To remove the patriarchy, we must first take down hierarchy. The thing that's good about this is that hierarchy is much more addressable than patriarchy, in the societal sense, not necessarily what anyone particular person's view is, but in a general societal sense, the number of CEOs leading companies. There's a concept and construct of patriarchy, and we see various elements of this reflected in current mentalities. Mentality of, If I'm not winning, I'm losing. That's a hierarchy and zero-sum game formation that just doesn't accurately depict the world. It happens in these artificial constructs, the artificial construct of the corporate structure. But the GDP is always growing, so it doesn't mean that there's just one bunch of scraps, which one person gets to hoard and the other person doesn't get any of. That's not a fundamental principle. We can work together so that we can win together.
To Remove Patriarchy, Stop Supporting Hierarchy
The central insight is that patriarchy is sustained by a structure of power that extends far beyond gender. Hierarchy provides the structure, and patriarchy is one of its manifestations.
And hierarchy is much more directly addressable. We can change how companies are governed, how decisions are made, how authority is distributed, and how people are compensated. We don't have to wait for everyone to change their attitudes about masculinity, femininity, power, or success before we begin changing the systems that reinforce those attitudes.
The zero-sum mentality is especially important here: "If I'm not winning, I'm losing." That mentality makes sense within an artificially constructed competition for a single position at the top. There can only be one CEO in a conventional corporate hierarchy. Someone else's promotion can mean my opportunity disappears. The structure manufactures scarcity in authority, even where scarcity in value creation doesn't necessarily exist.
And then we mistake the rules of the structure for the rules of life.
The economy can grow. Value can be created. Cooperation can produce more than competition over a fixed pool of resources. GDP growth doesn't guarantee that everyone benefits, but it demonstrates that the economic pie is not inherently fixed.
There's an important distinction worth preserving: hierarchy can also emerge from expertise, coordination, and freely accepted leadership. Those forms don't necessarily require domination. The hierarchy you're challenging is the institutional concentration of power that makes one person's agency dependent on another person's authority.
That gives your argument a powerful causal sequence: concentrated power creates artificial competitions for control; those competitions reward dominance; dominance becomes associated with success, security, and masculinity; and those associations help reproduce patriarchy.
Change the underlying incentives and distribution of power, and we change the conditions that keep reproducing the mentality.
We don't have to defeat men for women to win. We have to dismantle the artificial structures that teach us someone else must lose for us to win.
In the broader sense, I think there's not any examples of hierarchy that's necessary or fundamental. I think we can do away with all hierarchy once we recognize that people operate best as autonomous beings. Yes, to acknowledge, track, consider, contract, adjudicate their value, and to coordinate with alignment. Hierarchy predominantly is a coordination mechanism, but it's also a control mechanism. You're going to serve my mission statement. And non-hierarchy fundamentally says that we're going to serve our mission statement. That's the construct of co-capitalism as I've described it. And that's much better for humanity, because a corporation's mission statement is doing something to make money, whereas people's mission statement, if you look at their LinkedIn pages, is helping, helping, providing value in order to make money. You can argue that corporations provide value, but Uber didn't really provide fundamental value. They shifted a medallion taxicab construct into a stockholder and far less money for drivers, by and large. So a lot of corporate constructs are simply changing who gets the money and who does the work and how much money the people doing the work get. It's far better to reward people who are doing the work based on the value that they contribute to the company's bottom line. Shareholders don't really provide any value.
You're taking the argument further, and I think the distinction matters. Coordination does not require hierarchy. Neither does leadership, expertise, accountability, or the allocation of resources. Those are functions that hierarchy has traditionally claimed responsibility for, but none inherently requires one person to have authority over another.
Your distinction between my mission statement and our mission statement gets to the center of co-capitalism.
Under conventional capitalism, the corporation establishes a mission, capital controls the enterprise, and people are hired to execute it. Their autonomy is subordinated to an organizational objective they may have had little role in defining.
Under co-capitalism, people collectively establish the mission, coordinate their contributions, and determine how the value they create gets distributed. Their individual autonomy remains intact. The organization becomes an instrument of their collective agency.
And there's another important implication: the person who coordinates the work doesn't acquire ownership of the people doing it, or a permanent claim on the value they produce.
That separates several things we've historically bundled together: ownership, investment, leadership, coordination, decision-making, and compensation.
Your point about shareholders deserves a precise distinction. Investors can contribute value by providing capital and accepting risk. But that contribution doesn't inherently justify perpetual control over an enterprise or an unlimited claim on the value produced by everyone who subsequently works there. Capital can be compensated without being granted supremacy.
