The Creative Class Exists and Has Political Interests

Establishing Class Consciousness

I. Man as an Animal Who Civilizes Himself

Civilization is the outward form of the man’s internal world.

Man is the animal that refuses to stay as he is. He is born unfinished, a bundle of appetites and impulses that, left untended, drag him toward savagery. What makes him distinct is not strength or cunning but the capacity to shape himself into something higher. This is why Aristotle called man a politikon zōon in the Politics. Man transcends himself as a social creature and discovers his fullest self within a structured common life. The city, in his telling, is not merely a cluster of dwellings. It is the workshop where human nature is refined into human excellence.

The process is neither automatic nor easy. Norbert Elias, in The Civilizing Process, traced how societies slowly disciplined themselves, turning brute impulses into manners, customs, and laws that made sustained cooperation possible. Violence receded from the hearth to the battlefield. Appetite learned to wait. Speech became gentler, gestures more measured. None of this was ornament. It was the necessary conditioning that allowed people to build cathedrals instead of huts, to write epics instead of chants.

What emerges from this discipline is both an embrace of nature and its elevation. Desire becomes aspiration. Strength becomes duty. Curiosity becomes inquiry. Man does not lose himself in the process of civilizing; he discovers the deeper layers of what he can be.

Civilization, then, is both an external cage but an internal calling. It is how the animal grows into the human, and how the human reaches for the divine.

II. Civilization Lifts Man Above Himself

Civilization turns the struggle to live into the art of living well.

Civilization is the great lever that raises man beyond the reach of his instincts. It is what turns brute survival into a life worth living. Without it, we remain bound to immediacy, chasing food and shelter and fleeting pleasure. With it, we inherit language, law, art, and memory—the scaffolding on which every higher pursuit rests. Civilization is the point when humans stopped reacting to nature and began reshaping it. That shift marked the birth of agriculture, cities, and writing, but more profoundly, it marked the birth of aspiration.

The ascent is material. It is also moral. Roads and aqueducts, markets and libraries, these are not luxuries. They are the infrastructure that allows law to restrain vengeance and reason to discipline impulse. Elias showed how refinement in conduct mirrored a refinement of institutions; manners and parliaments grew together. Each taught self-restraint, and each rewarded foresight. Civilization’s gift is time. Time to plan, to build, to remember, to imagine.

It also multiplies difference. In the tribal state, most men do the same things. In the civilized state, one man tends vines while another studies the stars, and each can trade with the other. Specialization deepens knowledge, sharpens tools, and opens paths for beauty. Out of shared order, new forms blossom.

Civilization is therefore not a layer atop life. It is the mechanism by which life transcends itself. It allows man to aim higher than the next meal and the next breath. It is how a species learns to become a people.

III. Civilization Requires Civilizing

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

― Thomas Sowell

Civilization is not a permanent state. It is a practice that must be renewed with every generation. What we inherit as monuments, laws, and customs began as deliberate acts of shaping, and they survive only if we continue that work. Norbert Elias showed how fragile the civilizing process can be: it is a centuries-long accretion of restraint, discipline, and habit, yet it can unravel quickly when those habits stop being taught. What we call “civilization” is less a product than an ongoing project.

This project begins with the smallest units. Families teach patience and self-control. Schools discipline curiosity into knowledge. Laws transform vengeance into justice. None of these emerge spontaneously. They require sustained effort to hold appetite in check and direct it toward ends higher than appetite itself. And because human beings are forgetful, each generation must relearn what the last one knew.

Culture is the main instrument of this renewal. It teaches through symbol and story what cannot be enforced by statute. Rituals habituate reverence. Myths encode values that laws cannot legislate. Even manners are part of this civilizing labor, softening the edges of human interaction and reminding us that others matter.

When that work ceases, decline follows. Manners coarsen, language decays, customs fray, and violence fills the gaps left by restraint. Civilization does not collapse all at once; it erodes from neglect. Then it collapses. To remain civilized, a people must civilize themselves — again and again, without end.

