The Law of the Excluded Schmooze
(On Freedom, Discipline, and the Forgotten Middle of Social Life)
“Sometimes I feel like [I'm] the only anarchist who believes discipline is a good attribute... and before anyone comes up with some trolley-problem-level abstract edge-case, I am talking about the much more mundane: keeping to agreements, tidying up after yourself, finishing tasks when they're no longer fun, etc.” — anonymous Mastodon user
This simple lament captures a deep distortion in modern political imagination. It exposes a confusion that should never have seemed inevitable: the belief that freedom and discipline must be in opposition.
That opposition, I would suggest, only makes sense in a civilization that has long lived under what we might call the law of the excluded schmooze.
1. From the excluded middle to the excluded schmooze
In logic, the law of the excluded middle states that something must be either true or false. Between yes and no there is no room to dwell. Western social thought has applied a similar principle to human life. Actions are imagined as either the expression of autonomous individuals or the result of coercive institutions. Either I act freely, or I am constrained by some external authority. There is no acknowledged middle term.
But that “middle” is where almost everything human actually happens.
It is the dense, ambiguous, negotiated realm of mutual adjustment and coordination—the domain of tone, gesture, compromise, habit, humor, apology, timing, and attention. It is the space where meaning, trust, and cooperation are continually re-made, even when no rule compels them and no solitary will dictates them.
This is what I call the schmooze.
2. What is “the schmooze”?
The schmooze is not small talk or flattery, though both may play their part. It is the field of ongoing interpretive attunement through which people manage to live and act together at all. It is a social medium—visceral, reciprocal, constantly self-revising—within which individuals and collectives co-constitute one another.
In the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework (SIF), the schmooze is the level at which information ensembles—networks of perception, intention, and response—maintain their coherence. It is where interpretive frameworks are not just applied but enacted: where interpretation and action are fused into what I have come to call interpretaction.
The schmooze is the site of mortal computation—a real-time, situated, resource-dependent process of sensing, adjusting, and negotiating that cannot be fully formalized without killing the living coordination it supports.
3. How the West excluded the schmooze
The Western intellectual tradition has been astonishingly suspicious of this realm. From Plato’s disdain for rhetoric and performance, through Augustine’s distrust of worldly conversation, to the Enlightenment’s ideal of the solitary Reasoner, the preferred model of knowledge and virtue has been the individual standing apart, detached from the noise of human interplay.
Even when modern social science sought to study society, it often did so from above or outside—through statistics, abstractions, or structural laws that drained the immediacy out of human encounter. Political philosophy inherited this habit: society became an aggregation of rational agents or a structure of institutional constraint, never the fluid process of schmooze that actually binds human beings together.
The result is that freedom and discipline have come to appear as mutually exclusive poles. Freedom belongs to the isolated agent, discipline to the imposed system. The possibility that discipline might emerge organically, horizontally—from the shared upkeep of a common world—has been rendered almost unthinkable.
4. The politics that vanished with the schmooze
The exclusion of the schmooze has had profound consequences. It has hollowed out our conception of community, turning it into either a romantic ideal or a bureaucratic abstraction. It has made democratic deliberation seem impossible without procedural machinery, and cooperation seem impossible without command.
When anarchism appears allergic to discipline, or when socialism degenerates into managerialism, both are suffering from the same blindness: they lack a language for the middle dynamics through which coordination naturally occurs when people inhabit a shared world attentively and responsibly.
If we restore the schmooze to view, we begin to see that the maintenance of agreements, the tidying-up, the finishing of tasks when they cease to be fun are not acts of submission but acts of care. They are what living systems do to remain alive. They are not beneath politics; they are its foundation.
5. Toward a politics of the schmooze
To recognize the schmooze is to recognize that the fundamental work of freedom is not rebellion but maintenance: the upkeep of the relational fields that make both rebellion and rest possible.
A politics that honors the schmooze would not fixate on law, nor on individual will, but on the cultivation of the interpretive ecologies that sustain trust, responsiveness, and shared orientation. It would value the slow work of conversational repair, the etiquette of co-presence, the attentiveness that allows differences to coexist without collapse.
This is what we are after in the Communitarium Project: the deliberate reconstruction of the social middle—the living field of mutual interpretive action—through which communities can think, deliberate, and act as wholes without surrendering to hierarchy or fragmentation.
6. Closing reflection
The Western tradition’s law of the excluded schmooze has left us with politics that lurch between individualism and authoritarianism, between expressive chaos and imposed order.
But the schmooze has never ceased to exist. It persists in friendships, in kitchens, in protests, in open-source collaborations, in neighborhood assemblies. It is the real infrastructure of freedom.
To restore the schmooze to philosophical visibility is not to propose a new doctrine but to notice the living medium we already inhabit—and to begin designing our institutions so that they cultivate, rather than suppress, the disciplined freedom it affords.
Perhaps discipline, properly understood, is nothing more than care extended through time—and schmooze, the medium through which that care becomes collective.
#Schmoozalism #TheCommunitariumProject #RedefiningSocialism
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