The Faust Baseline™Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
There was a time when you didn’t need a briefing for ordinary things.
You learned by watching.
You learned by being corrected once and remembering it.
You learned by noticing when to speak and when not to.
No one sat you down to explain why you didn’t interrupt an older man fixing something. You just knew. No one handed you a guidebook on when to leave a room quieter than you found it. You felt it in your gut.
Somehow, that was enough.
I remember being handed tools without instructions. Not because the person handing them to me didn’t care—but because they trusted that I’d either figure it out or ask the right question at the right moment. Both mattered.
If you misused the tool, you didn’t sue the hammer. You learned.
A lot of things used to work that way.
You learned how to drive by driving.
You learned how to listen by being quiet too long once.
You learned responsibility by being allowed to fail in small, survivable ways.
None of this was written down.
None of it was optimized.
None of it needed to be.
It lived in timing.
In posture.
In judgment.
And judgment wasn’t something you announced. It was something you carried.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that if something wasn’t explained, it wasn’t safe. If it wasn’t documented, it wasn’t fair. If it couldn’t be defended in advance, it shouldn’t exist.
So we started adding layers.
Rules where understanding used to be.
Warnings where awareness used to live.
Procedures where trust once stood.
Again—not because people were evil.
But because trust is heavy, and rules feel lighter when you’re afraid.
The trouble is, rules don’t teach judgment. They replace it.
They train people to wait for permission instead of paying attention.
They teach compliance, not responsibility.
They create comfort without confidence.
And over time, something subtle happens.
People stop asking, “Is this right?”
And start asking, “Is this allowed?”
That’s a different question.
It leads to a different kind of person.
You can feel it when you talk to someone who’s never had to carry judgment without a net. They speak carefully. They hedge. They’re always checking the edges of the room, not the center of the idea.
They aren’t stupid.
They’re cautious.
But caution, left alone long enough, forgets how to stand upright.
There are things that don’t survive being over-explained.
Respect is one of them.
Timing is another.
Silence is a big one.
Silence used to mean you were thinking. Now it’s treated like an error state that must be filled.
We fill it with words.
With disclaimers.
With constant clarification.
We explain things that were once understood because we no longer trust anyone to understand them.
And when trust leaves the room, weight rushes in to replace it.
More policy.
More process.
More explanation.
Heavier and heavier, until no one can move naturally anymore.
I’m not interested in going backward.
I don’t want to relive some imagined golden age or pretend the past was cleaner than it was. It wasn’t. People made mistakes. They got things wrong. They learned the hard way.
But there was a difference.
Mistakes were owned.
Judgment was expected.
And responsibility had a face.
You knew who carried it.
Today, responsibility tends to dissolve into systems. When something goes wrong, no one quite touches it. It just… circulates.
That’s not progress.
That’s diffusion.
Some things only work when someone is willing to stand still and say, “That’s on me.”
No footnotes.
No escape hatches.
Just ownership.
I write because I still believe that kind of posture matters. Not loudly. Not urgently. Just steadily.
I’m not here to persuade anyone. I’m not trying to win an argument or rally a crowd. I’m keeping a few things from disappearing entirely.
Things like:
- letting a thought finish before interrupting it
- allowing silence to do its job
- trusting people to notice more than we think they will
These things don’t scale well.
They don’t trend.
They don’t perform.
But they endure.
And endurance has its own quiet gravity.
Some things never needed to be explained.
They only needed to be lived long enough to be recognized.
I’m still living that way.
Not in protest.
Not in nostalgia.
Just because it works.
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