The Faust Baseline™Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
For nearly a decade now, people have been living inside a slow, grinding breakdown that no one ever officially named.
Rules changed without explanation.
Standards shifted without consent.
Authority detached from accountability.
Language stopped meaning what it used to mean.
And through all of it, the public was told some version of:
“Trust the process.”
“Trust the experts.”
“This is necessary.”
“You’ll understand later.”
Later never came.
What did come was exhaustion.
When you dismantle a functioning system, you expect disruption.
But when you dismantle a system that was already compromised, something else happens entirely.
You don’t just see disorder.
You see what was rotting underneath.
The wounds are visible.
Contradictions surface.
Incentives are exposed.
Double standards become seen.
People in power stop being able to manipulate.
That’s not chaos.
That’s infection being forced into the open.
And once that happens, there is no going back to “just trust us.”
For years, institutions relied on narrative management to hold things together.
If something went wrong:
- reframe it
- soften the language
- shift responsibility
- introduce a new slogan
- promise reform later
That only works when people still believe the system is fundamentally sound.
Once enough failures stack up, reassurance stops calming and starts insulting.
People don’t want better messaging anymore.
They want structure.
They want to know:
- Who is deciding?
- Based on what rules?
- With what authority?
- And what happens if they’re wrong?
That hunger didn’t come from ideology.
It came from lived consequence.
What almost never gets acknowledged is this:
For nine years, ordinary people have carried the consequences of decisions they didn’t make, couldn’t question, and weren’t allowed to audit.
They paid in:
- lost trust
- social fracture
- economic instability
- institutional confusion
- moral fatigue
Meanwhile, decision-makers retained insulation.
That imbalance doesn’t produce rebellion at first.
It produces quiet recalibration.
People stop arguing.
They stop believing.
They start watching.
Demand doesn’t begin with slogans.
It begins when people realize something essential is missing.
What’s missing right now is not intelligence.
It’s not data.
It’s not expertise.
It’s ground rules.
People are no longer asking for answers.
They’re asking for how answers are formed.
That’s the shift.
The Baseline is not a belief system.
It is not a political position.
It is not a tool for persuasion.
It is a minimum operating standard for judgment.
It insists on:
- defined roles
- clear positions
- traceable reasoning
- visible responsibility
- stated consequences
That’s it.
In a healthy system, that feels obvious.
In a damaged system, it feels revolutionary.
The Baseline removes escape hatches.
It doesn’t allow:
- authority without explanation
- expertise without accountability
- neutrality without consequence
- decisions without ownership
That makes people nervous — not because it’s wrong, but because it works.
Once the Baseline is in place, manipulation becomes harder.
Not impossible — just visible.
And visibility is what damaged systems fear most.
Institutions don’t demand standards that limit their flexibility.
They adopt them only when forced.
The public, on the other hand, is already there.
They’ve learned through experience that:
- vague language hides responsibility
- complexity is often used as cover
- “trust us” is not a process
- expertise without explanation is power, not service
They don’t want control.
They want clarity.
They want to know the rules again.
Wounds don’t heal because someone convinces you they’re fine.
They heal because the body mounts a response.
What we’re seeing now isn’t collapse.
It’s immune response.
People are:
- questioning assumptions
- rejecting soft coercion
- demanding explanation
- walking away from narratives that don’t hold
That response doesn’t need to be guided.
It needs to be respected.
The Baseline doesn’t try to steer it.
It gives it structure.
Once a population learns to see infection, it doesn’t unsee it.
Once people understand how judgment should work, they don’t accept substitutes.
That’s why the Baseline won’t spread through marketing.
It will spread through recognition.
People will encounter it and say:
“That’s what’s been missing.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to articulate.”
“That’s the rule set I’ve been looking for.”
And when enough people say that, institutions will follow — not because they want to, but because the cost of avoiding clarity becomes higher than the cost of adopting it.
What comes after exposure is not chaos.
It’s repair.
Repair doesn’t happen through spin.
It happens through alignment.
The wound closes when:
- rules are visible
- authority is bounded
- reasoning is traceable
- consequences are real
Not because people were persuaded.
But because enough people refused to proceed without it.
That’s what the Baseline offers.
Not control.
Not ideology.
Not compliance.
A way to move forward without pretending nothing happened.
And after everything people have lived through these last nine years, that isn’t optional anymore.
It’s inevitable.
There’s another reason people resist the Baseline, and it’s quieter than fear of accountability.
The Baseline removes the shadows.
Every society depends on shadows to function.
Not just corruption — convenience.
White lies.
Unspoken exceptions.
Small distortions everyone agrees not to look at too closely.
Stories that smooth over harm instead of naming it.
These aren’t always evil. Sometimes they’re how people cope. Sometimes they’re how systems avoid collapse. But they still live in the dark.
The Baseline doesn’t attack those shadows.
It simply turns the lights on.
Shadows serve a purpose in damaged systems.
They allow people to say:
- “That’s just how it works.”
- “You have to understand the context.”
- “It’s complicated.”
- “We meant well.”
- “No one could have known.”
Those phrases aren’t lies by themselves.
They’re cover stories.
They allow people to move forward without resolving what was left behind.
The problem is that unresolved things don’t disappear.
They accumulate.
The Baseline removes the justifications that keep shadows intact.
It doesn’t allow:
- vague responsibility
- implied exceptions
- moral outsourcing
- quiet contradictions
It asks simple, uncomfortable questions:
- Who decided?
- By what rule?
- With what authority?
- And who paid the price?
Those questions don’t leave room for white lies to survive.
When you’ve lived inside a system that depends on shadows, clarity feels aggressive.
Not because it’s cruel.
But because it removes the excuses people use to live with themselves.
The Baseline doesn’t accuse.
It doesn’t shame.
It doesn’t punish.
It exposes.
And exposure is painful when a culture has survived by not looking.
When shadows lift, the first things people notice aren’t abstractions.
They’re:
- small injustices that were waved away
- quiet harms no one wanted to name
- decisions that “made sense at the time”
- people who paid costs others didn’t see
Those stories don’t need to be dramatized.
They only need to be acknowledged.
That acknowledgment is what many people resist.
Society tells itself:
- “It’s kinder not to dig.”
- “We’d tear ourselves apart.”
- “This keeps things stable.”
- “Some things are better left alone.”
That logic works only as long as people still believe the system is acting in good faith.
After the last nine years, that belief is gone.
The shadows no longer protect stability.
They protect avoidance.
This matters.
The Baseline is not about punishing history.
It’s not about rewriting blame.
It’s not about settling scores.
It’s about refusing to carry forward unresolved distortions into the future.
You cannot heal a wound you insist on keeping covered.
People push back because the Baseline removes the ability to say:
“I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t see.”
“I had no choice.”
Once the lights are on, those statements don’t work anymore.
That doesn’t make people evil.
It makes them human.
But it does mean the old ways can’t continue.
Shadows only persist when enough people agree not to look.
What’s happening now is different.
Too many people have already seen:
- the contradictions
- the double standards
- the gap between words and outcomes
Once that happens, shadows lose their power.
They become reminders instead of shelters.
The Final Truth
People don’t resist the Baseline because it’s harsh.
They resist it because it tells the truth without offering a lie to soften it.
And after everything that’s been hidden, smoothed over, and justified away, truth without shadows feels unfamiliar — even threatening.
But it’s also the only condition under which real repair can begin.
The Baseline doesn’t destroy society’s shadows out of spite.
It removes them because nothing broken heals in the dark.
And enough people now understand that instinctively.
That’s why, sooner or later, they will demand it.
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