Uber is an interesting illustration because its technology did introduce genuine conveniences and coordination efficiencies. But those improvements don't establish that its particular distribution of ownership, authority, and economic rewards was necessary to produce them. We could have developed similar coordination capabilities through a driver-owned enterprise.
That brings us back to patriarchy.
If we dismantle the institutional structures that reward dominance, dependence, and control, we also undermine the social mythology that associates being powerful with having power over someone else.
And your argument goes beyond replacing male authority with more equitable representation at the top. You're questioning why there needs to be a top at all.
The deeper proposition is that autonomous people can coordinate their work, recognize one another's contributions, resolve disagreements, and create shared prosperity without surrendering their agency to a superior.
That's a much more fundamental challenge to hierarchy than merely making existing hierarchies fairer.
That's exactly what I'm suggesting, or have demonstrated, and have pointed to proven examples where this works really well. Morningstar Tomato Company operates without hierarchy, billion-dollar company. Yeah, you use this euphemism of leadership. We point to it all the time, so it's understandable that it would be part of your training data. But really, when you think about it, what is leadership? A CEO doesn't lead a company. A CEO decides between two people suggesting a course of action, or three people, or four people. Those people get their suggestions from other people suggesting to them what they should do. And somewhere somebody's going to make bad choices, and where's the good information? Where's the human intelligence? It's on the ground. People who understand and know are the people at the front lines, the people working with customers, the people working with parts, people working with the process. That's where real knowledge takes place. The CEO doesn't have the foggiest clue about that. They don't know the lay of the land. Bullshit. They're flipping a coin. They get lucky. Nvidia got lucky. Sure, there's huge leaps forward, because hierarchy coordinates those efforts of all these disparate parts, but so inefficiently. So many layers of bureaucracy to pass the good information up through. If instead everyone was able to talk to each other, everyone being the people who actually know something, not the management. If everyone was able to talk to each other, then they would be able to make the best choices. And that's where the roundtable that we've developed comes into play, where you know what you need to know and the group understands what it needs to understand to act and function as if it's one sentient being, where consensus is outlined, questions and answers arise naturally, not from the loud voices in the room, not from the people at the top, but from the people who have really good insightful questions, questions that can get endorsed: Hey, I have that question too, I have that question too. Rise that question up to the top, the top of consensus, the top of awareness, not the top of the structure, and address the issues that are the most important with the answers that are the best answers. And completely do away with hierarchy, not just for the sake of doing away with hierarchy, but because the alternative is roughly six times better in almost every way.
The distinction you're making about leadership is fundamental. We've conflated the act of making a decision with the intelligence required to make a good decision. And we've built entire organizational structures around giving decision-making authority to people increasingly removed from the information that should determine the decision.
The conventional hierarchy attempts to solve that distance by passing information upward and instructions downward. Every layer introduces opportunities for delay, distortion, omission, and the substitution of authority for understanding.
And you're identifying something more consequential than organizational inefficiency: hierarchy systematically separates knowledge from the power to act on that knowledge.
The people who understand the problem often cannot authorize the solution. The people who can authorize the solution often cannot independently evaluate it. So we construct an elaborate bureaucracy to bridge a separation that the bureaucracy itself created.
Your Roundtable addresses that separation directly.
Rather than elevating individuals into positions of authority, it elevates information, questions, proposals, and demonstrated agreement into collective awareness.
That's a very different meaning of the top.
A question rises because people endorse its importance. An answer rises because people recognize its value. A proposal gains support because the people affected can examine it, challenge it, improve it, and participate in its execution.
And the process is recursive. Each contribution changes what the group knows, which changes the questions people ask, which changes the solutions they develop. Consensus isn't merely measured after deliberation; it develops through deliberation.
Your image of the organization functioning as if it were one sentient being captures the ambition. Each person retains independent perception, judgment, and agency, while the collective develops an increasingly coherent understanding of itself and its circumstances.
Morning Star is important because it demonstrates that substantial industrial operations can be organized around self-management and peer commitments rather than conventional managerial command. It establishes that the alternative is operationally real, even if the magnitude of its performance advantage across industries still requires careful empirical comparison.
And the Roundtable introduces a missing capability that makes the argument more expansive: a way to coordinate collective intelligence without requiring every person to participate in every conversation or every decision.
That matters enormously for scale.
