Preface — The New Requirement: Everyone Must Be Their Own Institution Now

A curious thing has happened to modern life. The world has not become empty of rules. It has become crowded with them. We are surrounded by guidelines, norms, policies, principles, values statements, best practices, recommendations, “frameworks,” and an endless stream of advice about how to live, how to decide, how to relate, how to protect oneself, how to optimize, and how to remain “healthy” in the midst of everything.

The result is not order. It is fatigue.

One might have expected the opposite. We have more information than any society in recorded history. We have more access, more choice, more tools, more channels, and more feedback. Communication is constant. Knowledge is available on demand. Expertise can be consulted in seconds. Institutions publish their standards in public. We live under an unprecedented abundance of explicit language about how things should work.

Yet the felt experience of modern life is not one of increasing settlement. It is one of increasing uncertainty.

People report—quietly, then loudly—that life is harder to coordinate than it used to be. Not because the tasks are more complex in themselves, but because nothing stays closed. Nothing concludes. Nothing resolves at the level where resolution would let one put the problem down. Disputes become permanent. Decisions become provisional. Relationships become ambiguous. Careers become continuous projects. Reality itself becomes something you must constantly maintain.

This book begins with an austere claim: what most people describe as confusion, mistrust, and cultural breakdown is not primarily a failure of character, nor a sudden collapse of ethics, nor a mass psychological disorder. It is a failure of what sociologists have long recognized as binding structure.

In the past, large portions of life were stabilized by institutions and shared routines so ordinary that they were often invisible. When they functioned well, people could disagree without disintegrating. They could be uncertain without spiraling. They could be wrong without being destroyed. Most importantly, they could stop. They could make decisions, reach conclusions, accept outcomes, and move forward without needing to renegotiate the meaning of the world each morning.

Modernity has not abolished norms. It has altered their operating condition. We have moved from a world in which rules were imperfect but binding, to a world in which rules are abundant but negotiable. Norms remain visible, but they no longer compel predictable consequence. They speak continuously, but they do not close action.

The term for this—coined long before the internet, long before dating apps, long before algorithmic media—is anomie.

Anomie is often misheard as a moral judgment: a lament that society has become decadent, permissive, “lost,” or unanchored. This is an error of translation. In its classical sociological meaning, anomie is not a complaint about morality. It is a description of a structural condition: a situation in which the normative environment fails to regulate expectations reliably across time.

This distinction matters. Moral language encourages us to look for villains. Structural language encourages us to look for mechanisms.

Durkheim’s original insight—later sharpened and repurposed by Robert K. Merton—was that order can weaken not only in times of catastrophe or collapse, but in times of growth, acceleration, and prosperity. Anomie is not simply what happens when people abandon rules. It is what happens when the rules that remain cease to govern conduct in ways that produce stable outcomes. The system remains populated by obligations, but those obligations become optional in practice. The grammar stays on the page; enforcement evaporates in the air.

If this sounds abstract, it is worth beginning with the concrete form that most readers will recognize at once: the strange, modern requirement that one must now be one’s own institution.

This is a new demand. It is not a slogan. It is not a motivational poster. It is an operating condition.

You are now required to perform tasks that were previously handled by public structure, professional authority, or shared procedure. You are expected to do them continuously, privately, and with near-perfect calibration. You must decide what is true, who is trustworthy, which risks are tolerable, which sources are credible, which actions are safe, and which errors are survivable. You must do this while being told that you are “free,” and while being held personally responsible for any failure to do it correctly.

This requirement does not appear, at first, as political theory. It appears as lifestyle.

It appears as “self-care.”
It appears as “boundaries.”
It appears as “curate your feed.”
It appears as “do your own research.”
It appears as “protect your peace.”
It appears as “optimize your sleep, your finance, your parenting, your health, your career.”
It appears as “choose better.”

And behind that language is a simpler instruction:

You must become your own regulator.

