My friend Evan wears a hat that says “I don’t like the government.” He gets a positive comment on it almost every time he goes out. It seems to be the one thing everyone still agrees on.
There’s a deep frustration running through society right now. AI takeover. Political polarization. Economic crisis. Broken institutions. Foreign wars. Epstein and the elites. So many talented people feel helpless against these impersonal tidal waves. Everyone is asking the same question: What are we going to do?
I think the answer is that we need to retribalize — in the best sense of the word. Let me explain.
The Modern Avenues to Political Change Don’t Work
If you want to change the society you live in, your options today are thin.
Writing your congressman accomplishes almost nothing. Protests trend for an afternoon and then vanish. Complaining online does even less. And even when your faction wins an election, the institutions reshape your leaders far more than your leaders reshape the institutions.
Just more of the same. A lack of control and influence over our own lives. A growing crisis on the horizon.
When power becomes this decoupled from the people — when you have so little control or representation — it creates the atmosphere for violent political instability. That’s the real danger. So it’s worth looking at how societies have actually transformed in the past.
The Five Ways Societies Transform
1. Exit — abandoning a society to start a new colony or breakaway state.
The Pilgrims sailing to Plymouth in 1620 to escape Anglican conformity is the archetypal case. The Mormon migration to Utah in 1847 is another: when Joseph Smith was killed and persecution intensified, Brigham Young led the community 1,300 miles into the desert. Today, Balaji Srinivasan’s “network state” concept and various seasteading projects are attempts to update exit for a world that no longer has an unclaimed frontier.
Failure mode: Exit requires a frontier — and without one, exit is just colonization. It can also be crushed by the society it flees, and it’s arguably a dereliction of civic duty.
2. Reaction — restoring an idealized past order.
Julian the Apostate (Roman emperor, 361–363 CE) was the last pagan emperor; he tried to roll back Constantine’s Christianization of the empire and restore traditional Greco-Roman religion. Nazi Germany sold itself as a return to a lost order too: the Volk, blood-and-soil peasant Germany, pre-Weimar masculine virtue, a mythologized Teutonic and medieval past. (Worth noting: the Nazis were also revolutionaries and futurists, not purely reactionaries — they wanted to disrupt the status quo as much as restore it.)
Failure mode: Reaction tends to calcify against progress, learning, and growth. It’s strong in feeling and aesthetic but too often hostile to innovation.
Strength: Every great movement does need to feel like a return to tradition — updated — rather than a leap into something alien.
3. Reform — working within institutions for incremental change.
Britain abolished the slave trade (1807) and then slavery itself (1833) through parliamentary action. The American Progressive Era delivered antitrust law, the income tax, women’s suffrage, and food safety regulation — all through existing channels.
Failure mode: Incremental change puts bandaids on a rotten core. It can’t fix the foundation. You get constant “progress” while quietly losing your roots and substance.
4. Revolution — redirecting history by force.
Revolution carries enormous heartfelt, change-the-world energy. But when it tries to reinvent society from scratch, it almost always ends in terror. France in 1789 led to the guillotine. Russia in 1917 led to Stalin. China gave us the Cultural Revolution. Iran in 1979 produced a theocracy.
The American Revolution is the rare success — and it succeeded partly because it was as much an exit as a revolution.
5. Withdrawal without exit — sometimes called the “Benedict Option,” after Rod Dreher’s book.
This is the path of monasticism, the Amish, the Hasidic communities, the Bruderhof.
The Story of Benedict
Around 500 AD, a 17-year-old nobleman named Benedict arrived in Rome to finish his education. He took one look at his classmates and decided he wanted no part of it. So he left. He walked out of the city and ended up in a cave about 40 miles east of Rome, where he lived alone for three years — basically figuring out what he actually believed when nobody was watching.
And then people started showing up. Over the course of his life, a new monastic tradition was born — one that became the spine of medieval Europe.
A few things he did right:
He stayed small and replicated. He figured out what worked — what rules, what way of life — and spread it slowly. Twelve monks per house, twelve houses. If any one cell failed, the others kept going.
He designed for stability. Monks took a vow to stay — this community, this place, for life. No spiritual tourism, no drifters.
He made the nobleman dig. Aristocrats and former slaves worked the same fields. The community itself was the equalizer.
You see the same strategy in the Mennonites, the Amish, the Hasidic Jews. The goal is to protect a way of life from a corrupting mainstream. The posture is defensive and inward-facing: minimize contact, build walls — literal or social — and survive intact until the storm passes. The metaphor is an ark.
A Better Option: Building Parallel Institutions
A parallel institution is built alongside the existing order — not against it. One foot in, one foot out. That posture matters more than people realize.
If you’re fully out, you’re a cult. You’re a commune in the woods, a doomsday compound, a hippie experiment that burns out in three years. The mainstream looks at you and sees weirdos who couldn’t hack it — and they’re not entirely wrong.
If you’re fully in, you’re just another faction inside a system that’s already failing. You spend your life writing op-eds and losing.
One foot in, one foot out is the strongest political position there is today. You keep deep respect for the civilization that raised you. You stay legible to your neighbors, your family, the grocery store, the law. You’re not asking anyone to denounce their old life to join you. You’re just living differently, in plain view, and letting people draw their own conclusions.