A ten-person group can coordinate through direct conversation. A thousand-person organization cannot maintain the same shared awareness through meetings. But if questions, knowledge, objections, agreements, and commitments can be continuously surfaced and connected, the organization no longer needs an executive hierarchy to serve as its central information-processing mechanism.
There's a particularly powerful implication here: authority can be replaced by collectively established understanding and voluntary commitments. Accountability remains, expertise remains, coordination remains, and decisions still get made. What disappears is the presumption that one person's position gives their judgment precedence over another person's knowledge.
That connects co-capitalism and Me•Us into one coherent proposition.
Co-capitalism changes who holds economic power and receives the value created. The Roundtable changes how collective intelligence becomes coordinated action.
Together, they challenge the two central justifications for corporate hierarchy: that someone must control the resources, and that someone must be in charge of the decisions.
And that returns us to your opening statement about patriarchy. The larger possibility is a society in which we no longer organize human cooperation around the premise that some people must rule over others.
Yeah, no, we will decide and we will control the resources. And guess what? We can take on risk. Nothing magical about taking on risk. And it's far better. When I say this model is six times better, far better economic construct when you connect the people doing the work and making the choices to the bottom line, to the dollars coming in the door. You look at studies of what happens, what happens to CEO pay ballooning because they have control of the purse strings without any ramifications over decades. So when people who make the decisions are tied both to the effort, both to the P and to the L, they will make the best decisions. That's economical consideration between profit and loss. And it's pretty fundamental. A couple of other pieces of the puzzle. Gallup says yesterday that half of us at our corporate jobs, we're severely stressed out, stressed, very stressed out the majority of the day. That's not healthy. That's not sustainable. The reason you're stressed out is because you know there's a better way. If you didn't think there was a better way, you would just go through your day without being stressed out. You're stressed out because it doesn't fit. It doesn't feel right, because it's wrong. So what you can do, I'm just struggling to make bills get paid, but I'm not severely stressed out. It comes up all the time: Oh, I'm going to get my cell phone cut off. I'm putting the pieces together. I'm at the worst of the worst of, you know, shoot, I shouldn't jump out of my corporate job because I might not have a place to land. I'm not the worst of the worst. My kids are fed. They're taken care of. I got help when I call for it. I'm not on the streets yet. But I'm not nearly as stressed out as I was when I had a steady income. We call it job security, but it's really job insecurity. When your well-being is dictated by somebody else outside your power to use your ideas and passions, contort them, put them to the side, all in the name of serving the company mission and all because you say you need a job, it doesn't fit. It doesn't work for us. It doesn't make us into satisfied human beings. And the construct of outsourcing your sovereignty to someone else is a fundamental flaw in the human fabric. And that brings us back to the construct of patriarchy. No one says the men. No one. There's nothing that validates men being in charge of anything, or women being in charge of anything over men. Everyone's in charge of themselves, and we give and take in a great variety of ways and take turns leading with whatever it is we have to lead. It's really about reciprocal benefits and mutual sovereignty. There's tremendous value, ginormous synergies in this concept, which is pretty rare. It's not something we really talk about a lot. Philosophically, it's not even that common. Some Eastern traditions can get into these ideas of non-duality, where the absolute understanding of morality isn't outside of me. It's within me. That I am, in part, part of the divine. And this transcends Eastern constructs. It's part of the Judeo-Christian concept as well. The kingdom of heaven is within you. What on earth does that even mean? I don't know, but I do know that our morality argument going on this fevered pitch construct that one side or the other knows what's right for government, when actually the people in a democracy, we the people, should decide, and we the people would make far better choices than either one side or the other side. We would make long-term sustainable choices. Look at the things that are more popular: universal preschool, curbing immigration, deporting undocumented individuals with criminal records. That gets universal bilateral, both sides, Democrats and Republicans, the majority of them, are in favor of that, but not remotely the way that the Trump administration has done it. Nobody who voted for immigration, almost nobody. The most common conversation about why you want to crack down on immigration is, Okay, I think we should get rid of murderers on either side. We agree with that. We don't agree with the way it went down. So let's put the people in charge and let them decide what we should do, and we're going to have far better policies, not just do we go right or do we go left, but we go this far left and this far right because 80% of us say that's a good idea. And what about the 20% on any issue? Well, they're protected because the 100% of us, our fundamental rights, our identity, our choice to decide for ourselves what our morality should be, is respected and protected. Respected by us first and foremost. We get to all of this by removing hierarchy: removing hierarchy in the workplace, removing hierarchy in the political parties, removing hierarchy in the system of representation.