IV. Culture as the Tool of Civilizing

Culture is how imagination learns restraint and desire learns direction.

Civilization is the house in which humanity lives. Culture is the set of tools with which we build and maintain it. It is not an ornament or a pastime. It is the means by which we refine our raw impulses and direct them toward higher purposes. Clifford Geertz described culture as a “web of significance” that man himself has spun and in which he is suspended. That web gives shape to our thoughts, depth to our emotions, and coherence to our shared life.

Creative works lie at the heart of this process. Through story, image, and sound, they capture the invisible and make it visible. They help us imagine not only what is but what ought to be. A tragedy teaches more about justice than a statute. A cathedral teaches reverence more deeply than a sermon. A novel teaches empathy in ways no rulebook can. Culture’s power lies in its ability to form the interior life. It shapes perception, desire, and judgment in ways that reason alone cannot.

This shaping is not neutral. Great works point upward, calling us to surpass ourselves. They offer models of courage, patience, and grace, not as abstractions but as living presences. And they outlast their makers, instructing those yet unborn.

When a society ceases to invest in such works, the civilizing process falters. Imagination untethered from judgment becomes chaos; intellect unshaped by beauty becomes sterile. Culture disciplines both, binding them to the task of raising man above himself, to the maintenance of a canon.

V. A Canon as the Spine of Civilization

A people without a canon stand upright only until the wind changes.

A civilization without a canon is a body without a spine. It may move, but it cannot stand upright. A canon is more than a list of books or paintings; it is the shared inheritance of a people, the enduring works that shape their ideals, their language, and their sense of purpose. It offers a common grammar of excellence, a standard by which new works are measured and old ones preserved. Without it, a society drifts into fragmentation, each generation inventing itself from scratch and forgetting what came before.

The power of a canon lies in its ability to unify. The Iliad and the Aeneid gave ancient peoples a shared lineage and destiny. The Bible shaped centuries of law, art, and moral imagination across continents. Even in the modern era, works like Shakespeare’s plays or Tolstoy’s novels remain pillars because they reveal enduring truths about human nature. As Harold Bloom argued in The Western Canon, such works endure not by decree but because they continue to teach, challenge, and inspire across ages.

A canon also directs ambition upward. It sets examples that later generations strive to surpass, ensuring a living dialogue between past and present. Each new creation enters a conversation already underway, deepening rather than discarding what came before.

When a civilization neglects its canon, standards dissolve into taste, and taste is too feeble to hold a people together. The canon is not a luxury for scholars. It is the backbone that keeps a civilization upright and reaching toward greatness.

VI. The Creative Class as Canon-Makers

The internal world has an architecture. Therefore, an architect.

A canon does not assemble itself. Behind every enduring story, every sacred image, every work that lifts a people, there stands a class of creators. Their labor is a civilizational function. They transform language into myth, stone into sanctuary, pigment into symbol. They take the raw materials of human experience and refine them into forms capable of teaching, binding, and elevating entire societies.

The economist Richard Florida popularized the term “creative class” to describe this group in modern economies, but the reality is far older. The builders of Gothic cathedrals, the playwrights of Athens, the poets of Tang China, and the sculptors of the Italian Renaissance were all part of this lineage. Their work shaped how their societies understood themselves and what they aspired to become. Without them, there is no canon, and without a canon, civilization loses its memory and its direction.

This class is by vocation. Its members labor in the service of beauty, meaning, and order. Their success is measured by the power of their work to endure and inspire. And their presence ensures that a society does more than exist.

When the creative class is neglected or suppressed, the canon withers, and the culture becomes thin. A society that fails to sustain its creators is a society that forgets how to speak to itself, and in that silence, its spirit begins to fade.

VII. Every Society Has a Creative Class

The world is mythic before it is real.

No society, no matter how ancient or advanced, has ever thrived without a class devoted to creation. The form changes, but the function endures. In the ancient world, priests and poets shaped myth into the framework of reality itself. The Enuma Elish gave the Babylonians a story of cosmic order. Hesiod’s Theogony organized the Greek pantheon into a lineage that explained the world and man’s place within it. These were not idle tales. They were the scaffolding of law, ritual, and kingship, turning raw experience into shared meaning.

