It wouldn’t exist.
Not because the principles are outdated. Because we’ve lost the ability to create anything that requires this much commitment.
Think about it: if someone pitched Freemasonry as a startup today, they’d be laughed out of the room.
“You want men to memorize hours of ritual? To meet in person? To progress through degrees that take months or years? To wear ceremonial aprons? And you’re not even going to tell them what they’re joining until after they join?”
The VCs would have an aneurysm.
We’ve Optimized Away Everything Meaningful
Modern organizations optimize for scale and convenience. Freemasonry optimizes for transformation. Those two things are fundamentally incompatible.
If Freemasonry launched today, the “growth hackers” would gut it immediately. The ritual would become a 20-minute video. The degrees would be a weekend workshop.
The aprons would be optional, or worse, NFTs.
Membership would be a subscription with “premium tiers.”
And the whole thing would be dead in three years.
Because here’s what nobody understands anymore: the friction is the point. The difficulty is what makes it work. The inconvenience is what creates commitment.
Remove those, and you’ve got nothing but another app claiming to change your life while you scroll through it on the toilet.
We’ve convinced ourselves that accessibility equals value. That if something is hard, we should make it easier. That if something requires time, we should make it faster. But some things (the things that actually matter) don’t scale.
They don’t optimize. They just demand that you show up and do the work.
Freemasonry wouldn’t survive today’s launch because we’ve forgotten how to value anything that requires sacrifice.
The Secret Is That There Is No Shortcut
If Freemasonry started today, it would face immediate pressure to “modernize.” To be more inclusive (read: ask for less). To be more accessible (read: water it down).
To be more relevant (read: become like everything else).
And if it gave in to that pressure, it would become another forgettable self-help community with a Discord server and a mission statement written by committee.
The only reason Freemasonry still works is because it’s old enough to not give a damn.
It predates the optimization mindset. It was built in an era when people understood that some things are supposed to be difficult, mysterious, and demanding.
That’s not a bug. That’s the entire operating system.
So what would Freemasonry look like if it started today?
It would look like every other shallow, performative, short-lived community that promises transformation and delivers content.
Thank God it didn’t.