Esteemed Colleagues, Honourable Representatives,

I write to you with a simple question. The answer may determine whether our civilization survives this century in a condition worthy of the name.

Is a human being a corporation?

The answer is obviously no. A human being is a living, breathing, self-aware processing system—a node in a web of constitutive relationships, born with the capacity for reason, emotion, and self-governance. A corporation is a legal fiction, a piece of paper, an artificial entity created by statute for the purpose of limiting liability and pooling capital. They are not the same thing. No reasonable person would confuse them.

And yet.

We have built a society whose entire legal, economic, and political architecture rests on precisely this confusion. Under the doctrine of corporate personhood—and its darker twin, the treatment of human beings as legal fictions under statutory law—we have created a system that grants artificial entities the rights of persons while reducing actual persons to the status of chattel. We have structured our world as though the fiction were real and the real were fiction. This is not hyperbole. It is a description of the legal and economic order within which every one of us now lives.

I am writing to tell you that this situation is not merely unjust. It is a primary driver of the global mental health crisis. And I am writing to propose three specific reforms that would begin to reverse it.

The Modern Delusion

Let me state the matter plainly. A society that cannot distinguish between a human being and a legal fiction is a society in the grip of delusion. And delusion, when it becomes structural—when it is baked into law, economics, and governance—does not remain abstract. It shapes minds. It trains human beings to perceive reality incorrectly. It teaches them, implicitly and explicitly, that the measure of a good life is not flourishing, connection, or contribution, but compliance, consumption, and legal status.

The consequences are visible everywhere.

We are experiencing an epidemic of mental illness—depression, anxiety, addiction, despair—that touches every community and every family. The standard response is to treat this as an individual problem: more therapists, more medication, more wellness apps. These have their place. But they cannot address the structural cause. You cannot cultivate mental health in a population that the law treats as property. You cannot teach self-governance to people whose governance has been outsourced to external structures they cannot influence. You cannot heal minds that are daily shaped by a system designed to exploit their attention, manipulate their emotions, and extract value from their relationships.

The crisis is not only individual. It is civilizational. And it has a root cause: the trinity of governance—Law, Economics, and Politics—has been usurped, externalized, and turned into instruments of control rather than tools of human flourishing.

The Trinity of Governance, Externalized

To understand what has been lost, we must understand what self-governance requires.

Law is the compass and the fence. It is the measure of what is good—a standard that allows individuals to evaluate their own thoughts, emotions, and actions. Morally, it points toward an ideal: actions that promote cooperative integration, that minimize harm, that sustain the nested wholes—families, communities, ecosystems—upon which all flourishing depends. Legally, it provides the minimum standard: a fence that, when crossed, triggers consequences to protect the whole. In a healthy society, the legal system exists to secure the natural rights of human beings—life, liberty, and rightfully held property—not to grant them as privileges that can be revoked.

But when the law treats human beings as statutory fictions—as “persons” whose rights are not inherent but granted by the state—the relationship is inverted. The state becomes the master. The human becomes the subject. The fence becomes a cage. This is the structural reality of modern legal systems that have adopted the logic of corporate personhood. The human being, under this logic, is not sovereign. The human being is chattel.

Economics is the management of relationships. The original Greek oikonomia means “management of the household.” True economics concerns all the relationships that constitute a life: with oneself, with others, with community, with the living world. A mentally healthy human being manages these relationships in ways that are, on balance, attractive—driven by love, benevolence, creativity, and peace—while retaining the capacity to respond appropriately to repulsive experiences like fear, grief, and anger. Health is relational health.

But modern economics has been reduced to a single dimension: monetary exchange. We have built an entire discipline—and an entire society—around the management of one kind of relationship, while systematically neglecting all the others. The result is a social delusion: we are trained to value what can be priced, and to price what cannot be valued. Relationships become transactions. Communities become markets. Human beings become human capital. This is not economics. It is a parody of economics, and it is training our children to manage their lives poorly.

