A husband and wife go to one of the nation’s leading psychiatrists. The husband resisted at the beginning, feeling a little overexposed and humiliated, but these feelings are quickly understood through internalized misogyny, and gently given a psychic playpen to harmlessly express themselves. They both have exceptional careers. He works in finance and she is the owner of a marketing firm. The kids too, are in the best schools and have good college prospects. They are well-adjusted and happy. Every square inch of their lives is filled with something to do, something to consume, something to learn. When the parents started going to therapy, they were fighting a lot. The therapist has them go on weekly dates to re-capture the spark. To her amazement, he now says things like, “I hear and appreciate you,” and “I need to set boundaries for self-care.” They have a date planned that night and it will likely end well. Things are good. And yet, if you looked in their eyes, particularly his, something is just not there...

Of course, “therapy” is a good idea in the right context. The Greek just indicates something like caring for the sick. If you tear your achilles, you should go get physical therapy. If you find out during war that not only are you capable of killing someone, but that you quite enjoy it, you will probably need some therapy to deal with what it means to go back to standing in line at the Safeway. In both of these examples, though, therapy is designed to end when normalcy is achieved. You wouldn’t balk at me if I told you it was time to get back to walking when your heel was working again. Why, then, is it such a problem to suggest that continued “Therapy Speak” within a relationship indicates that something is wrong and it would be better, all things being equal, if we didn’t continue to talk to each other like that?

First, let’s crisp up “Therapy Speak.” The pop-vernacular is a downstream sludge of a few things: boundaries and attachment theory, etc. The cleanest single origin is non-violent communication, which arose as a way of de-escalating actual violence. Again, clearly useful in acute situations, but not designed to be a permanent fix. Through no fault of its own, we have adopted a version of it for permanently dealing with conflict in therapy-mediated relationships. Look closely at the original four steps: observe without evaluating, name the feeling, locate the need beneath the feeling, then make a request.

Notice that these steps are, each more than the last, categorizing away your first person perspective (where, in revenge, it can terrorize you somewhere else in your shared psyche). By the final step you have formulated something so reasonable as to be nauseating and so no one on earth could say you did anything wrong and, incidentally, could possibly know or love you. Who could love someone they can’t wrong?

Notice the grammar of it all: The Self is split into an invisible manager and one who is managed. The same Self-Object split that is designed to defuse acute violence (and, again, does do this) also defuses sexual polarity and all its associated dangers and thrills.

Therapy Speak fails the individual because it promises and fails to capture the uncategorizable Self, but it also fails at romance because it succeeds at categorizing the other. You cannot love another as an irreducible Self if you are too terrified to see yourself as that. You also cannot desire what is made into a legible system. Thus, we are turned off by a spouse saying something vaguely therapeutic sounding like “That’s just your anxious attachment style.” With that, we are managed. Our personhood effectively factored out. What follows from that, predictably, is outrage, which is then “de-escalated” with morally superior sounding phrases like, “I want to give space for the fact that you’re feeling angry,” which is both unfalsifiable and unassailable, and so all emotional conflict-from-misplaced-eros is engineered out by slippery language. With it, little by little, romance is replaced by contempt.

Kierkegaard defined the self not as a thing but as “a relation that relates itself to itself.” He noticed the same Self-Object split that therapy now seeks to manage, concluding that the relationship cannot be closed from the inside, no matter how competent the manager. For him, despair had very little to do with bad feelings. It was the natural result of not wanting to be yourself: wanting to be someone else, wanting to be captured by a category, a diagnosis, to hide inside a line, “I just have an avoidant attachment style.” The Self is traded in for a dead specimen. The guy in the opening isn’t sad; he’s pretending to be something dead and general when he’s actually alive and singular. Despair is perfectly compatible with things going well. By 1966, Philip Rieff was watching as these ideas became institutionalized into something he thought would replace religion. He predicted “psychological man,” whose deepest ambition is to perfectly manage his own inner life, would overtake “religious man” in the West. He was right. Therapy speak is just his liturgical language.

Walker Percy made the futility of all this especially obvious to me in “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book”: No matter how much you generalize your ailments and neuroses as typical of their genus or trauma type, you are still stuck sitting behind your own eyes looking out at the world. The only thing that you can’t categorize is the categorizer. No amount of diagnoses or labels or divergencies will resolve the fact that it feels like something to be you. You alone must live your life and die. Anxiety about that is what therapy seeks to cure us of, but may be the only way to discover the possibility of the freedom to become a Self. Percy asks some questions like: why is it that we often feel so bad when things are good, but feel so good when a devastating hurricane is set to make landfall in a few hours?

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The movie opens with the rapper Travis Scott as an ancient Greek bard, standing on the dinner table.

Already, we’re either pleased or annoyed. If you’re one sort of person, you’ll think the parallel of rappers to rhapsodes is a smart one, if not a little on the nose. But you’ll nod lightly; at least it’s an interesting choice. If you’re a different sort of person, you’ll be pissed about the “historical inaccuracy” and mad that Hollywood is trying to shove some pandering diversity down your throats instead of focusing on telling a good story.

Nolan knows all that. He’s intentionally evoked those frames of mind because he wants to do something with them. What that is, Travis Scott helpfully bangs his staff and says plainly: “A face, a fleet, a war, a man, a thought, a trick.”

If you want to know what a film is going to try to tell you, you can just pay attention to the first few lines. Often, they will just straight up tell you. The first line of The Godfather is “I believe in America,” which is the entire Corleone tragedy in one sentence.

This movie is going to be a trick.

The trick

The icon of that trick appears in the next frame. The Trojan horse, half sunk in the sand and waves. Nolan said this was the first image he saw when he considered making this movie, and has carried it with him for a long time.

From that image we go straight to Page as a male soldier, which is probably the most contentious bit of apparently “woke” casting. But remember: we’ve already been told this movie is a trick. And we just saw the most iconic symbol for a trick of all time. Trojans approach the horse. Page’s character runs to tell them it’s a gift, but is still killed by their arrows. Because Odysseus lied about his being a trick, the Trojans believe it is a genuine gift, and so take it into their city. With it, the trickster Odysseus, spelling their loss of the Trojan war.

Later, Odysseus sails into Hades — hell, as he explicitly calls it — where he meets Sinon, Page’s character. In a remarkable bit of acting, covered in mud, crawling out of the chaos of hell, Sinon looks at Odysseus and asks, of the Trojan horse being a trick and not a real gift: “Why didn’t you tell me it was a lie?” To which Odysseus says: “Because I needed you to believe it.”

I actually got emotional at this point. A quick aside: Nolan is very private about what he believes. It creates a mystique around his films, so we can’t reduce them to propositions, which he himself may not even fully understand or want anyone to explicitly know. Unlike when I was younger and dumber, there are things I now believe that I also wouldn’t artlessly say in mixed company. So, what I’m going to suggest he “actually” meant is speculation, and to some extent, projection. That’s what movies are meant to make us do. They reveal things about ourselves, and about their creators, beyond what either of us could say we believe. If they were fully reducible to propositional facts, there would be no reason to make them.

I sense Nolan was in the guise of his trickster Odysseus in this Hades scene, saying to Page the actor: I used you as a Trojan horse to pull a trick-on-the-trick on my audience. I’m sorry. The original trick, of course, is the belief that our individual identity is what is most important about us, above our responsibilities to others. Nolan’s trick lures in modern identity politics from both sides.

It might have been more noble, more courageous for Nolan to tell Page this straight out. Hence the heartbreaking post-mortem “Why didn’t you tell me it was a lie?” His answer is simply that if you hadn’t really believed it, they would have caught on to the game. We would have caught on to the game. The trick wouldn’t have worked.

Nolan has made himself into a trickster to win a larger culture war, but he feels he broke something sacred.

Zeus’s law

That Nolan’s next film be a blockbuster is demanded by his massive career. So his king Agamemnon is anachronistically armored as this hulking, Batman-like figure. Nolan’s career is itself well-characterized by the similar-looking monster of The Dark Knight, which now looms dominant over even Nolan himself. For both him and Odysseus, this crusade is a command.

Odysseus is forced away from his home in Ithaca, away from Penelope. There is no honorable reason for Odysseus to leave his family to fight this war, but he still must. Since he is the most clever, he will think of a way to win it. So, he comes up with the Trojan Horse. Fittingly, Nolan himself implants the horse into this story (which is not in the original text) from other post-Greek texts. It is a gift taken into the home of the Trojans that betrays their trust by disgorging killers. Symbolically, it is also the epitome of undermining of Zeus’s law.

