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I’ve spent the last several months architecting a comprehensive legislative and constitutional package (127 points total) designed to address what I see as the terminal decline of American state capacity and moral coherence.
I am posting this here because I want a "stress test." Most political discussions are about vibes; I want to talk about mechanics.
The Core Pillars:
Institutional Security: Moving oversight to randomly selected Citizen Juries to break the back of the lobbyist/bureaucrat feedback loop.
Economic Anti-Fragility: Forcing a 20% market share cap on corporations to prevent them from becoming "Too Big to Fail" or "Too Big to Regulate."
Axiomatic Anchoring: Grounding the legal system in a Western/Christian moral framework (Life is Sacred) to act as a stable coordination point against value drift.
I used an LLM to help me cross-reference the data and polish the 500+ pages of text, but the architecture and the trade-offs are mine. I’m looking for the "smartest people in the room" to tell me where this breaks.
Note: This post contains unmarked spoilers for Hamnet. For the full experience, read it on Substack.
The Oscars are this evening, not that anyone gives a shit anymore.
The smart money says that, having snagged the equivalent award in the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes, Jessie Buckley is a lock for Best Actress for her starring turn in Chloe Zhao’s period drama Hamnet. I went to see it in the cinema last weekend and can attest that such an accolade would be well-deserved: her performance as Agnes Hathaway1 is an intensely physical (even primal) portrayal of a woman overwhelmed by grief. In a way, the excellent performances from Buckley and Paul Mescal are almost better than the material deserves, elevating a screenplay which struck me as somewhat undeveloped and underwritten. I also think we need a temporary moratorium on Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”, quickly becoming this generation’s “Adagio for Strings” and the go-to soundtrack for movies about mothers grieving the deaths of their children.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, a brief synopsis. William Shakespeare marries Agnes Hathaway, with whom he has three children: a girl named Susanna, and a pair of twins named Hamnet and Judith. William moves to London to pursue his career in the theatre, while the rest of the family stays behind in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of eleven, the already sickly Judith contracts a serious infectious disease which she appears sure to succumb to. Armed with her knowledge of herbal medicines, Agnes makes every effort to treat her illness, while William races home from London. Alas, in a tragic reversal, Judith makes a full recovery, but Hamnet contracts her illness, which proves fatal. Agnes and William are devastated by Hamnet’s death, with Agnes harbouring resentment towards William for his absence. Several years later, William channels his bereavement into his masterpiece, the tragedy of Hamlet. Agnes goes to see it being performed in the Globe theatre, with William portraying the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the title role by an actor who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Hamnet. The sight of what her son might have looked like as a young man has an immense effect on Agnes, and she smiles for the first time since his death. It’s an affecting tribute to the power of art to move and to heal.
Emerging from the cinema and wiping tears from our eyes, I remarked to my girlfriend that, as moderns, it’s difficult for us to comprehend the kind of relationship that people in the sixteenth century had with death. For most of human history, mothers dying in childbirth was a routine occurrence. In modern Western countries, a child dying in infancy is exceptionally rare, but in the sixteenth century, raising children was a numbers game. Parents would have eight or nine children, fully cognisant that half of them would not live to see their fifth birthday. Even in the most underdeveloped countries in the modern world, the infant mortality rate is a fraction of what it was in Europe in the seventeenth century or earlier.
A graph of child mortality over time. I struggle to envision a society in which literally half of all children would die before turning five. Note that this chart only dates back to 1751, over a hundred and fifty years after the setting of Hamnet, in which I can only imagine things were even worse.
In light of this, William and Agnes’s reactions to the death of their son are unavoidably anachronistic: they find his death just as shocking and unexpected as any modern married couple would. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, there’s simply no way that two adults of this socioeconomic status could have three children without understanding that at least one of them likely would not live to adulthood. The film even sort of acknowledges this when William’s mother points out to Agnes that three of William’s siblings died before the age of ten.
My mother once explained to me that, with infant mortality being such a horrendous commonplace in earlier eras, parents would deliberately avoid forming strong emotional bonds with their children until such time as they could be reasonably confident the child would survive to adulthood. Such an attitude might strike us as cold and heartless, but that’s only because we’re fortunate enough to live in a time and place in which infant mortality is an extreme rarity. In the sixteenth century, parents had operate under the assumption that one of their children might die young, and prepared accordingly.2 It’s a defensive strategy not unlike the emotional distance doctors are encouraged to maintain with their patients: a doctor who emotionally fell apart every time one of his patients died simply would not be able to do his job effectively.