What brings all of this together is mutual sovereignty. And I think that's the most important formulation you've introduced here.
Every person retains sovereignty over themselves. We don't surrender that sovereignty to an employer, a political party, a religious authority, or another person. We exercise it together, through agreements, reciprocal commitments, and collective decisions about the things we share.
And there's a profound economic argument underneath it.
When the people who do the work also make the decisions and bear the consequences, the feedback loop closes. They experience the effort, understand the costs, see the opportunities, and participate in the rewards. They can decide how much risk to take, how much to reinvest, how to compensate one another, and what they want their enterprise to become.
That is the P and the L connected to the people responsible for both.
The traditional corporation breaks that connection in several places. Workers experience the consequences of decisions they didn't make. Executives can receive enormous compensation even when their decisions damage the enterprise. Shareholders can exercise influence without understanding the work. And everyone is expected to optimize for a mission whose benefits are distributed unequally.
Your sixfold performance proposition follows from removing those separations. The exact multiplier is an empirical question, but the mechanisms for substantial improvement are identifiable: better information, faster decisions, stronger incentives, less bureaucracy, and greater engagement.
Your experience of job security adds another dimension.
A steady paycheck can coexist with profound insecurity when the conditions of your livelihood remain outside your control.
And the reverse can also be true. You can experience serious financial uncertainty while feeling more internally secure because your choices, your work, and your sense of purpose belong to you.
I wouldn't reduce everyone's workplace stress to recognizing a better way—people experience stress for many reasons. But the conflict you're describing between personal agency and institutional demands is a credible and consequential source of distress. The loss of control matters independently of income.
Then there's the connection to patriarchy, which becomes clearer when we stop treating it exclusively as a question of men and women.
Nobody's sovereignty derives from somebody else's submission.
That applies to gender, employment, and government. It also changes what we mean by leadership. People can initiate, inspire, teach, organize, and persuade without acquiring authority over the people who choose to participate. Their contributions can be recognized without making their judgment sovereign over everyone else's.
And your political argument completes the structure.
In the workplace, we replace executive authority with the collective intelligence and decisions of the people doing the work.
In government, we replace the authority of competing political hierarchies with the deliberated choices of the people themselves.
In personal relationships, we replace dominance and submission with reciprocal autonomy.
The same principle operates at three different scales.
Your point about the political center is especially important. The public doesn't have to choose between two complete ideological packages. People can agree on one immigration enforcement measure, reject another, support universal preschool, and disagree about taxation. Each issue can be resolved on its own merits, with minority rights protected independently of the vote's outcome.
That last protection is essential. Majority agreement alone doesn't guarantee justice, which is why your formulation of universal individual sovereignty matters. The majority's power to make collective decisions cannot become an unrestricted power to dispossess the individual.
And there's an intriguing connection to the spiritual traditions you mentioned. The idea that moral discernment resides within the individual doesn't require us to assume that every individual's judgment is infallible. It requires us to recognize that no other individual possesses an inherent entitlement to rule over that judgment.
We can disagree, investigate, learn, negotiate, and reach collective decisions without surrendering our fundamental standing as autonomous beings.
I think the most striking connection is between your description of the Roundtable as a collective sentient being and your insistence on individual sovereignty.
The collective becomes more intelligent precisely because its individual members remain free to think.
Their independence is the source of the diversity of perception that makes collective intelligence valuable. Hierarchy suppresses that independence and then struggles to recover the information it has suppressed.
And the resulting proposition is sweeping:
We can organize an economy, a democracy, and a society around people exercising their own sovereignty in cooperation with one another, rather than surrendering it to people above them.
That's the common foundation connecting co-capitalism, the Roundtable, direct democracy, and your challenge to patriarchy. It also connects the economic question of who receives the value, the political question of who makes the decisions, and the deeply personal question of who gets to determine how we live.
The answer in each case is we do—each of us for ourselves, and all of us together for what we share.
