The Technology of Good
Rex Miller
I. A Problem That Would Not Wait
In 1976, a college senior in philosophy submitted a thesis of 120 pages.* Its subject was a problem that has occupied political theorists since Hobbes: how can human beings form legitimate governments? But the thesis approached this question from an unusual angle. Rather than choosing among competing answers — Hobbesian order, Lockean rights, Rawlsian justice — it asked whether a theory of government could be built without first resolving the deeper question those answers all presuppose: what is the true nature of man?
The thesis argued that it could. More than that, it argued that the failure to separate these two questions — what government should do, and what human nature is — had produced centuries of political philosophy that could only speak to people who already shared its foundational assumptions. A Rawlsian theory speaks to Rawlsians. A libertarian theory speaks to libertarians. Neither can address, on neutral ground, the person who disagrees about the premises.
The alternative proposed in the thesis was called the Construct Theory. Its central move was to treat the diversity of human conceptions of man not as a problem to be solved, but as the very condition a theory of legitimate government must work within. People hold different views about human nature. They have always held different views. A political theory adequate to the real world must accommodate this fact rather than assume it away.
The thesis was reviewed by Michel Foucault, at the time one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Writing from the Collège de France on official letterhead, he noted significant convergence with his own analyses and judged that the ideas had been developed more rigorously and productively than he himself had managed. He was responding to the work of a twenty-year-old student.
The thesis was then, for fifty years, essentially unread.
II. What the Theory Says
The Construct Theory begins with a minimal pair of assumptions: that there is some common nature of man — something shared across the diversity of individual characters — and that a government representing that common nature is preferable to one that does not. These assumptions are kept deliberately thin. The theory does not specify what the common nature is. It does not need to.
From these premises, the thesis builds a multilevel architecture of human organization. At the first level, individuals form groups — communities organized around a particular conception of human nature, with rules that reflect that conception. A commune organized around mutual aid, a monastery organized around contemplation, a cooperative organized around democratic ownership: each is a construct in the thesis's terminology, a form of government that represents some view of what human beings fundamentally are and need.
At the second level, groups enter into relations with one another — inter-group constructs. The crucial question here is what rules should govern these relations. The thesis's answer is precise: the inter-group construct should be the least extensive one that any member group would accept. No group should be forced to accept arrangements more demanding than it is willing to support, because such arrangements would cause that group to withdraw, destabilizing the whole. And groups that are internally incoherent — whose conception of human nature cannot attract and retain members who genuinely assent to it — are allowed to fail rather than drag viable groups down with them.
This structure can extend to further levels: federations of federations, each governed by the same minimalist logic. The number of levels is limited only by the willingness of groups to participate.
The resulting architecture — which the thesis calls the Framework — is not a utopia. It does not prescribe how any particular community should organize itself. It prescribes only the conditions under which different communities can coexist, each living according to its own conception of the good, none imposing that conception on others.
The thesis closes with a move of considerable elegance: it demonstrates that this Framework, arrived at through a concern for the conditions of coexistence, converges with the tradition of Natural Rights — not because Natural Rights is assumed as a foundation, but because it turns out to be the form of inter-group arrangement that persons of a certain sort, reasoning from their own interests, would choose. The theory does not presuppose Natural Rights. It derives them.
III. Fifty Years and a Changed World
The problem the thesis addressed in 1976 was real then. It is more urgent now.
The decades since have produced a global condition in which communities organized around incompatible conceptions of the good are pressed into ever closer contact, without any neutral framework for their coexistence. The dominant responses — liberal universalism, which insists that one set of values applies to everyone, and relativism, which abandons the possibility of any shared basis for federation — have both proven inadequate. The first cannot accommodate genuine diversity. The second provides no ground for the inter-group constructs that make coexistence possible.
