For as long as I’ve lived you’ve been my only home. I’ve had a wonderful life here. Your inhabitants are almost universally kind, and I’ve become lifelong friends with many of your citizens. All of my family lives here, everyone I have ever known or loved, and I will miss them all a lot. But after 22 years, I feel impelled to leave.

According to your founders , “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one [person] to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to be disrespectful.

At first glance, you look like the greatest of all social systems. You seem like a stable and sturdy structure. People look at you and see strength. They see freedom and opportunity, democracy and unity. But a peek behind the curtain reveals a scared old man, desperately trying to maintain an illusion . Your size and complexity hide a simple truth: that you don’t physically exist. You are nothing more than a system of human interaction; not a thing in and of itself, but the result of a widespread pattern of behavior. You emerge from our beliefs, and the actions they compel us to take.