Reactivity Has Become Incentivized

Guest Opinion by Alicia Boothe Haggermaker

We keep saying we want sovereignty.

Then we say we’re waiting for someone with $10 million and a face.

Those two ideas are not coherent.

If concentrated power is the problem, centralizing hope cannot be the solution.

If we believe institutions, corporations, or entrenched political structures dominate outcomes, why would we reinforce that same architecture by waiting for another centralized figure to rescue us?

Waiting for a wealthy face feels safer.

Because if it fails, there’s someone to blame.

A name.
A target.
A scapegoat.

But sovereignty cannot be outsourced — and it does not come with a scapegoat.

It cannot be injected.
It cannot be funded into existence.
It cannot be centralized and redistributed later.

It must be practiced.

Practiced in how we build.
Practiced in how we coordinate.
Practiced in how we distribute risk instead of concentrating it.

Dependency looks for a face.

Sovereignty builds capacity.

The Incentive Problem

Alabama is not lacking participation.

People are working.
Building.
Organizing.
Paying attention.

The problem is not apathy.

The problem is incentives.

Our political ecosystem rewards reactivity.

Outrage travels faster than coordination.
Tribal loyalty spreads faster than structural reform.
Short-term wins are rewarded over long-term resilience.

When reactivity becomes incentivized, culture becomes reactive.

Crisis to crisis.
Bill to bill.
Headline to headline.

We rarely pause long enough to examine consequences before scaling the next idea.

Intent doesn’t fix that.

Infrastructure does.

Leaders change.
Parties change.
Narratives change.

Infrastructure persists.

If the underlying structure rewards extraction, extraction continues.
If it rewards consolidation, consolidation persists.
If it rewards speed over governance, instability compounds.

Good intentions cannot overcome misaligned architecture.

We Are Balancing Wings. We Are Not Navigating.

We often frame politics as two wings of the same bird.

But a bird that only obsesses over balancing its two wings will not make it far.

Flight is not just about symmetry.

It is about direction.

If all we do is argue over which wing is stronger, more loyal, or more principled, we drift.

And drift, over time, becomes decline.

While we argue over party loyalty, infrastructure shifts beneath us.

Incentives realign.
Economic flows concentrate.
Trust erodes.

We are balancing.

We are not navigating.

Sovereignty is navigation.

Party vs People

Recently, controversy erupted over someone being recorded saying they didn’t care about the party.

The reaction missed the deeper point.

We should not give our loyalty to a party over the people.

If integrity is real, it is anchored in service — not apparatus.
If leadership is real, it prioritizes citizens — not branding.

The issue is not what someone said about the party.

The issue is whether governance is aligned with the people.

Party loyalty cannot be the compass.

People must be.

When party allegiance replaces civic accountability, we drift.

What Sovereignty Actually Looks Like

No village in history survived because one family carried it.

Villages survive because skills are distributed, risk is shared, participation is expected, and coordination is constant.

No bailout creates that.

Only practice does.

We do not need a millionaire with a microphone.

We need distributed capacity.

One node is easy to isolate.

One leader is easy to scapegoat.

One reform is easy to undermine.

But coordinated regions, shared standards, transparent feedback loops, and local production networks are harder to collapse.

More nodes does not mean chaos.

It means resilience.

Reactivity has become incentivized.

Sovereignty must become practiced.

It will not be granted, bailed out, or declared from a podium. It will grow quietly — where responsibility replaces blame, structure replaces spectacle, and communities choose navigation over reaction.

That work is slower.

But it lasts.

Full Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/haggermaker/p/reactivity-has-become-incentivized?r=2oy210&showWelcomeOnShare=true 

Alicia Boothe Haggermaker is a lifelong resident of Huntsville, Alabama, and a dedicated advocate for health freedom. For more than a decade, she has worked to educate the public and policymakers on issues of medical choice and public transparency. In January 2020, she organized a delegation of physicians and health freedom advocates to Montgomery, contributing to the initial draft of legislation that became SB267.

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