One of the core questions developed within the new 20th-century moralism was one of immense simplicity: “Do the ends justify the means?” This question originates as a statement by Niccolò Machiavelli within his political treatise The Prince, though it appears precisely as the statement: “In the actions of all men… when there is no court to appeal to, one looks to the end.” Machiavelli attended to the absence of a court—in appeal to God—to justify what would become consequentialism against the mere rule-following default given to the princes of his time. The Church and God had seen to it that these princes were sovereign over their territory, yet they were still expected to follow teachings that were themselves suspect and whose betrayal could win them grandeur. Machiavelli asked these princes to look instead to the empirical determination of good ruling: did it succeed or not? The consequences of rule were its fruit, and the sweetness of that fruit alone revealed the health of the tree—their rule.

However, modernity—although originating in the Western literary tradition of which Machiavelli was a part—began to operate in a manner that inverted and questioned this advisement. For one, Thucydides presaged Machiavelli when he wrote: “The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.” This observation challenges universal consequentialism, as it reveals the nature of power over rules. The weak could make a set of good rulings yet still suffer, whereas the strong could behave incompetently as failsons and nevertheless see their fortunes grow simply by virtue of their strength. If one were empirical about the categorical imperatives set forth by the strong, one would observe them to be insufficient and particular to the positions of those who occupied them. Ultimately, consequential ethics appears less to the benefit of the “greater good” and more as the ethics of the powerful, used to justify their own rule-breaking against the deontological traditions that preceded them.

When Friedrich Nietzsche writes in The Antichrist:

“What is good?—All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.”

there is a recognition that power—the instrumental force necessary to manifest ends—had itself become the determining factor of Good and Evil. What remained for Nietzsche was something beyond good and evil: a distinction between masters and slaves, between those whose conception of virtue was a singular righteous act of “yea”—affirmation—and those slaves who were concerned with the total avoidance of evil, the “naysayers.” The means were recognized as the very site of morality rather than teleology, thereby inverting the view of Machiavelli’s consequential calculus. What mattered was not merely the ends of an action, but whether the action had made its author more powerful.

“It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.”1

What remained, then, was a formalization of the means. John von Neumann became the ‘great formalizer’ to take up this challenge. His book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior established game theory as the principal analytic framework for examining strategic behavior. Ludology, rather than teleology, became the primary site of study in empirical moral reasoning. Game theory—while easily interpreted as evidence for a utilitarian or consequential view of morality—is fundamentally a study of instrumental tactics for achieving goals whose values are taken as given. In other words, game theory concerns itself with how to play with rules, not what those rules ought to be.

Game theory makes no claims about teleology and therefore offers no prescription for how utilities should be axiomatically assigned. Nor does it fully trust rank rationalism or singular definitions of what constitutes utility. Instead, it formalizes the tactics required to accomplish and win a variety of strategic contests—the underlying modus operandi of capital, politics, and the many parlor games through which power is exercised. Game theory is pure formalization. It does not describe anything more than the implications of whatever people accept as their starting basis. However, this focus on games, cybernetics, and calculus—away from established implications and toward abstract systems—opened the door to the increased problem-solving capacity that would characterize the period of the Cold War. This was the same period in which “Do the ends justify the means?” functioned as stark propaganda. The West had become “pure means”—ludology and capitalism—while it fought an “enlightened”, primitive communism of “pure ends,” which would churn through its people in an attempt to crush the West under the force of its materialism.

What eventually distinguished the Western strategic apparatus was not merely superior resources but a different orientation toward action. Institutions understood themselves as open to change and dynamics, pragmatic to a fault. Success was not measured by the weight of a chandelier, but by a system’s capacity for adjustment and movement. Western markets did not collapse under Goodhart’s Law—“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”—but instead absorbed the inefficiencies and shocks imposed upon them by public authority, from taxation and regulation to geopolitical disruption. Liberalism, in spite of its own democratic irrationality, garnered some wisdom from the crowd, enough, at least, to prove itself more flexible than the alternatives.