The medieval era entrusted this task to artists, builders, and scribes. The towering cathedrals of Europe were not only feats of engineering but visual theologies carved in stone and glass. Illuminated manuscripts taught an illiterate people the stories of their faith through image as much as word. Guilds of craftsmen turned the sacred into the tangible, embedding transcendence into the daily life of towns and cities.

The Enlightenment redirected this creative energy into literature and philosophy. Novels explored the interior life with a depth unknown to the ancients. Political pamphlets carried revolutionary ideas across continents. New forms of expression met new social and intellectual needs, but the civilizational role remained constant: to articulate ideals, shape identity, and point a people toward higher ends.

Across ages and empires, societies have depended on this class to give them voice, memory, and aspiration. Wherever humanity gathers to build more than it consumes, creators stand at the center of that effort.

VIII. The Post-Industrial Flood of Creators

Freedom of speech destroyed curation and induced chaos.

Industrialization transformed not only how societies produced goods but how they produced meaning. The rise of mass education, urban life, and unprecedented material wealth expanded the ranks of those capable of creative work. Daniel Bell, in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, foresaw this shift: as economies moved from manufacturing to knowledge, the production of symbols, ideas, and experiences would become as vital as the production of steel. The creative class, once small and often patronized by church or crown, now numbered in the millions and found its patrons in a broad middle class.

Technology accelerated this expansion. The printing press democratized authorship, but digital tools shattered the last barriers to entry. A filmmaker needs no studio empire; a musician, no record label. A painter’s gallery can be a website visited by millions. Platforms like YouTube and Substack prove that creation is no longer the domain of the few. It has become a defining feature of modern life, woven into the economy as both labor and leisure.

This abundance has immense potential. It multiplies the number of perspectives, styles, and forms available to a culture. It allows a society to experiment rapidly, to explore niches as well as universals. Yet it also creates challenges. When everyone can speak, the signal competes with the noise, and the institutions that once curated excellence struggle to adapt.

Still, the fact remains: post-industrial societies possess a larger, more varied creative class than any civilization before them. That expansion is a source of strength.

If it can be harnessed.

IX. Why the Creative Class Matters in an Age of Automation

I dream of far more than electric sheep.

The creative class is not ornamental. It is the group that builds and sustains the symbolic world on which civilization rests. It teaches us how to interpret our past, imagine our future, and give shape to the present. Without it, law becomes dry administration, technology becomes cold machinery, and politics devolves into brute contest. Culture is what binds those forces together into a coherent story, and creators are the ones who write it.

Yet their work is increasingly undervalued. The Industrial Revolution began a slow displacement of creative labor by mechanization, and the digital revolution has accelerated it. Automation and artificial intelligence have absorbed many tasks that once required human skill—composing music, designing logos, even writing prose. Studies by organizations like the OECD and UNESCO warn that creative industries face profound disruption as algorithms encroach on the territory of human imagination.

The risk is not simply economic. As creative work becomes devalued, the people who sustain the cultural fabric lose the means to do so. Their absence weakens everything built atop that fabric: education, shared identity, moral aspiration. If left unaddressed, a civilization begins to hollow out from within, even as its technology advances.

Recognizing the creative class as essential is therefore a matter of self-preservation. Their interests are bound up with the fate of the civilization itself, and to neglect them is to neglect the soil from which higher life grows.

X. The Breaking of the Creative Class

Culture was never a luxury.

The conditions that once nurtured creative work have steadily eroded. Three forces in particular have eroded the foundations of this class: the disappearance of third places, the suffocating rise of housing costs, and the relentless pressure of the mass media’s winner-take-all dynamics. Each strips away part of the environment creators need to flourish.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined “third places” to describe cafés, pubs, salons, and studios — spaces outside home and work where people gather, exchange ideas, and form communities. These spaces have been closing for decades under the weight of real estate speculation, zoning laws, and digital isolation. Their absence severs the informal networks through which collaboration and patronage often begin.

