notes on the constitution
in defense of the t word
hello. hello. it’s one essay, two quotes, and a mothafucka who think islands float.
“the essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.” — james madison, 1787
“my fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.” — rep. hank johnson, 2010, during a congressional hearing about guam
one of these people helped design a system of government. the other thinks islands are boats. and that — right there — is the whole essay. kinda.
quick: what makes baseball a game but congress a shitshow?
both have rules. both got winners and losers. both got smart people sweating.
the difference: in basketball or baseball, everyone knows exactly what the rules are. hoop is 10 feet. three-pointer is 23’9”. bases are 90 feet apart. symbol grounded, baby. in congress? we perpetually arguing about what the rules should be. playing basketball but every time someone scores we gotta vote on whether baskets still count.
baseball is a game which is to say it’s a system in its final state. congress is a system staying perpetually messy, like ur roommate who never does dishes but promises they will tomorrow.
what makes basketball work is that it’s totalitarian. not in the stalin sense — relaaaaaaaax jennifer. in the original sense. totalis. complete. whole. all the rules specified. nothing left to vibes. the word integrity comes from integer which means whole or something lalala. totalitarian as high integrity. totalitarian as systems that did their homework. r u totalitarian marcus.
this essay is about why systems that work all got totalitarianism’s completeness property, why that word got poisoned so u can’t see this, and what happens when we refuse to let our systems grow up. whatever. let’s get into it.
the word “totalitarian” got invented in 1923 by this italian journalist giovanni amendola to describe mussolini’s fascist party. by the early 1920s, mussolini himself adopted totalitario and started bragging: “all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.”
notice what he describing: unlimited scope. the state’s rules extend to everything—ur thoughts, ur beliefs, ur private life, ur god, ur soul etccc.
by 1926, the term spread to english to describe fascist italy. then stalin’s soviet union. then hitler’s nazi germany. word became synonymous with the worst political systems humanity ever created. understandable.
totalitarianism as mussolini described it got two components:
completeness: all rules specified (from latin totalis = complete, whole)
scope: rules extend to everything (mussolini’s “all within the state”)
the nazi legal code was incredibly detailed. soviet bureaucracy was meticulously formalized. these weren’t systems with unclear rules. they were systems with complete rules that claimed jurisdiction over ur whole entire existence down to what u think about in the shower.
the word got contaminated because we conflated completeness with unlimited scope. threw both out. and now we can’t build systems that work. lalalalallala.
what i’m defending: completeness (component #1)
what i’m not defending: unlimited scope (component #2)
the nba: complete rules + limited scope (doesn’t care what u think about god)
soviet union: complete rules + unlimited scope (cared deeply what u thought about god)
basketball is totalitarian in completeness. not in scope. and that’s the whole trick right there. okay so here’s the big idea. hold onto this. systems mature into games. fully modeled systems are simply games. games are just systems dressed up for a party, looking good, rules on lock.
a system is that messy roommate who never does dishes. unpredictable. chaotic. u don’t know if the dishes getting done tuesday or never. a game is that same roommate after their mom visits. suddenly everything’s predictable. dishes done by 8pm. yas queen. lalalalalla.
when we don’t understand something, we call it a “system.” when we’ve domesticated it — when we got the rules on lock — when space-time is normalized — it becomes a “game.” the transformation from system to game is the transformation from chaos to totalitarianism. from mess to completeness. from “idk man” to “here’s exactly how this works.”
good games got a feature: in well-constructed games, cheating isn’t just forbidden—it’s made impossible. physics works like this. u can’t break the laws of physics. they not suggestions. they permits nothing that can be done. rules that can be broken are failures of game design.
in good game design winning is entirely distinct from re-writing the rules. a chess master doesn’t change how pieces move after he wins. a trader—however successful—doesn’t get to modify how the stock market works. lebron james doesn’t move the three-point line closer after every championship.
excellence has ludic foundations. the best at anything treat it like a game, not because games are trivial, but because games are how u get good at things. u can’t get good at a thing if the thing keeps changing. whatever. moving on.
look around and tell me i’m wrong:
academic job market? system (vibes-based, politics, who u know). nba draft? game (measurable, u either got it or u don’t). is this right no, is it useful no, is it accurate within the context window yes.
musical notation? complete specification with limited scope. every note precisely defined. notation doesn’t tell u what to feel about the music. that’s why it works across cultures. beethoven in tokyo hits the same as beethoven in new york because the game is specified.
video game speedrunning? works because games got complete rules. speedrunners find exploits by understanding the complete rule set. show me a game with vibes-based mechanics that got a speedrunning community. u can’t. because u can’t optimize what u can’t measure. u can’t master what keeps changing.
the nba in 1950 was chaos. traveling rules kept changing. nobody knew what counted as a foul. refs just making stuff up out here.
then they figured it out. specified everything. 18-inch hoop at 10 feet. three-point line at 23’9”. clear definitions. replay review for edge cases. the whole costume.
result: quality went straight up for 70 years. in 1974, only nolan ryan throwing 100 mph. in 2023? sports illustrated: “twenty-seven pitchers hit 100 mph in april, as many as pitchers did over the entire season 10 years ago... not a day has gone by this season without someone throwing 100 mph. one-hundred-mph fastballs are more common than stolen bases and double plays.”
track times keep dropping. swimmers keep setting records. why? because the game is clear. u know what ur optimizing for. the target doesn’t move.
compare that to: journalism quality? declining. education quality? declining. constitutional interpretation? increasingly incoherent. elon musk ain’t napoleon. trump ain’t reagan. pick any leader today versus their predecessor from 50 years ago and marvel at the gap. quality drifting downward because nobody knows what they optimizing for anymore. the rules aren’t specified. the target keeps moving. can’t hit what u can’t see.