Yet the Cold War did not ultimately vindicate the great ideologies of the twentieth century so much as exhaust them. The systems that survived did so not because their final visions proved correct, but because they retained the capacity to adapt their means faster than their opponents.

The end of the Cold War conflict therefore produced a strange result. The industrial teloi established as liberalism, communism, and fascism found themselves to be failures in different ways. Liberalism’s language of rights proved unable to assert duties. Communism’s equality principles made it less effective at coordinating solutions to its growing bureaucracy. Fascism’s high adventurism—manifesting the state as the arm of God—tore itself apart through auto-cannibalism. Either way, when Anti-Capitalist Musings writes in response to Vincent Lê:

The failure mode is identical across all three (liberalism, communism, fascism). Any goal-directed political system attempting to contain capital faces the same choice: instantiate capitalist dynamics to remain competitive, or maintain containment and become economically unviable. The means-ends reversal reasserts itself—not because of human nature or eternal laws, but because competitive pressure between jurisdictions makes sustained containment impossible.

it is an acknowledgement that teleology stands in direct opposition to problem-solving. Having a conception of a final goal or desired end can result in becoming less effective at achieving it. The more one stops attempting to solve specific problems and instead focuses on becoming powerful with what one has, the more one ends up accomplishing.

Classical moral teaching assumes the opposite relationship between ends and means. It is the exact opposite lesson of “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” The ant spends its time planning and organizing its life to survive the winter, whilst the grasshopper jumps around playing the lute, moving from summer breeze to fall harvest ease. The grasshopper dies, having accomplished nothing, so says Aesop—but what is the case in reality?

In nature, the grasshopper is meant to die within its season, just as humans eventually yield to the next generation. A new generation comes to replace the old. The ant survives one winter more, but survival itself is not the same thing as accomplishment. Its play instincts are suppressed in favor of preservation, yet it too will be eventually devoured in due time having done nothing more than extend its season2.

If one wishes to accomplish more with a life, the lesson is the reverse of a surface-level reading of Aesop’s fable: stop chasing final goals and begin cultivating the means already in possession. Fixating on ends narrows one’s life away from enjoyment. The grasshopper is an accomplished lute player. The ant is one of many. The grasshopper leaves behind his story that the ant was merely a part of. Ends fixation narrows one’s ability for transcendence. And what is true of the individual is equally true of collective wills.

Civilizations themselves operate in this manner. The civilizations that we remember and emulate are those who were vital. They emerge from rustic competence and simple productive ideals, grow into periods of martial dynamism and social churn, and eventually arrive at decadence—whereby they constrain their own actions to satisfy their own hedonic states. They deny their productive best to feed their consumptive worst. In this decadent state, markets often retain their adaptive vitality, but civic institutions become stages upon which desires are performed rather than problems solved. No one is allowed to press the “fix-everything button”. When an empire possesses a vibrant market but a flailing civic center, the party has both begun and already ended. No one comes to a party to solve difficult problems.

“There are basically two Americas—the public sector, which barely functions, and the corporate one, which is the best in the world.” — Peter Banks 3

Healthy problem-solving institutions are not fixated on final ends. Instead, they focus on becoming more capable—and therefore more important—than they presently are, using the means already at their disposal. They operate like the lute-playing grasshopper, striving for mastery without obsessing over how the performance ultimately concludes. Such institutions suppress the petty paralysis of principal-agent suspicion through shared participation in rising action. Everyone finds themselves extraordinarily busy trying to determine how best to contribute. When individuals are absorbed in confronting hard problems and advancing within the structure, complaints naturally recede and trust emerges almost incidentally. The critics of these institutions likewise recede, for those most inclined to complain are usually those who stand outside them—neither working within their structure nor depending on their success.

The Manhattan Project was one such healthy problem-solving institution. Everyone working on it believed themselves to be righteous patriots who would save the lives of their countrymen. Each was lifted in status as they worked on hard problems. Many of them are personal heroes. The country after the war had no choice but to trust the scientists—from Leo Szilard to J. Robert Oppenheimer to John von Neumann to Edward Teller. The Manhattan Project’s by-product innovations ended up affecting all elements of American life, defining the conservative dream of 1950s-era America.