A clip from Scrubs in which Dr. Cox explains how important this is.
This got me thinking about attachment theory.
This is a concept in psychology first proposed by the psychiatrist John Bowlby. He theorised that children’s early experiences with their parents (or lack thereof, in the case of orphans or those taken into foster care) are formative, and govern how children will tend to form emotional attachments with others in the future. The three canonical “attachment styles” are:
- Securely attached: Securely attached people feel comfortable in platonic and romantic relationships, expect their romantic partner to meet their emotional needs, and are more than happy to meet their romantic partner’s emotional needs.
- Insecurely attached – anxious: Anxiously attached people often suffer from low self-esteem, require regular reassurance that their romantic partners still like them, and tend to act out and engage in “protest behaviour” if they feel their needs aren’t being met. This is the classic “needy” or “clingy” woman who complains that her boyfriend doesn’t pay enough attention to her.
- Insecurely attached – avoidant: Avoidant people are put off by emotional intimacy and use detachment strategies to distance themselves from their friends and romantic partners. They often have unrealistic ideas about love and romance, fantasize about an “ideal” partner with whom they will feel no qualms about becoming intimate with, and idealize past romantic partners as a means of maintaining distance between themselves and their current partner. When women complain about men being “commitment-phobic” or “emotionally unavailable”, this is who they’re complaining about.
Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s book Attached is a fascinating introduction to the concept. A major limitation is that some of the terms are defined in a rather slippery fashion. Levine and Heller start by assuming, as Bowlby did, that one’s attachment style is largely determined by formative childhood experiences. But elsewhere in the book, they do seem to begrudgingly acknowledge that nurture isn’t the only game in town and that people might be genetically prone to one attachment style over another, and that traits such as sex might influence this. (It isn’t hard to imagine how deliberately keeping one’s sexual partners at an emotional remove might be an evolutionarily beneficial strategy – at least, for the sex which does the impregnating. Genghis Khan certainly didn’t spend much time writing sonnets dedicated to the mothers of his children.) They also recognise that one’s attachment style is not set in stone and that a securely attached person can “rub off” on their insecurely attached partner (or vice versa).
Perhaps attachment style is the wrong term. What I’m really driving at is not so much attachment styles (in the sense of one’s “natural” tendencies for how to act in an intimate relationship) but attachment strategies.
As we saw above, even a naturally friendly and gregarious doctor who thinks fondly of his patients nonetheless knows the importance of maintaining a certain emotional distance from them. If he were to react to a patient’s death in the same way he would if a close friend of his died, he would spend half the year on compassionate leave, rendering him unable to help his surviving patients. Any doctor who doesn’t learn this lesson will eventually be selected out of the talent pool, no longer able to shoulder the emotional burden of coping with the deaths of dozens or hundreds of loved ones. Logically, this implies that emotionally avoidant doctors have a major advantage over their securely attached peers: the latter must learn to suppress their natural predisposition to forming emotional bonds with those around them, while the former do that by default.3
Now think about this concept, not in terms of “survival” in the sense of career progression, but actual, life-or-death survival.
Imagine that you were the parent of several small children, and one of them unexpectedly died before the age of five. In all likelihood, you would be emotionally devastated. You would spend many long hours curled up in bed; your friends and family would likely have to chip in to help caring for your other children; you would probably not work for several months. Such an emotional response would be perfectly appropriate in our modern society, when a small child dying before the age of five is exceptionally rare.
But in a more primitive society like that in which William Shakespeare lived, such a reaction would be completely untenable. The concept of taking compassionate leave to process your grief simply didn’t exist (except for the exceptionally wealthy, who didn’t have to work anyway). Your friends and family likely won’t be in a position to look after your children for you: they’re already working twelve-hour days just to put food on the table for their own children, and two or three additional mouths to feed was no small ask. Like it or not, someone has to till the fields and milk those cows, and that someone will have to be you. A parent who responded to the death of their young child by curling up in bed for months would likely starve.