Housing costs compound the problem. In many cities, rising rents devour incomes and push creators to the margins. The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that nearly half of U.S. renters now spend more than 30% of their income on housing, a burden that leaves little room for art, risk, or experimentation. When the basic act of staying housed consumes one’s energy, creativity becomes a luxury.

Finally, mass media magnifies inequality among creators. Digital platforms follow Price’s law: a small minority captures the vast majority of attention and revenue. Those outside the top tier struggle for scraps, no matter their talent.

The combined effect is corrosive. The creative class is punished for existing, hemmed in by costs, isolation, and structural disadvantage. And when creators falter, the culture they sustain falters with them.

XI. The Subversion Trap

They’re not Marxists, postmodernists, socialists, communists, or any other kind of revolutionary. They’re theatre kids. And they’ve been getting raked over the coals since before the Industrial Revolution. But all they want is an audience that gives a shit and a community that isn’t humiliating. Are these really such large asks? I don’t think they are.

A civilization that continually punishes its creative class breeds a dangerous kind of discontent. The people drawn to creative work are often those with intense inner lives, unusual talents, and deep commitments to meaning. When their abilities find no outlet — when they are priced out of cities, stripped of gathering places, and drowned beneath the noise of mass media — they curdle.

Many drift downward into resentment. Some abandon their craft altogether, convinced that the world has no place for what they offer. Others turn their alienation into ideology, seeking in politics the dignity denied them by the economy. This is how large swaths of the creative lower middle class — teachers, designers, musicians, writers — have historically been drawn toward revolutionary movements. Karl Marx himself was not a factory worker but a frustrated intellectual. The Bolsheviks and the Jacobins were filled with dispossessed professionals and failed artists.

Sociologist Robert Putnam documented how the erosion of social capital leaves people unmoored and vulnerable to radicalization. Without the mediating structures that once supported creative lives — guilds, salons, civic associations — frustration festers in isolation. That frustration eventually seeks expression. It finds it in subversion.

This is not inevitable, but it is predictable. When societies fail to provide pathways for creative contribution, they convert potential builders into critics and potential teachers into agitators. The result is a politics of bitterness — one born not from malice, but from squandered gifts.

XII. Cultural Gravity and the Weight of Mass Taste

The Right embraced populism. How embarrassing.

The punishment of the creative class reshapes not only their lives but the trajectory of culture itself. When those who labor to raise standards are squeezed to the margins, the culture begins to crystallize at its lowest level. The logic is structural. In a mass media environment governed by Price’s law, a tiny fraction of creators capture the vast majority of attention, and their work inevitably caters to the broadest possible audience. Subtlety and ambition shrink because subtlety and ambition do not scale.

This gravitational pull flattens everything. Television is written for the distracted. Music is compressed for the impatient. Books are marketed as content, not as art. The most visible works become those that travel farthest, not those that climb highest. And because they dominate the channels through which people encounter culture, they begin to define the common taste itself.

The consequences ripple outward. Education has less worthy material to teach. Shared references grow shallow. The stories that once pointed upward now circle endlessly around desire, irony, and consumption. A culture that once lifted people beyond themselves begins instead to affirm them as they are.

Civilizations rarely collapse because of a single defeat. They decline when their symbols lose altitude and their art ceases to aim at the sublime. When that happens, the civilization’s moral imagination contracts, and the people who inherit it forget how to reach beyond comfort. The fall begins with concession.

XIII. The Rise of the Resentful

They hate you, yes. But you hated them first. So, how about we just… Don’t do that.

When a society crushes its creative class, it goes beyond merely destroying its dream. It manufactures a political problem. The result is a swelling population of frustrated, lower-middle-class people whose talents have no outlet and whose ambitions find no reward. These are not idle dreamers. They are the painters who teach high school art because galleries are closed to them, the writers who ghostwrite marketing copy because literature pays nothing, the coders who automate office work when they wanted to build worlds. Their frustration festers because they know they could have done more.

