Part One of Two: On self-determination, equality, and the feudal logic we keep having to fight

Two leaders, 250 years apart, each convinced that loosening their grip would unravel civilization itself. That they are uniquely ordained by God in their moment to save their empires. One wore a crown. One won an election. Both believed, with complete sincerity, that the people beneath them couldn’t be trusted to govern themselves.

But neither of them was really the story. The story was the ecosystem around them, who built it, who got poisoned by it, and who finally found each other and walked away.

We’ve been here before. That’s either depressing or hopeful, depending on what you remember about how it turned out.

WHAT GEORGE III ACTUALLY SAID

Last night I watched a documentary about George III’s correspondence from 1778 to 1784. The letters show us not the mad king caricature we learn about in school, but an actual human being wrestling with an impossible situation. George III was dutiful, religious, and genuinely believed he was acting in the colonists’ interest. He framed the American conflict in moral terms, viewing rebellion as disorder against God-given authority.

While he is remembered harshly in our country, at home, he was a man watching his empire crack, trying desperately to hold it together with logic that made perfect sense from where he sat.

In a letter to Lord North, he wrote that if America succeeded, the West Indies would follow, then Ireland, and Britain would be reduced to a poor island indeed. If the colonists could simply decide to govern themselves, what would stop everyone else?

“I know I am doing my duty,” he wrote, “and therefore can never wish to retract.” Think of this as a modern Truth Social post.

This is the voice of someone who has convinced himself that his position is not merely strategic but moral and historic. That holding on is not about power but about responsibility. Paternalism always sounds noble from the top. It frames authority as blessing, control as protection, and dominance as duty.

But here’s what those letters also reveal. George wasn’t only the source of the resentment that tore his empire apart. He was its last victim.

WHO ACTUALLY BUILT THE FIRE

Resentment doesn’t generate itself. It needs architects, people who understand that fear and scarcity and tribal identity can be shaped into power. In colonial America, pamphlet writers and firebrands, Thomas Paine among them, understood this perfectly. They took real grievances, and the grievances were real, and turned them into a consuming fire. Not entirely cynically. But not entirely innocently either.

The architects of resentment, of any age, share certain characteristics. They deal in enemies. They trade in scarcity, the sense that there is not enough, that someone else is taking what is yours, that the only answer is to fight. Their nationalism and their religion are transactional and tribal rather than transcendent. They don’t lift people toward higher ground. They plant people more firmly in the mud and tell them to be proud of it.

George III and his court fed this dynamic without understanding it. The taxes, the edicts, and the tone-deaf governance gave the architects exactly the raw material they needed. The king became the face of everything the resentment machine required: a distant, paternalistic authority that proved the architects right.

Today the architecture looks familiar. Right and left-wing media, culture-war entrepreneurs, political figures who have built careers entirely on grievance and division, people who have grabbed power through the same transactional, fear-based playbook. They create scarcity. They poison the commons. And the leader at the top, then as now, becomes both their instrument and eventually their last casualty.

THE SAME ARCHITECTURE, DIFFERENT CENTURY

This is where I could be wrong, so take what follows as one person’s attempt to make sense of what I’m seeing.

Listen carefully to how today’s administration talks about the people it governs. The poor are lazy. The immigrant is a criminal. The difference is deviant. Those with wealth and power deserve it, blessed by providence, proven by success. Those without have failed, morally and personally.

This is the same architecture as the colonial resentment machine, just in modern language. Authority flows from a source that cannot be questioned. For George, it was divine right and empire. Today, it is the same, as well as wealth-as-virtue and a particular strand of Christian nationalism. In both cases, the logic is feudal: some are born to lead, others to follow, and the hierarchy reflects God’s design rather than human choice.

What makes it so effective is that it captures real pain. The people whose grievances get harvested by this machine are not wrong to feel aggrieved. Life has become harder, more precarious, more exhausting. The scarcity is real. The architects of resentment didn’t invent the wound. They just made sure it never healed, because a healed wound has no use for them.

THE POISONED COMMONS

Here is the part that requires the most compassion to see clearly.

Ordinary people caught in a resentment ecosystem are not the villains of the story. The colonial farmers and tradespeople whose anger Thomas Paine ignited were not bad people. They were exhausted, pressured, and handed an enemy instead of a solution. The same is true today. Time-poor, financially precarious, told that their struggles are someone else’s fault and that the only answer is to fight, people in this condition don’t have the breathing room to ask bigger questions.

This is how manufactured scarcity works as a tool of control. Keep people scrambling, and they stay dependent on whoever promises to name their enemy. Keep them too busy and too frightened to find each other. The resentment machine runs on exhaustion. It requires that the commons never quite get enough space to see through it.

George III’s correspondence shows a man who genuinely couldn’t understand why the colonists wanted to leave. He thought he was providing order and protection. He couldn’t see that the order itself was the problem, that the protection was a cage, that the people beneath him were being kept just precarious enough to need him.

THE RESIGNATION IN THE DESK DRAWER

After Yorktown, when British defeat became undeniable, George III drafted an abdication letter. The loss represented such a fundamental challenge to everything he believed that he prepared to walk away from his throne rather than face the new reality.

He never sent it.

Instead, he eventually recognized the new nation. The man who swore never to let a possession separate lived to see that possession become a trading partner. The world he feared turned out to be a world he could inhabit after all.

But notice what made that possible. It wasn’t George III’s change of heart that mattered most. It was what the colonists had already done before he adapted. They didn’t wait for him to change. They didn’t defeat the resentment machine by arguing with it. They outgrew it. They found enough space and enough proximity to each other to want something bigger than the architects of resentment could offer.

In doing so, they left George III behind. Not only as a defeated enemy. As a relic of a framework they had transcended.

THE QUESTION WE’RE LIVING INSIDE

We are approaching our 250th birthday as a nation, and we are having the same argument we had at the founding. Do we actually believe in equality and self-determination, or was that just mythology we told ourselves?

The No-Kings movement has emerged as one answer to that question. Like the Boston Tea Party before it, it is not simply an act of opposition. It is a signal that enough people have found each other, have stepped back from the resentment machine, and are choosing higher ground together.

George III was educated, thoughtful, and genuinely believed he was acting in the colonists’ interest. He just couldn’t imagine them managing without him. The architects around him had made sure of that, feeding him the same scarcity logic they fed everyone else, just from a different angle.

The parallel is uncomfortable precisely because it isn’t about monsters. It’s about an ecosystem built on fear and scarcity that eventually consumes everyone inside it, including the man at the top.

A DOOR OPENING

Here’s where I want to leave you, not with anger, not with despair, but with a question that I think is genuinely exciting.

What if the most important part of this story isn’t the king or the architects or even the resentment itself?

What if it’s what happens to the people who find each other in spite of all of it, who discover in that finding something they didn’t know they were capable of?

The colonists didn’t just reject a king. They found each other. And in finding each other, they built something that changed the world.

I think we’re at the beginning of something like that again. In Part Two I want to explore what that crossing looks like, why it requires space and breathing room to happen, and why a lecturer at Yale, a grassroots movement, and a book about time poverty might all be pointing toward the same hopeful thing.

Part Two: The Crossing, coming Friday.

If this resonated with you, I think you’ll find my forthcoming book, Room to Be Human, genuinely useful. Follow along here and keep an eye out for it later this year. In the meantime, my previous book, Better Places, traces my own journey — from a resentment-driven scarcity thinker to someone learning to harvest abundance and compassion instead.