Politics is the act of governance itself. Not elections. Not parties. Politics, properly understood, is wisdom in action—the capacity of the charioteer to hold the reins and direct the horses. In the ancient analogy, the body is the chariot, the emotions are the horses, the thoughts are the reins, and wisdom is the charioteer. Personal politics is the daily practice of governing one’s own mind: observing thoughts, regulating emotions, choosing actions aligned with what is genuinely good. Without this capacity, an individual is at the mercy of every passing impulse, every manipulation, every advertisement, every outrage algorithm.

But in the modern world, politics has been entirely externalized. We have been taught that politics is something that happens in parliaments and capitals, conducted by professional representatives on our behalf. The result is a population that has forgotten how to govern itself—and that is therefore easily governed by others. A person who cannot manage their own mind will be managed. A population that cannot exercise sovereignty over its own attention, emotions, and decisions will be ruled by those who can capture those things for profit.

The Plantation, Evolved

The pattern is not accidental. It is the result of a system that concentrates power by externalizing governance from individuals and placing it within structures that are manipulable by those with sufficient resources to manipulate them.

Consider the feedback loop. Within the current system, the primary way to accumulate money is through exploitation—extracting more value from relationships (with workers, consumers, communities, ecosystems) than one replenishes. The more one exploits, the more money one accumulates. The more money one accumulates, the more one can influence the legal, economic, and political structures that govern society. The more one influences those structures, the easier exploitation becomes. This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural inevitability of a system in which human beings and corporations are treated as equivalent entities before the law.

The plantation did not disappear. It evolved. The slave master no longer owns the individual human body outright. Instead, the state owns the legal fiction attached to that body, and the individual—confused about their own status, educated to comply, economically constrained, psychologically managed—behaves as expected. The relationship of subjugation remains. Only the paperwork has changed.

This is not a metaphor. It is a structural description of the legal order that governs modern life. And it is incompatible with mental health, because mental health is self-governance, and self-governance requires sovereignty.

What Is to Be Done: Three Reforms

The framework I have developed—grounded in the Systemic Alignment Theory of Human Flourishing and presented in full in “The Way of Self-Governance: A Handbook for Mental Health” and its theoretic foundational paper, “What Mental Health Is”—provides a clear, falsifiable, and philosophically rigorous account of what mental health consists in and what conditions produce it. That framework points directly toward the reforms that are necessary.

I am not asking for incremental adjustments. I am asking for a reorientation of society toward reality. If we are serious about mental health—if we genuinely want to reduce the suffering of hundreds of millions of people and build a civilization capable of flourishing—then we must address the structural delusions that make mental health impossible.

I propose three starting points.

1. Education Reform: Make Self-Governance a Foundational Literacy

We teach children to read, write, and calculate. We do not teach them how to govern the instrument that will determine the quality of their entire lives: their own mind.

This must change. Mental health literacy and the principles of self-governance must be treated as fundamental to human development as literacy and numeracy. A core curriculum should include:

– Understanding the mind: teaching children how their thoughts, emotions, and behaviours interact—the feedback loop of consciousness, the mechanism of emotional capture, the plasticity of the self.

– A universal moral compass: grounding students in an objective, discussable framework of what is good—minimizing harm, ensuring fairness, honouring dignity, and promoting the cooperative integration upon which all flourishing depends.

– The Trinity of Governance: explaining the interlinked roles of Law (the measure of quality), Economics (the management of relationships), and Politics (the act of governing) as they apply to both the individual and society.

This knowledge is not a luxury. It is the essential software required for a human being to navigate the complexities of existence without being captured by every passing impulse, manipulation, or ideology. A population educated in self-governance is a population that cannot be easily exploited—which is precisely why this education has been neglected.

2. Correctional Reform: Rehabilitate Through Empowerment, Not Punishment Alone

If a deficit in self-governance is a primary driver of harmful behaviour—and the evidence strongly suggests it is—then the cultivation of self-governance must be the core of rehabilitation.

Our prisons should become true correctional facilities. This means:

– Mandatory education programs in mental health, emotional regulation, and the principles of self-governance.