In light of this, parents had little choice but to maintain an emotional distance with their children, so that they could remain relatively functional if the worst were to befall them. Just as with our doctor example above, this is a situation in which the emotionally avoidant have a competitive advantage: unlike their securely attached peers, avoiding forming emotional bonds with others comes naturally to them. A securely attached parent with a close emotional bond to their young child would likely be so devastated by the loss of that child as to be completely unable to function, thereby selecting themselves out of the gene pool. If attachment styles are innate and subject to genetic predisposition, it’s conceivable that emotional avoidance might even have achieved fixation. When one in four (or even one in two) children die before the age of five, a parent forming emotional bonds with their young children simply isn’t a viable strategy.
In our era, in which infant mortality is rare, the selective pressure on parents to be emotionally avoidant is essentially non-existent, and parents are expected to form strong emotional bonds with their children from a very young age (indeed, the state can even take children into care if their parents are deemed emotionally neglectful: imagine how bizarre that statement would sound to someone in the sixteenth century). Given this, one would logically expect emotionally avoidant behaviour to be rare. After all, there is no society in human history in which the risk of being emotionally devastated by the death of a loved one (including a child) has been lower.
But if anything, the opposite seems to be true. Millennials and Gen Z are having far less sex and far fewer romantic relationships than previous generations. Gen Z are the most sexless generation in human history, with 44% of Gen Z men reporting no dating experience at all during their teen years. Derisive jokes about the “male loneliness crisis” hide the fact that what’s really going on is a human loneliness crisis, with 27% of Gen Z reporting having no close friends at all.
In a society in which death is an omnipresent fact of life, emotionally insulating oneself from those around you is a sound strategy. I truly don’t know what to make of people applying the same strategy in a society in which premature death is practically unheard of.
1Shakespeare’s wife was actually named Anne Hathaway, but the film renames her Agnes to avoid confusion with the actress of the same name (who was herself named after the historical Anne Hathaway).
2This has got me thinking about the concept of psychological trauma, which was traditionally defined as the emotional responses exhibited by people after experiencing distressing events outside the realm of normal human experience (examples including rape, bodily injury, natural disasters etc.). This implies that which events are “traumatic” and which aren’t is a fundamentally statistical matter: an event which might be “outside of the realm of normal human experience” in one society might be common in another. The idea that the death of a minor child would qualify as “traumatic” for a modern married couple, but would not for a married couple in the sixteenth century, sounds a bit weird. But it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. To a greater or lesser extent, all of our emotional responses are shaped by the culture in which we are raised. It’s reasonable to assume that modern parents would feel more emotionally devastated by the death of their child than would parents who grew up in an environment in which children dying was fairly common.
3As entertaining as it was to read, this was one of many major bugbears I had with Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. In one chapter, he points out that the single most important factor determining whether a patient files a medical malpractice suit against their doctor is not whether they believe he is medically culpable for poor patient outcomes (or even criminally negligent), but simply how much they like him: as a rule, patients don’t sue people they like. I don’t doubt that this is true: my disagreement with Gladwell is that he seems to think this is a point in support of his thesis (namely, the importance of relying on intuition and snap judgement), when to me it could not be a greater indictment thereof. My goal in going to the hospital is to get better: I’m not here to make friends, and certainly not to make friends with my doctor. A competent doctor who does everything in his power to help his patient should not get sued just because of his substandard bedside manner. Conversely, an idiotic doctor who kills patients by the boatload should not get off scot-free just because of his winning smile. I’ll take Dr. House over Patch Adams any day, thank you.
If you want to map the trajectory of my medical career, you will need a large piece of paper, a pen, and a high tolerance for Brownian motion. It has been tortuous, albeit not quite to the point of varicosity.
Why, for instance, did I spend several months in 2023 working as a GP at a Qatari visa center in India? Mostly because my girlfriend at the time found a job listing that seemed to pay above market rate, and because I needed money for takeout. I am a simple creature, with even simpler needs: I require shelter, internet access, and enough disposable income to ensure a steady influx of complex carbohydrates and the various types of Vitamin B. For all practical purposes, this means biryani.
