With Max Borders

Course begins Sunday, April 12th 2026

The Meaning of America

Introduction

250 years on, what does America mean? The question is too big to answer. It’s like counting stars or measuring the weight of a dream. Yet it is precisely the question we must ask and answer—especially now, as the American experiment teeters.

America is many things: an ideal and its betrayal, a promise and its breaking, a beacon and a shadow. To understand what America means is to hold such contradictions simultaneously—to resist the temptation of either cheerleading or cynicism. To reckon with this indispensable nation, we must try to see it in its totality.

This course approaches that question through four essential lenses, each revealing a different dimension of America’s meaning.

Start date: Sunday, April 12th 2026

Time: 7:00pm CET (Paris) · 1:00pm EST (New York) · 10:00am PST (Los Angeles)

Price:

Top Tier - €250 – VIP summit: Includes two e-books from the author
Second Tier - €200 – Live Experience + Video Recordings
Third Tier - €100 – Video Recordings

4 Weekly Live Zoom Classes/Digital Campfires (2 hours each)

The Question

To ask "What does America mean?" is ultimately to ask a more timeless question: How are we to live? If there is one answer, there are a thousand. We dream, build, fail, succeed, and dream again—to rise, to fall, then perhaps to rise again.

This course offers no easy answers or partisan narratives. Instead, it invites you to grapple with America's strangeness and contradictions: its breathtaking achievements and its devastating failures, its capacity to self-correct and its propensity for self-destruction. Just when you think the Dream is dead, Americans still dare to dream.

The American Project hangs by the slenderest of threads. Whether those threads hold, fray, or snap—or are rewoven into something entirely new—the story is still being written. And, like it or not, we’re all writing it.

Class 1 – The Ideal

Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, April 12th 2026 :700pm CET (Paris) · 1:00pm EST (New York) · 10:00am PST (Los Angeles)

This is what America aspires to be—a revolutionary experiment in ordered liberty. Here we find the nation's foundational ideals: religious pluralism born from religious conflict, the Lockean trinity of life, liberty, and property enshrined in the Declaration, and a restless pioneer spirit.

Later, Americans grasped for two different Dreams—material prosperity and moral equality. This is also the America that invited the world's "huddled masses" and promised that free people, freely associating, could govern themselves. We must ask whether it is still the America that, at its best, expands the circle of dignity and opportunity generation by generation.

But ideals alone cannot tell the full story.

Class 2 – The Shadow

Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, April 19th 2026 :700pm CET (Paris) · 1:00pm EST (New York) · 10:00am PST (Los Angeles)

The Shadow forces us to reckon with the chasm between America’s aspirations and her harsh realities. The four original sins—the destruction of Native peoples, the institution of slavery, the systematic oppression of women, and the eugenics movement—were not aberrations but central features of American development.

Then, from Puritan moral rigidity to Prohibition's failed crusades, from Tuskegee to frontal lobotomies, and from the therapeutic state to political assassinations, we confront those who have repeatedly inflicted cruelty in the name of progress.

Today, her legacy manifests in fractured politics, digital isolation, and the paradox of tolerance: Can a free society survive those committed to destroying freedom and order? A low-grade civil war threatens to burn out of control.

Of course, America's meaning cannot be contained within its borders.

Class 3 – The Empire

Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, April 26th 2026 :700pm CET (Paris) · 1:00pm EST (New York) · 10:00am PST (Los Angeles)

Here we trace how a continental republic became a global hegemon—often against its own stated principles. From westward expansion to Theodore Roosevelt's "big stick," from World War II to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, America accumulated power it has never been quite sure how to wield.

The dollar as reserve currency, covert operations, regime change, nuclear deterrence, hundreds of military bases spanning the globe—these made America into part World Constable, part global mafia, for better and worse.

Now, as that empire shows signs of overextension and decline, we must ask: What was the price of this power, and who must pay it?

Class 4 - The Future

Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, May 3rd, 2026 :700pm CET (Paris) · 1:00pm EST (New York) · 10:00am PST (Los Angeles)

In our final section, we confront what America is becoming. Multiple crises threaten: Institutional corruption, demographic transformation, and the ongoing tension between freedom and order persist today. As we sense that something decisive approaches, we must prepare to read the signs and prepare before getting caught unawares.

Will there be a peaceful breakup or civil war? Will the unaccountable masters of the economy make the impossible choice between default and hyperinflation? These are not abstract scenarios but looming inevitabilities. Yet the future also holds transformative potential: decentralized technologies, artificial intelligence, and their convergence as "universal acids" that will dissolve old systems and create new ones.

Can Americans adapt, renew, and reimagine themselves—or will the experiment come to a terrible end?

Max Borders

Max is the author of The Social Singularity (2018) and The Decentralist (2021). His most recent book is called Underthrow, which is also the title of his popular Substack and show. Max is also the director of Human Respect Labs, an incubator dedicated to supporting projects with liberatory promise in creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. His latest project is a brotherhood called Chrysalis: The Art of Becoming (becoming soon).