the difference: sports got complete specification + limited scope. u know exactly what ur optimizing for. but the nba doesn’t care what u think about politics or religion or whether pineapple belongs on pizza. limited scope. the costume went on and stayed on.
journalism, education, government? still systems. still messy. rules keep changing. nobody agrees on what “good” even means. i think life is good but that’s a different essay. optimization is impossible because the target won’t stay still. u playing a game where the goalposts move every quarter.
here’s the thing that makes the constitution fascinating and broken at the same time. pay attention because this is the whole point.
the fifth amendment: “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
cool. dope. sounds good. but like... what is life?
the constitution doesn’t say. the founders attempted something incredible—maximum variety, maximum order, with the fewest rules possible. rules as information held constant. they were trying to build the ultimate game. the final boss of political systems. but they left “life” undefined. kinda. wall-e world did not exist then. life not symbol-grounded. not complete.
and this — right here — is why it doesn’t work.
we can coordinate on “don’t kill people” = good. everyone agrees murder is bad. but we can’t coordinate on “wall-e world where everyone’s obese and staring at screens” = bad. because we never defined what life actually is. is that living? is that not living? who knows! vibes!
nobody knows. so every single case becomes a fight about definitions rather than applying known rules. we’re not playing the game. we’re arguing about what the game is. that’s not a game. that’s a system that never grew up.
compare to basketball: “the ball must pass through an 18-inch hoop at 10 feet.” symbol-grounded. measurable. complete. u either scored or u didn’t. no debate.
the us government: “u have a right to life.”
okay what’s life?
“not being biologically dead i guess? something something wall-e”
that’s not a game. that’s vibes. that’s ur messy roommate saying they’ll “probably” do the dishes “later.”
if the constitution were more totalitarian (more complete in its definitions), it would actually be MORE whole. wider in scope at the right level of abstraction. because we could coordinate on what actually matters—not just preventing murder, but promoting flourishing. but we can’t get there because the foundational term isn’t grounded. constitution doesn’t have definitions, us doesn’t have an official language, lalalala.
this is what madison got right about power needing specification. but he didn’t go far enough. incomplete specification means power stays arbitrary. hank johnson thinks islands float because the system never forced precision. u can say anything and nobody can call u on it because nothing is defined. what r we doing in congress.
this is why quality increases in sports and declines in governance. when the game is clear, u can get better at it. when it’s not, u just flailing in the dark hoping u doing good.
congress is even worse. philosopher nick land calls this kind of thing “social domination” - maybe the worst-constructed game in history. the rules of social domination: winners get to rewrite the rules. “let’s keep changing the rules until everybody likes it,” except the changes never stop and u can’t opt out and the people who win like the game more and more and the people losing hate it more and more but can’t leave. what is life again, lalalalallalala.
compare that to basketball where winning is totally separate from rule-making. lebron doesn’t get to move the three-point line after every ring. steph curry doesn’t get to make the hoop bigger. that would be insane. but that’s what congress does. that’s what every poorly-designed system does.
these are different dimensions, check it:
sports leagues: complete rules, limited scope, clear updates, exit rights
modern democracies: incomplete rules, limited scope, democratic updates lol, exit rights
soviet union: complete rules, unlimited scope, fake updates, no exit
brave new world: complete rules, unlimited scope, no updates, no exit
brave new world is maximally totalitarian in both components: complete rules + unlimited scope. that’s why it’s dystopian.
it’s like if the nba rules were: “everyone must dribble with their left hand only, shoot backwards, smile the whole time, u can never stop playing basketball, and ur position determines ur entire social caste forever.”
perfectly complete specification. perfectly dystopian. because scope + bad purpose + no exit. totalitarianism in completeness ≠ totalitarianism in scope. this is the whole thing. this is what everyone misses.
stalin and hitler weren’t bad because rules were unclear—the soviet legal code was extremely detailed, bureaucracy was meticulous. they were bad because rules served domination not flourishing, extended to everything (thought, culture, belief, what u eat for breakfast), u couldn’t leave, and rules changed whenever it served power.
complete specification + bad purpose + unlimited scope + no exit = dystopia
complete specification + good purpose + limited scope + exit rights = basketball
got it? good.
the final state of a complex system is a game.
systems that work mature into games. good games are totalitarian in completeness, not in scope.
sports chose complete specification + limited scope → quality increases every year
actual totalitarianism chose complete specification + unlimited scope → dystopia, genocide, bad times
everything else chose incomplete specification → quality decreases, nobody knows what they doing
we need: completeness without scope explosion. max order max variety fewest rules.
the fifth amendment should define “life.” for real. symbol-ground it. make it measurable. make it clear. systems engineering says our job is to “language the project”—find the right words so problems can be solved.
if we can’t define “life,” we can’t protect it. more importantly, we can’t promote it. we stuck coordinating on the bare minimum (don’t murder) instead of the actual goal (flourishing, whatever that means, we don’t know because it’s not defined either).
totalitarianism in completeness = systems finally growing up
totalitarianism in scope = dystopia
basketball figured this out. the constitution didn’t. a 3-pointer is symbol grounded. life is not.
madison understood that power needed complete specification to constrain it. he tried. but he didn’t go far enough. hank johnson thinks islands float because the system never forced anyone to be precise about anything.
one designed a system that tried to become a game but left the most important words undefined. the other perpetuates a mess where nobody knows what the rules are and everyone just saying whatever.
quality follows accordingly.. lalalalala.