Why did a foreign branch of the Qatari immigration department require several doctors? Primarily, to process the enormous number of would-be Indian laborers who wished to take up jobs there. I would say they were 99% of the case load - low-skilled laborers working in construction, as domestic servants, as chauffeurs or truck drivers. There were the odd handful of students, or higher-skilled workers, but so few of them that I could still count them on my fingers even after several hundreds of hours of work.
Our job was to perform a quick medical examination and assess fitness for work. Odd chest sounds or a weird cough? Exclude tuberculosis. Weird rashes or bumps? The absolute last thing Qatari urban planners wanted was an outbreak of chickenpox or fungal infections tearing through a high-density labor dormitory. Could the applicant see and hear well enough to avoid being crushed by heavy machinery, or to avoid crushing others when operating heavy machinery? Were they carrying HIV? It was our job to exclude these possibilities before they got there in the first place. Otherwise, the government wasn't particularly picky - a warm body with mostly functional muscles and ligaments would suffice.
This required less cognitive effort than standard GP or Family Medicine. The causal arrow of the doctor-patient interaction was reversed. These people weren’t coming to us because they were sick and seeking healing; they were coming to us because they needed to prove they weren't sick enough to pose a public health hazard or suffer a catastrophic workplace failure.
We were able to provide some actual medical care. It's been several years, so I don't recall with confidence if the applicants were expected to pay for things, or if some or all of the expense was subsidized. But anti-tubercular meds, antifungal ointments and the like weren't that expensive. Worst case, if we identified something like a hernia, the poorest patients could still report to a government hospital for free treatment.
A rejection on medical grounds wasn't necessarily final. Plenty of applicants returned, after having sought treatment for whatever disqualified them the first time. It wasn't held against them.
While the workload was immense (there were a lot of patients to see, and not much time to see them given our quotas), I did regularly have the opportunity to chat with my patients when work was slow or while I was working on simple documentation. Some of that documentation included the kind of work they intended to do (we'd care more about poor vision for a person who had sought a job as a driver than we would for a sanitation worker), and I was initially quite curious about why they felt the need to become a migrant worker in the first place.
Then there was the fact that public perception in the West had soured on Qatari labor practices in the wake of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Enormous numbers of migrant workers had been brought in to help build stadiums and infrastructure, and many had died.
Exact and reliable numbers are hard to find. The true number of deaths remains deeply contested. The Guardian reported that at least 6,500 South Asian migrant workers died in Qatar since the country was awarded the World Cup in 2010 - many were low-wage migrant workers, and a substantial share worked in construction and other physically demanding sectors exposed to extreme heat. However, this figure is disputed. Critics noted that the 6,500 figure refers to all deaths of migrant workers from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh regardless of cause, and that not all of those deaths were work-related or tied to World Cup projects.
Qatar's official position was far lower. Qatari authorities maintained there were three work-related deaths and 37 non-work-related deaths on World Cup-related projects within the Supreme Committee's scope. But in a striking on-camera admission, Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, told a TV interviewer that there had been "between 400 and 500" migrant worker deaths connected to World Cup preparations over the preceding 12 years. His committee later walked the comment back, claiming it referred to nationwide work-related fatalities across all sectors. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both called even the 400-500 figure a vast undercount.
It is worth pausing here, because the statistics are genuinely confusing in ways that I think matter. The 6,500 figure, as several researchers have noted, covers all-cause mortality for a very large working-age male population over twelve years - a group that would have a non-trivial background death rate even if they stayed home and did nothing dangerous. Some analyses, including ILO-linked work on Nepali migrants, have argued that overall mortality was not obviously higher than among comparable same-age Nepali men, though other research found marked heat-linked cardiovascular mortality among Nepali workers in Qatar. The Nepal report also (correctly) notes that the migrants go through medical screening, and are mostly young men in better health on average. They try to adjust for this, at least for age.
I raise this not to minimize the deaths - dying of heat exhaustion in a foreign country, far from your family, in service of a football tournament, is a genuine tragedy regardless of the comparison group - but because I think precision matters. "Qatar killed 6,500 workers" and "Qatar had elevated occupational mortality in difficult-to-quantify ways" are meaningfully different claims, and conflating them makes it harder to know what we should actually want to change.
I am unsure if there was increased scrutiny on the health of incoming workers to avoid future deaths, or if the work I was doing was already standard. I do not recall any formal or informal pressure from my employers to turn a blind eye to disqualifying conditions - that came from the workers themselves. I will get to that.
