Tortoises & the Failure of Modern Governance
Sovereign duty, handed down by fate (or Petco).
When I stopped by a pet store after a quick jog in the park, I did not at all expect to purchase an extremely expensive tortoise. Certainly, I am in no such position to do so but my professional experience with exotic reptiles compelled me to “save” him as he was suffering through inadequate conditions.
The transaction felt simple at the time. You pay the money, you get the tortoise. But what no one tells you is that, in doing so, you inherit a crown. This was not a partnership. There was no onboarding process, no period of shared governance. From the moment I walked out of that store, I was the state, and the tortoise was my subject.
Its name is GiGi, and it was in the process of adjusting GiGi’s heat lamp for the fifth time in a single afternoon that I realized thi i][\-s governance in its purest form. There were no layers of middle management between my decisions and their consequences. No petitions, no subcommittees, no tedious power-sharing agreements. There was only the direct line between sovereign and subject, responsibility and outcome. And in that clarity, I realized something: this is what freedom actually looks like.
Consolidating responsibility liberates the people — not into some vague abstract "freedom," but into real, tangible freedom to live, create, and thrive without having to constantly govern themselves into exhaustion. (The exhaustion, by the way, is largely the result of a lack of access, interest, and understanding of and to information necessary to hold a pertinent perspective.)
Modern political thought insists the opposite: that freedom requires power-sharing, elections, committees, endless meetings where everyone gets a turn to speak. But what this produces isn’t freedom — it’s widespread confusion and the theft of constituents’ time. Bogged down negotiating who’s responsible for what, and when, and how, nothing ever gets done. Everyone becomes a low-level bureaucrat in their own life which I explain in detail in this article on fascism and education.
The tortoise does not need deliberation. It needs food, it needs heat, and it needs water. All of which remind me of another certain species I’m quite familiar with.
It needs a sovereign caretaker who acts swiftly and decisively, without waiting for a quorum. And because all responsibility is mine alone, my tortoise enjoys the greatest freedom possible — the freedom to simply be a tortoise, without fear that its survival hinges on the competence of a committee.
He ended up running away while playing outside, but at least he ran away in good health, of his own accord, and is now quite likely a much happier creature than he would have been in a tank.
I didn’t think tortoises could be so fast but, as the saying goes, they tend to win the race.
-M. Shultz