The essential thing is not to “other” the world around you. The moment you do, you become a cult — or the empire crushes you. (Remember the Osho cult of the 1980s.) We need deep respect and curiosity about the world we came from, not just a reaction against it. And then we aim to inspire it.
The goal is to build a new system — a new town, a new academy — that is obviously superior.
How a Parallel Institution Forms
It starts the way every real human society has ever started: a group of people gather around a shared identity and a shared ideal.
This is who we are. This is how we want to live. These are the things we believe. And these are the systems we choose to build together.
That’s it. That’s the whole seed. Everything else grows from there.
The teams forming today are essentially the founding teams of a startup — except their startup includes a business and a civilizational consciousness.
Here’s the process:
1. A small team of genuinely aligned people. Almost always under 20 to start. (Retribalize.ai is our free matchmaking app to meet the most aligned people in our database. I met my whole team through my YouTube channels, and we built this app so you can do the same. Link below.)
2. Proximity. They actually live and work together. Co-living. Residency. The same neighborhood or town.
3. Embodiment over argument. They stop debating the old society and start demonstrating a new one — usually embodying an older, deeper tradition with an update. (Reaction + reform.)
4. Communication outward. Benedict’s Rule, Shaker furniture, kibbutz literature, the Gospels — the tribe’s way of life is made legible to outsiders.
5. Snowball. Close followers join once the path is visible, and the project spawns sister communities.
6. Federation. Related tribes link up, share what they’ve learned, and eventually seed new institutions — schools, companies, eventually towns and nations.
Remake the world.
Think Netflix versus Blockbuster. You don’t beat the old thing by fighting it. You build the better thing next to it and let it win.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Two years ago I started an online philosophy group with five guys. Today there are over 100 members in the men’s academy. What began as a personal development group became a club dedicated to building parallel systems and communities.
I started getting shared houses with the men. Building my team. Seventeen people came to Arizona over the past two months — tech founders, martial artists, writers, builders.
Now we’re building residencies at a larger scale. We’re building the co-ed Retribalize Academy for everyone who wants to join us. Our next residency is in France. And we’ll keep going until we have 20-plus people ready to build a new campus with us — a place where we can create powerful, transformative living experiences while slowly growing the tribe.
Let me show you where this goes.
A Picture of What This Could Look Like
Imagine a town.
A few hundred people to start. Self-governing. Its own school system, K through whatever. Farm-to-table cafes that source from fields you can see through the cafe window. An internal economy where most of what you spend stays in the community and circulates back. A local currency, maybe. Real craftsmen — woodworkers, builders, chefs, coders, farmers — who know each other by name and trade in trust.
In the middle of the town, a university. But not the kind we have now.
This university is a residency. You come for two or three years to master a craft — coding, building, writing, farming, fighting, healing, teaching. But the curriculum isn’t just the craft. It’s total human flourishing. Meditation in the morning. Martial arts in the afternoon. Performance, dance, music, and celebration woven through the week. You leave knowing how to build something real with your hands, hold your own in a fight, sit with your own mind, move your body, and throw a feast.
The whole place runs on the oldest American tradition there is — the original one: self-governing citizens. Independent. Tied to a place. Tied to each other. Building something together that no faraway bureaucracy gave them and no faraway bureaucracy can take away.
This isn’t a commune. There’s private property. There’s commerce. There are normal families. People drive normal cars and use normal phones. It plugs into the broader American economy and culture in a hundred ways. In fact, the guilds and the university excel at serving the wider public.
It’s just better. Better than any neighborhood in the United States. Healthier kids. Stronger marriages. Real friendships. Work that means something. Old people who are honored instead of warehoused. A main street you actually want to walk down. A life that doesn’t feel like it’s being lived inside an algorithm.
Why This Beats the Other Four
Look at what a town like this quietly accomplishes.
It has exit’s freedom — you’ve built your own thing, on your own terms, with your own people. But you didn’t need a frontier or a breakaway state to do it.
It has reaction’s depth — you’ve recovered older traditions of citizenship, craft, family, and place. But you’ve updated them. No one’s trying to bring back 1880. You kept the antibiotics.
It has reform’s legitimacy — you’re operating openly inside the existing legal and economic order. You pay taxes. You follow the law. You’re not at war with anyone.
It has revolution’s ambition — you’re building a fundamentally different way of life, not adjusting the old one at the margins. But you’re not burning anything down to do it. The old order keeps standing for as long as it can stand.
It avoids every failure mode. No new frontier required. No calcified longing for a past that never was. No grinding against institutions that reshape you faster than you can reshape them.
The Endgame: A City on a Hill
Many towns rise. They form an ecosystem of communities — a new network. They trade. They send their kids to each other’s residencies. They share what they’ve learned. A federation forms, and it remakes the world.
The leaders of the world 50 years from now will be the tribe founders of today. You’ll have the most incredible receipts.
If you’re ready to meet the people already building this — and maybe attend a residency — come join the Retribalize Academy. We now have residencies running, landowners offering sites, and the network of founders you’ve been looking for.
That’s where the next ten years gets built.
Cheers,
Kristian