History is filled with examples of such people turning their bitterness into ideology. Early socialist movements drew heavily from disaffected teachers, journalists, and clerks — people who possessed education but lacked power. The Bolshevik Revolution was led by alienated intellectuals. Even in the 20th century, the cultural radicals who reshaped Western politics were often failed or frustrated creatives seeking a stage larger than the one the market offered.

Robert Putnam’s work on social capital helps explain why this happens. As associations, guilds, and informal networks decay, individuals lose the spaces where talent might be recognized and cultivated. Cut off from those mediating structures, creative frustration becomes political rage.

The danger is not confined to the discontented themselves. A civilization that allows its creative class to sour ensures that many of its most imaginative citizens will wield their gifts against it. What might have been architects of renewal become saboteurs of the existing order.

XIV. When Culture Sinks to the Lowest Level

A sight needs an eye to see it.

The damage does not stop with the creators themselves. When they are driven out or diminished, the culture that remains begins to harden into a stagnant shape, one molded by mass taste and commercial imperatives. In this environment, the few works that thrive are those that appeal to the broadest possible audience, a consequence of Price’s law and the winner-take-most dynamics of digital platforms. Works that challenge, refine, or elevate are crowded out by those that flatter and soothe.

The result is a cultural gravity that pulls everything downward. Art becomes entertainment. Education becomes content delivery. Public life is saturated with symbols that demand nothing and teach nothing. In the absence of a vigorous creative class, the canon stops expanding, the standards stop rising, and the shared language of a people becomes shallow and disposable.

This stagnation has consequences far beyond aesthetics. Moral imagination shrinks when it is no longer nourished by great works. The public’s capacity for sacrifice, patience, and wonder atrophies. People become harder to govern because they are harder to inspire. Societies that once looked upward begin to turn inward, measuring themselves by comfort rather than greatness.

Collapse does not always announce itself with fire and ruin. Sometimes it arrives quietly, in the thinning of taste and the lowering of horizons. A civilization that ceases to elevate its people inevitably begins to decay — not because it is attacked from without, but because it forgets how to lift itself from within.

XV. A Cohort Ready to Act Together

They're already politically active and pursuing the wrong issues. I have better ones.

The creative class is not a scattered collection of individuals. It is a cohort with shared conditions, shared frustrations, and shared stakes in the future. It is large — numbering in the tens of millions across advanced economies — and it is deeply networked through studios, schools, galleries, publishers, and digital platforms. Even when its members do not see themselves as part of a distinct group, they function as one, shaping the stories and symbols that bind societies together.

Richard Florida’s research on the creative class highlighted its economic importance, but its political significance is even greater. This class produces the narratives that define legitimacy, the images that anchor identity, and the language that frames debate. Its influence is subtle but immense. And because it shares structural challenges — from platform monopolies to precarious livelihoods — it has the latent capacity to act collectively in pursuit of its interests.

That potential matters because those interests are not selfish. They are bound up with the health of the civilization itself. When creators have the means to produce enduring works, society gains the stories and standards that sustain it. When they are marginalized, society loses its memory and direction.

A class with such power over meaning cannot remain politically voiceless forever. Whether through formal organization or organic alignment, the creative class is poised to become a faction in its own right — one whose fortunes will shape the destiny of the civilization it serves.

XVI. Why Past Efforts Have Failed

Riddle me this: I’m not an artist. Why should I care about you?

Attempts to organize the creative class have existed for centuries, yet they have rarely achieved lasting power. Most have taken the form of trade guilds, unions, or professional associations focused on narrow material goals — higher wages for writers, residuals for actors, collective bargaining rights for animators. These are worthy causes, but they speak only to those within the craft. A screenwriters’ strike matters deeply to screenwriters, but to the rest of society it is an inconvenience, not a rallying cry.

The result is fragmentation. Each group fights for its own corner while the broader cultural terrain is ceded to market forces and political actors with more unified aims. The musicians’ union cannot defend public taste. The painters’ guild cannot preserve language. The actors’ union cannot argue for the civilizational role of art. They all fight important battles, but none can win the war.

