The Package Deal

Ask why a person’s view on capital gains predicts their view on pipeline permits, pandemic policy, and the interpretation of a novel, and you have asked the strangest question in public life. There is no philosophical thread connecting these positions. There is only a supplier.

An industry standard

Consider what a party platform, a denomination’s catechism, or a scene’s unwritten code actually is, commercially speaking: a bundle. Positions on trade, borders, energy, criminal sentencing, family law, and the meaning of history — issues with no logical dependency on one another — are packaged and priced as a unit, take-all-or-leave-all. The nearest business model is the old cable-television bundle, and the resemblance is not decorative; it is structural. Nobody wanted two hundred channels. The bundle existed because it was efficient for the seller: it moved weak products on the strength of strong ones, simplified billing, and made every household’s subscription identical and therefore cheap to service. Replace “channels” with “positions” and the sentence survives intact. A movement cannot mobilize millions around forty separate judgments; it can mobilize them around one membership. The bundle is not a conspiracy. It is a logistics solution — for the logistics of someone else.

The tell is that the bundles reshuffle. Positions migrate between packages from decade to decade — a stance on free trade, on war powers, on state surveillance will appear in one party’s bundle in one generation and the rival’s in the next, the way a channel jumps carriers when a contract lapses. The positions did not change their truth values in transit. They changed suppliers. Anyone whose convictions completed the same migration on the same schedule has learned something uncomfortable about who was doing their believing. If your opinions travel in a flock, it is worth checking whether they are your opinions, or the flock’s.

What bundling does to thought

The package deal has a second-order effect worse than its contents: it deactivates the faculty that would have evaluated the contents. Once the bundle is adopted, each new question arrives pre-answered — the subscriber needs only to check what the package includes this season. Simone Weil, watching the machinery up close, identified the resulting condition as “mendacity at the very centre of his soul”: the member half-knows the answer was issued rather than earned, and must spend real cognitive effort not knowing it more clearly. The laboratory evidence agrees — partisans reason most poorly precisely where the bundle has pre-committed them, and the most able reasoners defend the bundle best. Skill, once enrolled, works for the supplier.

There is also an arithmetic problem, rarely stated plainly. The probability that one supplier holds the correct position on forty independent questions is, to a first approximation, zero. Every bundle is therefore certainly wrong somewhere — the only open question is where, and the subscription’s terms forbid asking. A reader who accepts this paragraph’s arithmetic has already conceded the manifesto’s sixth article; the rest is inventory management.

The unbundling, and its counterfeit

Industries built on bundles end the same way: unbundling, from below. Recorded music was sold as albums until it was sold as songs; television until it was sold as streams; newsprint until it was sold as articles. Belief is late to unbundle because its distributors do not invoice in money — they invoice in belonging, a currency with no competing mint. But the ledgers say the run on the bank has begun: the parties, pews, and lodges are emptying in every established democracy, and the leavers are not converting to a rival bundle. They are going à la carte.

Two honest warnings complete the picture. First, à la carte is work — forty questions, forty investigations — and no one completes it; the grown-up version is triage with open books: investigate what you can, suspend what you cannot, and never mistake the suspension for an answer. An honest I have not examined this is worth more than a bundle’s confident error, in exactly the way an empty ledger line is worth more than a forged one. Second, beware the counterfeit unbundling: the algorithmic feed also promises freedom from the package, then quietly assembles a new one from your clicks — a bundle with a sample size of you, sold back as taste. The test of genuine unbundling is the same as ever: can your next conclusion surprise your last one? A mind shopping à la carte produces a scatter. Anything tidier is a subscription, whoever prints the invoice.