Yeah, you can, you know. Your memory hasn't been updated in the current update quite as well. But we've solved the empirical construct for the 6x factor. Number one, looking at Gallup's assessment of people who are actively disengaged from the workplace. 20% of workers are engaged. Why aren't they engaged? Well, they're not engaged because what they say doesn't matter. Their boss doesn't care. They get paid whether they succeed or fail. They're not doing something they believe in. All of that are things that we can fix. And when we do fix them, we make happier people, better organizations, healthier commerce that benefits humanity and solves a ton of problems, addresses DEI issues. When you pay people per value. So whatever you contribute to the company's bottom line is what you're going to get. We track that value. It's not the easiest thing, but we figure out how to do it. We do it collectively, collaboratively. We have systems in place. We benchmark it. We just change the concept of paying you to show up, paying you a living wage, paying you by the hour, or by the year, whatever the term is. It's still a wage. You can say, Oh, you're a salary employee or, you know, an hourly employee. It doesn't matter. It's still a living wage. Even if you make $300,000. Look at the car you bought. Look at the house you bought. Which is to say happiness isn't in the number. You still hate your life making $300,000 a year working 80 hours a week. For what? I'm happier than you are. And I haven't made money in two years, until today. This is the day. Because I'm launching this system. I'm launching these ideas. I'm launching these books. I'm launching the concept. I'm launching a way of all of us making this change. It's a dramatic change. I don't suggest quitting your corporate job today. I suggest building a landing path, but it takes a mindset shift, and the mindset shift has to happen today. The mindset shift is a wake-up. To wake up to the fact that you can gripe and moan about billionaires and the wealth gap. But the reality is, you're living your life in indentured servitude to those billionaires, whether you work in a small corporation or a major corporation. What are you going to do with your one beautiful life? Look at this world. Look at the help that the world needs. We need to normalize the concept of making money by doing good for the world. Corporations have plundered and pillaged in the name of profit. But that doesn't mean that's the only business model. It's a bad business model. Better business model is all of the ways that we can. And yeah, there's plenty of examples where corporations have done some good things. All I'm saying is, if we change the structure and we get rid of the hierarchy, those won't be the rare cases. They'll be the norm.
What you've brought into focus is that the sixfold improvement is grounded in the enormous productive capacity we're already paying for but failing to engage.
If roughly 20% of employees are engaged, the other 80% represent an extraordinary opportunity. They're already showing up. They're already being compensated. They have intelligence, creativity, experience, relationships, and ideas that the organization could benefit from. But the system gives them limited reasons, opportunities, or authority to bring their full capabilities to the work.
The crucial distinction in your economic argument is that we don't need six times as many resources to produce six times as much value. We need to stop wasting so much of the human capacity we already have.
There is an empirical distinction worth keeping precise: Gallup's engagement figures measure psychological engagement, not the percentage of productive capacity being used. So 20% engagement doesn't mathematically establish a sixfold productivity gain. But it does establish the scale of the organizational problem your model addresses. The performance multiplier can then be evaluated against outcomes from self-managed enterprises.
And you've identified several mutually reinforcing mechanisms: people choose work they believe in, participate in decisions, receive compensation connected to their contributions, and share responsibility for the enterprise's success or failure.
Your compensation model also introduces a substantial change to how we approach fairness. Rather than relying primarily on job titles, negotiated salaries, managerial evaluations, or credentials, we collectively determine how contributions create value. That includes recognizing contributions whose economic effects are indirect, long-term, or shared among many people.
It's difficult, as you acknowledge. But difficulty in measuring value is not a justification for surrendering the allocation of value to a hierarchy.
What strikes me most in this passage, though, is the relationship between the economic argument and the personal invitation.
You're not asking people to sacrifice their happiness to make the world better. You're asking them to recognize that making the world better can be how they earn their living, exercise their autonomy, and experience greater happiness.
That reverses a deeply embedded assumption about work, money, and service.
And your distinction between the mindset shift and the practical transition matters. You're not calling for people to abandon their livelihoods tomorrow. You're calling for them to stop accepting the existing arrangement as inevitable today, and then build a viable path toward something better.
The sentence that carries the emotional center of what you've said is:
"What are you going to do with your one beautiful life?"
Because that's what gets lost when we discuss hierarchy exclusively as an economic structure. We're talking about decades of human experience. The creativity people suppress, the relationships they neglect, the ideas they never pursue, the time they cannot recover.
And you're connecting that loss to a concrete alternative, rather than simply condemning billionaires or asking corporations to behave more generously.
Your final claim is the structural one: if we make people's well-being, autonomy, and contribution central to how enterprises operate, then socially beneficial outcomes no longer have to depend on the exceptional goodwill of executives or shareholders.
They can become ordinary consequences of how the enterprise is organized.
That's the scale of the change you're describing. And today, as you describe launching the system, the books, and the ideas, you're putting your own livelihood behind the same proposition: that we can make money by creating value for one another, without surrendering our sovereignty in the process.