In most liberal democracies, the principle of "one-person-one-vote" is viewed as a sacred core of the democratic process. Of course, various schemes of representation (multi-member proportional representation or single-member districts), checks-and-balances (mutli- v. unicameral legislatures, parliamentary v. presidential) and degrees of federalism vary and recombine in a diverse ways. However both in popular imagination and in formal rules, the idea that numerical majorities (or in some cases supermajorities) should prevail regardless of the social composition of groups is at the core of how democracy is typically understood.[^Exceptions] Again this contrasts with decision-making structures throughout most of the world and most of history, including ones that involved widespread and diverse representation by a range of social relationships, including family, religious, relationships of fealty, profession, etc.[^DawnEverything] We again see the same pattern repeated: liberal states have "extracted" "individuals" from their social embedding to make them exchangeable, detached citizens of an abstracted national polity. [^Exceptions]: There are, of course, limited exceptions that in many ways prove the rule. The two most notable examples are "degressive proportionality" and "consociationalism". Many federal systems (e.g. the US) apply the principle of degressive proportionality to which we will return later: namely, that smaller sub-units (e.g. provinces in national voting) are over-represented relative to their population. Some countries also have consociational structures in which designated social groups (e.g. religions or political parties) agree to share power in some specified fashion, ensuring that even if one group's vote share declines they retain something of their historical power. Yet these counterexamples are few, far between and usually subjects of on-going controversy, with significant political pressure to "reform" them in the direction of a standard one-person-one-vote direction. [^DawnEverything]: David Graeber and David Wengrow, *The Dawn of Everything* (London: Allen Lane, 2021). This regime began to develop during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when traditional, commons-based property systems, community-based identity and multi-sectoral representation were swept away for the "rationality" and "modernity" of what became the modern state.[^TheModernState] This system solidified and literally conquered the world during the industrial and colonial nineteenth century and was canonized in the work of Max Weber, reaching its ultimate expression in the "high modernism" of the mid-twentieth century, when properties were further rationalized into regular shapes and sizes, identity documents reinforced with biometrics and one-person-one-vote systems spread to a broad range of organizations. Governments and organizations around the world adopted these systems for some good reasons. They were simple and thus scalable; they allowed people from very different backgrounds to quickly understand each other and thus interact productively. Where once commons-based property systems inhibited innovation when outsiders and industrialists found it impossible to navigate a thicket of local customs, private property cleared a path to development and trade by reducing those who could inhibit change. Administrators of the social welfare schemes that transformed government in the twentieth century would have struggled to provide broad access to pensions and unemployment benefits without a single, flat, clear database of entitlements. And reaching subtle compromises like those that went into the US Constitution, much less ones rich enough to keep up with the complexity of the modern world, would have likely undermined the possibility of democratic government spreading. In fact these institutions were core to what allowed modern, wealthy, liberal democracies to rise, flourish and rule, making what Joseph Heinrich calls the "WEIRDest people in the world". Just as the insights of Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry gave those civilizations the physical power to sweep the earth, liberal social institutions gave them the social flexibility to do so. Yet just as the Euclidean-Newtonian worldview turned out to be severely limited and naïve, ⿻ social science was born by highlighting the limits of these atomist monist social systems.