Economic incentives shift constantly, but moral cohesion is the force that actually holds communities together over time. I’ve trained as a theologian, so I’ve seen firsthand how powerful shared moral conviction is compared to financial reasons to stay. When you look at what Vitalik thinks about network states, the insight becomes clear: people will abandon a group the moment the money dries up, but they’ll endure hardship if they believe in something together. This is why The need for morals for unity in states has become central to how I think about any new community—whether that’s a startup, a movement, or an emerging network state.
The comparison to cults is something I keep returning to, though I wish I had more rigorous sociology or theology to back it up. What I mean is that cults demonstrate the sheer binding power of shared belief, and you see hints of this same dynamic in fandoms and other tight-knit groups. I might be over-exaggerating the parallel, but the mechanism is real: people stay because they’re bound by something they believe in together, not because the incentive spreadsheet looks good. The difference lies in whether that moral structure emerges organically from what’s actually there in the community, or whether it’s manufactured and imposed from above. Network states built around genuine moral alignment have fundamentally different staying power than those where the founder is simply manufacturing belief for control.
The hard part is distinguishing a genuine moral cause from one that’s being weaponized to keep people loyal. I don’t have a clean answer here—it’s subjective and genuinely difficult terrain. What I do know is that a healthy moral foundation is organic, emerging from real alignment, while a dangerous one is deliberately constructed. This connects to Networked States and Libertarianism, because libertarian incentive design assumes people optimize for personal gain, but that misses what actually holds human communities together. Listening to what’s already present in a group—rather than imposing your vision onto it—seems like the crucial distinction.
If I fully accepted that moral glue matters more than getting incentives right, I’d have to shift my entire approach to building or joining a network state. I’d need to deeply understand what the moral structure actually looks like before committing, but here’s the problem: communities become extremely founder-dependent. I might have to wait and see how an organization functions and evolves past its founder before I could trust that the moral cohesion is real and sustainable. Network states require this kind of patient observation, not just economic modeling, because The political leanings of a networked state will emerge from whether the moral foundation is genuine or manufactured.