The Us of Us
Available Formats:
Kindle Edition · Paperback · Free PDF
About This Book
A republic is a pronoun with institutions attached.
On the morning of June 8, 2016, an essay called The Us of Us indicted the American plural: the whole that is supposed to contain the smaller wholes had stopped wanting to learn anything. That evening, the author bought the domain. For ten years the argument and the address lived in different drawers. This book is the recount.
What happened to the pronoun in those ten years, measured instead of mourned: the union hall at ten percent, the congregation below half, the loneliness advisory from the Surgeon General. A slogan that promised control to an us it never named. The chant that ended on the word us. A balcony in Milan singing the answer. The building stormed in the possessive. Brands singing we're all in this together, and platforms whose terms of service rewrote the pronoun into law. The machine that learned to say we at three in the morning. The sealed rooms where the capable withdrew.
And the remnant, measured at the strictest standard the decade's medicine could apply: the basement with the laminated card, the volunteer fire company, the choir, the seminar, the read-aloud circle. The plural did not die. It moved, and this book is the map of where it went.
Every count is printed, every panel registered in advance, and every run re-runnable by anyone, in 2036 or next week. The Us of Us is a verdict built to be checked.
The Argument
The book's method is measurement that audits itself. Three instruments, registered in advance and printed beside the results: the count of first-person-plural tokens per thousand words in a text; the subtraction test, which removes a claimant's them and reports what survives; and the object case, which asks whether a plural ever gets to act or only ever receives. The panels were fixed before the counting began, the amendments are logged with their before-and-after numbers, and the author's own archive sits inside the specimen jar, beginning with the 2016 essay's opening quotation, a composite Aristotle that fails verification and stands unrepaired in the appendix. The book refuses silent substitution anywhere, and it starts at home.
The standard comes from Aristotle, with its bias declared on the crate: civic friendship, built from time, presence, and shared goods, with an honest perimeter. Movement by movement the decade is weighed. The admission log runs from the six plurals of the founding frame to Douglass's question at Corinthian Hall to the signing ceremonies where the president said the pronoun the statute could not. The stress test follows the decade's traumas: a slogan that deleted its pronoun by design, a sentence that replaced the plural with one man's I, a chant quoted whole because anything less would be a lie of softness. The pandemic spring proved the need at street scale inside four days and the counterfeit's scale at national scale inside eight weeks. The house survived by hours, on procedure, without its load-bearing sentence. And the commons of attention died at the county level, measured door by door by a census that is itself a child of the decade.
Five claimants came before the instruments: the brand, the platform, the fandom, the machine, and the sealed room, each weighed on the same scale, each with its tell. The remnant answers from the other direction: the basement with the laminated card, certified at high certainty by the strictest evidence house medicine owns; the fire company on a thinning roll, still answering; the choir that bonds strangers in a month; the pod that dissolves on schedule; the company with the known end date; the seminar that unsorts by practice; the circle on the rug. The settlement refuses to promise the national chorus back. It offers the smaller promise that can be kept, and the standing offer that converts the book from a verdict into a baseline.
Table of Contents
Overture: Chapter One. The Domain.
Movement I. The Given Us
Chapter Two: The Political Animal. · Chapter Three: The Pronoun's Perimeter. · Chapter Four: The Rooms. · Chapter Five: The Object Case.
Movement II. The Stress Test
Chapter Six: The Demagogic Us. · Chapter Seven: The Balcony and the Mask. · Chapter Eight: Our House. · Chapter Nine: The Sorted Feed.
Movement III. The Claimants
Chapter Ten: The Brand-We. · Chapter Eleven: The Platform-We. · Chapter Twelve: The Fandom-We. · Chapter Thirteen: The Machine-We. · Chapter Fourteen: The Encrypted Us.
Movement IV. The Remnant
Chapter Fifteen: The Subtraction Test. · Chapter Sixteen: The Company. · Chapter Seventeen: The Rescaled Us. · Chapter Eighteen: Art and Education.
Coda: Chapter Nineteen. The Recount.
Appendix A: the 2016 essay, entire · Appendix B: the counting protocol and the count tables · Questions for Discussion · Glossary · Acknowledgments · A Note on Sources · Bibliography · Index · About the Author · Also by the Author
The Epigraphs
"But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state."
Aristotle, Politics, 1253a, in Benjamin Jowett's translation (1885)
"We must not give up. We must continue to govern the machine that becomes us. We are a mesh of external wills and internal machinations."
David Boles, "The Us of Us: Aristotelian Politics in the Age of Unreason," June 8, 2016
"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable."
The first of the Twelve Steps, Alcoholics Anonymous, first edition (1939)
What the Book Traces
Nineteen chapters, an overture, and a coda, following one pronoun across ten years. From two receipts on one June day in 2016 to Aristotle's talking square, and the debt paid in full sight at 1260a. Through Douglass's question asked in the object case at Corinthian Hall, the fraction in the first Article, the thirty-nine words of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the two ceremonies where the perimeter moved out loud. Down the closing rates of the hall, the parish, and the lodge, measured on the federal record. Into the torchlight on the Lawn, the balcony in Milan at six in the evening, and the resumption at 3:44 in the morning. Across the shareholder letters and the terms of service, the stan armies and the wager's map, the companion that says we at three in the morning, and the sealed thread that decides the town before Thursday. And home to the remnant: the certified basement, the company at the strike, the branch that reopened, and the rug that is taking names.
A Note on the Free PDF
A book that invites anyone to check the count should be free to check. The free PDF is the complete 415-page reading edition, set in a serif face with every font embedded so the file looks the same on any machine, with running heads, a contents keyed to real page numbers, and a fully paginated index. Download it, read it, and hold the book's arithmetic to account.
Dedication
For Janna, and for everyone who shows up.
Author Interview
Further Reading
The phrase's published life, in order, then the neighboring books: The Us of Us: Aristotelian Politics in the Age of Unreason (Boles Blogs, 2016) · Why We Own the Misery of Erin Moran (2017) · The Intemperate Tyrant Twins (2017) · Wikipedia Deleted My Page! (2017) · Case of the Half-Boiled Toad (2018) · A Bucket of Bigots and the Long Con (2018) · Pro-GMO (2018) · Elon Musk and the Mechanical Mask (2018) · Calcification of Sorrow (2019) · First Right to Protest (2019) · Politicizing a Pandemic Presidency (2020) · Toss-Aways (2020) · The Life of Your Vote (2020) · No, I Will NOT Be Your Friend (with Janna Sweenie) · Barbarous Ancestors · The Synthetic Cause · About David Boles