Outsourced: How Society Gave Away Binding—and What Replaced It
Summary:
This book is a diagnostic book about a specific kind of modern failure: not the disappearance of rules, but the weakening of their force. In many domains of life—dating, work, health, parenting, politics, institutions—the problem is no longer “lack of information” or “lack of values.” The problem is that disputes do not close, obligations do not bind, and coordination becomes privately managed rather than publicly enforced. People remain sincere. Communication increases. But settlement becomes rare.
This book exists to describe that condition cleanly, without moral panic and without self-help theater. It is not a set of recommendations. It is an attempt to name the operating logic of contemporary life: when binding is outsourced, individuals inherit the burden of interpretation, vigilance, and risk-management. The result is not chaos in the dramatic sense—but drift, fatigue, and non-overlapping realities that make shared problem-solving increasingly difficult.
What this book is
- A structural diagnosis of modern coordination failure
- A vocabulary for explaining why communication increases while agreement collapses
- An analysis of how “binding” gets replaced by interpretation, signaling, and private truth-systems
- A framework that applies across domains (not only dating, politics, or media)
- A book that treats modern instability as systemic, not as personal weakness or moral decline
What this book is not
- A self-help guide or personal improvement program
- A moral critique of “bad people,” “weak people,” or “declining values”
- A political argument for one ideology over another
- A therapeutic model, a trauma lens, or an “attachment style” explanation
- A set of instructions for how readers should behave
Structure of the book:
This book is published as a sequence of individual essays / chapters, released online in serial form. Each chapter is designed to be read independently, with enough internal structure to stand on its own. Readers can enter wherever the topic feels most relevant and still understand the core argument.
The order of chapters reflects development, not instruction. The chapters are arranged to progressively clarify the mechanism—how binding fails, what replaces it, and what that replacement does to trust—but the book is not meant to function as a step-by-step program. It is closer to a field manual or operating-system description than a course: you read it to understand what you are living inside.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 - The Forgotten Function of Institutions
Chapter 2 - Outsourcing vs. Delegation
Chapter 3 - Karl Polanyi and the First Catastrophe
Chapter 4 - When Markets Taught Society to Externalize Cost
Chapter 5 - The Privatization of Truth
Chapter 6 - Private Epistemologies as Structural Adaptations
Chapter 7 - Moral and Emotional Outsourcing
Chapter 8 Time - The Ultimate Fictitious Commodity
Chapter 9 - Temporal Anomie and the Infinite Draft
Chapter 10 - Politics After Closure
Chapter - 11 Religion Without Binding
Chapter 12 - What Cannot Be Outsourced
Status:
This book is complete in substance but may be revised for clarity over time.