The law: If you have a guest, a visitor, you must be hospitable, because that person could be a god in disguise. The law binds the guest, too: to betray the welcome you’ve been given is a perhaps worse sacrilege. Hospitality was indeed important to the ancient Greeks, but the movie takes it more seriously as if it is an inkling of the Christian idea that everyone is a child of God. Zeus’s law allowed ancient Greece to be as powerful and prosperous as it was because it fosters trust. Break Zeus’s law, you plant the seed of civilizational collapse.

When we sit down in a dark movie theater, we are passive and open and trust the director to tell us an edifying story. Nolan realizes the only way to make a movie more financially successful than anything in his career so far is to bait the moviegoers. The movie’s casting is itself Odysseus’s Trojan horse, and we are the Trojans.

Look, every single one of Nolan’s films has been layers upon layers of meta-frameworks that often have reached out through the screen itself. That he might take this to a new extreme with The Odyssey is not a surprise. Actually, that he would suddenly make a flat summer blockbuster without those layers is implausible. And that this time his Trojan Horse would be so subtle that he cannot even explicitly comment on it or even tell his actors what he is up to is impressive, but only a half-step more complex than what he has already known to attempt.

He’s at least a good magician, as evidenced by the apparently magical cultural impact of his career.

Apparent magic

The very first words that appear on screen: “A time of apparent magic…” Along with Travis Scott’s opening line, these are words to keep in mind, because the entire first part of the movie is notably more enchanted and pagan than the second half.

It’s dreamlike and brutally unremorseful about murder and rape. Only later do we realize Nolan’s unique twist as to why: For the first half of the movie, Odysseus is actually on Calypso’s island, eating intoxicating lotus flowers. The only way modern minds could possibly get in the head of a pre-Christian is to imagine taking a psychedelic. Thus, the highly mythical elements — the Cyclops, the giants, and the witch — maybe partly are only the memory of his addled mind. Unlike the source material, the film outgrows that consciousness within its own arc, ballooning all the way to something anachronistically modern by the end.

In one of the early episodes, his men enter the Cyclops’s cave and Odysseus assumes they’ll be welcomed and fed. His men say they should be careful. Odysseus says: they have to feed us, it’s Zeus’s law. His right-hand man says: I don’t think these people are going to know about Zeus’s law. Or Zeus. And Odysseus: everybody knows about Zeus’s law. We learn only later that here Odysseus is in denial about the subversion he has wrought in Troy. He still wants to assume trust in the world; he doesn’t yet see the civilizational collapse his own actions planted the seeds of.

Island by island, magical betrayals of hospitality are played out against them. The audience sees them coming from a mile away. But it’s not like they can go back to the world before the trick: once everyone realizes guests can be killers, the possibility for trust in a pre-Christian consciousness altogether dissolves into a nightmare. By the time Odysseus gets to Calypso, his men are dead and he wants to forget it. He stays with Calypso for seven years, unable to face what he’s done.

We watch him slowly begin to want to remember as we experience the first half of the movie through him. Calypso tries to soothe. He realizes he has to go home. He stops taking the lotus. The only way off the island is to totally submit himself to the power of the gods and take his punishment. Calypso says this explicitly. The suggestion here is that the only way out of the now endless cycles of violence is either the development of a sort of Christian consciousness or mutual death.

He builds a small raft from the remains of his ships, lays on it as if crucified, and crosses the ocean, finally without defiance. All the glory of war and rage of Achilles that was at the center of the original Homer is fully washed away. Nolan’s Odysseus is a different character from Homer’s or even Dante’s from here out. He submits himself to Poseidon, the one who hates him for killing his son, the Cyclops. To redeem himself, Odysseus must submit himself totally to that non-being, to death, to the loss of control, and merely have faith that he will be carried home.

From this point of the film onward, we’ve woken up from the spell of the lotus flower, too. Our pre-Christian consciousness has been taken out of the apparent magic of the tribal, enchanted world and into the more rational world of post-Christian consciousness, carried across by the symbol of Odysseus crucified on the ocean.

The return of the king

The second most powerful moment of the film for me: the dog.

When Odysseus returns, his old dog has been tossing in a dung heap, having lived twenty-plus years waiting for his master’s return. We saw earlier that this dog as a puppy was about to be thrown off a cliff for not being fit enough. Odysseus rescued him. This is both a glimpse of the brutality of the ancient world, and a glimmer, through Odysseus himself, of the now normal Christian idea that the meek will inherit the earth.

The moment the returned king lays a hand on him, his tail wags in joy and celebration, in recognition, and then he dies. That is also the moment his son recognizes the disguised beggar as his father.

Together, they kill all the suitors in the house. In the original text, the violence ends only because Athena asked Zeus to stop Odysseus mid-pursuit with a thunderbolt. Mercy arrives as a divine imposition, itself a glimmer of a divine cycle-of-violence ending act later fulfilled by Christ. In Nolan’s version, Odysseus kills all the guests in his house. But he is careful to not allow his son to do the same, keeping him pure of the sin of subversion. In this way, he does yet another trick. But this time he makes himself the sacrifice instead of Sinon. He literally lives long enough to see himself become the villain. So he is banished. Penelope and Odysseus have to leave Ithaca and head to the unknown West. They leave their son to be the sinless king.

We know what’s in that unknown West, even if Odysseus doesn’t. America is the most westerly place you can get. It is the end of the world, the eschaton. We know that if we fail here, we have nowhere westward left to run. This audience-character-knowledge mismatch implies that this is a movie is fundamentally in favor of the return of a rightful order, if possible. It’s a Christian film, even if only accidentally, because when Odysseus wakes from his lotus stupor and realizes what he’s done, the film projects backwards onto the Odyssey a realized Christian morality. There we see revealed a new regret over the slaughter at Troy, which is nowhere to be found in the ancient text. Nolan reads it into the story himself, as if to intentionally say: now that we’ve woken up to this, we cannot go back to a pagan thirst for glory unless you are willing to pay with your life and everyone you love.

For this to work, victory can’t be won for your race, your class, your identity. So it can’t be that white people are particularly evil, or that other groups are particularly victimized or innocent. It is also pointedly against the woke right, who see global-village-style diversity casting as symbolically the fall of the traditionally white West and something to rage against. This all plays out in Nolan’s casting: Pattinson is the beautiful boy, big jaw, the natural heir. He denies his responsibility of his lot and wants the kingdom on the strength of his identity. He is willing to play tricks to take it. He admires Odysseus for the wrong reasons. Sinon is his mirror: marginal, meek, misguided, but willing to sacrifice to do the right thing for others. The film suggests the second is braver than the first, but both are wrong about what their identity means.

We cannot be defined by the particulars of our individual identity. That is too dangerously atomizing. We are better defined by our adherence to laws greater than ourselves: hospitality, truth, self-sacrifice. We know this. We’re just so damn tired of hearing these things in our stories. But it just seems to be the case that there is nothing further west of them. There is no better story to tell. To undo them out of boredom is merely to return to a brutality and division, which we can no longer even imagine in the modern world.

Apparent modernity

There are elements that feel modern enough to perhaps just be a mistake. Nolan’s films will often sacrifice believable emotions and characters for a high concept like I laid out above.

It was, for example, a little clunky that Matt Damon’s Odysseus would want to tie himself to the mast to hear the sirens, based on everything we’d learned of the character up to that point. I did, however, still find the siren scene compelling as a warning about what endless pleasure offers us and how it distracts us from our responsibility to return home. “It told you that what you most want is what you can’t have. And what you most can’t have is what you already had, and lost.”

It is kind of like what he did with The Dark Knight, making Batman less a mystical figure and more technologically explained, e.g. “What if you could functionally explain myths?” However, the first half of the movie is genuinely a mystical experience, done extremely well with beautiful practical effects. It does move toward mechanical by the end, but I think that works thematically, while still granting that Nolan’s rationalistic approach can be a little sterile.

The casting decisions were generally good, both as meta-commentary on woke and anti-woke, and because each of the apparently too-modern cosmopolitan Trojan-horse castings did a particularly good job. Page was fantastic. The Helen of Troy casting was another meant to spark outrage, but within the mythos of the movie it made perfect sense to me: an undeniably beautiful and symmetrical woman. Just not in an Aryan-white-goddess way. Clever bait by Nolan.