I already felt some degree of innate sympathy for the applicants. Were we really that different, them and I?
At that exact moment in my life, I was furiously studying for the exams that would allow me to move to the UK and work in the NHS. We were both engaged in geographic arbitrage. We were both looking at the map of the global economy, identifying zones of massive capital accumulation, and jumping through burning bureaucratic hoops to transport our human capital there to capture the wage premium. Nobody really calls an Indian doctor moving to the UK a "migrant worker," but that is exactly what I am right now. The difference between me and the guy applying to drive forklifts in Doha is quantitative, not qualitative.
I could well understand the reasons why someone might leave their friends and family behind, go to a distant land across an ocean and then work long hours in suboptimal conditions, but I wanted to hear that for myself.
As I expected, the main reason was the incredibly attractive pay. If I'm being honest, the main reason I moved to the UK was the money too. "Incredibly attractive?" I imagine you thinking, perhaps recalling that by First World standards their salary was grossly lacking. To the point of regular accusation that the Qataris and other Middle Eastern petrostates are exploitative, preying on their workers.
First World standards are not Third World standards.
This is where Western intuition about labor often misfires, stumbling into a sort of well-intentioned but suffocating paternalism. The argument generally goes: This job involves intense heat, long hours, and low pay relative to Western minimum wages. Therefore, it is inherently exploitative, and anyone taking it must be a victim of coercion or deception.
This completely ignores the economic principle of revealed preferences: the idea that you can tell what a person actually values by observing what they choose to do under constraint. Western pundits sit in climate-controlled pods and declare that nobody should ever have to work in forty-degree heat for $300 a month. But for someone whose alternative is working in forty-degree heat in Bihar for $30 a month with no social safety net, banning Qatari labor practices doesn't save them. It just destroys their highest expected-value option.
You cannot legislate away grinding poverty and resource constraints.
The economic case for Gulf migration from South Asia is almost embarrassingly strong when you actually look at it. India received roughly $120 billion in remittances in 2023, making it the world's largest recipient, with Gulf states still accounting for a very large share, though the RBI's own survey data show that advanced economies now contribute more than half of India's remittances. For certain origin states - Kerala being the clearest case, alongside Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu - remittance income is not a rounding error in household economics; it is the household economy. The man sending money home from Doha is participating in a system that has done more for South Asian poverty alleviation than most bilateral aid programs combined. This is not a defense of every condition under which that labor is extracted. It is simply a fact that seems consistently underweighted in Western discourse.
Consider the following gentleman: he had shown up seeking to clear the medical examination so that he could carry sacks of concrete under the sweltering heat of a desert sun. Out of curiosity, I asked him why he hadn't looked for work around his place of birth.
He looked at me, quite forlorn, and explained that there was no work to be had there. He hailed from a small village, had no particular educational qualifications, and the kinds of odd jobs and day labor he had once done had dried up long ago. I noted that he had already traveled a distance equivalent to half the breadth of Europe to even show up here on the other end of India in the first place, and can only trust his judgment that he would not have done this without good reason.
Another man comes to mind (it is not a coincidence that the majority of applicants were men). He was a would-be returnee - he had completed a several year tour of duty in Qatar itself, for as long as his visa allowed, and then returned because he was forced to, immediately seeking reassessment so he could head right back. He had worked as a truck driver, and now wanted to become a personal chauffeur instead.
He had been away for several years and had not returned a moment before he was compelled to. He had family: a wife and a young son, as well as elderly parents. All of them relied on him as their primary breadwinner. I asked him if he missed them. Of course he did. But love would not put food on the table. Love would not put his son into a decent school and ensure that he picked up the educational qualifications that would break the cycle. Love would not ensure his elderly and increasingly frail parents would get beyond-basic medical care and not have to till marginal soil at the tiny plot of land they farmed.
But the labor he did out of love and duty would. He told me that he videocalled them every night, and showed me that he kept a picture of his family on his phone. He had a physical copy close at hand, tucked behind the transparent case. It was bleached by the sun to the point of illegibility and half-covered by what I think was a small-denomination Riyal note.