It sounds wrong to suggest that the success of the Manhattan Project was predicated on the lack of an end goal. Were they not interested in building the bomb? Was there not desire? Yes—but was it teleology? “Build the bomb before the Germans” was not a blueprint for a finished architecture of the world to come. Most participants had competing understandings of what was to be accomplished when the bomb came together. Many others had no clue about the whole story of what they were doing owing to compartmentalization. What was to be the bomb was not formalized in advance. There only thing that was specified was the human qualities required: “patience, flexibility, intelligence”.4

The difference is subtle but decisive. The teleological institution starts with a vision of what it wants to be and defends its identity. It avoids death at all costs, with slave morality as its guiding principle. The ludological institution wants to learn and become more prominent through its principles of play and adopts goals only insofar as it believes them support its own evolution. In summary, it adjusts itself not to follow a script but to follow its own taste. No one knew how the bomb would be built or which mechanics would prove most effective, but internalized competition and pivoting allowed the project to grow and scale its way to prominence as “The American Project.”

The difference is easily illustrated by imagining two dog-food companies: one where the CEO and his dog eat what comes off the line, and one whose interest lies in following the recipe and avoiding upsetting the customer base through change.

In the former, the CEO feeding his dog tells him what is too much and what is too little, and so he makes adjustments to his supply lines to improve the product. It is likely that his customers and their dogs will not notice. Quality, as far as the market is concerned, is simply the affirmation of enjoyment. However, this attention to detail forces the CEO into action, which produces new relations and new advantages. By trying to improve the taste of the dog food, the CEO is whisked away toward investigations and adjustments that easily convert into opportunities. Perhaps he discovers underutilized ingredients. Perhaps he makes a successful new hire who saves him from a downstream lawsuit. At the very least, his new suppliers might have dogs of their own.

In the latter institution, developmentalism has been shut off in favor of surviving for another season. Complaints and hecklers line up and steal the time of the CEO who is committed to serving more of the same. The opportunities that existed for the man who ate his own product are inverted for the one who refuses to do so. He uses the same ingredients despite their rising costs. He hires only as a mode of replacement, lending to complacency and placing him at the mercy of stronger external forces such as regulation. He gains no new customers because he never investigates his own processes.

The dog-food-eating CEO and his company are a ludological institution. They produce feedback loops and recreate their processes as a matter of taste. The result is opportunities that make them more valuable while ignoring the noise. The tasteless company is a teleological institution approaching its final end. It wants to retain itself as it is, but it has forgotten its own mortality. It has even forgotten its birth.

The reality is that teleological institutions are never formed independently; they arise as extensions of ludological institutions—most often through the accumulation of contracts. A contract is a declaration of ends: it fixes the telos to coordinate between parties. As institutions accumulate contracts and obligations, their mode of operation becomes increasingly fixated to these teloi. Their activity begins to orient itself toward fulfilling predetermined commitments rather than producing feedback loops to shift based on sensory taste.

Each additional obligation narrows the institution’s capacity. What they stabilize between other institutions, they lower in terms of agency. They are adopted out of fear that agents will undo the structure of the institution, destroying its identity; however, the cumulative effect is rigor mortis, as the ability to operate creatively dissipates. An institution that stockpiles such obligations begins to prioritize survival over transformation. Like the ant, they survive one winter more, but do not solve problems. The avoidance of identity-death results in them gradually losing the taste that produced its own initiating upswell and happiness.

The ludological institution, insofar as it does not adopt a teleology, dies and is reborn anew with each season. The Manhattan Project ended distinctly: its heroes completed their work, then returned to their home colleges. Western civilization, as a chain of empires, affirms each death as a mode of continuation within its canon, certain of the infinite tragic potential of man. When Bernard Suits discusses Utopia—the nowhere place—he reserves play as the unabolished social core, run exclusively by grasshoppers who preserve their own death and ghostly rebirth as the engine of continuity. The unnamed post-industrial ludi now actively forming counteract the industrial teloi—liberalism, communism, fascism—by better handling higher degrees of problem-solving potential while also affirming their own eventual death.

