Walter White from Breaking Bad famously said – “I was alive”. What essentially drove him to build that Drug Empire was entrepreneurship, that excitement of feeling alive. It was not about providing for family. Being alive is about being in direct contact with reality — absorbing and processing external signals. It demands constant awareness – processing stimuli, gauging situations, and adapting accordingly. In that sense, being alive is also a lot about being human. What separates us from animals, at least most of us, is that ability to not just instinctively react, but instead employ higher levels of cognition. Having that widespread opportunity to employ higher levels of thinking through individual ownership and responsibility deserves some acknowledgement. For most human history, this was a privilege reserved for the few.  

Being alive is quintessential Americana; few civilizations have managed to formally encode this at scale into a political Constitution and broader social fabric. Devising a layered framework to limit the collective while defending individual volition at this scale is unique, because arguments for such a framework run counter to intuition.  

Channeling essential English liberties and the Scottish Enlightenment, American Framers executed something different in terms of impact and scale. They made a well-reasoned argument for Federalism and achieved democratic consensus. A sufficiently intricate argument was framed, communicated to the broader population, and executed as an institutional change. Selling an idea this sophisticated is not easy – usually complex ideas find agreements within a limited minority and then the results motivate slow widespread adoption. But the American framers abstracted the underlying principles of the existing society to a higher level – to that of a union of states and drove mass consensus from there. Being able to execute something like this without corrupting those core ideas through demagoguery or personal agendas is uncommon. In fact, popular support of ideas which refuse to pander to baser instincts is an unusually rare phenomenon. 

There is an interesting scientific aspect to this. Being part of a collective is comforting. Whether it’s politics, sports or music, we tend to seek out that tribal identity. It’s probably our hunter gatherer instincts, constantly pushing us to belong. In that sense, American institutions elevated the overall social order by channeling the tribalism as a check. To paraphrase F.A. Hayek — ‘man got civilized in spite of his best efforts’.  

James Madison quite presciently stated in defense of Federalism — ” the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority”. Instead of enforcing compliance through centralized mechanisms, American framers accepted reality as it exists and attempted to work within those constraints. It simply grounded republicanism in a more realistic understanding of human nature.  

While many societies enforced conformity through top-down control and directed purpose, American framers showed unusual practical prudence. They allowed civil society, order and purposes to emerge through peaceful coexistence.  From that perspective, American Federalism created a framework of incentives favorable to formation of civil society. A society where individual volition can survive, where coexistence was the path of least resistance, and more importantly an individual could feel alive. 

Even though at a more basic level, riding motorcycle is also a lot about being alive, and probably more about staying alive too. For starters, you are always in touch with the realities of the environment. You’re expected to be responsible for your own safety. You’re not protected by the collective, their seat belts, or air bags. You must be aware of the lifted truck with no visibility or minivan with a driver busily sifting through the critical social media reels. You need to simply adapt your path to steer clear of them, or any other potential threats, social media driven or otherwise. But the flip side is, when you are riding, all the other travails blend into the background. So plugged in to that sublime present, there are no cognitive resources to think about an uncertain future, or that disappointing past. In that sense, you feel alive, but in a different mode of engaging with reality.