Sequel to RAJEE vs IAM: The Petty Life of Secrets
Write as a witty dialogue where Schmitt pitches Arendt and Montesquieu on IAM vs RAJ as a metaphor for humane governance.
ChatGPT Prompt
Start with the story of an exhausted king who had to judge every petition of the land he had pacified.
Prologue: The Exhausted King
Narrator:
Once there was a king who had pacified the land. Roads were safe. Trade flourished. The borders held.
And yet the king was exhausted.
For every petition—large or small—came to him.
A farmer wished to draw water.
A merchant wished to open a gate.
A soldier wished to move a cart.
Each act required judgment.
Each judgment required presence.
Each presence required the king.
The kingdom was secure.
The king was finished.
Act I: The Diagnosis
Carl Schmitt:
You see the problem immediately. Sovereignty everywhere is sovereignty nowhere.
Montesquieu:
A ruler who must decide every act has confused law with execution. There is no constitution here—only vigilance.
Hannah Arendt:
And authority that must constantly intervene has already lost its legitimacy. Authority, properly understood, does not require continuous force.
Schmitt:
Precisely. This king ruled directly. He judged every petition. He collapsed authority and power into the same motion.
Act II: The Original Sin
Montesquieu:
So the failure was centralization?
Schmitt:
No. Centralization was necessary. The land was vast; the blast radius was total.
The sin was subtler.
The king collapsed three distinct questions into one act:
- who may act,
- who may authorize,
- and what was authorized.
Every footstep became a trial.
Arendt:
Law as a permanent emergency. That is not governance; that is fear.
Act III: The Turn
Schmitt:
Now imagine the king does something radical.
He stops judging acts.
Montesquieu:
Abdication?
Schmitt:
No. Constitution.
He becomes not a king, but a maharaja—one who rules over rulers.
Act IV: The New Order (Defined Precisely)
Schmitt:
Let us be exact. The maharaja governs three things only.
A) Citizenship — Who may act
Citizenship defines who is recognized as a subject at all.
Identity. Standing. Belonging.
Without citizenship, no action is even intelligible to the law.
B) Officers (RAJA) — Who may authorize others to act
The maharaja appoints officers, called RAJAs.
A RAJA is not a governor of outcomes.
A RAJA is an officer of authority.
Their mandate is narrow and explicit:
- to evaluate a declared intent,
- under the law as written,
- and, if lawful, to notarize authority.
They do not act.
They do not enforce.
They legitimate.
C) Notarization (RAJ) — What was agreed
What the RAJA produces is a RAJ.
A RAJ is:
- a signed statement,
- of agreed intent,
- scoped, bounded, and time-limited,
- verifiable by any domain that trusts the seal.
It is not a request.
It is not a suggestion.
It is delegated power made explicit, like a charter or notarized covenant.
Act V: Withdrawal
Arendt:
And once the RAJ is issued?
Schmitt:
The sovereign withdraws.
No further judgment is implied.
No per-act consultation is permitted.
The law now governs execution.
Montesquieu:
So the provinces rule locally—but only by charter.
Schmitt:
Exactly. The maharaja rules legitimacy, not behavior. That is imperium, not micromanagement.
Act VI: Revocation, Reframed
Arendt:
What of revocation?
Schmitt:
The maharaja remains sovereign over the future.
He may:
- close the mint,
- dismiss officers,
- rotate seals,
- change the law for new charters.
He may not:
- reinterpret a RAJ mid-flight,
- revoke power already notarized,
- intervene per act.
That restraint is not weakness.
It is fidelity to law.
Act VII: Redemption
Montesquieu:
So the kingdom is safe, and the ruler may finally rest.
Arendt:
Authority is restored precisely because it no longer coerces.
Schmitt:
And sovereignty appears only where it belongs:
at the boundary of legitimacy, not inside every action.
Epilogue: The Moral
Narrator:
The exhausted king saved the land by judging everything.
The maharaja redeemed it by judging only what must be judged.
From:
- per-request centralized authorization
To:
- per-intent notarized authority
- against centralized identity
Or, more simply:
Citizenship defines who may act. Officers (RAJAs) define who may grant authority. Notarization (RAJs) defines what was agreed.
That is not merely better cloud architecture.
It is humane governance, finally made legible at scale.
Appendix I: IAM’s Original Sin
IAM’s original sin was not centralization.
Centralization was necessary. The cloud control plane was global, multi-tenant, and existentially dangerous if misgoverned. A single, authoritative source of truth for identity and permission was the only viable starting point.
The original sin was category collapse.
IAM collapsed three fundamentally different questions into a single, per-request decision:
- Who may act?
