Edition 022: The Franchise of the Soul

The last edition ended on a question. Whether we are building a world that can feel the weight of a life it has no use for, or one that steps on the small thing without noticing. I had meant to answer it with a long section on American culture, on what we worship and what we have built, the franchise, the prosperity gospel, and the kind of leader we have learned to admire. I drafted it, but I could not weave the parts together. At some point, I admitted that I am exhausted, that I have offered a great deal of criticism already, and that what people want now, what I want now, is the part of this book where we talk about what on earth we are going to do. So, rather than perform my cultural diagnostic, I am going to gloss over that entire section in this edition and then spend my remaining time where it matters. But I want to answer the question first, because the answer is underneath everything that follows. We have built the world that steps on the small thing without noticing. What follows is how.

We made individualism a national religion, and then, ironically, built the most identical country in human history. The same restaurants, the same hotels, the same Walmart anchoring the same parking lot, from Maine to California. The franchise has overwhelmed the landscape, and even reached into desire. We follow influencers who are paid to want things where we can see them, and they all want the same things, because someone paid for that too. It is not only products. We scroll past families who look perfect, marriages that look effortless, and lives that look finished, and then we measure our own lives against them and often come up short. We forget we are seeing the staged version, the one built to be seen. We are sold the same things to buy and the same lives to envy. American individualism turned out to mean the freedom to choose which version of the same manufactured things. A culture starved for belonging, having dismantled the structures that used to provide it, found its shared ritual in the brand.

And then it went further, and we began to brand ourselves with “personal brands.” We have been told to build them, manage them, and protect them, as though a person were a product with a logo and a market position. Charles had a particular view on this. You are not a cow, he would say, or detergent, or a luxury watch. You do not need a personal brand. A brand is something you broadcast. Your reputation is something other people decide you have earned, over time, by what you actually do. The brand is style. The reputation is substance. And substance is the only one of the two that requires anyone else, because you cannot have a reputation alone.

But the market deals in what sells, and it sells different things to different people depending on what they can pay. The franchise sorts us. In one neighborhood, it sells identity, the curated sameness you can afford to choose. Twenty minutes away, it sells survival, payday lenders, and a dollar store where the grocery used to be, arriving after every other institution has left and calling it service to an underserved population. The sameness of affluence hollows you out slowly, and you can live inside it for years without noticing. The sameness of poverty is not slow and not optional. It taxes you, every day, in money and time and the attention that survival demands. And it is happening twenty minutes from the people who will never see it.

The church used to focus on the poor. It once looked at the wealthy and said this is not enough, there is something you owe. The teaching at the center of that, that the poor are blessed and the last shall be first, has been turned on its head. The prosperity gospel, as it is called, teaches that wealth is a reward from God. Now wealth is the blessing, and the poor are simply the ones who lacked faith. A gospel about money, and wanting more of it, is the franchise of the soul.

And the kind of leader this culture trains us to admire is the opposite of the one worth following. My favorite college professor, Bonnie Wheeler, called King Arthur a “vir modestus,” a moderate man, one who measures his strength by who he can protect rather than what he can take.[1] The Round Table was an argument that a civilization’s highest purpose was unity around the protection of its most vulnerable members. The leaders we now produce are the opposite—loud and acquisitive, sitting at the head of every table, demanding attention, deference and power for themselves. I will come back to the idea of “vir modestus” later, because it belongs to the part of this book that asks what we build instead. Here I am only naming a standard we lost—values that seem quaint in these times when even invoking the word “values” feels uncomfortable.

None of this would have survived an education that taught us to think, and that is the practice we let go first. Over decades, the country moved its students away from the humanities, away from history and philosophy and literature and political theory, the disciplines that teach you to ask where an idea came from and whose interest it serves, and toward business and law schools that teach you to optimize within a system without asking whether the system is just. Rankings began to measure graduate salaries rather than the graduate’s capacity for thought. The steady message was that the practical education is the financial one, that what you learn in an accounting class is useful, and what you learn reading Malory is not.

There is a particular illness in a culture that cannot ask questions and can only see itself. We turn inward and call it reflection, but the gaze never leaves the self, so even our self-criticism is ineffectual. A culture this self-referential loses the ability to hold two true things at once because holding contradiction requires standing for a moment where you are not, inside a life that is not yours, and that is the muscle that goes slack when the self is the only vantage point left. So, we reach for the clean answer, the side to be on, and the villain to name, because ambiguity asks us to leave ourselves and we have forgotten how. And the systems built to carry our thoughts do not correct this. Rather, they reinforce it. They learn what we already respond to, the things we click and linger on and return to, and they feed us more of it. The loud and the certain are rewarded, the quiet and the careful buried, because the loud and the certain are what compel us. The result is not a simpler world. It is a narrower one. A loop drawn around the self we have already shown them, returning us to ourselves again and again, narrowing the odds that we will meet the idea that does not fit, the life that is not ours, or the fact that would have made us see things differently. The machine did not make us self-referential, but it certainly found the tendency and trained it, because reinforcing what we are is what keeps our attention, and keeping our attention is what it was built to do.

Almost nothing now passes between two people without a layer between them, a platform, an app, a company that carries, stores or otherwise processes the message and takes its cut. We ceded that ground willingly, because having an intermediary was convenient and often, it was free. But nothing is free. When things are marketed as “free,” you are the product. The only relationship that the platform actually cares about is the one between its owner and its investors. The layer has its own interest, and its interest is not in your well-being. It was built to hold your attention, to store your data, and to train its algorithms, not to deliver you to the other person. So, the friend reaches you already sorted and ranked, the neighbor arrives as a profile, everything is curated, and the friction that used to build empathy is engineered out. You cannot practice seeing people through something designed to keep you looking at your own narrow world. We handed our relationships to intermediaries, and they gave back the parts that could be measured and kept the rest.

This runs deeper than culture. It is built into the negative rights this book has already traced. A country whose founding promise is restraint, the state that cannot harm you rather than the state that must provide for you, teaches a lesson over two centuries. If no one is owed anything by right, then no one owes anything either. You owe me nothing. I owe you nothing. We are all, in the deepest legal sense, left alone together. It sounds like liberty. It works like abandonment.

And once no one owes anyone anything by right, only one thing is left to organize a relationship around. The exchange. What can you do for me? What do I get for it? We are pushed to measure the people in our lives the way the market measures everything else, by what they return. A friend becomes a contact. A relationship is assessed for what it produces rather than held for what it means. The transaction is the only form of connection that the culture has left fully intact, and a person, naturally, reaches for the structure that is there.

That is the section I could not finish. It comes down to one thing. A culture that prices everything loses the practices that hold people to each other, and what is left is sameness, the self, and the wish for more. We say individualism is the national religion. The truer one is efficiency. We will optimize anything, a supply chain, a morning, a friendship, a self, and we call the optimizing progress without asking what it costs to run a life the way you run a factory. The franchise, the feed, the transaction, the education, all of it is the same act. We found the efficient version and took it, and the efficient version kept what could be measured and discarded the rest. The prosperity gospel was maybe the most honest version of it, the franchise reaching all the way into the soul and calling what it found there good news. I have spent this book tracing that through data and money and the systems that run on both. I do not need another hundred pages to tell you it reached the culture too. You live in it. You already know.

So, I am going to move toward the end, and toward what we do.

…

[1] Wheeler, Bonnie. “The Masculinity of King Arthur: from Gildas to the Nuclear Age,” Arthurian Interpretations (Winter 1992), https://www.jstor.org/stable/27870210. Accessed 19 June 2026.