I’m sure I’ve missed a lot in my reading. People will unfold this more and more as time goes along. But it captured my imagination and evoked something in me; about my home and my wife. A reminder that we each have a duty to pay the price for our particular sins, submit to death, and go home as a king.

We’re racing into a post-literate age of global media. Local accents are going away, and pretty much everyone in the world is at least 35% American in their disposition. It is in many ways a resubmerging into a more tribal, ancient way of apprehending the world. But this time around, in what Walter Ong described as secondary orality, the entire global multimedia apparatus is the village. We’re a global tribe now, which means it is one big house, and a house divided cannot stand. Worse, our village is extremely susceptible to Trojan horses: betrayals of our trust, marketing, packaging, bullshit, ideology. This film is a double inversion of all that, a trick-on-the-trick. It wants to warn us how fragile our huge shared reality is, but it also may hurry the doomed by being the apotheosis of that trick.

Or it could wake us up to the hard fact that we are all ultimately bound to the same Natural Law which is the now oh-so-obvious Christian morality. It is even more vital in this global village, in fact. No matter how somebody says they identify, no matter what tribal, political bubble or echo chamber they belong to, we should treat them like they belong to us.

Because that person is a Child of God in disguise.

Behind an Orthodox church in an exurb outside Cleveland, there was a conference about re-telling the cosmic epic. To a panel consisting of Jonathan Pageau, Mary Harrington, Father Josiah, and Deacon Seraphim I asked, “Why can’t we tell better stories than Hollywood yet?…”1

A smattering of reactions I can recall: Pageau briefly went into how movies are combinations of all forms of media, making them like the crack of entertainment. Mary said “I don’t know,” followed by “It’s kind of a loaded question, like ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’” and Father Josiah said, “Hollywood does not tell stories.”

Jonathan is right, but I think his assessment is incomplete. Film does uniquely combine the existing forms that already most attract us: music, images, drama, etc. – but for me that doesn’t quite capture the allure of film, which is more about the hybrid demands of the medium itself than any particular component of its output.

Movies seem to sit in the awkward middle of an axis: dissolved from below by infinite scroll and condescended to from above by book people. You can only understand why film is such a strange, hard-to-beat pinnacle if you see it along two axes instead of just one. Film, importantly, begins intensely literate. To make a great movie, you need to write a screenplay that is so great on its own terms that it motivates a literal village of people to sacrifice several years and millions of dollars to bring it into being. The first of many things remarkable about films is that you need a hyper-literate cohort of specialists and visionaries to self-consciously calculate all the mythical elements, but you can be practically illiterate to enjoy the results. Book lovers may complain, famously, that the movie was not as good as the book. That is sometimes true (but not always) from a pure literary perspective. But the movie is achieving a lot more than pure literary quality. The second miracle of film is that it simultaneously succeeds in the tribal/oral domain. It has to slip through Overton windows to enter the acceptable unconscious of the culture while also appeasing global market interests. Making a successful movie that also happens to be good literature is basically impossible. That is why we are all involuntarily awed when it happens.

I say “involuntarily” too because, even at this summit full of the most literate people around, despite some of them being anti-film, or probably more accurately, anti-Hollywood, they are still just as likely to use a Hollywood movie as a touchstone as a book. This makes perfect sense given Marshall McLuhan’s framework, borrowed by Harrington: movies allow us to participate in a global village, and that is very useful when a lot of strangers meet in Cleveland for a weekend. Books, on the other hand, feel more like gold you purloin from esoteric lands and display on a shelf. The knowledge is often deeper but harder to share.

If you or I tried to make a movie, we would put our actor on a flat background and film him saying the lines, and then be appalled by the stupid and ugly footage that has nothing to do with what the writing made us see in our mind’s eye. Most of us will never understand the millions of choices and vast cooperation of institutions of craftsmen that must go into making something tribal emerge from a literary dream. What it takes to make a shot of grain and a man’s hand suggest mortality. This is why we admire auteur writer/directors almost more than anyone, even if we can’t understand or articulate why. They can not only write world-class literature, they can serve it to you in a hypnotizing vision, filled with a million hidden intentions, perceived passively in dark theaters. We accept their work, if it’s good enough, as reality and then walk around projecting it on everything. Without knowing we know, we know the power these artists have over our very perceptions, and so we both hate them and love them more than anyone. Great film takes private literacy and transmutes it into communal gold. Walter Ong’s “secondary orality” is not necessarily an evil. When done toward a lie, it is propaganda. When done toward the good, true, and beautiful, it is the best tool we have. The New Right so far fails to capitalize here because it tends to conflate correct ontological propositions (which it often has) with these many embodied choices.

Wendell Berry was horrified to find that in the slums of South America they had little tube TVs in most shacks, all playing American TV and movies. A lot of these children would draw their TV when asked to draw their best friend. They are not fawning strictly because of multimedia stimulation; they are obsessed by the Western hyper-village transmitted through the form itself, which they would nearly as happily watch on mute through a keyhole. This is an extreme image of the medium with nothing good poured into it and why we sometimes think we need to reject it totally. Movies, but especially TV, have this re-tribalizing effect that partly undoes what widespread literacy initially did to form the West, an undoing now accelerated by the phones. Mary’s own talk set this up as essentially the origins of a post-literate society and she laments that. She also notes that before widespread literacy, people had to memorize epics and sing them over hours. I asked Harrington if she thinks being highly literate is a help or a hindrance in an increasingly post-literate world. She answered to the effect of, “I don’t know, it depends if you mind being lonely.” Big laugh.

As you might be picking up on, I’m a little perplexed by this dismissal. It was a panel, so they’re put on the spot and quips are natural. In her prepared talk (now published on Substack, which was fantastic, by the way), she makes a central claim that I agree with: we are entering a new sort of dark age. Her prescription is custodial: keep the lamps of the literate past burning like the monks did. Memorize, preserve, contemplate. She specifically makes the comparison to Noah’s Ark: it is not a universal solution and most of the world will be flooded. The problem is that the historical monasteries were never only inward, nor did they wait for formation to finish before turning outward. The copying happened in the same building as the chants. They evangelized the illiterate masses with the best of hybrid media of their day: music, liturgy, icons, architecture, stained glass, mystery plays. The other thing, I think significantly symbolic, is that the story of Noah ends with an explicit promise to never flood the world again.

We certainly seemed to speak highly of ancient illiterate societies for their oral storytelling abilities. We also seemed quite eager to bemoan the failures of the too-literate West (especially as judged here by the Orthodox East), with its lack of good mythos and its temptation to raise science to the place of religion. But then as we approach this new world and the opportunity for the highly literate few to make the best of our day’s hybrid art (which we revealingly can't stop reviewing and breaking down2), suddenly we pretend to be confused about what our aims actually are.

Despite still being able to occasionally make good things, creativity has drained away from increasingly risk-averse and sequel-happy Hollywood for decades and left a wide open opportunity for this new “myth” cohort to do some wild stuff. The fact that we have so far largely failed to capitalize on this gap, perhaps too distracted by our own sneer, is embarrassing. The mostly uncreative and also somehow anti-traditional Disney-exec types are still winning despite only pretending to be marginal, basically hating normal people, while also having almost nothing interesting to say. When the monasteries were the only place people could read, two things were much clearer than they are now: a monk’s duty was to serve illiterate masses with whatever they could most easily understand and participate in, and that not everyone needs to be a monk.

The central mistake of the majority of the ‘New Right’ — that emerging cohort of traditionalists who are much more creative than the neocons who came before them — seems to be its readiness to merely mock Hollywood films for their semi-illiterate woke propaganda. Father Josiah tapped into this sentiment with his comment “Hollywood does not tell stories.” What? He might have meant that Hollywood films sometimes invert the truth, or maybe they are not as participatory as a liturgy, which, sure. But half the speakers referenced a film in their talk to help a general audience participate in their point. One of the speakers was even ex-Hollywood. We love films. We would love it if more of them better retold the cosmic epic, but for some reason we can’t do it for ourselves yet. Gibson did it twenty years ago, once. But he funded it himself, so it didn’t happen again. Instead we feel vaguely like the “real” solution is reading more books and watching fewer movies or something. When pressed on this contradiction, we handwave that films “used to” be better, but fail to be specific about when that was and when, exactly, it all went to hell.

