As discussed in the chapter on origins of Disenchantment, the move toward rational, abstract governance was a necessary safety mechanism - a "flight from fanaticism" that built a more stable, predictable world. However, this stability came with a trade-off: it sidelined the very mechanisms that make us moral agents. It created a gap between the scale of our problems and the biology and intuition that allows us to care about them [1]. The architecture of the modern parliamentary institutions faces a challenge of structure rather than will; we are attempting to navigate the hyper-complexity of the twenty-first century by inadvertently filtering out the evolved capacity for empathy and embodied reasoning that defines our species.
To understand the limitations of modern parliamentary representation, we can look to the evolutionary history of leadership. As explored in earlier historical chapters, early human societies relied on high-fidelity, face-to-face feedback loops. The "Tribal Council" was more than a political meeting; it functioned as a sensory environment where every participant shared the same physical reality - the same weather, the same hunger, the same land. This shared context allowed for what we might call a "sentimental empiricism” - a way of knowing the world that integrated data with felt experience [2].
The modern parliament attempts to scale this dynamic to the nation-state, but often strips away the physical context that made it effective. Without the shared sensory environment, we are left with the procedural form of the council but lose its "metis"—the practical, embodied wisdom. This disconnect can trigger a reversion to the "Big Man" instinct: a desire for a singular, decisive figure who promises to cut through complexity, a phenomenon that is less an ideological shift than a biological reflex for legibility in an illegible world [3].
As governance scales, a "cognitive gap" opens between the center and the periphery. To manage a nation, the state must make it "legible" through abstraction - simplifying complex social realities into data, as noted in James C. Scott's work. While necessary for the society to function at scale, this process privileges techne (formal, codified knowledge) over metis (context-specific, embodied wisdom) [4].
The challenge of the modern state is that it often suppresses metis in favor of "paper realities". It is a system that excels at the "rational safety", but struggles with the messy, organic reality of human life. The Parliament of Enacting is proposed not as a rejection of this rational order, but as an architectural intervention to re-anchor it. It seeks to restore the layer of intuitive direct experience by reintegrating the experiential feedback loops that ancient narrative systems once provided, adapting them for a post-scarcity, high-complexity era.
If the fundamental flaw of abstract governance is the decoupling of the map from the territory - the techne from the metis-then the solution is to re-anchor data in experience rather than abandoning it. Rather than positioning "reason" as the enemy of "intuition," this approach integrates them.
The traditional legislative ideal imagines the policymaker as a dispassionate observer, a "blank slate" who weighs evidence without the "contamination" of emotion or bias. This model, rooted in a nineteenth-century model of scientific objectivity, is a necessary but insufficient baseline. Human beings are not calculation machines; we are biological organisms that think with our nervous systems, our hormones, and our evolutionary adaptations/biases.
The philosophy of “Sentimental Empiricism” challenges this arid view of political rationality. Consider a doctor diagnosing a patient: while blood tests (data) provide one layer of truth, the patient’s description of their pain (felt experience) provides another. A diagnosis that ignores the latter is incomplete. Similarly, Sentimental Empiricism asserts that true fidelity to the Scientific Method requires us to expand the range of admissible data. Emerging from the analysis of embodied cognition and phenomenology, it argues that our sensory and emotional engagement with the world is not a distortion of truth, but the primary medium through which we access it [5]. In this view, a "feeling" is not a whimsical lapse in rigor; it is an empirical data point. It is a "disposition" toward the world that reveals the "intermedial" connections between things.
To be objective, the legislator must not detach themselves from the subject; they must "attune" themselves to it. They must be capable of "taking in this life as movement," perceiving the shifting interactions of lived friction and human consequence that static data misses. Objectivity, therefore, is the capacity to align the statistical reality - the techne) with the felt reality - the metis). It is the triangulation between multiple, distinct modes of knowing. The legislator's task is not to validate every personal prejudice, but to trace the emotional signal back to its root-separating the biological reflex from the structural reality.
The neuropsychological validation for this experiential approach is found in the rehabilitation of the concept of intuition. For decades, the dominant model of rational choice disparaged intuition as "System 1" thinking-fast, emotional, and prone to bias - while elevating "System 2" thinking - slow, deliberative, and logical. However, research into "naturalistic decision making" has rehabilitated intuition as expert intuition.
Studies of firefighters, military commanders, and emergency responders reveal that in high-stakes environments, experts do not make decisions by comparing options in a spreadsheet. Instead, they rely on recognition-primed decision making (RPD) [6]. They scan the environment, recognize a pattern based on a vast library of past experiences, and intuitively run a mental simulation of the most likely solution. If the simulation “feels” right, they act. This “gut check” is not a guess; it is a sophisticated, rapid-fire synthesis of thousands of data points that the conscious mind is too slow to process.
The Parliament of Enacting seeks to enable legislators to use this same “strategic intuition” regarding policy. In this model, the “gut feeling” serves as an early warning system. If a legislator, immersed in a simulation, feels a sense of cognitive dissonance about a policy that the data says should work, this is treated as a valid signal. It suggests that the model is missing a variable—perhaps a cultural norm, a psychological reaction, or a local constraint—that the human nervous system has detected. This allows for a collaborative workflow where human intuition and machine logic function as interdependent partners, achieving a state of systemic cognition. Intelligence is not located in any single brain, but emerges from the interaction between the representatives, the artifacts they use, and the simulations they inhabit [7].
The Parliament of Enacting is proposed here not as a rigid blueprint, but as a speculative institutional architecture—a thought experiment in how we might bridge the gap between the enclave economy and the State. This architecture requires a new kind of operator: not just a legal drafter, but an "Experiential Representative" trained in simulation and empathy. It also requires a formal and operational distinction between the “Framework” of governance and the “Ethos” of culture.