This failure is not inevitable. It stems from a narrow conception of creative interests as purely economic. A civilization does not need painters to be rich or writers to be secure; it needs the works they produce to uplift and unify. When the creative class speaks only for itself, it forfeits the chance to speak for that larger purpose — and loses public sympathy in the process.

A new approach must frame creative work as a public good, not a private career. Only then will the wider public see its fate as intertwined with the fate of those who make the culture that shapes their lives.

XVII. Civic Aestheticism: Art as Social Infrastructure

“Art is about self-expression.” = “There is no reason for you to care about me.”

If the creative class is to reclaim its role as a pillar of civilization, it must reframe its purpose. The arts cannot be presented as hobbies deserving subsidies or as industries seeking better contracts. They must be understood as social infrastructure — as vital to cohesion, morale, and meaning as roads are to commerce. This is the premise of civic aestheticism: the view that culture is not a luxury but a public good that strengthens the bonds of a society and orients it toward higher ends.

This idea has deep roots. Thinkers like Matthew Arnold argued that culture’s task was “to make reason and the will of God prevail” by refining taste and deepening moral understanding. Public art programs in Renaissance Florence were not decorative; they were instruments of civic pride and shared purpose. Even the New Deal’s Federal Art Project treated creative work as essential to national recovery, funding murals, theater, and writing to remind Americans of their heritage and what they could become.

Civic aestheticism applies this principle to the present. It argues that art and culture, properly cultivated, are tools for rebuilding fractured communities, countering atomization, and rekindling shared aspiration. They are how a people remember their story and how they dream of their future.

A society that sees culture in this light does not subsidize art as charity. It invests in it as a matter of survival — because a people that ceases to aim at beauty soon ceases to aim at anything at all.

XVIII. Organizing by Aesthetic Worlds

A preamble to the Guild Reformation.

If civic aestheticism is the principle, organization is the method. The creative class must stop grouping itself solely by profession and start grouping itself by vision. Painters, musicians, coders, and writers working on different media but within a shared aesthetic should see themselves as part of one guild — one dedicated to building a coherent world the public can enter and inhabit.

This approach changes how people perceive creative work. A Renaissance fair is not a conference for blacksmiths or lute-makers. It is an immersive world, a living expression of a historical aesthetic that draws crowds precisely because it offers an alternative to the flattening sameness of everyday life. Visitors do not need to be experts in metallurgy or medieval music to care about the event. They care because it offers them a glimpse of a different order of beauty and meaning.

Guilds organized around shared aesthetics could make similar promises. A Gothic guild could work toward reshaping public spaces with vertical grandeur and sacred geometry. A pastoral guild could champion humane architecture, natural materials, and rituals of seasonal life. The key is that each offers the public a tangible proposition: if we succeed, your city, your festivals, and your daily surroundings will look and feel like this. You will enter the world of the aesthetic.

When creators organize around worlds instead of wages, they give society something to believe in. They transform art from a private act into a public vision — one that ordinary people can see, touch, and support because it promises them an attractive life.

XIX. Policy One: Heavy SEO to Break the Winner-Take-Most Trap

Just weight recommendation systems to penalize content that is already popular.

Guilds organized around aesthetic worlds can offer the public something to believe in. Policy can clear the ground on which those worlds grow. The greatest obstacle they face today is not a lack of talent or ambition but the structural bias of digital distribution. Algorithms built to maximize engagement reward what is already popular, creating a cycle where the same handful of creators dominate attention while new voices vanish before they are heard. Price’s law, once a sociological observation, has become hardwired into code.

This is where the idea of heavy SEO becomes vital. Instead of ranking content solely by popularity, search engines and recommendation systems could be tuned to penalize oversaturation and elevate underexposed work. Research into algorithmic diversity shows that discovery systems can be designed to favor novelty, craftsmanship, and range without sacrificing user experience. The effect would be to widen the funnel, letting emerging creators reach audiences that are currently locked behind the inertia of existing hits.

