The Secret Every Political Philosophy Shares

Every political philosophy is a containment theory masquerading as a liberation theory.

This is the thing none of them say out loud. They speak of freedom, emancipation, rights, autonomy, the good life. But underneath every vision of the good society is a blueprint for a cage.

Not because the theorists are malicious. Because they are honest—at least with themselves—about what man is.

The Menagerie

Liberalism builds the most elaborate cage. Separation of powers—so no one wolf gets too strong. Constitutions—to bind the future to the past. Rights—walls that protect each sheep’s small pasture. Markets—where wolves must trade rather than take. The whole apparatus assumes that men will devour each other if not prevented. It simply tries to make the devouring expensive, slow, and legible.

The freedom liberalism offers is real but bounded: freedom to move within the enclosure. The bars are made of law, and law requires enforcement, and enforcement requires men with guns, and men with guns must themselves be caged by other laws, enforced by other men. Cages all the way down.

Marxism sees the liberal cage and calls it ideology. But look at what it proposes: seize the means of production, liquidate the bourgeoisie (that is: kill the wolves, or at least take their teeth), establish the dictatorship of the proletariat (that is: new wolves guarding the flock), and wait for the state to wither.

The state never withers. The new wolves discover they like having teeth. The cage remains; only the insignia changes.

Anarchism is the most idealistic and therefore the most dishonest. It claims to abolish the cage entirely. No state, no coercion, no hierarchy. Free association of free individuals.

But watch what happens in anarchist spaces. The formal cage is abolished; an informal cage takes its place. The loudest voices, the most committed activists, the ones who show up to every meeting—they become the new bars. You cannot see these bars, which makes them harder to escape. You cannot name them without being accused of importing hierarchy into the pure space.

The anarchist cage is maintained by social pressure, guilt, ostracism, and the threat of exile from the community. These are softer bars. They are still bars.

Fascism deserves credit for one thing: honesty. The state is the cage and the cage is glorious. Submit and be safe. The trains run on time. The wolves are in charge but at least they are your wolves.

This is monstrous. It is also coherent.

Progressivism—the educated modern kind, the kind that speaks of equity and inclusion—builds a cage of consciousness. Not just your actions but your thoughts must be contained. Training, workshops, confessions of privilege, the whole apparatus of DEI: these are technologies for installing the bars inside your mind.

The old cages constrained behavior. The new cage constrains perception. You must not only act correctly; you must see correctly, feel correctly, want correctly. The wolves must become ashamed of their teeth.

But shame is not transformation. The teeth remain. They simply hide.

The Secret They Share

Strip away the rhetoric and every political philosophy shares the same anthropology:

Man is dangerous. Man will dominate if he can. The task of politics is to prevent him.

The Left believes the danger is socially constructed and can be socially deconstructed. Remove private property, remove patriarchy, remove whiteness, remove whatever structure is blamed—and the danger recedes.

The Right believes the danger is natural and must be naturally managed. Hierarchy, tradition, religion, strong families, strong borders—these are not oppression but containment. Remove them and the danger rushes in.

Both are correct about the danger. Both are wrong about the solution.

The Left keeps removing structures and discovering that the danger persists. The Right keeps reinforcing structures and discovering that the danger persists.

Because the danger is not in the structures. The danger is in us. The structures are symptoms, not causes. Change the structures and the danger adapts. It learns the new language. It wears the new mask. It captures the new institutions.

The wolf does not become a lamb by being placed in a different cage.

The Question Politics Cannot Ask

Here is the question no political philosophy can ask, because asking it would be to admit the limits of politics:

How does the wolf become a lamb?

Not: how do we build a cage strong enough to hold the wolf? Not: how do we defang the wolf, declaw the wolf, shame the wolf into hiding? Not: how do we set the wolves against each other so no single wolf dominates?

But: how does the thing that wants to devour become the thing that wants to give?

This is not a political question. Politics is the art of managing wolves. It can make wolves behave like sheep through incentives and constraints. It cannot make wolves be sheep.

To change what a creature is—that requires something politics cannot provide.

