The Castle of Broken Promises
A Humble Response to "Kant and the Empire Builders"
A writer I respect put out a piece this morning that I thought was well made but didn’t quite hot the mark. I’ve had some back and forths with this writer months ago but we were always just talking a little past each other.
I’ve come to realize something that this person doesn’t seem to quite get.
This is my attempt to open the conversation back up.
PS sorry for the cover art, it’s not a dig I just thought it was too amusing not to use 😆
Imagine you're five years old.
You were promised a castle.
Big, strong, beautiful — a place where everyone would be safe.
But when you go to build it, the grown-ups give you junk:
Bent blocks.
Melting glue.
Instructions that don’t even match the pieces.
They say, "Don't worry! Just imagine the castle is there. Pretend hard enough, and it will be real!"
So you try
.
You stack the pieces.
You pretend the gaps don't exist.
You even learn new words to explain why the wobbling tower is actually perfect.
You get really good at pretending.
You even teach the next kids how to pretend better.
But the castle still falls.
Every time.
Because you were lied to.
Not by one bad king.
By a system that forgot what real castles are made of.
Now you're an adult.
Maybe you study law, politics, philosophy, governance, culture.
You work hard.
You want to fix the world.
But the pieces you’re given are still bent.
Still broken.
You’re told:
"Freedom" is obeying rules you never wrote.
"Truth" is whatever fits the official system.
"Rights" are permissions handed down by institutions.
And if you ever ask: "Wait, where did these pieces come from?"
They call you dangerous.
They say you’re "attacking progress."
Because deep down, they know:
The castle is made of lies.
Where did it start?
Kant.
And the thinkers who loved him.
They told people they couldn’t know reality directly.
That all truth was "constructed" in the mind.
That morality wasn’t about obeying a higher order, but following universal rules created inside human reason.
It sounded noble.
It made obedience look like freedom.
It made empire look like enlightenment.
And it taught generations to love their cages.
Frederick the Great didn’t need to put a soldier on every street.
He just needed to put a teacher in every school.
Teaching kids that freedom means self-policing.
Teaching citizens that rational systems are sacred.
Teaching everyone that anyone who talks about higher truth is a threat.
It worked.
The empire grew.
And the people built their own prisons, brick by rational brick.
Today?
Most "rights" talk is just prettier chains.
Most "freedom" talk is just louder applause for the system.
Most "reform" movements just repaint the same decaying walls.
Because the real infection isn’t political.
It’s metaphysical.
We forgot that freedom isn’t invented — it’s received.
We forgot that truth isn’t constructed — it’s encountered.
We forgot that rights aren’t permissions — they’re inheritances.
But there's a way back.
One day, a man named Saul thought he was serving the highest ideals.
He had law.
He had credentials.
He had logic.
Then reality itself — not an argument, not a new law, not a better system — knocked him blind off his horse.
And for the first time, he saw.
Not a new castle.
A real King. 👑
If you want to save the castle, you don’t polish the broken bricks.
You tear it down and return to the rock beneath it.
You stop pretending.
You stop stacking melted lies.
You let the real stones cut your hands if they must.
Because only in bleeding for the real can you rebuild anything that lasts.
(Footnotes for the Academically Inclined)
Kant's “Copernican Revolution” redirected epistemology inward, eroding access to ontological participation.
Rationalist frameworks operationalized in statecraft created scalable compliance at the cost of metaphysical anchoring.
The American constitutional structure depended on participatory realism — severed, it collapses into technocratic despotism.
Saul's confrontation on the Damascus road represents a metaphysical rupture, not merely a moral reformation.
Restoration requires metanoia (repentance), not merely metaphysics.