What the Construct Theory offers is a third path: designed pluralism. A framework that protects the right of each community to organize according to its own conception of human nature, requires only the minimum necessary for stable coexistence, and allows communities to fail if their internal conception cannot sustain the genuine assent of their members.
This path was always available in principle. What it lacked, in 1976, was any practical instrument for navigating the complexity it implies. To implement the Framework in the real world, one would need to know: what forms of community organization have actually been tried? What assumptions about human nature does each form require? Which communities could viably coexist and federate, and under what inter-group arrangements? What does each community's experience suggest about the conditions under which its internal conception of human nature can sustain genuine membership?
In 1976, answering these questions comprehensively was not possible. It is possible now.
IV. The Instrument
The project known as the Technology of Good is the practical instantiation of the Construct Theory. It is an AI system trained across the breadth of heterodox economic, political, and social thought — commons theory, moral economy, indigenous knowledge systems, cooperative and solidarity economics, and the many traditions of community organization that have developed outside the mainstream of Western political philosophy — for the purpose of serving as the connective tissue the Framework requires.
The system does not recommend. This is the feature that most sharply distinguishes it from existing tools for institutional design and community development, which almost always embed a preferred answer — some version of deliberative democracy, market efficiency, or sustainability metrics — and then present that answer as neutral guidance. The Technology of Good has no preferred answer at the level of outcomes. It is committed to no conception of what a good community looks like.
What it does instead is illuminate. A community considering how to organize itself brings its actual situation — its values, its conflicts, its resources, its history — and the system maps the space of possibilities: what forms of organization have been tried in analogous situations, what each form assumes about human nature, what the inter-group arrangements might look like if this community were to federate with others, and what the historical record suggests about the conditions under which each approach can sustain genuine assent.
This is not a tool for producing best practices. There may be many valid ways for communities to organize, as different from each other as the communities themselves. The system's purpose is to make those ways visible, to illuminate the assumptions each requires, and to help communities understand what they are actually choosing when they choose a form of organization.
In the terms of the thesis: the Technology of Good is the administrative body of the Framework. It enables groups to exist and federate without imposing a construct on any of them.
V. Why General Intelligence
A further document, titled General Intelligence and the Technology of Good,** addresses in detail the question of why this task requires a general reasoning system rather than a specialist one. The argument, briefly stated, is this: the problems the Technology of Good is designed to address are irreducibly multi-domain. They arise from the interaction of economic, political, historical, social, and ecological factors simultaneously. No specialist system — however deep its training in any single domain — can hold all relevant considerations at once. The intellectual traditions the system draws upon are themselves integrative, having developed across and between established disciplinary boundaries. Their application to real institutional problems requires reasoning that is similarly cross-domain.
Whether a general AI system proves equal to this task is, as that document notes, one of the questions the Technology of Good is designed in part to investigate. The project is an experiment as well as a tool.
VI. What Is Being Sought
The Technology of Good is at an early stage. The theoretical foundation — fifty years in development, with roots in a body of work that Foucault recognized as rigorous and original — is in place. The intellectual architecture is clear. What remains is to build.
Building requires two things above all. The first is a programmer with the technical capacity to handle AI and large language model integration, and the intellectual curiosity to care about what the system is actually doing — someone who reads the thesis and the framework it generates and finds them genuinely interesting, not merely as a technical problem but as a project worth working on.
The second is institutional partners: communities, cooperatives, federations, and other collective organizations that are actively grappling with questions of governance and organization, and that are willing to work with an early system as genuine collaborators in its development. The Technology of Good is not designed for passive users. It is designed for institutions that are stuck — that have real problems of organization and coexistence that existing tools have not solved — and that are ready to think carefully about what they are actually choosing when they choose a form of collective life.
If you are reading this and either description fits you, or if you know someone it fits, the conversation is worth having.
Rex Miller
Los Angeles, California
2026
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* The Construct Theory, part 1 The Construct Theory, part 2 The Construct Theory, part 3
** See the second part of Collaborator Brief