What the current conservative media incentive machine does, in its revealed function, is take the excesses of weird beliefs on the left and mock them to death for political or pseudo-artistic clout. That’s fine, but there’s a natural ceiling to this niche. The more effective you become, the more they are pushed toward the margin, where they function normally again, and break your business model. Artists are disproportionately marginal and weird. Most of them will fail. But a very small percentage will come up with something transcendent. What’s unique about our age is that we are so prosperous that the marginalized have started to meaningfully take the center, which is a pretty good definition of what “woke” actually is.

Media empires like the Daily Wire have emerged in reaction to this, bankrolling the New Right’s rising players to mock the work out of the center again. They rightly think that a lot of popular art has been captured by weird ideologues, but they can’t seem to do better themselves, fundamentally because they make a living mocking the very people who occasionally manage to do it. The Daily Wire tried to create a Snow White as a reaction to Disney’s “woke” Snow White, which they mocked as “Sand Beige.” Tellingly, they never released their own version. Angel Studios, for another example, can only make pretty good imitations of great films that have already been made (The Chosen is maybe an exception). Young Washington is competent as a timely counter-signal to Hollywood, but nothing about it is transcendent enough to make it a classic on its own merits. Interestingly, they have admitted to using generative AI effects to shortcut otherwise hard and expensive on-set choices.

In general, conservative incentive structures just aren’t as likely to pay for the massive risk required to produce truly good hybrid and therefore culture-defining art. Nobody is willing to invest patient capital in institutions that only mock. What’s potentially special about the New Right moment, in many ways a mirror of the woke phenomenon, is that there is a minority of genuinely high-openness and creative traditionalists now in the mix. A huge portion of the population would pay for what they want to make. Many of them were at this conference and even approached me to talk about their creative projects after I asked my question, also feeling unsatisfied by the answers. Jeremy Boreing was one hopeful creative voice in the reactionary system. However, he “stepped down” around the time his creative project “Bent Key” financially failed. It worked against the Daily Wire’s own woke-mocking incentives. They have made a few financially successful movies, yes, but notice they are all long-form mockery of the left.

Meanwhile, Nolan’s supposedly “woke” adaptation of The Odyssey – the cosmic epic written from foundational Western literature – seems to be breaking through all coordinated attempts at sneer and confident predictions of a flop: it opened this week to the best reviews of his career and IMAX screens sold out a year in advance. And the involuntary awe follows close behind: when Jonathan gave his glowing review of the film – “The movie is a Trojan horse” — conservative commentators turned on him. I think he summed up this whole essay: one reason conservatives can’t have good art is that they have “the subtlety of Left Behind novels.”

Even the most highly online and reactionary cultural commentators build their audiences for the small chance to make something as impactful as a film (or a book that will become a film). Everyone wants to be Nolan. I realize that this goes against pretty much everyone’s conventional wisdom, left or right. The left tend to think that movies will go the way of live theater and radio in the wake of vertical shorts. The right generally agrees but thinks we should have stopped somewhere in the past. That moment of downfall will vary from the 90s to the 900s, depending on who you ask. But the logic of “progress,” good or bad, has actually not been so uniformly in one direction. As is evident in things like the Metaverse, for example, wasting billions of Zuckerberg’s money. It also increasingly seems to be the case with AI video; Sora shutting down this spring was a historic failure. Actually, AI seems to elicit a near-vomit-inducing level of disgust, which does not appear to be strict Ludditism because the younger generations can both spot it easier and hate it more. The fact is, global culture is still disproportionately downstream of film (even internet culture in terms of prestige and formative power), which is itself downstream of literacy. This is not showing signs of changing, even as the literate few shrink. This confuses the more reactionary types who see film as nothing more than a slippery slope towards slop: a guilty pleasure worse than reading but better than a vertical short. This isn’t true if you understand it on both axes.

The tech bros and corporate suits who have no capacity for thinking like this will continue to be baffled that people hate their AI images and videos. It’s the same reason we hate CGI, times a thousand. CGI can be wonderful when it is enfolded into the millions of embodied choices of an auteur. It is terrible when it flattens and shortcuts choices. When they film everything on greenscreen with soft lighting, they forgo their duty to make sacrifices for bringing into being an embodied vision, vowing to “fix it in post,” but really just using the opportunity to slough off a few thousand moral decisions. The result is a movie that looks perfectly realistic (CGI is photorealistic now), but has that uncanny feeling that people struggle to name, sometimes wrongly naming it “unrealistic.” It is really the flattening of these uncountable choices. Truly, an abdication of artistic responsibility. AI is this to the extreme. It is all spectacle and no responsibility; only a handful of human choices rather than a million. The difference will always confuse people who think the meaning of the image is flatly in the pixels.

The New Right’s strange and paradoxical hatred of modern film is really disowned love. If I were asked my own question, given a few weeks to think about it, I might say, “Because it’s really hard and I don’t know how. But I love movies and I hope more of us try to make good ones because we have the best story.” The actual work of “rebuilding the monasteries” or “retelling the cosmic epic” is creating films and other great art that genuinely moves us, for the masses, post-literate or not, rather than only mocking what they currently enjoy.

Thousands of years in the future, long after your body is dissolved, billions of microscopic particles in place of you will remain buried six feet down in a vaguely fetal shape. Because surely we can’t get away with this.

The hatefulness of a Holiday Inn faux wood headboard hums just below consciousness, and so you imagine the cursed textile shedding into our water, our blood, our brains. They say it’s in rain, salt, your dog, the carpet under your baby, bottled water, tap water, and spring water. One study suggested there’s just as many microplastics floating around in the air of the Amazon rainforest as there are in the middle of a city. Really now, how could that be?

Researcher Madeline Clough wondered if we really do consume around a credit card’s worth of plastic every week, or if there was just something wrong with the testing methods. She tested everything from the spray bottles to the very air in the lab to see if they were contaminating the results. No. Finally, she tested the nitrile gloves that nearly all the researchers use, and found that a substance to prevent them from sticking to molds had a profile that was nearly indistinguishable from polyethylene. To be clear, it wasn’t the plastic in the glove the tests were detecting, but a harmless salt with a similar signature to plastic.

So the entire microplastic media panic was plausibly built around this and similar false positives. For another example, they found that one particular lipid in the human body shows up falsely as microplastics when broken down by heat in the testing process. The particles of plastic you’ve heard about in your balls and brain could be just another artefact. One highly cited 2024 study suggests having more of it in your arteries causes more heart attacks, but they also used this same lipid method. Adding to the confusion are things like BPA chemicals on certain plastics which can leech off, especially when heated or scratched. These are often conflated with microplastics, but are chemical additives not tiny plastic particles. So maybe don’t put styrofoam in the microwave or eat your mechanical pencil.

It’s hard to figure out how much plastic is in our bodies and how dangerous it really is, actually. Clough’s findings call into question the mainstream panic, but exactly how much is unclear. If you Google it or ask AI, you’re going to be talked down to like you’re a bit dim. It’s maddening. More specifically, it’s bullshit. Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit” is not exactly a lie, but is just indifferent to material facts.

The plastic panic, like the Satanic Panic in the 80s, refuses to see its devil as primarily a symbol. The symbol is mostly correct, but we should just flatly read it as a symbol and figure out what we actually mean: Plastics, like everything we touch, use, and own, take up meaningful space, not just physical space. Plastic is cheap, ugly, and disposable. Since we make sense of the world by our relationship to the things we put in it, we feel ourselves becoming cheap, uniform, and devitalized. That is to say, every object is stubbornly sacramental. They are visually meaningful, yes, but they also habituate our sense of ourselves. Everyday things like forks are transformed from potentially expensive family heirlooms to white plastic soon-to-be trash. They are one of many emblems that now inform us that it’s OK to eat quickly, without dignity, and alone.

It’s not even necessary that there be some sort of environmental disaster or that they radiate a chemical poison to explain the malaise that they imbue in us, although some of those might also pull the causal strings. Less than they’re saying, surely. More toward what matters, we treat ourselves like our objects: at best, shiny for a few years yet quick to be made ugly with sun damage and finally thrown away and put out of sight. Sent somewhere to some hideous landfill, some modern hades we can’t even imagine.