He said this all in an incredibly matter-of-fact way. I felt my eyes tear up, and I looked away so he wouldn't notice. My eyes are already tearing up as I write this passage, the memories no less vivid for the passage of many years. Now, you are at the point where my screen is blurry because of the moisture. Fortunately, I am a digital native, and I can touch-type on a touchscreen reasonably well with my eyes closed nonetheless. Autocorrect and a future editing pass will fix any errors.
(Yes, I do almost all my writing on a phone. I prefer it that way.)
There. Now they're drying up, and I'm slightly embarrassed for being maudlin. I am rarely given to sentiment, and I hope you will forgive me for this momentary lapse.
I asked him how well the job paid. Well enough to be worth it, he told me. He quoted a figure that was not very far from my then monthly salary of INR 76,000 (about $820 today). Whatever he made there, I noted that I had made about the same while working as an actual doctor in India in earlier jobs (as I've said, this gig paid well, better than previous jobs I'd had and many I had later).
He expected a decent bump - personal drivers seemed to be paid slightly better than commercial operators. I do not know if he was being hired by a well-off individual directly or through an agency. Probably the latter, if I had to guess, less hassle that way.
I asked him if he had ever worked similar roles in India. He said he had. He had made a tenth the money, in conditions far worse than what he would face in Qatar. He, like many other people I interviewed, viewed the life you have the luxury of considering inhumane and unpalatable, and deemed it a strict improvement to the status quo. He was eager to be back. He was saddened that his son would continue growing up in his absence, but he was optimistic that the boy would understand why his father did what he had to do.
One of the reasons this struck me so hard then, as it continues to do now, is that my own father had done much the same. I will beat myself with a rusty stick before I claim he was an absentee dad, but he was busy, only able to give his kids less time than he would have liked because he was busy working himself ragged to ensure our material prosperity. I love him, and hope this man's son - now probably in middle school - will also understand. I do not have to go back more than a single generation before hitting ancestors who were also rural peasants, albeit with more and better land than could be found in an impoverished corner of Bihar.
By moving to the Middle East, he was engaged in arbitrage that allowed him to make a salary comparable to the doctor seeing him in India. I look at how much more I make after working in the NHS and see a similar bump.
I just have the luxury of capturing my wage premium inside a climate-controlled hospital, sleeping in a comfortable bed, and making enough money to fly home on holidays. I try to be grateful for the privilege. I try to give the hedonic treadmill a good kick when it has the temerity to make me feel too bad for myself.
There are many other reasons that people decry the Kafala system other than the perceived poor pay and working conditions. The illegal seizure of passports, employer permission required to switch jobs, accusations of physical abuse and violence are all well-documented, though the link to the 2020 Reuters article claims the system was overhauled and “effectively dismantled”.
I make no firm claims on actual frequency; I have seen nothing with my own two eyes. Nor do I want to exonerate the Qatari government from all accusation. What I will say is that "exploitation" is a word with a definition, and that definition requires something more than "a transaction that takes place under conditions of inequality." If we define exploitation as taking unfair advantage of vulnerability, we need a story about how the worker is made worse off relative to the alternative - and the workers I spoke with, consistently and across months, told me the opposite story. They are not passive victims of false consciousness. They are adults making difficult tradeoffs under difficult constraints, the same tradeoffs that educated Westerners make constantly but with much less margin for error and no safety net.
The people who know best still queued up for hours in the hopes of returning, and I am willing to respect them as rational actors following their incentives. I will not dictate to them what labor conditions they are allowed to consider acceptable while sitting on a comfy armchair.
I do not recall ever outright rejecting an applicant for a cause that couldn't be fixed, but even the occasional instances where I had to turn them away and ask them to come back after treatment hurt. Both of us - there was often bargaining and disappointment that cut me to the bone. I do not enjoy making people sad, even if my job occasionally demands that of me. I regret making them spend even more of their very limited money and time on followups and significant travel expenses, even if I was duty-bound to do so on occasion. We quit that job soon; you might find it ironic that we did so because of poor working conditions and not moral indignation or bad pay. I do, though said irony only strikes me now, in retrospect.
Returning to the man I spoke about, I found nothing of concern, and I would have been willing to look the other way for anything that did not threaten to end his life or immediately terminate his employment. I stamped the necessary seals on his digital application form, accepted his profuse thanks, and wished him well. I meant it. I continue meaning it.
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