Welcome, reader. I’m so happy that you’re alive today.
I mean it. You bring something unique to the world that has never existed before and will never exist again after you’re gone. You are the sum total of your heritage, your upbringing, your experiences, and your dreams, and no one in the world can exemplify that particular combination as well as you can.
Sappy, I know, but in this case also literally true, at least by the metric I use to gauge reality. You don’t have to share my views on whether it is literally, morally, or spiritually true, but I hope you’ll at least consider this as a useful lens to view the world through.
I can’t tell you why life exists in our universe, which is what people usually mean when they discuss the “meaning of life”—I’ll leave that to the philosophers and the priests. What I can tell you is why you might want to see life in a universe, if you had one to play around with.
Imagine yourself a researcher some fantastic distance into the future, where we have the ability to simulate entire universes, down to the microscopic scale. Why would you choose to simulate life developing in your little pocket universe instead of something interesting, like galaxies colliding, or black holes eating nebulae, or astronomically huge crystalline rock formations?
You would choose life in specific if what you wanted was to try as many different possibilities as you could, all at once. All life tends to diversify; a species tends to set itself apart in a way that lets it become the best at filling its ecological niche, and an individual tends to set itself apart from its species in a way that makes it more successful than its peers.
As a researcher, you might use that tendency to breed microbes that can eat nuclear waste, a process that could take millions of years in the real world. So you seed your pocket universe with microbes that eat every type of thing you can think of. You allow them to breed, and mutate, and diversify, as all life will, and once there are enough of them, billions and trillions and quadrillions of individuals, the chances that at least one of them has the combination of genetics, environment, stimulus, and drive that you need are basically one hundred percent.
All you need to do is make sure you don’t miss these individuals when they pop up. You fill your little test universe with lots of tasty little nuclear poops, and you keep a careful eye on them as you run the simulation. Once you start to see them disappearing, you can just pause the simulation and see what’s doing it, and there are your microbes, with genetic code that you can copy and try in our universe. So long as the ecosystem is healthy enough, you can leave it running for however many millions or billions of simulated years it takes before some lucky microbe finally hits on that magic combination.
I don’t know why life exists in our universe, or even if there is a why. What I do know is that in order to fulfill that purpose, we must all of us find the traits and skills that most truly fulfill us, and we must cherish and nourish them to find the thing that each of us is best suited for doing, over all else. After all, if your lucky nuclear-eating microbe never tried the spicy radiation food just because all the other microbes were busy eating chlorophyll, you’d never even know it existed.
This is why I bear Donald Trump no personal animosity. He is an execrable miscreant; he is being the best damn execrable miscreant he can be. He’s doing it right. He’s exemplifying the wealth he came from and the awful personality he was presumably born with, and I would expect no less.
As I said previously: the United States was always going to elect someone like Trump. Our current electoral system selects for the people who can best appeal to the public, which limits the pool to saints and sociopaths. When the country is doing well, the public likes to elect a President who is positive and forward-looking, just like they are in their own lives. When the country is doing poorly, the public likes to elect a President who can tell them who is to blame for their problems.
The whole world is doing poorly. The regulations that currently exist around the global economy are causing wealth to become more and more stratified at a faster and faster rate, and it is causing life to become more and more difficult for the vast, overwhelming majority of people. More and more, people will turn to someone who can tell them who is responsible for the way things are.
That’s why I need you to set aside your pain, just for a moment. If you think that Donald Trump is personally responsible for what is going on, or that Democrats are, or Republicans or immigrants or any other group, then you are missing a very, very great deal of the bigger picture. Our government, itself, has fallen sick. A big part of our strength as a country comes from our ability to maintain continuity even as we change our government out over and over again; now, it is that very continuity that persists the illness. Our legislators no longer have enough political freedom to defend our Constitution from Trump, or to deal with any problem where the desires of the wealthy conflict with the needs of the country.