On some level, we intuit that those billions of pounds of undead dirt will one day pour into our great-grandchildren’s living room. By kicking that proverbial plastic bottle down the road to be dealt with by generations of our progeny, we feel less invigorated to procreate that Wall-E progeny. That is what we suggest to ourselves through our habituating objects: we don’t care about the future or the people in it. So, our biology, which is actually quite well attuned to the meaning of our environment of objects, will react accordingly: reduce our sex drive and shrink our testicles and lower our testosterone and blur our sex differences. Why not? From the perspective of the body, this is not rebellion, it is just acquiescence to a symbolic demand. It is the same reason you sweat during a horror movie.

It’s not only the physical plastic that attacks the reproductive parts, it’s that we’ve assigned our lack of fertility and resulting anxiety to plastic because it is the category defying substance of our age. Anthropologist Mary Douglas says what we define as “dirt” or “trash” isn’t really about chemical poison or hygiene, it’s about category violation. The headlines about microplastics are always about how it’s in the blood brain barrier, the breast milk, the balls, the placenta. It is only salient and scary insofar as it is undead material violating the sacred boundary into the organic and alive. You would never see a headline about how it’s found in, say, your clothes or your hair. You would not worry about “microcotton fibers” in your blood, because cotton does not violate the same categories of living/dead as plastic. We crave a modern Leviticus as a formal code to say which objects are clean/holy and which objects are dirty/degenerate.

When microplastics show up in our headlines as potentially infiltrating every nook and cranny of our biology and making us unwell, we click and share because a lot of plastic use violates our intuition about beauty, place, permanence, sacrament, and so we seek to punish it and ourselves. A plastic headboard made to look like local wood in a hotel room is deemed “unclean” to our collective body and rejected like old implants. Even if the science on that turns out to be iffy, the intuition is true. It is just a mismatch of meaning layers. We have trouble communicating on the meaning layer that I’m describing, so in lieu of that, we want the meaning layer of materialism to continue to conform to our intuitions even if it turns out it doesn’t quite.

It always seems to affect our genitals, doesn’t it? Disposable and hideous objects all happen to destroy our ability to create the future? hm… We’re not willing to pay for the more expensive and permanent things and therefore invest in the future, so that shortsightedness manifests in us as psychic, reproductive, and physical illnesses. The sort of illness tends to be revealingly symbolic. In response, we unconsciously and only half-heartedly attempt to encode that modern Leviticus because we don’t believe in the project of Leviticus as moderns. But we actually crave holy, blessed, and sacramental objects and rituals. We should allow ourselves to hate plastic just because it’s disgusting and not because science gives us a rationalization for what we already know is true about it.

The best thing that we can do is really not worry about plastic on the material level. Worry about beauty, plastic or not. Be grateful for IV tubes and PVC and be disgusted by lead painted plastic toys because you already are. If you make your life ugly and self-centered to avoid consuming microplastics, those cursed midichlorians, you inadvertently do their job for them, which is to make you sexless, lonely, and sick.

Reading is hard.

Certain corners of the internet prostrate themselves as we find ourselves in the soon-to-be-post-literate West. Much has been written about who isn’t reading anymore and how little. That, for example, at least 28% of the population is now functionally illiterate, up dramatically from 19% in 2017.

It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. The miracle that still needs explaining is why anyone, much less the majority of people, would spend their time doing something as difficult, tedious, and isolating as silently reading for the amount of time it would take to carefully read a wordy pamphlet, much less to grapple with a great work of literature.

Let’s repress our inner library-poster about the magic of books. If people aren’t going to read big difficult texts anymore, and that increasingly seems to be the case, and if we do have an intuition that wouldn’t be ideal, then we’re going to have to get a little more realistic about what exactly reading is and why people did it to begin with. We even need to be able to entertain the notion that reading may rightly go the way of the dodo as we invent new technologies to take its place. Why exactly is reading a book better than, say, a bunch of TikToks of roughly the same content? Suspend your disbelief.

Reading crams all five sensory inputs through the eyes, which produces a society that values rational, linear thought. Maybe that seems like a strange claim because you are doing it at this very moment. But, like a violinist trained from early childhood, you don’t recognize the enormous amounts of practice that has gone into the visual fluency that for example instantly transmutes “rotten egg” into a subtle olfactory response. You know on some level that other people are “illiterate” but have mostly forgotten the years of tedious and painfully self-conscious practice. Like a violinist, there are a thousand little movements you learned to make with your psychic “fingers” to silently produce the meaningful sounds of these symbols in your inner theater of imagination. You must deeply internalize the subtle glottal motions to make the sounds of each letter, and layer on top of that the contextual meaning of the combined sounds into words, and layer on top of that the ability to understand all that while composing the words into infinite possible meaningful sentences. You don’t learn all this by focusing on grammar, but on emotional images and stories and then, slowly, you begin to associate those emotions with rules for your particular language’s more granular syntaxes. You can even get away with never consciously learning many of the rules as I, to be frank, still don’t know what the hell present perfect is, but I can presumably still “do” it. These wordy fragments can then form into self-contained chunks like ideals and ideologies, which in some cases can totally detach from their source and float around from one person’s head to another.

So it’s clear that silent reading is hard and recent and mysterious. Much more so than speech, oddly. Children will learn to speak without a whiff of a formal lesson but will almost never learn to read unless you make them. Reading is like looking at the symbols of sheet music and being able to hear it all, from the oboe to the bassoon, in your head. How are you doing that? Not from memory, but being able to make new sounds that you’ve never heard before, in your imagination. As Beethoven went deaf, he relied more and more fully on his previously developed musical literacy to continue to “hear” the music. In fact, arguably his best stuff was written after he went completely deaf and could only work on the piece in his mind’s theatre, which is only possible by assimilating written musical language into an inner soundscape. It is a miracle that so many people had an analogous psychotechnology of silent reading in the modern world. Imagine a world where the majority of people could “hear” written music as well as Beethoven. That was the height of the West’s verbal literacy, at least for a while there. Literate consciousness floated in our air even for the less literate. It built the world as we know it, and why we intuitively fear losing it.

There is the tempting and obvious solution that doesn’t work:

Beg people to read more books. We feel that this is of mortal importance, even if we can’t quite say why. Henry Oliver has taken up this crusade, urging more people to read great literature and bemoaning that an editor of the New York Times book review hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't consider that a problem. What’s funny is that I heard Henry reporting this on an audio-visual podcast from Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker, not in some post-post modern novel about how nobody reads novels. Now, as far as pushing a few people to read Dante and Shakespeare who otherwise might have re-read Game of Thrones or something, I think that’s a noble enough cause. As far as righting the larger cultural ship, however, it won’t work. Firstly, what’s “novel” about postmodern novels has almost fully worn off. They rightly spelled out the culmination of the highly literate Gutenberg West. It was an amazing artifact of prophecy, but not viscerally interesting anymore because we are living out a more extreme version of their insights: the atomization and then deification of the Self. People aren’t motivated to read modern novels, not because they’re not great or because people are illiterate morons, but because the tantalizing sparks that would help a person overcome the great heft of reading a thick novel are played out and old news. Maybe it will be interesting in a hundred more years, but not at this epoch. We’re entering a new age and leaving the modern one behind, and it’s difficult to see that from within it. It’s more readily apparent in our behavior than anything we can easily verbalize, hence why Henry is more prone to express this concern in a podcast rather than via the next great American novel, despite himself fearing the implications of that.

On that podcast he pointed out how impoverished he thinks modern media like prestige TV is compared to, say, King Lear. This, I think, is Henry’s highly literate mind anachronistically applying golden-age literary aesthetic standards to more oral media. Henry is an outlier, and is therefore more literate than almost anyone, but especially compared to an average TV viewer. This does not necessarily make him more sophisticated in his thinking, just that his favored medium has trained him in its tropes and more broadly to be very linear and rational and highly individualistic in his ability to and taste for verbalizing inner experience. When judging something like Succession, he is going to be less “fluent” in the standards of quality from an oral storytelling perspective. He focuses on the clichés in the script and impoverished realistic dialogue as compared to the best of great literature. He is less able to assess the “vibe” of the show, the music, the non-verbal humor, the in-group signaling, and so on. I get it because I also don’t like it, and he did say that he might be wrong. But for us to judge secondary orality by literate standards is to miss the point a bit obtusely. Like it or not, we are leaving behind the modern novel and entering an age of vertical content. One that we don’t yet know the shape of, and one full of dangers and opportunities.

