Benjamin Life on the Underthrow Strategy of Institutional Change
Discussion
Benjamin Life:
"Not overthrow, which implies seizing the existing apparatus of power, which would only reproduce the same dynamics under new management. Not reform, which implies the existing system can be fixed from within, when the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the system’s dysfunction is not a bug but a feature. And not revolution in its etymological sense, revolutio, a turning-over, because we don’t need the wheel to make another rotation through the same cycle.
Underthrow means something different. It means recognizing that the empire is declining and collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and that our task is not to knock it over or to take it over but to build what comes next while the old structure composts itself. It is a refusal to engage on the empire’s terms, the terms of zero-sum competition, of power as domination, of legitimacy as the capacity for violence, instead flowing from an insistence on building from a fundamentally different set of premises.
This is not passivity. It is, if anything, the most demanding form of political engagement, because it requires not only building new institutions but shifting the imaginal space and ontological ground on which institutions are built.
Our current political and economic systems are grounded in what we might call a transcendent metaphysics, a worldview in which reality is fundamentally composed of separate, competing entities vying for scarce resources. In this worldview, power is the ability to impose your will on others. Value is extracted from the world by subjects who stand apart from it. The economy is a zero-sum game that requires institutions to mediate the inevitable conflicts between self-interested actors. The state exists to prevent the war of all against all. This metaphysics is so deeply embedded in Western culture that it feels like common sense rather than a philosophical position, which is precisely what makes it so powerful and so difficult to see past.
But it is not the only metaphysics available to us, and it is not the one that the living world actually operates by.
An immanent metaphysics, a worldview grounded in the recognition that we are embedded in, not separate from, the web of relationships that constitutes reality, generates a fundamentally different understanding of power. In an ecological model, every organism asserts its agency: the tree grows toward light, the mycelial network distributes nutrients, the watershed directs the flow of water. Each element is expressing its nature within a web of relationships, and the result is not a war of all against all but an intricate web of reciprocity in which the flourishing of each participant is bound up with the flourishing of the whole.
This is not survival of the fittest in the Social Darwinist sense that warped Darwin’s (likely stolen) insights into the aristocratic justification for the strong crushing the weak. It is fitness in Darwin’s actual sense: each organism fitted to its niche, thriving through the quality of its relationships rather than through dominance. An ecosystem doesn’t optimize for any single species’ advantage. It optimizes for the complexity and resilience of the whole. Competition exists, but it is nested within cooperation. Predation exists, but it serves the health of the system. Nothing is wasted. Everything is co-emergent and interdependent.
An ecological model of power, grounded in this immanent metaphysics, recognizes that we don’t have the right to assert our agency in ways that undermine or restrict the agency of others. This is not abstract moralism but a practical recognition that in an interconnected system, what harms the part harms the whole. In theory, our current legal system acknowledges a version of this: you can’t murder someone. But we utterly lack this principle in our economic life. When we go to work, most of us enter what is functionally a mini-dictatorship: we do what our boss says or we lose our livelihood. In the broader economy, we supposedly have the freedom to choose where we spend our money, but in a monoculture economy dominated by a handful of corporations, that “choice” is as fictional as the grocer’s sign in Havel’s parable.
The shift from a transcendent to an immanent metaphysics, from seeing ourselves as separate subjects competing for resources to recognizing ourselves as participants in a living web, is the ontological underthrow that precedes and enables the political one. It is the shift from which a different kind of governance becomes not just possible but obvious: governance that honors the agency of all beings, that optimizes for positive-sum relationships, that draws its legitimacy from the quality of care rather than the capacity for control.
Jefferson’s ward republic intuition pointed in this direction, even if the institutional form was insufficient and the philosophical framework incomplete. His insight was this: national coordination, the role that is currently filled by the federal government, should instead be composed of representatives from small, self-governing communities, negotiating among themselves how to coordinate and make decisions together. Power should reside in the hyperlocal, in the community that can see the river, knows its neighbors, and tends the relationships that make collective life possible."