Distributed Virtue

Centralized power has momentum. Once established, it self-perpetuates: bureaucracies expand, executives accumulate authority, dependency relationships form. It requires only a few people to maintain control and many people to accept it. The coordination costs are minimal—one person making decisions is logistically simple.

Distributed virtue requires the opposite. Every citizen needs independence (economic, intellectual, moral), education, willingness to sacrifice private interest for public good, and sustained engagement. The coordination costs are enormous. A hundred people deliberating requires shared language, mutual respect, procedural knowledge, and everyone showing up.

This is why civic republicanism keeps losing to centralization. It's not that the principles are wrong—it's that distributed virtue is exhausting. Every generation has to choose it again. You can't inherit it or automate it. One generation gets tired, decides they'd rather outsource governance to experts or strongmen, and the whole thing collapses.

The founders understood this. Their paranoia about corruption, luxury, standing armies, and factions wasn't irrational—it was recognition that anything compromising citizens' independence makes them prefer comfort over participation. They built for slow decay because they knew distributed virtue couldn't be permanent.

Jefferson's tree of liberty needing periodic refreshing wasn't advocacy for violence—it was acknowledgment that systems drift toward centralization and only crisis forces redistribution of power. The question isn't whether centralization will happen, but how long you can delay it.

The Stoic position offers no solution to this structural problem. You can maintain personal virtue in a corrupt system—Marcus Aurelius proved that. But you can't maintain civic republicanism without distributed virtue. When the system fails, the Stoic still has their character. The civic republican loses their arena.

This creates an uncomfortable tension: participate in republican institutions while accepting their inevitable failure, or retreat to internal virtue and abandon the civic project entirely. The Stoic civic republican chooses the former—maintains the republic knowing it's terminal, because that's what logos requires here and now. Not optimism about outcomes, but duty to what's in front of you.

Distributed virtue isn't a rallying cry for reform. It's a diagnosis of why reform keeps failing.