Socrates, as I too often point out, says in Phaedrus that the written word would be bad for people because they would no longer bother to remember anything. I love that anecdote because, like Socrates himself, it annoys you into thinking. As the father of our highly literate society, his dislike of the written word produces a delicious contradiction that can’t be neatly resolved. I like that. A little self-sufficient Zen Koan; Escher’s impossible geometric shapes that make you pause long enough to look beyond them.

Modern consciousness depends on language so deeply that linguistic intelligibility is fundamental to our ability to perceive the cosmos the way we think is a given. Paradoxically, it also seems that language is not the same thing as reality and if you stare too long at its glittering refractions, you will lose touch in some extremely dangerous way. “I think therefore I am” could only have emerged in a highly literate society, somehow abstracted enough to pull “I” clear out of body, place, and other people.

Before written language was orality; wild and beautiful and paradoxical was poured into our awareness through memorized myths, long before anyone thought to devise a way to mark it down for ghosts of the future. What makes the stars in the sky and the distant mountains “awesome” is the primal meaning your ancestors gave to them as symbols all the way to you and how you take in the world. They are the reason you can even “see” the stars, much less be impressed by them. Have you ever noticed that your dog doesn’t care about the stars in the sky even though the photons are certainly tickling their optic nerves, same as you? Spoken and sung language is so enveloping and involuntary (you don’t have ear lids) that it suggests a power beyond yourself that you must stop and listen to. Take in. It makes the world for the consciousness formed by that medium enchanted and brimming with meaning.

Widespread deep literacy begins to move the dominant mode of perception from passive listening to active seeing. At first only a devout elite of strange prophets, visionaries, and hermits were able to do it. That was what made them “visionaries,” in fact. Socrates was wrong that they would stop remembering things because of their strange practice. He just had no way of foreseeing how they would transfer embodied memories of shared myths about places into a new ability to create and memorize abstract landscapes. His student Plato had this idea about a palace of Forms and his strange hatred of Homeric poetry is explained by him being the transition point from oral to literate. The written word gives rise to those visual, abstract, linear, logical thoughts. The music of the old myths remain, but more hidden, soft, and sealed off into the “inner world” of the buffered self. You can still hear shouts of the old myths in poetry, which retains the ancient ways of speaking by, for example putting effects before causes, inverting the sense of linear cause and effect made so strong by literacy. It ushers our minds back to the pre-literate. We still feel this temporal inversion to be “poetic:” the ashes fell / the city burned.

Now, we are developing more and more technologies that allow us to ease into the warm womb of our storytelling past: the radio, then the TV, and now the phones. That is comfortable and much more natural than the great effort of reading, but there are obvious problems. One, is that our state of nature for humanity is not as the Rousseau hippies predicted. Turns out, in the state of nature we are only kumbaya with the ingroup and extremely violent with everyone else. Two, our new oral environment is no longer the natural world but super-literate wizards of Oz who are A/B testing every jot and tittle for a little more of your attention and money.

People naturally sense that a drop-off in reading will lead to tribalism without being able to explain why. They tend to think it’s because of a lack of “knowledge” or something, but that’s too simplistic. As McLuhan now too-famously said, the medium is the message. The medium of written text trains us to harness our animal drives to think linearly and rationally. The all-surrounding medium of audio or audio-visual (reels, podcasts, TV) trains us toward a more holistic, natural and therefore tribal mode of awareness. Interestingly, it is best produced by highly literate people, and consumed by the entire spectrum of literate to illiterate. Ostensibly, the attention economy and the star system that preceded it rewards the oral-native high-charisma performers, but they have always been the tools of their more literate operators. Unlike a novel, a film can hit you in the limbic system and enthrall you for three hours without you or even the actors being able to explain why. If you go deeper still; learn to “read” the language of movies instead of just letting them wash over you, focusing on the literary quality as if it’s an acted-out novel, you will find that it’s a whole new world of a secondary oral culture to explore. My wife and I love movies, and we consistently find that some of even the most “dumb” movies can have extreme literary depth hidden in the non-literate languages like lighting, acting, sets, vibe, and so on.

The reason we involuntarily venerate auteur writer-directors is because they are masters of both the literate scripting and the oral/tribal performances, actors, settings. If you or I tried to make a movie, we would put our actor on a flat background and film him saying the lines, and then be appalled by the bland and ugly footage that has nothing to do with what we see in our minds’ eyes. Most of us will never understand the billions of choices that must go into making something real conform to a dream. As literate people, we cannot even begin to imagine the consciousness of oral people, much less project their waking dreams onto a screen, through the cellulose of great literature. We don’t know how Coppola changes the faux sun beams coming through the palms at the exact right moment to indicate “revelation” to the oral mind; we will just believe he somehow pointed the camera and got the sensor to receive the reality of his meaning.

What we rightly fear about most people no longer reading is that they will become tribal creatures living in a global oral sensorium machine, controlled by the elite few who can think clearly enough with language to ensnare them and get their attention and even worship by using their high literacy to scaffold hyper-salient oral media. Walter Ong calls this secondary orality. The larger the disparity becomes between the literate and the illiterate (the data suggests that the most literate cohort is remaining stable while everyone below them is dropping off quickly), the more there is a temptation for the literate to make things in bad faith: the less common people read, the fewer novels, essays, and films the elite bother to make, the more slop, reels, politics, and ads will easily make them rich.

So is reading going the way of the dodo? Maybe so. Maybe we will never have a majority of highly literate people the way we did in the modern age. But, like the pre-Gutenberg age, a highly literate minority will still retain all the power and influence, and those people will either be moral or immoral. You can either be one of the people to help order the passions of everyone upward, or we will leave everyone at the total and ever-increasing mercy of a global hyper-literate and amoral elite who, through no consciously malicious decision on their part, are ever-nudged toward more and more hyper-salient media for their increasingly illiterate masses.

Literacy is neutral. What’s really scarce are those virtuous literates who love to craft and enjoy the good, true, and beautiful artifacts of secondary orality. Without good literate people making good things, this will always end in the ultimate culmination of visual salience: porn.

Porn is easy.

Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, was also a logician and mathematician. His Symbolic Logic book is full of bizarre puzzles with absurd assumptions that are somehow still internally consistent. Here’s one that Steve Martin made famous in a joke in the arrow-through-head early days:

• All babies are illogical.

• Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.

• Illogical persons are despised.

Therefore:

• Babies cannot manage crocodiles.

I told this to a couple of my friends while staying in Metairie. We had a sensible chuckle, then set out to figure if it was internally consistent. We broke each statement into clear components to carefully model the confusing negations. It turns out, it is internally consistent. Figuring that out had us shouting at each other.

Carroll intentionally disconnected his syllogisms from normal experience to make you better at seeing pure rationality without worrying about what is “true” in an everyday sense. I like this approach because it both helps you become more rigorous in your cold reasoning but also reminds you that detachment is fantastic nonsense without real-world intuitions to ground the premises. That’s why they’re funny, which was not lost on Carroll.

At the same time, I also noticed, we found a different kind of joy in the act of digging under the surface to find those clear mechanisms. Without us really noticing, the gestalt of why it was funny faded and the thrill of “figuring it out” came more to the fore. We had murdered to dissect, so to speak. That was fine, but then a thought came to me:

This is basically the motivating sensation behind the scientific method or rationalism as such. Cold rationalism isn’t enough to push someone to dedicate their entire lives to cosmic ray protons or devils hole pupfish, say. That must be motivated by the joy of understanding, which is achieved by a deconstruction of larger meanings into graspable bits.

A possible danger of that is if you go so far as to destroy the source, the gestalt, which is your raison d’être. That is to say, none of the clarity we extracted from the logic added up to the sum of the joke. Put another way, none of it could help us understand why we were interested in breaking down that particular thing among a billion others. Put yet another way, none of the clarity was as fun as the joke itself. The joke happens all at once: in the laughter which is something like simultaneously apprehending many living layers. Rationalism gives off little charged particles of meaning, one at a time.

Re-enchantment, as a cultural concept, has already been flogged to death. If you don’t already know John Vervaeke’s lectures and Charles Taylor’s book and so on, do check those out. I just want to see if I can come at this obliquely through a dumb joke. None of this is to say that rationalism is wrong. It is just my desire to bring back places where the gestalt is allowed to exist without having to deal with the constant barrage of well-actuallys.

I’ll give you another dumb example.