– Treating incarceration as a period of necessary development, not merely punishment—a time to acquire the skills that were missing.

– Making demonstrated literacy in these principles a condition for release. A person who does not understand how to govern their own mind and make good decisions is a risk waiting to re-offend. True public safety is achieved by creating healthy, self-governing individuals.

This is not softness. It is the hardest, most practical response to crime: ensuring that those who have harmed others develop the capacity never to do so again. Punishment alone does not achieve this. It never has.

3. Legal Reform: End the Legal Fiction that Subjugates Humanity

This is the most fundamental reform, and the one from which the others derive their urgency.

The current system rests on a legal fiction: that a human being and the state-created legal entity (the named “person” on a birth certificate, the corporate entity, the statutory construct) are equivalent before the law. This fiction has roots in the post-slavery era’s invention of corporate personhood and the subsequent extension of statutory, admiralty-law frameworks to human beings.

The consequence is straightforward and devastating. Under this system:

– Natural Law holds that humans are born sovereign, with inherent, inalienable rights to life, liberty, and rightfully held property. The state’s role is to secure these rights—to protect them, not to grant them.

– Statutory Law treats rights as privileges granted by the state, which can be amended, regulated, or revoked. Your freedom becomes contingent on compliance with countless statutes, licenses, and codes that you did not create and cannot meaningfully influence.

When human beings are legally equivalent to corporate entities, the state becomes the master and the human becomes the subject. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a description of the legal architecture within which modern life is conducted. And it is incompatible with mental health, because you cannot cultivate self-governance in a population that the law treats as governed property.

We must legally separate human beings from corporations. Human beings are living systems with inherent rights. Corporations are legal fictions with granted privileges. These categories must not be confused. The rights of human beings must be recognized as inherent, not granted. The current legal system may remain with its function of managing the privileges of artificial persons, but only with the creation of a Natural Law-based system for managing the fence for living (human) beings who fail to govern their own self in accordance with what is objectively good for humanity.

A Standard for What Is Good

I am not asking you to accept these proposals on faith or authority. The framework that supports them—the Systemic Alignment Theory—provides a clear, objective, and discussable standard for what is good. It is grounded in the observable structure of reality: the pattern, visible from quantum physics to human societies, in which cooperative integration builds and sustains organized complexity. Good is that which promotes, maintains, or generates cooperative relationships that form greater integrative wholes. Bad is that which degrades them.

This standard is not arbitrary. It is not culturally relative. It is not imposed by power. It is discovered by observing how reality actually operates. And it applies across all scales—from the integrity of the individual mind to the health of families, communities, and ecosystems.

I invite you to examine this framework. Critique it. Test it. Propose a better one if you can. But if no better standard can be found—if this account of what is good is the most robust available—then the question becomes: why would we not adopt it as the foundation for our social architecture?

A Closing Invitation

I have spent twenty years as a cognitive psychologist examining the nature of mental health from every angle I could find. The results of that work are available freely on my website. They include a practical handbook for individual self-governance and a rigorous philosophical paper establishing the theoretical foundations. I offer them not as final answers but as a starting point for the conversation we urgently need to have.

The crises we face—ecological, psychological, social, political—are not separate. They are expressions of a single underlying problem: a civilization that has lost touch with reality, that has substituted legal fictions for living persons, monetary relationships for human ones, and external control for internal governance.

We can do better. We have the knowledge. We have the framework. What we need is the will to act.

I ask for your engagement, your critique, and your support. The reforms proposed here—education in self-governance, rehabilitation over punishment, and the legal separation of human beings from corporate entities—are a starting point. They are not the whole solution. But they are the foundation upon which a saner, more flourishing society can be built.

The way is open. The will is ours to develop.

Respectfully,

Luke Benton 

Founder, HumanityUnlocked.com 

Author, “The Way of Self-Governance: A Handbook for Mental Health”

Author, “What Mental Health Is: Integration, Teleology, and the Normative Foundations of Psychiatry”