Why Governments Aren’t Startups and Souls Aren’t Employees (Part 1)

This weekend, I had the pleasure of watching the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform in the sunny Dolores Park. I’ve seen them before, but I’d forgotten how radical, witty, and intelligently provocative their work is! Their latest show offered a biting local satire of the city’s—and country’s—dysfunction, set to live music, brilliant sound effects, and delivered with the kind of fearless theatricality that only radical artists can pull off. One line stood out and lodged itself in my mind: “The government is a business, not a service for the people.”

It was meant to be satirical, of course—but satire only works when it exaggerates something real. And what’s striking is just how unexaggerated that line feels these days. The idea that government should be operated like a business has been slowly ossifying from cliché into philosophy. You can hear it almost everywhere now—among tech elites, in startup rhetoric, and across various flavors of libertarian and accelerationist thought. But it finds its strongest foothold in a movement called the Dark Enlightenment: a loosely connected network of anti-democratic thinkers shaped by Curtis Yarvin and echoed by voices like Peter Thiel.

The Business-State Delusion

Yarvin, for instance, doesn’t just think government should be efficient. He thinks it should literally be run as a firm. In a recent essay, “A New Sovereign Accounting,” he wrote, “The state is a firm. The nation is its property.” He goes further, suggesting that fiat currency is government equity—shares in the state, devoid of rights but backed by force. He proposes a world where governance is stripped of its moral and philosophical heritage and reimagined purely through the lens of control, ownership, and capital efficiency. The logic of corporate structure is transposed wholesale onto the structure of civilization.

And while that may seem like a clever provocation, or a coldly rational alternative to the perceived chaos of modern democracy, it is—in the end—a category error. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what government is for, what people are, and what the arc of human development actually demands from us.

Because a country is not a company. A state is not a product. And the soulis not a business asset.

The real cost of this worldview isn’t just political or economic—it’s existential. It leaves out the very thing that makes us human: the mind behind the metrics, the self behind the system. It severs purpose from power, depth from data. It forgets the soul.

The Metrics We Inherit

To understand why, we have to look at what this model values. When we run government like a business, we end up importing the metrics that business uses to measure success. In this view, a strong nation is one with high GDP, healthy stock indexes, low “consumer uncertainty,” and an upward-sloping curve of productivity. But GDP is not a measure of national health. It doesn’t care whether the economic growth came from building libraries or selling fentanyl. It doesn’t distinguish between services that elevate the human spirit and those that degrade it. In fact, GDP often goes up during war, incarceration, and mental health epidemics—because these are expensive.

If a forest stands untouched, GDP registers zero. If it’s chopped down and sold, GDP rises. That should tell us something. And yet we continue to accept these abstractions as proxies for value.

And it’s not just GDP. It’s the whole ecosystem of economic metrics that define success in this model—not only at the national level, but at the personal one too. Wealth creation becomes a kind of moral metric, a stand-in for virtue. If you make money, you must be doing something right. If you don’t, you must have failed. The American Dream—the belief that anyone can rise through hard work and grit—is so baked into our cultural DNA we barely see it. But for most, it’s hollow. It sells meritocracy while ignoring the forces—social, psychological, historical—that decide who even gets to compete.

In this model, government’s job isn’t to cultivate minds or expand consciousness. It’s to “get out of the way” so that the market can crown its winners. It’s to create the conditions under which wealth can concentrate efficiently and uninterruptedly. And so we mistake affluence for insight, net worth for self-worth, and profit for proof of progress. The soul disappears behind a spreadsheet.

But a society isn’t healthy just because its top 10% is thriving. And a life isn’t meaningful just because it scales. A thriving civilization isn’t one where a few people “make it”—it’s one where everyone has a meaningful path toward becoming more themselves.

How have we deluded ourselves into thinking otherwise?

The Ontological Void

What this reveals is something deeper: a disappointing kind of spiritual illiteracy. A blind spot not just in policy but in metaphysics. When we measure the value of a nation by its output rather than the quality of its citizens, we’ve already made a decision about what matters—and what doesn’t.

In this worldview, people are variables in an optimization equation. They are economic actors whose worth is determined by their productivity, their consumption, and their contribution to a balance sheet. This is not a bug of the business-model government. It’s the very point. The citizen becomes a shareholder only in the loosest, most rhetorical sense. In practice, they are employees—disposable ones.

Governance isn’t optimization—it’s cultivation. A society isn’t a platform; it’s a garden. And its health isn’t measured in speed or revenue, but in the coherence and growth of the minds within it.