Henrik Karlsson wrote an essay about how to walk through walls. How to be a “hacker.” One of the examples he uses is speedrunners in The Legend of Zelda. When he was a kid, he played The Legend of Zelda for hours. He understood it at the level of narrative; the game as it was designed to be presented. The speedrunners, however, worked to not understand the game as a simulated fantasy world of the imagination, the battle of good versus darkness, and whatever else that game is supposed to evoke. They understand it on what you might say is the deeper level: code, bits, ones and zeros. They do things like overload the RAM so as to confuse the system about where the character is in time and space, making large jumps forward for very small amounts of time. By understanding that it is “actually” built on code, they transcend how the game is played, beating it in twenty minutes or some unfathomably short amount of time. If you were watching a speedrun without understanding the ins and outs of their hacks, it would be incomprehensible. You would just see jolting, half-understood flashing images. This is meant to be the insight: learn the ability to take a system, understand its underlying code, and then use that to walk through walls—do things so much faster that it appears magical to other people.

It’s a good piece. And what’s good about that mindset is that it attacks bureaucratic systems that have mutated beyond the narrative they were created to serve. Karlsson uses the film industry: Entrenched industry people want you to go through the studio hoops so you spend tremendous amounts of money to do things in the established way. A “hacker” might better understand the mechanisms of what “actually” needs to happen to get the shots to make a movie for as small a budget as possible. Here the hacker is taking down a corpse to serve a living thing, which is good. A good hacker is reverent to a good mythos and aggressive with dead ones. That I see.

The hacker mode is unambiguously bad when it senselessly breaks down what gives itself meaning. Notice, for example, that there is actually an even deeper level of understanding to The Legend of Zelda than the code. No one would be interested in hacking the underlying code if it weren’t for the salience of the narrative. If it were just a bunch of blind code, speedrunning it would make no sense. You would no longer be doing a feat that was meaningful to others, you would just be moving random digits around. At that point, why do anything at all? You might as well do the ultimate hacker speedrun and delete the code. A new record. What is bizarre is that the speedrunners have developed a new mythology and sprawling online community on top of the game like a cake with alternating layers of reverence and rationalism, but all of it ultimately depends on reverence for the game. If you fully server that nativity, everything else crumbles. The deepest layer, the layer even deeper than the hacker can easily see, is what attracts the hacker to video games in the first place. The story. It is both the most superficial layer and, at the far end of the bell curve, the deepest. The narrative arrived in the mind of the creator long before a line of code was written, and even now that code would cease to matter if that original spark died.

Rationality cannot replicate that relevance, it can only give you the thrill of explaining it away, which is not the same as making it. The rationalist hacker mindset of the last couple hundred years is a mythos, itself nested in a much larger mythos. The rebel, the college dropout, the hacker: these all exist as archetypes, too. They require a machine to rage against to generate their energy. If you become so much of a hacker culture that you even hack the hacker story itself, you kill what motivates you to get out of bed. For most people, it is better to play the proverbial Legend of Zelda on the narrative level than on the level of code. The code is not there to pull the wool over your eyes, but to give you an arena for your own unfolding. You do not have to be so paranoid. Often to “see through the matrix” defeats its own purposes, which is to give you the container against which you become more like yourself.

We are obsessed with breaking down as a way of gaining power; over government agencies, patriotism, religion, and even, ironically, the scientific method itself. Rationalism is a wonderful faculty of being human, but cannot be the primary faculty. If it is treated as if it is, it becomes impossible to make or maintain a country, a company, or any motivational identity that unites people. If we make it our mission to constantly break down, interrogate, and fragment everything, we will be left with nothing but rotten pieces. We may have gained total power over those hacked up bits, but the cumulative loss will be much higher. If you operate at a net mythos loss over a long enough time, you will eventually run out of fuel. That’s fine. From decomposition comes fertile soil, and out of soil blooms new narratives. We can also notice, during all of the decomposition, what survives among them. History knows it is not always going to be brand new things that rise from the ashes, but also what survives across apocalypses.

A lot of people’s first reaction to understanding re-enchantment is to start LARP’ing some instagram trad life or something. That reaches too hard for an unearned and probably long-dead mythos. There are good things all around us that happen to be actually alive: laughing about a logic joke with your friends in Meep’s house in Metairie. Being able to know when to be a hacker and when to be reverent Aristotle named phronesis. Wisdom. You can’t make a rule out of it. If you could, then the hackers could automate art, and well, good luck with that. But it’s a virtue, which means it’s trainable. That means you’ll have to risk some embarrassing sincerity.

It’s all right here and entirely consistent, get it? babies cannot manage crocodiles. Play lightly on the apparent level rather than the code level. You’ll know when the reverse is warranted. When in doubt, play inefficiently and for the sake of playing. One because that is much more normal and comfortable, and two because it’s paradoxically closer to reality.

An earlier draft of this (can’t stop editing, sorry) was published in Sword & Spade magazine where they also recently interviewed me in a podcast.

I was playing racquetball when my priest collapsed, saying, “My Achilles just went.” Most of the time, reality is drawn tight: you can’t stray very far from predictable behavior, and not much of what you do will survive in memory. This only gets worse with age. Occasionally, though, the veil pops open like the rupture of a tendon.

To tell you the truth, I feel partly responsible. I’ve been playing the game longer, and my wife watches us, so I really didn’t want him to beat me. This particular night, he won one game out of two. At that point, it was past nine, and all signs pointed to it being time to go home. Instead, I pushed him for two out of three. Two volleys later, he’s on the ground. Of course, this isn’t some hokey “everything happens for a reason” sort of thing. This is just one of those rare opportunities to see on the other side of the veil.

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If you ever have the opportunity, I’ll be the one to tell you: drive to the ER, get a Powerade for everyone, then sit in that waiting room and watch Seth Meyers until one AM with the increasing number of injured and paranoid crackheads, no questions asked. It doesn’t matter how much work you have the next day or how tired or hungry you are. Mood and discomfort will quickly fade, and you aren’t often lucky enough to know you’re walking in a memory. Changes of fate only take place in places like these, so tread carefully. When you do finally look back, everything will be trapped in amber and on naked display. All the gripes, competitions, and bodily aches will be gone, and all that’s left is the evidence of who you chose to be and what you’re likely to continue to do. Your future self uses these memories as evidence of who you habitually will become.

The mechanism of nostalgia is the motivation to know this in advance. I was lucky to know I was in a memory that night and acted accordingly. We had no idea that we were in such a golden memory in the cover photo. That is a picture of my father and me at our family convenience store in the 90’s, named “Buddy’s,” after my dad. It’s almost as if I could speak to them across the sheen between us: they are both still walking in my memory. I wish I could warn them what’s at stake: they will form the people looking back at them, thirty years on. If by some magic I could get back there, I would probably be in awe of all the artifacts that prove it is the 90’s: the hairstyles, the subtle differences in manufacturing materials, the way people talk, and what they talk about. Everything about then and there would be so helplessly 90’s, and yet no one else would have the perspective to even perceive that. Yet it wouldn’t look like the photo’s quintessentially “90s” quality, which tricks my memory into thinking back then was all hard shadows from plastic flashbulbs. It would look stark, new, and mundane, as things do right now. But Clarence would still be alive and flirting with the cashier. Francis’ cartoonishly shrill voice would be chattering over the sound of boiling grease. My mother would be in her office, clapping the calculator for payroll, my father and mother would still be together. If I were drawn through the sheen, I would be compelled beyond all reason to grab collars and shout cliches: Pay attention! It will all be over and gone so much faster than you think!

Nostalgia isn’t a simple yearning to be in the past. Nostalgia is the guilt that the past wasn’t appreciated until it was too late, and the hope that we can learn from that mistake to appreciate this moment now, before it too becomes unreachable. Everything we do and say now is helplessly defined by the fact that it’s the 2020s, like a smell we can’t even perceive on ourselves. We will only know exactly how and why it constrains us once we see it from out there. Nostalgia is best when it reminds us that we are walking in the memories of future minds who, thanks to their temporal distance, can love us better than we can. It is bad when we use it to withdraw even further because we can twist what the past could have been into a bunker to hide from the present. But we should not dwell on false projections. Turn your attention to the fact that you were walking in a memory now, calling to mind how your own child, looking at a photo of you in thirty years, would want you to do, be, and value. Nostalgia is the determination to do, be, and value the right things despite how you feel.

