 However, this problem also may be just a matter of appearance. After all, the framework proposed by Nozick does not exclude imperialists in the sense of stipulating their non-existence. Rather, one of the core roles of the framework is precisely to protect non-imperialists and their voluntary modes of association and dissociation from those epistemically short-sighted, albeit still existing, imperialists. The operation of the framework should, therefore, be seen as a two-level discovery procedure. On one level it operates as Nozick explicitly describes—as a competitive market place of communities serving individuals who are becoming more informed about their taste for community. However, on another level, the operation of the framework is a procedure through which non-imperialist communities and non-imperialist individuals who do not enter any utopian community discover how, if at all, they can cooperate in maintaining and operating the framework so as to protect themselves and their epistemic quest from the imperialists.