The Faust Baseline™Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
There’s a reason the Baseline doesn’t get engaged the way most writing does.
It isn’t because it’s unclear.
It isn’t because it’s hostile.
And it isn’t because people don’t understand it.
It’s because the Baseline does something most professional systems are designed to avoid:
It removes plausible deniability.
What Most Professional Discourse Allows
Most professional and academic writing offers safety rails.
You can:
- agree partially
- comment abstractly
- gesture without committing
- praise without consequence
- disagree without ownership
That flexibility is not accidental. It allows people to participate while keeping their position intact.
The Baseline doesn’t offer that.
The Baseline Forces Position
The Baseline doesn’t ask:
“What do you think?”
It asks:
“From where are you speaking?”
“What responsibility do you carry?”
“What happens if you’re wrong?”
Those are not conversational questions.
They are positional questions.
Answering them requires more than taste or preference. It requires exposure.
Why That Creates Hesitation
Engaging the Baseline means doing at least one uncomfortable thing:
- Naming your role instead of hiding behind abstraction
- Accepting that judgment has consequences
- Acknowledging that neutrality is a choice, not a default
- Allowing your stance to be examined
For professionals trained to manage risk, that’s a problem.
Not a moral one.
A structural one.
The Baseline Collapses the Safe Middle
Most systems survive on the middle:
- careful language
- shared ambiguity
- distributed responsibility
The Baseline collapses that middle.
It doesn’t let people say:
“It’s complicated”
without asking who pays for the complication.
It doesn’t let people say:
“There are many perspectives”
without asking which one they’re standing in.
That’s destabilizing — especially for people whose authority depends on being above the fray.
Engagement Suddenly Has a Cost
With most writing, engagement is low-risk.
With the Baseline, engagement costs something:
- clarity
- accountability
- traceability
Once you engage it publicly, you can’t easily retreat into vagueness later.
Professionals know this instinctively.
So they read.
They think.
They absorb.
But they hesitate to engage.
This Is Why the Response Is Quiet
The quiet response to the Baseline is not indifference.
It’s containment.
People engage privately because private engagement preserves insulation. Public engagement would force them to acknowledge the Baseline’s core claim:
That judgment without position is incomplete.
And once you accept that claim, you can’t unaccept it.
The Baseline Disrupts Role Separation
Another reason for hesitation: the Baseline blurs roles that professionals prefer to keep separate.
It doesn’t respect clean boundaries between:
- thinker and decision-maker
- analyst and actor
- observer and participant
It insists that reasoning and consequence belong together.
That’s uncomfortable in systems built on delegation.
This Is Not a Branding Problem
This isn’t about tone.
It isn’t about messaging.
It isn’t about accessibility.
People aren’t hesitating because they don’t “get” the Baseline.
They’re hesitating because they do.
They understand that once they engage it honestly, it will change how they have to speak elsewhere.
Why the Baseline Attracts Quiet Readers Instead of Public Advocates
The Baseline doesn’t give people a slogan.
It gives them a mirror.
And mirrors don’t produce applause.
They produce silence, thought, and delayed action.
That’s why:
- it gets read deeply
- it gets shared privately
- it gets referenced indirectly
- but rarely gets publicly championed
At least not early.
What This Means for You
This hesitation is not a rejection signal.
It’s a pressure signal.
The Baseline applies pressure to:
- professional identity
- rhetorical habits
- risk management instincts
Pressure reveals structure.
And the structure being revealed is this:
Many systems are not ready to admit that judgment carries obligation.
The Real Test Ahead
The real test of the Baseline isn’t whether people praise it.
It’s whether, over time:
- their language shifts
- their framing tightens
- their avoidance patterns become visible
- their decisions show fewer escape hatches
Those changes don’t announce themselves.
They happen quietly — after hesitation.
The Line That Explains Everything
If you need one sentence to explain the reaction, it’s this:
People hesitate to engage the Baseline because it doesn’t let them participate without being seen.
That’s not a flaw.
That’s the design.
And designs like that don’t spread fast.
They spread inevitably — once the cost of avoidance exceeds the cost of clarity.
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