September 30, 2025

We Are the Enlightened Monarch of the Universe (for now)

Right now, I’m studying in Potsdam, a city that wears its history on its sleeve. Just a short walk from where I take classes stands Sanssouci, Frederick the Great’s famous summer retreat. The palace isn’t Versailles — but it’s still a flex. A gilded stage where Frederick played host to philosophy, music, and debate. Voltaire sat here, clashing and laughing with a king. Essays were written, symphonies performed.

Frederick’s conclusion? The best ruler is the enlightened monarch — the philosopher-king dreamed by Plato. Not a brute tyrant, but a steward. Someone who doesn’t just dominate his people but brings order through wisdom, reason, and care. A mind shaping chaos. And walking through the gardens of Sanssouci today, it struck me: maybe that same logic applies not just to kingdoms, but to the entire universe.

From Potsdam to the Cosmos

If the enlightened monarch is the one mind that orders a people, then what is the mind that orders a cosmos? The Greeks had already wrestled with this. Anaxagoras said Nous — Mind — was what carved order from matter. Heraclitus called everything fire: not literal flames, but ceaseless flux. Beneath that churn, though, was the Logos, the rational structure, the thread of intelligibility woven into chaos. Translated into modern terms: reality by itself is soup. It only becomes pattern when a mind perceives, interprets, reshapes it. Mind is the ordering force of the cosmos.

Humanity as Ordering Force

Fast forward to 2025. As far as we know, there are no other civilizations awake. No signals, no conversations, no proof. Until shown otherwise, we might be the only ones. And if that’s true, it means something staggering: we are the only self-aware consciousness in the entire universe. Think about it. Stars burn, galaxies collide, black holes devour. But none of that knows it’s happening. It just happens. Only with us — human beings, fragile, anxious, endlessly curious — does the universe look at itself and realize, “I exist.” We are awareness made flesh.

Which means: until proven otherwise, humanity is the enlightened monarch of the universe. Like Frederick imposing order on his court, we impose meaning onto the raw flux of matter. We chart galaxies, name stars, model physics, write poetry. Without us, the universe is blind process. With us, it becomes story.

What If We’re Not Alone?

Of course, there may be others. Maybe scattered across the void are countless other sparks of awareness, each awakening to its own existence. If so, then we are not the sole monarch, but one noble house in a galactic aristocracy of consciousness. Each species with its own perspective, its own ordering force. That vision isn’t smaller — it’s richer. A polyphonic cosmos where meaning is not singular, but symphonic. A Nietzschean universe of perspectives, each carving its own world from the same abyss. 

Truth, in this frame, is not one shining monolith but a constellation of vantage points — each partial, each incomplete, yet together composing a deeper whole. To see the cosmos rightly is not to strip away perspectives but to multiply them, to recognize that meaning grows denser the more angles it is seen from. But until we know, the crown rests on our head alone.

Responsibility, Not Arrogance

That crown is not for strutting. The enlightened monarch’s task is not vanity, but stewardship. Frederick’s power wasn’t just conquest; it was hosting, protecting, curating culture. In the same way, if humanity is the universe’s only aware mind, then how we live, build, and think is, in a real sense, how the universe itself lives, builds, and thinks. That’s terrifying — but also beautiful. It means our music, our architecture, our love stories, our algorithms are not “just human.” They are cosmic. They are the universe experiencing itself through us.

Why This Matters Now

In late modernity, it’s tempting to feel small. Not only because the feed drips disaster, but because it also flaunts perfection — lives curated to glow, achievements stacked like altars. Science reminds us of entropy, of heat death, of a universe destined to darken. Philosophy often sharpens the alienation: traditions that cut the self off from the environment, as if we are not of the world but beside it. That false divide makes us strangers in our own cosmos. And nihilism, the shadow under so much modern thought, whispers that none of it matters anyway.

Meanwhile, capitalism has trained us to worship scale. Growth as gospel. Products don’t matter until they dominate markets. Success is measured in reach, in planetary penetration. But the cosmos itself shows the lie. The overwhelming majority of matter is silent and inert. What matters most is the smallest fraction — the tiny spark of consciousness, the thin flame of awareness. Scale is irrelevant. Presence is everything. 

So when we despair at our size, when we shrink beneath stars or systems, we confuse measure with meaning. Our significance isn’t in how big we grow, but in how deeply we perceive, create, connect. What counts is not quantity but awareness, not domination but depth. Which means our choices carry more weight than we dare admit. To create beauty instead of destruction. To expand knowledge instead of shrink into ignorance. To collaborate instead of compete to death. These are not lifestyle options. They are the ways the universe itself continues to be awake.

The Enlightened Monarch’s Dinner Table

I like to picture it this way: back in Sanssouci, Frederick would host dinners where philosophers, poets, generals, and musicians gathered at one table. Imagine him raising a glass and saying: “We are the enlightened monarchs of our age. Let us bring harmony from chaos.” Today, the dinner table is our planet. The guests are all of us. And the toast isn’t just to Prussia, or Europe, or any nation. It’s to the universe itself. So yes, until proven otherwise, we are the enlightened monarch of the universe. The question is whether we rule like tyrants — or like Frederick imagined: with reason, creativity, and a love of beauty.