- Who may authorize action?
- What authority was actually granted?
By answering all three questions every time, in the same place, with the same mechanism, IAM fused:
- authority with execution
- legitimacy with enforcement
- law with motion
This produced a system that was:
- extraordinarily safe,
- globally consistent,
- and operationally defensible,
but also:
- opaque to human intent,
- hostile to governance,
- and incapable of expressing meaning.
Authorization became a continuous emergency, rather than a settled agreement.
The Structural Consequence
Because authority and power were never separated:
- No authorization decision ever stabilized into an artifact
- No intent was ever conclusively “decided”
- No delegated power was ever explicitly owned
Every API call re-litigated legitimacy.
This made revocation absolute and instantaneous—but at the cost of:
- explainability,
- stewardship,
- and trust.
Why This Was Understandable
This collapse was not ignorance. It was fear.
IAM was designed under conditions where:
- blast radius was global,
- prior art was thin,
- and failure would be public and catastrophic.
In that context, collapsing authority into enforcement minimized:
- ambiguity,
- distributed correctness risk,
- and institutional shame.
IAM chose legibility of failure over legibility of governance.
Why It Is Still a Sin
Not a moral sin—but a constitutional one.
Because what is safe in extremis becomes deforming when normalized.
A system that cannot distinguish:
- identity from authority,
- authority from delegation,
- delegation from execution,
will eventually exhaust both its rulers and its subjects.
The Redemptive Move
Redemption does not undo IAM’s central insight.
It factors it.
By separating:
- Citizenship (who may act),
- Officers / RAJAs (who may authorize),
- Notarization / RAJs (what was agreed),
authorization moves from:
- per-request judgment
to: - per-intent covenant.
The law remains sovereign.
Power becomes entrusted.
Governance becomes legible.
That is the redemption of IAM’s original sin.
Appendix II: Resource Federalism
Resource federalism completes the redemption by separating global legitimacy from local meaning.
Identity and authority remain centralized.
Interpretation and execution are deliberately local.
This appendix names the roles precisely.
The Three Roles in a Federal System
1. RAJA — The Officer of Authority
A RAJA is an officer empowered by the sovereign to authorize intent.
The RAJA:
- evaluates a declared intent,
- against policy,
- for a certified identity,
- at a specific moment in time.
Formally:
RAJA authorizes each RAJ intent based on policies for a certified identity.
The RAJA does not:
- understand resource internals,
- participate in execution,
- or adjudicate per-request access.
Its sole responsibility is legitimacy at issuance.
The RAJA answers:
May this identity pursue this intent, under the law, now?
If yes, it notarizes that answer as a RAJ.
2. RAJ — The Notarized Agreement
A RAJ is the artifact produced by a RAJA.
It is:
- signed,
- time-bounded,
- scoped to an intent,
- bound to an identity,
- and cryptographically verifiable.
A RAJ does not contain policy logic.
It contains the result of policy evaluation.
It represents a settled agreement, not an ongoing negotiation.
3. RAJEE — The Local Executor
A RAJEE is a resource-side enforcement engine.
The RAJEE:
- receives a RAJ,
- verifies its signature and validity,
- checks that the requested operation is a subset of the authorized intent,
- and allows or denies access accordingly.
Formally:
RAJEE evaluates the RAJ to allow access to a resource.
The RAJEE does not:
- consult the sovereign,
- interpret global policy,
- or reason about identity beyond what the RAJ asserts.
Its authority is strictly derivative.
The RAJEE answers:
Does this request fall within the authority that was already granted?
Why This Is Federalism (Not Fragmentation)
This model is federal because:
- Authority is singular
Legitimacy flows from one sovereign source. - Execution is plural
Resources interpret intent locally, according to their domain semantics. - Supremacy is preserved
Only the sovereign can authorize new intents or change the law. - Autonomy is real
Resources enforce without constant supervision.
This mirrors political federalism:
- the center defines citizenship and law,
- provinces govern practice within their domain,
- courts enforce charters, not whim.
See Federalism.
The Key Invariant
Resource federalism rests on one invariant:
No resource may decide who is legitimate; no sovereign may decide how a resource behaves.
Each does only its proper work.
The Net Effect
Compared to centralized IAM:
- Blast radius becomes explicitly bounded
- Governance becomes human-legible
- Enforcement becomes mechanical
- Audit becomes explanatory, not forensic
Fear-driven centralization gives way to structured trust.
In One Sentence
RAJA decides whether an identity may pursue an intent; RAJ records that decision; RAJEE enforces it locally against the resource.
That is resource federalism.
And it is how authority scales without tyranny.
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