If men were angels
If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
Madison wrote that in 1788, and it is still the most useful sentence ever written about institutional design. He did not build the American system for developed, enlightened citizens. He built it for the knave and the tyrant, and built it to survive them: competing branches, divided powers, ambition made to check ambition. It works because it assumes the worst about everyone, including the people running it.
So when we hear that the future of institutions is to fit people to their developmental stage, we get nervous, because the proposal inverts the one thing that reliably works. An institution that depends on its members being advanced breaks the moment they aren’t — and sometimes they won’t be. There is also a knowledge problem the designers wave past: no central authority can actually measure where ten thousand people are
and sort them correctly. Better to let people sort themselves through exit, voice, and federalism. Don’t build one cathedral that needs saints. Build many ordinary rooms people can move between. That is the inheritance worth keeping.
The integral designers want institutions that grow people. The critics want to be sure no one gets graded. We want institutions that work whether or not either side gets its wish.
Where we concede ground: Ask nothing of who members become, only what they do, and proceduralism slowly hollows them into citizens with no inner life.
What would change our mind: A developmentally tiered institution beating a plain checks-and-balances one on both resilience and fairness over twenty-five years.
Read the full synthesis: Can one institution serve people at very different stages?