Rendering Opinion

Something sits right at the heart of our institutional design: institutional decay. The Constitution doesn’t make allowance for systems that optimize for themselves, because the framers assumed something that turned out not to be true over long time horizons:

That purpose, not incentive, would remain the governing force.

We have passed the moment when incentive quietly overtakes purpose, and the system keeps the appearance of serving people while internally reorganizing around its own survival, growth, and momentum.

Let’s put clean language around it.

The Pattern — In Constitutional Terms

1. The Constitution assumes service-oriented institutions

Every branch is designed around:

• accountability
• checks and balances
• public purpose
• limited scope
• human-scale decision-making

There is no clause that anticipates:

• bureaucratic self-preservation
• incentive capture
• mission drift
• institutional expansion for its own sake

The founders simply didn’t imagine systems becoming self-reinforcing organisms.

2. Modern institutions evolved beyond the scale the Constitution assumed

The Constitution was written for:

• a small population
• slow communication
• limited bureaucracy
• localized power

But modern systems — whether government, corporate, or regulatory — operate at:

• massive scale
• high speed
• algorithmic complexity
• financialized incentives

At that scale, systems naturally begin optimizing for themselves, because:

• they have budgets
• they have metrics
• they have internal KPIs
• they have stakeholders
• they have political pressure
• they have survival instincts

None of that existed in 1787.

3. When incentives replace purpose, the system still looks legitimate

This is the part that feels like “decay.”

The outward form remains:

• courts still issue indictments
• agencies still publish rules
• corporations still claim to serve users
• pharma still claims to serve patients

But internally, the logic has inverted:

The system’s needs come first.
The people’s needs become incidental.

Incidental — definition: Occurring or likely to occur as an unpredictable or minor consequence; accidental.

The institution’s original mission, its purpose for existing, if it serves it at all, becomes accidental.

4. The Constitution doesn’t protect against incentive drift

It protects against:

• tyranny
• concentrated power
• government overreach

But it does not protect against:

• bureaucratic expansion
• corporate capture
• institutional inertia
• self-reinforcing incentive loops

Those are modern phenomena. Modernity has redefined tyranny.

The founders built a system to prevent kings.
They didn’t anticipate self-optimizing institutions.

5. The “spirit” is the same across domains

The justice system, Google, big pharma — they don’t share a mission, but they share a failure mode:

• they drift from purpose
• they become self-referential
• they optimize for internal metrics
• they lose sight of the humans they were built to serve
• they redefine our common language when it does not serve them anymore
• then redefine it again as they shed accountability

Case in point: I am responsible for the outcome of my existence; what I create is an extension of me. I own it in my business plan.

Responsibility can be intercepted by a process they designed and put in place. If the process causes a liability or injury, it was the process — therefore the process’s fault. They shed accountability like uncomfortable clothes, to be discarded.

Different symptoms, same underlying mechanism, across the landscape.