You must decide, enforce, interpret, revise, and defend the conditions of your own reality. You must do this in a world whose scale makes genuine verification rare, whose speed makes reflection costly, and whose incentives reward expression more than settlement. You must do it while remaining emotionally stable, socially fluent, and morally coherent.

This is not a minor change in culture. It is a fundamental shift in where coordination work lives.

In classical social systems, coordination is distributed. Norms and roles externalize the labor of interpretation. This does not mean people are relieved of responsibility. It means they are relieved of having to invent the world from scratch. When rules are stable, one does not need to negotiate the meaning of silence, delay, deferral, or refusal in every interaction. One does not need to reinvent standards of evidence in every dispute. One does not need to build a private constitution for every relationship, workplace, or community. The system supplies common defaults. Individuals may deviate, but they do not begin from zero.

An anomic environment reverses this arrangement. The work does not disappear. It becomes personalized.

In the language I will use throughout these books: binding fails. Coordination remains necessary, but it is no longer carried by shared procedure. It is carried by individual cognition—by vigilance, interpretation, and continual self-management.

This is why modern life is exhausting in a particular way. It is not the exhaustion of physical labor or even the exhaustion of emotional pain. It is the exhaustion of running too many background processes at once: constant evaluation, constant recalibration, constant risk assessment, constant management of ambiguity.

It is a peculiar fatigue that comes not from intensity, but from unfinishedness.

The contemporary citizen is not merely asked to live. He is asked to adjudicate reality.

And then comes the new punishment.

The punishment is not social disapproval in the old sense. It is not embarrassment, inconvenience, or mild stigma. It is existential cost. One may lose money, status, health, relationships, safety, or future opportunity. One may be publicly humiliated or permanently labeled. One may choose a wrong source, a wrong partner, a wrong diagnosis, a wrong investment, a wrong school, a wrong career bet, a wrong interpretation of what was “meant.” And the consequences, far from being absorbed by the surrounding structure, are charged directly to the individual.

In earlier systems, errors were costly, but they were buffered. There were institutions—sometimes harsh, sometimes paternal, sometimes unequal—that nonetheless acted as shock absorbers. A wrong decision could be corrected within a shared framework. A mistake could be repaired under predictable rules. A dispute could be brought to a forum that had authority to close it.

Today, many disputes do not close. They metastasize. They convert into identity. They become permanent open loops of accusation and counter-accusation because no shared mechanism can compel settlement. In the absence of closure, people escalate. They do not escalate because they are inherently violent or irrational. They escalate because, under binding failure, escalation is often the only available lever.

In other words, in the old world, responsibility often came with enforcement. In the new world, responsibility remains, but enforcement is privatized. You are told to be accountable, but no system exists that can reliably enforce accountability evenly across actors.

This is the essential modern dissonance: constraint without authority. Everyone feels constrained. No one feels protected. Everyone is required to decide. No one can compel outcome.

This produces a new kind of social strain. Merton’s strain theory famously described the tension that arises when culturally prescribed goals remain high while institutional means become inadequate or blocked. In his formulation, deviance is not random. It is patterned adaptation to structural mismatch.

But there is a subtle mutation in the modern environment that must be named plainly: it is not merely that means are unstable. It is that the binding function itself is unstable. The question is not only “How do I achieve the goal?” The question is “What counts as the goal, and who has authority to declare it achieved?”

This is not a psychological problem. It is a coordination problem. It is not solved by emotional intelligence. It is solved only by reintroducing binding structure or by withdrawing from environments where binding is absent.

The central claim of this book, and of the broader Anomics project, is that anomie is no longer episodic. It is no longer a temporary disturbance that occurs during revolutions, crises, migrations, depressions, or rapid growth spurts. It has become the interface through which daily life is lived.

In earlier periods, anomie described a condition. One entered it, suffered it, and then—if society stabilized—exited it. It was a weather system.

