Something strange has happened to our institutions.

They still function, in a sense. The procedures run. The reports get filed. The metrics get hit. But somewhere along the way, a connection was severed. The institutions that were built to serve us seem to be serving something else: their own logic, their own perpetuation, their own narrow measures of success. They have become very good at a certain kind of competence while losing the capacity for another kind entirely.

This is the trust problem, and it's deeper than corruption or incompetence. People don't distrust institutions because they're failing at what they do. They distrust them because what they do no longer seems connected to anything that matters.

The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist offers a framework that helps explain what's gone wrong. In his work on the divided brain, McGilchrist argues that the two hemispheres don't do different things (the old "left brain logic, right brain creativity" split has been debunked). Instead, they attend to the world in fundamentally different ways.

The left hemisphere's attention is narrow, focused, and grasping. It sees parts, categories, things that can be isolated and manipulated. It prefers the explicit, the measurable, the fixed. It works with representations and abstractions: maps, models, procedures. It excels at "what" and "how."

The right hemisphere's attention is broad, open, and relational. It sees wholes, contexts, connections. It understands implicit meaning, metaphor, the embodied and the particular. It stays present to what is living, flowing, and interconnected. It holds the "why."

Both modes are necessary. The ideal, McGilchrist argues, is a cycle: experience originates in the right hemisphere's broad awareness, gets processed by the left for analysis and articulation, then returns to the right for integration into the larger picture. A musician hears beautiful music (right), learns the individual notes (left), then performs the piece as a living whole (right again).

McGilchrist uses a parable to describe the proper relationship: the right hemisphere is the master, the left hemisphere its emissary. The emissary goes out into the world, gathers information, executes tasks. The master retains the broader view, the sense of purpose, the understanding of how the parts fit together. Problems arise when the emissary forgets its role and begins to believe it is the master.

Our institutions are emissaries.

They were built to serve something larger: the common good, the flourishing of communities, the practical needs of citizens who cannot manage everything themselves. They categorize, measure, regulate, and administer. This is necessary work. You cannot run a complex society without bureaucracies that standardize, agencies that enforce, systems that process.

But emissaries need masters. They need a broader context that sets direction, provides meaning, and integrates their narrow work into the larger whole. When that connection is severed, when the emissary begins to serve its own logic rather than the purpose it was created for, something goes wrong.

The institution optimizes for what it can measure, because measurement is what the left hemisphere does well. Yet what matters most often resists measurement. The institution follows procedures, because procedures are explicit and controllable. Yet wisdom is largely tacit and contextual. The institution becomes self-referential, evaluating itself by its own internal standards rather than by its connection to the lived reality it was meant to serve.

This is a different kind of institutional capture than we usually discuss. Not capture by special interests or regulatory targets, though that happens too. Capture by a mode of attention that has lost contact with the whole.

You see it in healthcare systems that hit their metrics while patients feel unseen. In educational institutions that optimize for measurable outcomes while students emerge without the capacity to think. In regulatory agencies that follow every procedure while the thing they were meant to protect crumbles. The emissary is working hard. It has simply forgotten what it's working for.

The backlash against this was inevitable. When institutions lose their connection to lived reality, people notice. They may not have the language to explain what's wrong, but they feel it: the sense that the system no longer serves them, that the experts have disappeared into their own abstractions, that no one is steering toward anything that matters.

Here is the trap: the backlash has largely taken the form of another kind of left-hemisphere capture.

The strongman promises to fix it. He will take control. He will cut through the procedures, fire the bureaucrats, impose his will. This feels like a restoration of mastery. Finally, someone is in charge.

Yet this brings no return to the right hemisphere's mode. The strongman offers narrowness of a different kind: grasping, controlling, demanding loyalty rather than integration. He doesn't restore the relational, the contextual, the capacity to see the whole. He replaces rule by procedure with rule by personality, bureaucratic capture with authoritarian capture.

The citizenry, exhausted by emissaries without masters, reaches for a false master rather than reclaiming the role themselves.