Such an approach would not suppress success; it would cultivate breadth. It would restore the conditions in which aesthetic guilds can thrive — where distinctive voices have a fighting chance to be seen, and where public taste can stretch beyond the familiar.

Heavy SEO would not solve every problem facing the creative class, but it would shift the terrain. It would make the digital commons a place where worlds compete on vision and craft, not merely on momentum, and where culture once again rewards creation over virality.

XX. Policy Two: Mandatory AI Disclosures

Made with the assistance of AI.

If heavy SEO addresses the distribution problem, then mandatory AI disclosures address the problem of authenticity — a growing fault line in the creative landscape. As machine-generated content floods every medium, audiences are losing their ability to distinguish between the work of a human hand and the output of an algorithm. This erosion of trust undermines the very foundation of artistic labor, which relies on the assumption that a work reflects human intention, effort, and vision.

Requiring creators to clearly disclose when and how AI tools were used would restore that trust. It would allow audiences to make informed judgments about what they consume and support. In fields from journalism to visual art, institutions are already debating how to draw these lines, and several legal scholars have argued that disclosure requirements would strengthen both copyright law and consumer transparency.

Such policies would not stigmatize the use of AI. They would instead distinguish between works that extend human creativity and those that merely automate it. A poem written with AI assistance is still a human work if it bears the mark of intention and craft — but audiences deserve to know when that is the case.

For aesthetic guilds, disclosure is more than a consumer right. It is a defense of the very category of the human in art. It signals that while machines may aid in creation, they cannot replace the soul behind the work — and that soul deserves recognition.

XXI. Policy Three: Cultural Councils with Teeth

Everyone outside of the Anglosphere already does this. So they get to keep their countries.

Even with better discovery and transparency, a civilization still needs institutions that guard its cultural standards against erosion. Markets reward what sells, not what uplifts, and left unchecked they will always tilt toward the shallow and the sensational. To counter that pull, societies need bodies dedicated to preserving their language, nurturing their canon, and articulating the higher aims that art should serve. France understood this when it founded l’Académie Française in 1635 — an institution tasked with safeguarding the French language and, by extension, the civilization’s cultural identity.

A modern equivalent would be cultural councils empowered to both advise and act. They could set standards for publicly funded art, support works of enduring value that markets overlook, and curate national canons that reflect a civilization’s aspirations rather than its appetites. They could also serve as a counterweight to the homogenizing tendencies of global media, ensuring that local traditions and languages do not vanish under the weight of algorithmic sameness.

Such councils would not dictate taste or censor dissent. Their purpose would be stewardship: to preserve the conditions under which excellence can flourish and to provide a stable reference point for public life. They would give the creative class a visible institutional ally and give the public a trusted guardian of quality.

Without such institutions, culture remains at the mercy of commerce. With them, a civilization gains the means to protect both its soul and the creators who give that soul form.

XXII. Guildrim as a Vehicle for Civic Aestheticism

DM Gene Botkin for the Guildrim project.

These policies and principles require a framework through which they can act. That framework must be more than a lobbying group or a funding body. It must be a living structure — one capable of organizing creators, articulating shared values, and turning vision into reality. The Guildrim project is conceived as precisely that: a tool to help the creative class recognize itself as a political force and channel its collective power toward the renewal of civilization.

Guildrim begins with the insight that aesthetics are not side projects of culture but its organizing principles. A society built around shared aesthetics can offer its people not only beauty but belonging. By grouping creators into guilds defined by themes and styles rather than professions, Guildrim builds worlds the public can enter, support, and inhabit. It turns art from an isolated pursuit into a civic project — one that offers ordinary people the promise of living inside the ideals those guilds embody.

This structure also provides a platform for advancing the policies outlined above. Guilds can lobby for algorithmic reforms like heavy SEO, advocate for AI disclosure standards, and collaborate with institutions to build cultural councils that safeguard standards and canon.

Above all, Guildrim reframes the creative class as something more than a collection of starving artists or market actors. It is a civilizational force. Its work is not decorative. It is foundational. And if it succeeds, it will do more than improve the lives of creators. It will give a civilization back its capacity to dream.