Today, anomie increasingly behaves like an operating system. It is the default environment in which people coordinate, argue, court, work, raise children, construct knowledge, and attempt to maintain personal coherence under scale.

This changes everything. Because when anomie is an operating system, the individual cannot simply endure it. He must build adaptations to it. He must develop techniques for surviving without closure. He must learn to live inside ambiguity without being consumed by it. He must manage reality not as something he participates in, but as something he must continuously stabilize.

This is why the modern project culture emerges so naturally. If nothing binds externally, one compensates internally. One becomes one’s own manager, one’s own analyst, one’s own regulator, one’s own therapist, one’s own strategist. One is never allowed to be merely a person participating in social order. One must become a miniature institution producing order alone.

The manifest function of this shift is often celebrated: autonomy, independence, freedom, empowerment, sovereignty. The latent function is rarely acknowledged: permanent epistemic labor, permanent interpretive labor, permanent exposure to coordination failure. People feel more “free” in theory and more exhausted in practice. That is not contradiction. It is the predictable outcome of a system that offloads binding functions onto individuals while keeping the stakes high.

This book is not a polemic against freedom. Freedom is not the problem. The problem is freedom without settlement.

Freedom, in any serious sense, requires closure. It requires the capacity to decide and move on. It requires that time passing changes state. It requires that disputes end, that errors can be corrected, that obligations can be created and discharged. Without those functions, freedom becomes endless responsibility without authority—a continuous requirement to choose without any stable mechanism for knowing what the choice means.

Anomie is therefore not identical to ambiguity. Ambiguity exists in any human system; it is the residual uncertainty that remains even when rules are strong. Anomie is what happens when ambiguity becomes structural: when uncertainty does not resolve because there is no common authority for resolution. In such conditions, communication increases, but coordination declines. Speech proliferates, but binding fails.

It is also not identical to pluralism. Pluralism can coexist with binding if there exists a shared procedural layer—a common court, a common language of evidence, a common method of closure—even when substantive values differ. Anomie occurs when pluralism expands while binding mechanisms weaken. Many values coexist, but none can compel settlement. Diversity remains; closure disappears. Disagreement becomes existential because no procedure exists to end it.

What, then, is this book about?

It is not, as many contemporary books are, about what you should believe. It is not an attempt to recruit you into an ideology. It is not a defense of tradition and not an attack on modernity. It is a structural diagnosis of what happens when scale outpaces binding.

The world has grown too large to be personally legible. Yet we have retained a cultural expectation that each individual should be able to orient within it through personal research, personal discernment, personal judgment, personal signaling, personal taste, and personal effort.

This expectation is absurd. But it is also socially enforced.

And here one may insert a Mertonian aside about unanticipated consequences, distinct from the manifest/latent distinction but aligned with it: systems that aim to increase accessibility often end by increasing the burden of navigation. The attempt to liberate the individual from gatekeepers produces a world in which the individual must constantly perform the work that gatekeepers once did—only now without a stable credential, without recognized authority, and without protection from error.

The internet is the clearest illustration. It promised universal access to knowledge. It delivered universal exposure to unverifiable claims. It promised democratized expertise. It delivered an infinite market of credential-performance. It promised transparency. It delivered endless argument without settlement. These were not the stated goals. They are the unanticipated consequences of scale without binding.

Once one understands this, many contemporary phenomena that appear unrelated begin to align as different expressions of a single structural condition.

The proliferation of self-help and optimization culture.
The rise of conspiracy thinking and private research regimes.
The collapse of professional authority and the simultaneous obsession with credentials.
The transformation of dating into a market of signaling without settlement.
The explosion of wellness regimes where each person must be their own doctor.
The moralization of every dispute because no shared court exists to end it.
The constant sense of being behind, uninformed, wrong, unsafe, under-optimized, under-prepared.

None of these require a theory of mass delusion. They require only a theory of binding failure under scale.