F.A. Hayek saw where this leads. His critique of central planning in The Road to Serfdom is, at its core, a left-hemisphere critique.

The central planner can only work with explicit information: data, statistics, reports. But the knowledge that makes societies function is largely tacit, distributed, embedded in relationships and particular places. It exists in the right hemisphere's mode: implicit, contextual, resistant to abstraction. The system works not because someone designed it but because it aggregates countless local judgments that no single mind could hold.

When you try to replace this distributed, relational knowledge with centralized, explicit planning, you don't get efficiency. You get serfdom. The only way to make the plan work is to force reality to conform to the model. The map becomes more real than the territory. Those who resist the map must be corrected.

This problem doesn't arise from bad planners or evil intentions. It arises from a mode of attention that cannot see what it's missing. The left hemisphere, McGilchrist notes, is confident in its own completeness. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. It filters out whatever doesn't fit its categories and assumes that what remains is all there is.

The road to serfdom is paved with this confidence.

What would genuine mastery look like?

The master has left the house.

This is not a metaphor about institutions failing to listen. It's a statement about knowledge. The citizenry that should set direction for institutions, the elected officials who should translate public judgment into policy: these are the rightful masters of the emissary. But mastery requires something. You have to know what you're doing. You have to understand why the institutions exist, what problems they were built to solve, what happens when they fail or are captured or drift from their purpose.

This knowledge has been bleeding out for generations. The history of the republic, the hard-won lessons about dispersed power and institutional constraint, the reasons why certain structures exist and what they protect against: this is the "why" that the right hemisphere holds. It connects the parts to the whole. It tells you what you're looking at and why it matters.

Without the why, the master has no view. And without a view, there is no direction to set.

What remains is reaction. Frustration at institutions that feel unaccountable. Rage at elites who seem to serve themselves. A sense that something is deeply wrong without the framework to diagnose it or the knowledge to propose alternatives. The citizenry knows it has been abandoned by its emissaries but has forgotten what mastery would even require.

So they reach for the simplest answer: someone who will take control. Someone who promises to fix it, to drain the swamp, to burn it down and start over. This feels like agency. It feels like finally doing something. But the strongman doesn't restore the why. He forces the institutions to serve an outcome rather than a process. The feedback loop that would connect them to lived reality gets replaced by loyalty to a personality.

This is what happens when the master doesn't know the house.

Hayek understood where this leads. The road to serfdom begins not with malice but with ignorance: the ignorance of why things are the way they are, the ignorance of what was tried before and why it failed, the ignorance of the tacit knowledge embedded in institutions that look arbitrary until you understand their purpose.

Central planning fails because planners cannot hold what they don't know. The same is true of citizens. A republic requires a citizenry that understands, at least in broad strokes, why the republic is structured as it is. What the separation of powers protects against. Why institutional constraints on popular will are features, not bugs. What happened in societies that abandoned these structures.

This knowledge is not elite knowledge. It's the inheritance that every citizen was supposed to receive: the story of where we came from, what was built, what it cost, what threatens it. The right hemisphere's capacity to hold context, to see the whole, to integrate the parts into meaning.

When that inheritance is lost, the master has no view. The emissaries run without direction. And eventually, someone offers to become the master who requires no knowledge at all, only the will to dominate.

The work, then, is not merely institutional reform. Institutions cannot reform themselves; they are emissaries, not masters. The work is the recovery of the knowledge that makes mastery possible.

This means education, but not the kind that treats history as trivia or civics as procedure. It means understanding why: why these structures, why these constraints, why this distribution of power rather than some other. It means recovering the relational knowledge that connects us to those who built what we inherited and to those who will inherit what we leave.

The master's role is not to control the emissary. It's to know what the emissary is for.

Without that knowledge, we are all lost in the house, rearranging furniture in the dark, while someone outside promises to burn it down and build something better. They don't know what they're building. They don't know what they're destroying. But they sound certain, and certainty is seductive when no one else seems to know anything at all.

The house is still standing. The question is whether anyone remembers what it's for.