Governance in a Mental Universe

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if we really did live in a purely material universe—one with no intrinsic purpose, no underlying structure, no consciousness beyond chemistry—then the Dark Enlightenment might actually make a strange kind of sense.

If mind is just a fluke of biology, an emergent side effect of neural machinery with no intrinsic significance, then why wouldn’t we optimize for wealth creation, genetic propagation, and control of resources? Why wouldn’t the game go to the most strategically ruthless? If life has no built-in direction, then “might makes right” stops sounding barbaric—and starts sounding inevitable. In that frame, a state built on corporate logic and competitive dominance can seem almost rational.

But what if that premise is wrong?

What if we don’t live in a material universe made out of lifeless stuff, but in a mental one—made of thought, structure, and meaning?

This is the turn that materialist systems refuse to make. They take for granted that matter is primary, that mind is secondary, and that purpose is something humans project onto an indifferent world. But what if mind isn’t the byproduct of matter at all? What if it’s the base layer—the substrate, the source?

This is the essence of philosophical idealism: the idea that reality is, at bottom, mental. Not metaphorically—literally. Not in the sense that the world is “in your head,” but that everything that exists is an expression of structured thought. Patterns. Frequencies. Logic. Mind.

And if that’s true—if we live in a mental universe—then suddenly the question of governance transforms. Because now we aren’t just managing bodies or coordinating markets. We’re participating in a shared developmental arc. The cosmos isn’t neutral. It has direction. Minds aren’t accidents. They’re the point.

Of course, this is the hardest riddle in the world to solve. What is mind, really? What is consciousness made of? What does “purpose” even mean in a universe not defined by survival or profit? These aren’t easy questions. They shouldn’t be. But difficulty isn’t the same thing as impossibility. And ignoring them doesn’t make them go away—it just leaves them to be answered by whoever shouts the loudest.

So the real fork in the road is this: do we organize society as if minds are an incidental glitch in the meat, or do we organize it as if it’s the core of what reality is?

If that’s true, the challenge shifts. Governance stops being about managing resources—and starts being about shaping minds. It becomes a kind of spiritual engineering: understanding how consciousness works, what it’s aiming for, and how to help it grow. Not by force, but by resonance. Not through command, but through structure.

Illumination, Misunderstood

For all of human history, the question of consciousness—what it is, where it comes from, what it’s for—has been the deepest riddle in the universe. Science couldn’t solve it. Religion couldn’t pin it down. Philosophy circled it like a black hole. And yet the answer was there all along, hidden in plain sight—not in scripture, or dogma, or folklore, but in structure. In mathematics.

Here’s the strange part: someone may have already solved it. Not a startup chasing valuation. Not a king building empire. Not a cult selling salvation. A small lineage of thinkers who believed that reason—real reason—might be sacred.

They called themselves the Illuminati. Not to show off, but to make a vow. To bring light. To reveal a universe made not of matter, but of mind. A cosmos that could be mapped—not in parable, but in pure mathematics.

And for that, they were ridiculed, silenced, suppressed. Labeled conspirators by a culture that couldn’t grasp what they were offering.

So when critics imagine the “Illuminati” as a cabal of rich manipulators, they’ve got it exactly backwards. Illuminism is not a conspiracy—it’s a calling. A vision of a world in which every citizen is empowered to understand the logic of their own mind and their place in the cosmic whole. It’s not about a secret society pulling strings—it’s about a revealed structure anyone can learn to play. The real Illuminati will never introduce themselves. They don’t have to. The point isn’t who they are—it’s what they knew. And whether we’re ready to know it too.

While the Dark Enlightenment dreams of a startup monarch wielding absolute power, Illuminism envisions something far more radical: a society guided not by rulers, but by reasoners. By minds trained in logic, mathematics, and metaphysics—who lead not by decree, but by demonstration. Who don’t impose their will, but illuminate the structure of will itself.

At the core of this tradition, Ontological Mathematics doesn’t speculate about reality—it defines it. What we think of as the “physical world” isn’t physical at all. It’s a shared projection, a kind of dream shaped by the overlapping frequencies of every conscious mind. Reality, in this view, is made of thought. A field of awareness rendered through spacetime like a hologram.

That’s why how we think matters. Our private distortions ripple outward. They become public architecture. Our clarity becomes shared structure. We’re not just spectators—we’re co-authors.