You don’t ask a surgeon to do surgery on themself, and I personally consider it unconscionable (in addition to being ill-advised and generally unsuccessful) to ask an elected government to change the laws that got it elected in the first place. That becomes an unavoidable conflict of interest, one which the public will always lose; or at least, one where the government is not incentivized to choose the solution that best suits the public’s needs.
This is why we need a second way to elect our government. If we are to remain the United States of America—the nation of the people, by the people, and for the people—then we cannot be a country with just a single electoral process. No matter how fair and good we make it, we will always end up back where we are today, in 2026, because every complex system will eventually enter a failure state it can’t escape without help. We must be a country with two electoral processes: one will be what we use normally, designed to find and elect the best, brightest, and savviest politicians America has to offer. The other, the Restricted Election, is designed to elect the most trustworthy Americans, the ones with the best view of what is actually going on with the country: the working class.
As I mentioned last time, the Interim Government has another control that keeps it honest. Anyone elected to the Interim Government by Restricted Election is forbidden from seeking re-election. No Confidence does not hand America over to a new government, the way you might see if we were conquered by a foreign nation or toppled by a revolution. No Confidence lets us give the existing electoral system a much-needed break. We get to send a bunch of legislative janitors to go in and, with clear incentive and pure motive, make us an electoral system that we can be proud of as Americans, rather than having to cringe every time someone says the words “electoral college.”
And then when they’re done, two years later, we get to try out the brand-new electoral system they created for ourselves. Whoever your favorite legislator is, they’ll be back; anyone truly beloved of their constituency has nothing whatsoever to worry about. Only the legislators who have hung on by electoral trickery will have to worry about their seats.
We don’t have to worry about the Interim Government messing things up for everyday Americans, because the Interim Government will be made up of everyday Americans, ones who will be taking two years (or four, or six) out of their lives to do the hardest thing this country has had to do in 250 years. And when those years are over, they will go back to their everyday lives, and they will want those lives—and the lives of their family, and their friends, and their community—to be as good and healthy as possible.
And when they’re done and the new Congress gets elected, they will get seated in a (conceptually) brand-new Capitol, still with that fresh new-government smell, and they will have so much more capacity to do good work for this country, and for the world, than they have today.
You might not believe that the world is teetering on the edge of disaster, but you don’t need to. If you turn around and look away from the scary you’ll see that the world is poised at the threshold of freedom, and we as Americans just have to be brave enough to make the leap. The technology of the twenty-first century has given us what we need, to be able to make this happen: the ability to take a single voice and magnify it into a thousand, into a million, and fire it off as a single shot that will echo around the globe and resound through the closed doors of our legislatures.
We have nothing to lose from No Confidence—our government has already failed us. We have everything to gain; not just for ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren and for everyone else.
I know hope is in short supply these days, but if you can find any between the couch cushions, now is the time to scrounge it up. No Confidence gives us a way out. Not just a way to fight back; a way to truly birth a new era for our society, one in which we, the People, are truly in control of our own destiny.
Until then, stay safe.
Thank you for being you, and for trusting me, over the past four articles, with an hour or two of your time. These past four articles describe the shape of our dream, the goal we have in sight; now, you just have to know why it is that 2026 gives us the best chance we’ve ever had at doing this, and why the end goal is closer than you might think.
If you haven’t yet walked outside and told your neighbor, “I’m helping to launch a political movement to fix the US, it’s called Unfucking The World, and you can find it at UTW.vote,” I highly encourage it! Yes, you can say that, I give you permission. After all, if it weren’t for you, this movement wouldn’t exist.
Questions, challenges, additions, and thoughtful disagreements are encouraged in the comments; bring your good faith, and others will do the same. Today’s topic: what do you hope for most out of the Interim Congress? What’s the secret yearning you’ve wished the US Government would do, if only they’d start listening to the people?
Share this with someone you know who brings something unique to the world, and stay safe.
–Danielle
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