Dogfoodism is the core factor that gives these institutions their potency: the cybernetic element of taste as opposed to ends-fixation preserves feedback loops and gives allowance to sin--”It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” By contrast, the contractualism of teleological systems inevitably loses dynamism, irrespective of design. The desire for predictability of the end result imposes huge operational costs that cannot be overcome by technical expertise. It doesn’t matter whether the U.S. government acts monopsonistically through fixed-price, cost-reimbursement, or indefinite-delivery contracts: once a program is constrained by a prior conception of what its final identity must be, its problem-solving capacity is diminished.

Rather, the government programs that have succeeded most dramatically are those whose ultimate end state was defined only loosely, if at all. The development of the atomic bomb, the Moon landing, the economic reconstruction and integration of Europe, the exploratory research mandate of DARPA, and even the construction of the interstate highway system all proceeded under goals that described a capability or frontier, rather than a contractual form. As programs or facilities, their mandates eventually ended--being taken over by new institutions whose respective ludological or teleological characteristics determined further success. Institutions that assert ambitions that are well beyond their capabilities operate in a manner whereby their goals are flexible to their means, letting them simply “cook”.

The contrast between ludological and teleological institutions is now visible in real time within the development of American broadband infrastructure. In late 2021, Congress passed the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program under Section 60102 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. BEAD is contractually obligated to “provide affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband service to locations currently lacking such access.” The program is funded at $42.45 billion—exceeding the Manhattan Project, whose estimated inflation-adjusted cost is roughly $30 billion. Its mandate is to distribute grants capable of delivering broadband speeds of at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload at greater than 99% uptime to roughly 7.2 million Americans designated by the FCC as “lacking access.” In addition to technological neutrality, the program requires compliance with labor standards, climate resilience criteria, low-income provisions, and extensive transparency requirements.

Meanwhile, SpaceX—motivated primarily by its “goal” of lowering launch costs for Mars—developed Starlink, a global satellite broadband network. For roughly $50 per month, Starlink provides comparable capabilities while remaining available virtually anywhere on Earth. The total BEAD allocation alone could theoretically fund Starlink service for approximately 7.08 million households for a decade. Under BEAD, however, many households will still be expected to pay for service once infrastructure is installed, raising questions about adoption rather than mere availability. Infrastructure that produces services people are willing to pay for generally finances itself through use. BEAD, by contrast, operates as a teleological specification of broadband—one defined by regulatory conditions rather than by opportunistic taste. SpaceX before even being IPO’d has already achieved profitability at an estimated $8 billion, whereas BEAD is contractually committed to spending vast sums delivering infrastructure to populations who may no longer need it.

The conundrum of problem-solving is that fixation on a particular consequence often destroys the capacity to produce consequences at all. BEAD will likely end up a comparative waste. The alternative uses of those funds—upgrading undersea telecommunications cables, building out a “GovLink” satellite system, enhancing infrastructure around spaceports like Cape Canaveral, funding open-source software dependencies, or even simply subsidizing Starlink subscriptions—would plausibly generate far greater capability for the same expenditure. Returning to Machiavelli’s observation that “in the actions of all men… when there is no court to appeal to, one looks to the end,” we can see the irony: institutions that define themselves by their ends often achieve the poorest ones. By constraining their own means, they lose the capacity to solve problems. The consequence of consequential thinking, paradoxically, is worse consequences.

Do the ends justify the means? The result is decisive: ends-fixation destroys problem-solving capacity. Institutions that optimize themselves toward final goals become progressively worse at generating outcomes. By contrast, ludological institutions—those that do not fear their own dissolution and are willing to eat their own dogfood—retain the highest degree of capability. They are the most cybernetically enhanced, preserving feedback loops rather than defending a finished identity. An institution that is actively pursuing problem-solving capabilities must not define what it is to be in advance. It must not contradict the spirit of Leslie Groves, when he writes, “Nothing would be more fatal to success than to try to arrive at a perfect plan before taking any important step.” An institution must, most of all, affirm its own death. All that is good is good to the season.

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