In this light, power isn’t about control. It’s about coherence. The most powerful people aren’t those who dominate, but those whose signals are most aligned—within themselves and with others. Coherence doesn’t mean conformity. It means structured resonance. A clear, stable signal. A mind at peace with itself and in tune with the world.

This is what makes the Illuminati vision so threatening—not because it hides truth, but because it seeks to make it public. It proposes that if everyone understood the architecture of their own mind, and the mathematical arc of their becoming, then manipulation, exploitation, and hierarchy would collapse—not by revolution, but by obsolescence.

We’re told through memes and conspiracy theories that the “Illuminati” are out to enslave us. But this flips the truth on its head. What’s really happening is projection—casting the logic of the Dark Enlightenment onto its opposite. People see control where there is actually comprehension. They see authority where there is, in fact, lucidity.

The Dark Enlightenment wants a CEO.

Ontological Mathematics wants a mentor.

The former wants obedience. The latter wants actualization.

What do you want? Really?

Coherence and the Mental Health of Civilization

If reality is mental—if existence is made of structured thought—then how we think isn’t just important. It’s formative. Our ideas, perceptions, and beliefs don’t simply reflect the world; they help shape it. We’re not just thinking within reality. We’re thinking reality itself—into coherence, or into chaos.

In that light, mental health isn’t a side quest. It’s the main event.

Because in a universe made of mind, the clarity of our thinking doesn’t just affect our personal lives—it steers the course of civilization. Mental health isn’t a niche concern. It’s where the future begins. How well we think—individually and collectively—determines what kind of world we create.

Most people don’t need a degree in metaphysics to know what it feels like to be incoherent. You feel scattered. Anxious. Pulled in ten directions. You don’t trust your thoughts—or you can’t stop them. Your inner world is loud, disjointed, sabotaging itself. This isn’t failure. It’s fragmentation.

Now scale that across a population. Imagine millions of people whose minds are out of sync—whose thoughts are distorted by trauma, stress, fear, or misinformation. The result isn’t just personal suffering. It’s political instability. Polarization. Violence. A crisis of meaning.

And when we look around, it’s obvious: nearly every social crisis has a root in mental disorder. Wars driven by paranoia or greed. Policies distorted by trauma. Institutions held hostage by fear, greed, and ego. Look at any act of cruelty or injustice and you’ll likely find a tangled knot of unresolved pain beneath it—fear masquerading as ideology, insecurity dressed up as leadership. The external chaos of society reflects the internal incoherence of its people.

A society isn’t well because it has low unemployment or rising GDP. It’s well when its citizens are. And wellness begins with clarity.

In my work with neurotherapy, I’ve learned that nearly every psychological condition—depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, even narcissistic personality traits—can be traced back to maladaptive neuroplasticity. In plain terms: the brain adapts to survive, but sometimes in ways that become self-defeating. Loops form. Circuits misfire. What begins as coping becomes constraint.

The brain learns patterns—of thought, of feeling, of reaction—and those patterns can stick. But here’s the hopeful part: they can also change. Coherence can be restored. Neurophysiology now gives us tools to track and even retrain the brain’s functional connectivity. We can literally observe how well different regions of the brain are working together—how in sync they are. And that’s not just biology. It’s a reflection of mind.

Of course, we’re shaped by more than thought alone. Genetics, environment, diet, and social context all matter. These aren’t excuses—they’re signals. And while they may fall outside the immediate scope of this essay, they point to the same need: to build systems that support mental coherence at every level.

And this is where Ontological Mathematics offers something uniquely powerful. It gives us a definitive map—not just metaphor or model—for what inner clarity actually is. In this system, each mind—all of us—is a mathematical entity: a soul. Not poetic, not metaphorical—literally real. And the evolution of the soul is the process of moving from disorder to order. From inner noise to signal. From reaction to reflection. From incoherence to clarity.

This isn’t about becoming perfect. It’s about becoming integrated. It’s not about thinking the same thing—it’s about thinking clearly. Seeing yourself and the world without distortion. Moving as a unified self, not a divided one.

And this has political implications. Because if mental health is measurable, and if coherence is cultivatable, then society isn’t helpless. We don’t have to guess at what’s wrong. We can see it—in the signal. And we can build around it.

This is how personal development becomes civic design. Not through surveillance or coercion, but through support. Through alignment. Through systems that help people clarify, not comply.

Because when you build a society that supports inner coherence, you don’t just get calmer people. You get clearer politics. And in time, a clearer world.

…Part 2 coming soon!