The Inheritance Trap

There's a move institutions make when they're losing an argument. You've seen it. The organization is underperforming, the criticism is mounting, and someone reaches for the founding documents.

We were established to serve the public interest. Our constitution guarantees these rights. This company was built on innovation.

The implicit claim: because we were created with good intent, our current performance inherits that legitimacy. The origin story becomes a shield against present-tense questions.

This is a category error with a name: the originating/joining confusion. Once you see it, the pattern becomes visible everywhere.

Two Kinds of Consent

Political philosophers distinguish between two ways people come to be bound by institutions.

Originating consent is what happens at founding. A group of people create something new—a government, a company, a community—and agree to its terms. They shaped it. They chose it. Their consent is direct and participatory.

Joining consent is what happens after. Everyone who comes later didn't create the institution; they inherited it. Their relationship to it is fundamentally different. They're evaluating a going concern, not architecting from scratch.

Here's the problem: institutions conflate these constantly. They invoke the legitimacy of originating consent (the founders agreed!) to deflect questions about joining consent (should we still agree?).

"We were created to do X" doesn't answer "are you doing X well now?"

Why This Happens

Origins feel real in a way that ongoing performance doesn't. A founding moment is concrete—there's a document, a story, a date. Current performance is diffuse, harder to evaluate, subject to interpretation.

There's also something psychologically protective about the originating frame. If legitimacy was established once and inherited forward, then no one currently in the institution bears responsibility for re-earning it. The founders did the hard work. We're just... continuing.

This is comfortable. It's also incoherent.

Legitimacy isn't a substance you acquire at founding and then possess forever, like a deed to property. It's a relationship—one that requires ongoing maintenance. More like a marriage than an inheritance. The wedding doesn't guarantee the marriage is working thirty years later.

Institutions that forget this are genuinely confused when people stop granting them authority. But we were established to serve the public interest! Yes. Are you? Now? That's not a question the charter can answer.

The Pattern in History

The American Revolution was, at its core, a joining-consent crisis—and examining it closely reveals the structure of every legitimacy dispute that followed.

The colonists weren't disputing England's original authority to govern. Parliament's power had coherent origins in English constitutional history. The Crown's claim over the colonies traced back through charters, settlements, legal frameworks that the colonists themselves had operated within for generations. No one was arguing that the whole arrangement was illegitimate from the start.

They were arguing that current performance had voided the relationship.

The Declaration of Independence is essentially a joining-consent document. Read it again with this lens: it spends remarkably little time on abstract philosophy. The bulk of the text is a list of present-tense grievances. He has refused. He has forbidden. He has dissolved. He has obstructed. These are not claims about 1607 or 1688. They're claims about now.

The Crown's response was predictably originating-consent: appeals to tradition, to legal precedent, to the established order that had governed for over a century. This is how it's always worked. These are the terms you agreed to. The system is legitimate.

They weren't even having the same argument. One side was asking "does this relationship still work?" The other side kept answering "this relationship was properly established."

This is why legitimacy crises feel so intractable. The parties aren't disagreeing about the same question. They're talking past each other—one pointing backward to founding, one pointing at present dysfunction. Until someone names the confusion, resolution is nearly impossible.

The Diagnostic

When you encounter an institution defending itself, listen for the tense.

Are they answering present-tense questions—how are you performing, what outcomes are you creating, who are you serving—with past-tense claims about founding, tradition, original intent?

That's the tell. They're conflating originating and joining consent. They're treating legitimacy as inherited rather than maintained.

This doesn't automatically mean they're wrong or that the institution should be dissolved. It means they're not actually addressing the question. The founding documents might be beautiful. The origin story might be inspiring. None of that is evidence about current performance.

The honest response to a joining-consent question is a joining-consent answer: here's what we're doing now, here's who we're serving, here's how we're performing against our stated purpose. Not "here's who we were when we started."

The Inversion

Intellectual honesty requires noting that this pattern cuts both ways—and critics can make the same category error in reverse.

Sometimes critics attack institutions at the level of originating consent when the actual problem is joining consent. The founders were flawed, therefore the institution is illegitimate. This is its own confusion—using origin stories to delegitimize current performance that might actually be working.

An institution with a troubled founding can still be performing well now. An institution with a noble founding can still be failing its current constituents. Origins don't determine outcomes in either direction.

The diagnostic applies equally: What kind of question is being asked? What kind of answer is being given? Are they the same category?

What to Carry Forward

Every institution you're embedded in—every government, company, community, tradition—has an origin story. Some of those stories are genuinely noble. Many of them are doing real work: providing meaning, creating continuity, building shared purpose.

But none of them answer the present-tense question.

Legitimacy isn't inherited. It's renewed—or it isn't. The founders can't do that work for you. Neither can the documents they left behind.

When something feels off about an institution, and defenders keep pointing you backward to founding moments, you now have language for what's happening. They're answering a joining-consent question with an originating-consent claim.

The question still stands.