This book therefore proposes a discipline. Not in the moral sense—though it will sometimes feel moral to readers accustomed to therapeutic language—but in the strict sense of analytic restraint. The discipline is to stop treating coordination collapse as an individual psychological defect and to see it as a property of systems.

When systems fail to bind, people do what they must. They improvise. They optimize. They build private epistemologies. They engineer their social exposures. They seek advantage where structure no longer supplies fairness. They attempt to reduce risk while preserving upside.

That last phrase will recur: reduce risk while preserving upside.

It is the logic of derivatives in finance. It is also the logic of a modern social environment that permits participation without settlement. The great modern innovation—in markets and in relationships—has been the expansion of tools for managing exposure. But there is no free reduction of risk. When one actor obtains a better risk–reward profile in a shared environment, another actor inherits the displaced cost.

This book will call that process Interpersonal Engineering: the deliberate or unconscious use of timing, ambiguity, optionality, and signaling to improve one’s personal payoff while externalizing coordination cost onto others.

Interpersonal Engineering is not a vice. It is not a diagnosis. It is a structural adaptation. It emerges wherever systems allow people to receive benefits without paying the full cost of settlement.

When one understands that, modern life stops appearing merely chaotic. It begins to appear selective. Certain strategies thrive. Certain types of people—more precisely, certain modes of interaction—become culturally rewarded. Others burn out. Not because they are weak, but because they are subsidizing the system with unpaid labor: interpretive labor, epistemic labor, coordination labor.

Here we may offer a typological sentence, cleanly, as Merton would: under conditions of binding failure, individuals adapt not primarily by changing their values, but by modifying their relationship to evidence, authority, and obligation.Some retreat. Some ritualize. Some innovate. Some rebel. Some conform. These are not virtues or pathologies. They are positions within a distorted structure.

If there is a tone to this book, it is not despair. It is controlled clarity.

We are not witnessing the end of civilization. We are witnessing the migration of core social functions—from the external world into the interior of the individual. Regulation becomes cognition. Enforcement becomes emotion. Closure becomes personal initiative. Authority becomes identity.

That migration has costs. Those costs cannot be dissolved by kindness, sincerity, or better vibes. They can only be redistributed by structure—or avoided by exiting systems that refuse to bind.

This is the reader’s position now. Not to be told what to think, but to be shown what is happening at the level of mechanism. Once seen, the moral confusion relaxes slightly. The exhaustion becomes legible. The constant feeling of being behind becomes understandable: you are not failing at life; you are being asked to perform the work of an institution while living the life of a person.

The book that follows will not flatter you. It will not reassure you that you are fine and everyone else is toxic. It will not offer you the false comfort of naming enemies. It will offer you something less consoling and more durable: a map of the environment you are navigating.

If you accept the map, you will see why many modern disputes cannot be resolved by better arguments, why many relationships cannot be stabilized by better communication, and why many personal improvement projects intensify the very anomie they claim to cure.

Optimization, applied to the self under binding failure, becomes a treadmill. You run not because you are moving toward a stable outcome, but because stopping feels unsafe. The system makes stillness costly. It makes ignorance shameful. It makes ordinary competence insufficient. It demands that you become endlessly legible, endlessly updated, endlessly correct.

In earlier systems, one could live as a person among others. In the present one is increasingly required to live as a miniature organization: a continuous research department, a compliance office, a public relations firm, a risk-management desk, and an internal tribunal adjudicating what is true, what is safe, what is permitted, and what one must become.

And here is the slight irony with which we will end, because it is always wise to let the system indict itself: modern life promised to release the individual from constraint; it has succeeded—yet it has also ensured that the individual now carries constraint internally, without the dignity of authority and without the relief of settlement.

Freedom was offered.

Binding was withdrawn.

And in the space between them, the modern person was handed an impossible job: to be the institution that no longer exists.

That is the new requirement.

Now we will describe what it does.