Because that’s what he is: fiction.
He sounds self-sufficient, but he didn’t get there alone. He followed roads surveyed by the federal government. Claimed land acquired by government treaty or conflict. Relied on supply chains, currency, forts, railroads, and laws. His bacon fat probably came by boat. His independence rode on the back of infrastructure built stone by stone by collective effort, tax payers, and the many generations before him.
The idea of being “off-grid” was, in reality, made possible by the grid. Take the westward expansion:
• Land policy: The Louisiana Purchase, the Homestead Act, the annexations and territorial acquisitions of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Hawaii, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, along with the purchase of Alaska years later, gave millions access to land they had not settled themselves. These examples do not even include the many wars and forced removals of Native Americans.
• Movement systems: Roads, canals, and railroads were surveyed, funded, and maintained by governments, tax payers, and networks of engineers.
• Knowledge flows: Land-grant universities spread the agricultural and engineering know-how required to prosper.
• Enforcement systems: Property rights, military security, and legal frameworks secured claims.
Similar myths live on in technology start-ups. Founders in garages eating pizza and wearing hoodies programming world changing software capture headlines, but under the surface are venture capital, cloud infrastructure, open-source libraries, universities, intellectual property law, federal research grants, and global labor markets.
The myth of the self-made hero persists because it flatters. But the truth is more useful: civilization doesn’t grow from grit—it grows from grids. The myth sells. The grid delivers.
The Grid and Its Scaffolding
What is a grid? In our context today, it’s the web of interconnection that makes complexity work. Not top-down hierarchies, not lone-genius breakthroughs, but lateral networks where people, tools, and ideas link together in a network. Trade routes were grids. Railroads were grids. Today, global supply chains, the internet, and financial markets are all part of grids.
But grids don’t just exist by accident—they rest on scaffolding. Scaffolding is the invisible support that allows a grid to form and grow. It’s the policies, standards, legal protections, and cultural norms that hold the structure steady while it scales. A railroad is part of a grid; land surveys, steel-making, and uniform time zones were its scaffolding. The internet is part of the gird; TCP/IP protocols, fiber optics, and intellectual property laws are its scaffolding.
Alone, any single strand is fragile. Together, the grid holds weight like a cargo net. They distribute energy. They absorb shocks. Without scaffolding, grids collapse under their own weight. With it, they scale.
The Hanseatic League
The myth of the lone merchant, like the myth of the lone frontiersman, never matched reality. In Northern Europe from the 12th to the 17th century, merchants discovered that survival and prosperity came not from going it alone, but from building a network or grid. They called it the Hanseatic League.
Centered in Lübeck, it grew into a federation of nearly 200 towns across the Baltic and North Seas. The League standardized weights and measures, secured sea lanes against pirates, built warehouses, and negotiated treaties as one. A merchant leaving Riga could sell his goods in Bruges knowing his rights and cargo would be protected. It wasn’t a king’s empire or a single company’s strategy—it was a platform of trust and rules that multiplied value across hundreds of cities.
The League’s scaffolding—shared standards, collective defense, legal protections—made the network viable. When those supports weakened in the face of rising nation-states and shifting trade routes, the League collapsed.
That same dynamic plays out today. Uber doesn’t scale because of one car; it scales because of the platform that connects drivers, riders, and payments. Amazon isn’t a single store; it’s a trust infrastructure for millions of sellers. The Hanseatic League was a medieval rehearsal for the platform economy.
The Modern Collision
Fast-forward to today. We still have frontiersmen, but they’re mostly hobbyists, political extremists or YouTube influencers. They rail against modernity while using social media apps, navigating with GPS, fundraising with digital payments, and stockpiling cryptocurrency.
They want the myth, but they live on and in the grid.
This is the great collision: between the story of individualism and the reality of deep interdependence. And it’s not just a culture war. It’s a strategic leadership crisis.
You cannot govern, operate, or innovate effectively if your worldview is misaligned with how the world actually works. You can’t decouple your culture from your connectivity. And you certainly can’t design the future while nostalgic for an operating system that no longer exists.
