts have emerged. In July 2024, a coalition of prominent Black Democratic leaders launched Project FREEDOM, an ambitious counter-framework built on the pillars of Freedom to Live, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Vote, and Freedom to Thrive. It aims to re-anchor liberal governance in moral clarity and material policy, offering a proactive vision rather than just reactionary opposition.

Similarly, the Center for Progressive Reform has outlined a set of Progressive Principles—a clear call to safeguard the integrity of the civil service, elevate equity in public policy, and push back against corporate dominance in regulatory spaces.

These are serious beginnings. But they still lack what Project 2025 exploits so well: a unified metaphysics. A theory of mind. A philosophy of human development that could unify these proposals under one purpose. Until we address that layer, our strategies remain vulnerable to fragmentation.

Like the early days of the French Revolution, today’s movement is clear on what must be dismantled, but hesitant to define what should replace it. Liberty, equality, and fraternity may ring in our ears, but without a mechanism to synchronize those ideals across a population, they remain aspirations rather than architecture.

Part of the reason is structural: decentralized movements don’t lend themselves easily to grand narratives. But part of it is deeper. Liberalism often defines itself by what it won’t do—it resists authority, avoids dogma, and defends plurality. Those are virtues worth preserving. But without some shared theory of what human thriving looks like—and how to organize toward it—the result is often fragmentation.

It’s not enough to resist. Protest alone cannot produce pattern. Without a theory of how minds integrate, societies fragment by default.

Rediscovering Rousseau: The General Will and the Physics of Freedom

This is where Rousseau’s idea of the General Will returns as more than historical curiosity. For Rousseau, the General Will was not the will of the majority or the consensus of the loudest. It was the emergent coherence that arises when individuals, acting with full awareness of themselves and each other, begin to align.

It is not agreement imposed from above. It is signal tuned from within.

Imagine a jazz ensemble. No conductor. Each player listens, adjusts, contributes. The result isn’t uniformity—it’s something richer. A shared direction that none could have generated alone, but all are responsible for sustaining.

This, Rousseau believed, was the essence of a free society. Not ungoverned, but self-governing. Not silent in obedience, but synchronized in awareness.

One might even compare it to Plato’s idea of the philosopher-king—not as a tyrant ruling from above, but as a mentor whose role is to ensure that the systems of society support the development of every citizen’s full intellectual and moral potential. Leadership not as control, but cultivation.

Syntax, Semantics, and the Architecture of the General Will

To make this vision practical, we have to get more technical about how thought works. In both linguistics and information theory, syntax refers to the structure or form that organizes thought—the rhythm, the rules, the pattern. Semantics is the meaning we extract from that structure—the story we tell, the symbols we interpret, the conclusions we draw.

If a society is a network of minds, and those minds are structured by syntax, then the General Will arises only when those internal structures begin to harmonize. Not in what they say (semantics), but in how they process (syntax). Shared values emerge from shared structure, not the other way around.

This distinction matters. Because if we keep trying to resolve political conflict at the level of meaning—narratives, identities, beliefs—without attending to the syntactic distortions that shape how those meanings form, we will continue to misunderstand each other. The General Will is not a semantic agreement. It is a syntactic achievement.

Neurotherapy, Collective Resonance, and a New Role for Government

This understanding is not just theoretical. In neurotherapy, we work directly with these wave patterns. When the brain becomes fragmented, we don’t argue with its content. We support its structure. We apply feedback and stimulation to help it remember how to synchronize.

Sometimes this looks like improving sleep, focus, or emotional regulation. But more often, something subtler happens: people start thinking more flexibly. They question assumptions more easily. They listen longer. It’s not that we teach them what to think. We restore their capacity to think with themselves.

Now imagine a government that works the same way. Not as an enforcer of ideological purity, but as a mentor of collective coherence. What if leadership wasn’t about imposing answers, but about cultivating signal clarity in the people it serves?

Toward Project 2030: A Republic of Minds in Formation

This is the kind of vision we need now—not just as a counterpoint to authoritarianism, but as an inoculation against its return. Imagine a Project 2030 that seeks not only to rebuild democracy but to upgrade it. A long-range plan not for policy tweaks, but for cognitive infrastructure. A cultural software update designed to replace GDP with GCM: Gross Cognitive Maturity.

Such a project would include:

• National investments in mental clarity, emotional regulation, and systems thinking

• Widespread access to neurofeedback, mindfulness education, and therapeutic resources—particularly in schools, underserved communities, and reentry programs

• A redefinition of education that centers metacognition, emotional literacy, and civic reasoning

• Civic institutions redesigned to promote dialogue over debate, feedback over force, participation over spectacle

• Media ecosystems built around signal amplification, not attention hijacking

• Structural supports that relieve chronic stressors (poverty, housing insecurity, discrimination) which fragment cognitive coherence at the root

And most importantly, it would aim to shift our national identity—not from individual to collective, but from isolation to relationship. The goal isn’t to elevate an intellectual elite. It’s to create conditions where more people can think clearly, feel deeply, and act wisely together.

Because a republic is only as strong as the coherence of the minds within it. The future won’t be saved by better arguments. It will be shaped by better signal.

Our Metaphysical Alternative: The Mind in Motion

What we propose instead is a metaphysics of process, not prescription. Not divine law, but evolving signal. Not hierarchy, but holarchy—where complexity is structured, but never frozen.

In this view, the universe is mental and mathematical. Each soul, a unique interference pattern of thought. The mind isn’t an accidental byproduct of biology—it is the organizing principle behind reality. And freedom isn’t the absence of rules, but the capacity to self-organize. To tune.

This metaphysics centers on coherence—not as enforced order, but as relational intelligence. The ability of systems to hold structure and flow at once. To listen. To adjust. To resonate.

It honors the individual, but never isolates them. It assumes that meaning is emergent from relationship—that just as notes form music only in context, minds form truth only in dialogue. That consciousness is structured, but not static. Governed by pattern, but always capable of learning new ones.

It is not just a spiritual worldview. It is a civic philosophy. A foundation for governance that seeks not to rule people, but to cultivate their ability to rule themselves.

We don’t need kings. We need minds that know how to think clearly—and systems that support their evolution.

The Real Meaning of No Kings

That’s what we’re really marching for.

“No Kings” isn’t just a rejection of monarchy, or “effective monarchy” like we are facing in the USA. It’s a refusal of any system that believes people must be ruled. It’s a commitment to developing the kind of minds that can rule themselves. Minds that don’t need domination because they know how to tune to each other. Because they can sense the difference between noise and signal.

In the end, the future won’t be decided by who rules. It will be shaped by what kinds of minds we are willing to produce.

No kings. No gods. Just minds—alive, aware, and learning to resonate

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If this resonates and you’d like to learn more, please subscribe to my Substack, The Dream of Matter, or my YouTube channel, The Quantified Soul!