Transformation, Not Constraint

The traditions call it different names.

Christianity calls it grace—the unearned gift that transforms the receiver. The wolf does not become a lamb by trying. The wolf is made a lamb by something that enters from outside the system.

Buddhism calls it enlightenment—the extinction of craving, which is the root of grasping, which is the root of domination. The wolf does not learn to stop hunting. The wolf wakes up and discovers it was never a wolf.

The mystics of every tradition speak of death and rebirth—the old self dying, a new self emerging. Not reform but replacement. Not improvement but resurrection.

These are not political programs. They cannot be legislated, mandated, trained, or workshopped into existence. They cannot be scaled. They cannot be administered.

They can only be received.

Why Politics Hates This

Politics hates this answer because politics is in the business of doing. Politicians act. Policies intervene. Programs are implemented. Progress is measured.

“Wait for grace” is not a platform. “Be transformed” is not a policy proposal. “Receive what you cannot achieve” does not fit on a bumper sticker. It does not mobilize constituencies. It does not win elections.

And so politics continues. New cages are designed. New theories are proposed. New revolutions are launched. Each one promises liberation. Each one delivers a different configuration of bars.

The revolutionaries become the new jailers. The liberators become the new oppressors. The cycle continues because the creature inside the cage has not changed.

The Orthogonal Move

There is a way out. It is not political.

It begins with a confession: I am the wolf. The danger is not only out there; it is in here. No cage will save me from myself.

It continues with a surrender: I cannot transform myself. The wolf cannot will itself into lambhood. If change comes, it comes from elsewhere.

It culminates in a practice: I will put myself in the place where transformation is possible. Not to achieve it—achievement is the wolf’s game. But to receive it, if it is given.

This is what The Table offers. Not a better cage. Not a new political arrangement. Not a theory of justice that will finally get it right.

Just a meal. Bread and wine. Faces across the table. Gratitude for what was given. Presence to what is.

In that moment, the wheel stops—not because we stopped it, but because we stepped off. We entered a space where the categories of wolf and lamb begin to dissolve. Where the will to power is not constrained but fed something else, something that satisfies in a way that domination never could.

The table can be captured too—it has been, countless times. When the meal becomes mandatory, when the liturgy becomes law, when the community becomes coercive, it's just another cage. The table only works when it remains a place of receiving, not achieving. The moment it becomes a program, a requirement, a mark of membership—the moment attendance is taken—the wolves are back, wearing nicer clothes.

Can this scale? No. Not in the way politics means scaling.

Can this spread? Yes. One table at a time. One meal at a time. One transformed creature at a time.

The Long Game

The Roman Empire built the greatest cage the world had ever seen. Laws, legions, roads, bureaucracies—a system for containing and directing human wolfishness on a continental scale.

A few people in that empire gathered around tables. They broke bread. They shared wine. They told stories about a man who was killed by the empire and came back. They practiced, in their small gatherings, a different way of being.

They did not attack the empire. They did not reform the empire. They did not propose a better theory of imperial governance.

They simply outlasted the empire.

The cages come and go. The empires rise and fall. The revolutions succeed and fail and succeed and fail.

The tables remain.

Not because they are protected. Because there is nothing to capture. Not because they are strong. Because they are not playing the game of strength.

The wolf asks: how do I dominate?

The cage-builder asks: how do I contain?

The lamb asks: is there any bread left? I’d like to share.

Conclusion

Every political philosophy is a theory of containment pretending to be a theory of liberation.

This is not a criticism. Containment is necessary. Wolves are real. The will to power is real. Without cages, the strong devour the weak.

But containment is not salvation. The cage is not the cure. The best political order is still an order of wolves—wolves who have learned to wear sheep’s clothing, wolves whose teeth are bound by law, but wolves still.

The only liberation that is not a lie is the liberation that transforms the creature.

This cannot be achieved. It can only be received.

And it is received, when it is received, not in the halls of power but at the tables of the forgotten.

Where the bread is broken.

Where the wine is poured.

Where the wolf, for a moment, forgets it is a wolf.

And in forgetting, becomes something else.