Eric Ries’s new book Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great names a question that haunts anyone who’s built a business they care about: whether their creation can survive the forces of success. He calls that pressure financial gravity: the doctrine of shareholder primacy pulling every company toward extraction. Ries’s answer is structural. Costco’s governance. Patagonia’s ownership handed to the earth. GitLab’s values embedded so deeply in process that no one has to be in the room to enforce them. Build the right scaffolding, he argues, and the mission survives contact with success.
It’s a good diagnosis. But look at the last few years of American governance. The corporate framing falls short.
Structure is not self-enforcing #
Corporate governance, no matter how cleverly designed, is downstream of law. Bylaws, board structures, dual-class shares, mission locks: all of it exists inside a legal system. A legal system is only as strong as the willingness of the people running it to follow the rules.
That willingness has been failing nationally for a long time. A recent example is the For the People Act of 2019 (an anti-corruption bill, but for democracy instead of companies). It died in the Senate. Mitch McConnell blocked it, and later Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked the rules changes that could have gotten it past him. And more recently we’ve watched Trump treat the law itself as optional, betting correctly that the usual checks can’t reach him (so far).
This is the same failure mode Ries is writing about, but one level up. Incorruptible institutions can’t be built only out of governance design, because law is itself an institution. Someone still has to choose to honor it. The statutes that make a mission lock enforceable, that let a board fend off a hostile takeover, that give Patagonia’s ownership structure any teeth, all exist because Congress and the courts uphold them. Congress could rewrite corporate law to strip that protection away, or simply decline to enforce it when a well-connected shareholder tests the limits. Costco’s mission lock survives only because the people who could hollow it out choose not to.
The people holding power are the real leverage point. What matters is whether they can feel the pull toward self-interest and not go under. Manchin is a case worth keeping in mind: he had every reason to vote for reform and folded anyway. Whatever vetting he survived to reach the Senate, it wasn’t enough.
How would you even test for that? #
Call the skill what you want: empathy, integrity, emotional regulation, self-leadership. The label matters less than the fact that our current ways of detecting it aren’t good enough.
Start with self-report, like financial disclosures. Good, but politicians routinely lie about their intentions. Worse, plenty of people who eventually fold probably believed, at some point, that they’d hold the line. Sincere aspiration is a prediction, made by the person least able to see their own blind spots. Questionnaires fare little better. People tend to answer the way they think the test writer expects, a well-documented effect called demand characteristics.
Voting records and reputation feed a third category: the judgment of a trained observer. If any profession has tried to formalize that kind of judgment, it’s talk therapy. Years of supervised clinical hours. It’s the most serious attempt we make at vetting. But it’s enormously expensive: years of one-on-one expert attention per person. And even then it’s still a judgment call. Show the same session to two different supervisors and you can get two different verdicts. And a voting record doesn’t receive anywhere near that level of scrutiny.
All of these approaches share annoying weaknesses: they watch someone when nothing is at stake, or trust their word for how they’d behave under fire. A real test has to ambush the person with material they can’t rehearse.
The test we’ve been overlooking #
Consider a classical psychedelic like N,N-DMT, psilocybin, or LSD. Among other effects, these substances make inner experience more vivid and enticing—part of why bad trips happen. Some of those trips go bad for mundane reasons: too high a dose, an unsafe setting, an inexperienced guide. Others go bad when fear, grandiosity, or greed unexpectedly takes over. Losing yourself to these feelings is almost irresistible.
Feeling that pull and not being swept away by it is the skill. Daily life provokes people too, but unpredictably: a crisis arrives on its own schedule, at whatever intensity it happens to bring. A psychedelic session administers a measured dose of provocation. Fail once and it might be something about the occasion. Fail consistently and it’s you.
Recall Manchin. Nobody outside his own head knows for certain, but his behavior fits a familiar pattern: coal and gas donors with a stake in the outcome, a Senate seat that felt safer if he stayed the guy who protects the filibuster. Something pulled harder than the reform did, and he went under. A DMT session creates the same fork in the road, on demand. Fear or self-interest surges, and the person either holds firm or is swept away by it.
DMT is the most direct instrument we have to test whether someone can be with strong emotion without being carried away by it. To fulfill Ries’s vision, we need a way to identify who can be trusted with power. We have never had a plausible test for that, until now.
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