The Chain of Development
If you zoom out far enough, you’ll see it: a civilizational pattern. Not of linear progress, but of dependent stages:
• Agriculture enabled cities
• Cities enabled writing
• Writing preserved knowledge
• Printing democratized it
• Steam and electricity industrialized it
• The internet distributed it
• AI now accelerates it
Every leap stands on a platform built by the last. There is no AI without electricity, no electricity without cities, no cities without food surpluses, and no surpluses without tools and seeds.
This is the real arc of polyintelligence: not the invention of something new, but the orchestration of what has always been building.
Nature Knew First
As we discussed in previous articles, polyintelligence isn’t our invention—it’s nature’s playbook. Forests share nutrients through fungal networks. Coral reefs operate as co-ops of fish, algae, and chemistry. Flocks, swarms, rivers, ant colonies—all reveal systems of partial knowledge synchronized into networked collectives.
We’re just now catching up. But unlike flocks, we get to choose whether to coordinate. And we can do it at scale, with tools, laws, and stories.
You Can’t Scale on Nostalgia
Too many leaders are trying to operate future-facing systems with past-facing worldviews. They’re applying rugged individualist playbooks in an entangled, high-velocity world.
The result? Fragility. Blind spots. Resistance to change dressed up as virtue. What they need is temporal agility—the ability to design for today’s interdependence while anticipating tomorrow’s disruptions.
The Polyintelligent Pattern
The American frontier was polyintelligent. So was the Hanseatic League. So was the Industrial Age. So is the AI era. What has changed is the speed, scope, and visibility of our interdependence.
In the past, scaffolding was background. Now, it’s foreground. In the past, we had time to learn by mistake. Now, lag is lethal.
You don’t win the future by insisting you did it alone. You win by building systems where many intelligences align—human, machine, ecological. The ability to orchestrate them is no longer a competitive edge. It’s the price of admission.
Leadership Principles for the Grid
1. Retire the lone Hero Myth – Progress is collective. Say it, show it, design for it.
2. Honor Your Scaffolding – Understand and respect the pain, work, and investments that previous generations contributed to your success today.
3. Map Your Grid – Know your inputs: data flows, talent networks, ecological dependencies, machine systems.
4. Design for Interdependence – Build cross-domain fluency into your strategy, structures, culture and ecosystems.
5. Upgrade Literacy – Historical literacy to see the chain and scaffolding, network literacy to see the grid, and digital literacy to move through it successfully.
6. Equity Multiplies Resilience – The more you spread intelligence, opportunity, and participation across the grid, the stronger and more shock-resistant the whole system becomes.
History gives us many reminders of this truth: the Hanseatic League scaled by spreading trust across cities; the American frontier succeeded because it leaned on national scaffolding; and today’s platforms thrive because they distribute participation across millions of users. But how does this principle play out in our own time, under real-world pressure?
For that, look to Finland.
After the Cold War, it faced the sudden loss of its biggest trading partner: the Soviet Union. The economic collapse was brutal—unemployment soared above 20 percent, GDP fell by double digits, and many nations would have collapsed under the strain. But Finland leaned on equity. Instead of concentrating recovery in a few industries or elites, it spread responsibility and opportunity across society. The government invested in universal education, broad-based digital literacy, and social safety nets that empowered citizens to retrain and adapt. Companies, communities, and schools became active nodes in a national grid of resilience.
The result was not just survival but reinvention. Within a generation, Finland transformed from a timber-and-paper economy into one of the world’s most digitally advanced societies, home to Nokia’s rise, SKYPE developers, Oura rings, the Angry Birds franchise, and an innovation ecosystem far larger than its population would suggest. Its resilience came not from a single leader or sector, but from activating thousands of nodes across society. Equity was the multiplier.
The grid is not a constraint to be avoided. It’s your multiplier. Polyintelligence isn’t about glorifying complexity—it’s about metabolizing it. The goal isn’t to move alone, but to move well, together.
Progress isn’t a solo summit. It’s a choreography of generations, connected by knowledge, carried on networks, timed to the rhythms of ecology, powered by aligned intelligences.
Myths and systems impact how we see ourselves and influence our actions throughout history. In my next article I'll introduce the Seventh Generation Principle, a discipline for weighing today’s decisions against future consequences.
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Listen to two clever AI generated podcast hosts discuss this article in detail below:
Kevin Benedict
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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