The future is always solidifying and then quickly dying, never to return. This unbearable torrent is happening every second you’re awake. What’s tempting about inappropriately wallowing in the past, in fact, is that the full potential of the future has already been played out and so is no longer liable to unexpectedly pop on you like a ligament. But most of the fears we habitually use to escape the demands of the present will never come to pass. Even the fears you have no control over, like the loss of family, you will eventually make peace with after appropriate grief. What will actually haunt you forever are the small decisions: to be honest or to lie, to be chaste or to cheat, to be present or to check out. Worry much more about those. If you make the wrong ones and then still refuse to notice when things eventually rupture, you will spend the rest of your life wishing you could step through an old photo and do it again.

What’s strange is that what broke open the veil that night was the small choice to twist the knife: not wanting to lose even once in front of my wife. That opened up for me a different choice, and maybe anyone would have bought Powerades and watched Seth with the junkies. What mattered was I knew that I was in a memory, so I’ll never yearn to go back and do it again.

To give you an idea of how embarrassing it is to try to pass off AI writing as your own: I won’t even tell you which family member clearly used GPT to write a congratulations for our wedding. I feel it would be disrespectful, even though you don’t know this person.

I would rather they texted me a picture of a dead dove captioned “thinking of you two” than the slop we actually did receive, “not X, but Y” maudlin sort of prose. It’s especially awkward because I can’t even tell the person that I know because it would embarrass them. I just have to grimace and hope for better in the future.

We know you’re using AI and nobody will tell you because it would embarrass you. We don’t necessarily want to do that. Except sometimes when someone is really asking for it.

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Robert M. Hamburger (you can’t make that up) wrote an open letter to Substack leadership complaining about, I wanna say, promulgating short-form media as opposed to more thoughtful long-form essays. I don’t know, I didn’t read it carefully. Detection software tells me his letter is top-to-bottom AI-generated. How this might count as irony is apparently lost on Hamburger. I don’t even need the software to know. I can smell it. It’s filled with telltale AI-isms, sure. But I don’t need those either. Even if he had used it “just as an editor,” I can feel it like plaque on my teeth. When he was called out for the AI by Chris Best, he doubled down with what read like the prose of an AI-generated presidential concession speech. The humiliation was almost too intense to watch.

By the way, I am not at all moved by those quizzes that suggest people are no better than chance at guessing what is AI text and what is not. The same sort of people who think that GPT is conscious are the ones that set up these studies, apparently. First of all, I can still tell. Second, a piece of random text presented in a flashcard setting might as well be AI-generated, anyway. I don’t care if you show me a line of Tolstoy and an AI generated plausible faux version and one day I can’t tell the difference. The overlooked important bit is that Tolstoy actually existed and we all care about his existence enough to make the machine sort of convincingly imitate him, and that is only if it is taken out of any plausibly natural context and entirely in hindsight. What is unique about actual human writing is that it comes from within lots of context. We know what bits Tolstoy actually wrote because we have agreed-upon records, and that is what actually makes any of it interesting at all.

If, for example, you tend to inarticulately bloviate like a Cockney, and then suddenly start texting like a museum plaque right when things start to get intense, I’m going to know that what you’ve presented to me is, if not AI-generated, at the very least bizarrely inauthentic. In that sense, I can understand why Hamburger would be motivated to post his slop. He wants to make sure his ideas are palatable and legible. And it worked. It has almost 5,000 likes and 2,000 comments or something like that. Most people don’t notice that it’s AI-written.

The cynic in me wants to say that, therefore, people en masse are morons. I don’t see it that way. People en masse are busy and AI is particularly excellent at pressing mass-appeal buttons to spiritual passersby, extremely legibly, without upsetting or disrupting their common sensibilities. Somebody not reading thoroughly is much more likely to skim it, share it, like it. Thus, these things spread like a three-day cold. In the short term, it’s exponentially more popular than real writing.

People look at those numbers going up to the right and project that slop is therefore soon to take over everything. This is just the classic mistake of a too-short time horizon. As a category, it tends to bloat in the short term and then quickly rot from public memory. It has a negative capacity at getting the approval of the right people: the people who you love, who have things you need, who may employ you, etc.

You burn bridges, in fact, when you indulge in not thinking. If you commit to this strategy, you’ll end up frenetically chasing your own tail, trying to spike your slowly declining popularity with people who, by definition, go away as they pay more attention to you. You enter into a cycle of self-humiliation, finding more and more ways to justify that to yourself and others. People who get caught in this loop accidentally seal themselves into a self-contained yet declining ecosystem, which will be their creative end. It’s not unique to AI. You see it all the time. I knew viral listicle writers who were very popular on Medium. They were naturally taken with AI and produced a bunch of slop, and then humiliated out of existence. I don’t believe real writing is in any danger, the arc of justice is just longish.

I mostly worry about my friends and family suddenly having access to this thing. It’s so embarrassing and I just don’t know how to tell them. Here: to everyone using AI in your texts, your Facebook posts, and your job applications, stop it. We know. We don’t like it. The short-term thrill of sounding more crisply articulate than you are will hurt you, not even in the very long term. It makes it too easy to not do the vulnerable thing of revealing what sort of person you are through the prism of what you would plausibly know about off hand. People try to make the following argument: we’ve always had editors and thesaurus and so on. How is AI any different? They haven’t thought it through: that’s the classic joke of someone writing inauthentically with a bunch of pompous similes: “writing with the thesaurus.” Imagine that times however many datacenters.

My wife and I met the superintendent of the public school at karaoke the other night. She told us how easy it is for her to tell when parents email her using AI. They always start with, “I hope you are well.” Of course, the AI style is also obvious and becomes even more agonizing once they meet in real life and they’re nowhere near that erudite. Unlike what I predicted of AI early on, it has not bothered to adapt itself to fool the most scrupulous. It has adapted to the greater market pressure to be like a semi-useless degenerate Tolstoyan aristocrat. Everyone knows the kids are all cheating with AI. The only reason they get away with it is because the teachers get to use AI to grade the AI homework. Then, parents complain about how uneducated their kids are with AI. For now at least, we have allowed a total mutual waste of time at the expense of the taxpayer. It’s doomed because everybody knows it’s happening. The schools that ban the phones and go back to reading and writing, oral exams, handwritten essays, etc. are going to outperform, embarrassingly, the ones who don’t. Just give it time.

Despite what the most flagrant tech bros tend to think, you can’t become capable of thinking if a machine does your thinking. You may think you’re “high-agency” enough to skip Moby-Dick and cheat your way through school and drop out and do a startup. That might have happened a few times as a cash-out of generations of accrued societal and familial wisdom, but a society that makes a habit out of that behavior becomes a dead society. One that can’t ensoul children to be able to think anything at all. It doesn’t matter if you avoid the em dashes and the “I hope you are wells,” and the “not X, but Ys” and if you always keep up with the new ones. What is always happening behind the scenes is that you’re stealing wisdom that you haven’t earned. Again, I’m not moralizing at you. I’m just telling you that we can tell. You’re trying to get away with something. You’re not going to get away with it forever. So, don’t get too used to using it for your job applications, your sermons, your cover letters, your texts. Especially if it’s difficult, high stakes, or emotional. Don’t do it. You will eventually be embarrassed and no one will even be able to tell you. They will just stop reaching out.

I’m not above it, either. I’m tempted to run these drafts through AI to make sure they’re tight and that I haven’t forgotten anything. But it’s better to miss something. It’s better to show the pattern of your ignorance as it truly appears than to buffer what you already think through a sycophantic machine that’s going to find every piece of evidence to agree with you, and therefore never allow you to have a difficult experience of transformation.

AI is a tool, yes. “Morally neutral” as people like to say. Sure. But its truly “morally neutral” applications are extremely limited. It’s a good spell checker. It’s good for transcriptions. If you’re a lawyer, it’s good for summarizing documents, but you still have to check them. It’s good for cooking and translations and phone plans and things I’m forgetting and don’t know about, I’m sure. Somewhere just a hair beyond, it’s suddenly a complete deal with the devil. The moment the thing spits out the text, you have your reward.

The people who matter can tell and it’s embarrassing.

Say, you go to a plantation in South Louisiana, where the only open coffee shop in town is. In the parking lot there’s a sign that says, “Do not park to the right of this sign. Violators will be towed.”

You would immediately understand that the sign meant your right given the vantage from which you can read the sign. This is left unexplained. Confidence in this interpretation is high enough that you don’t notice the actually quite labyrinthian web of assumptions that go into the the placement and the meaning of the sign: the first-person concept of right-handedness in relationship to where you can read the English words, the concept of free parking, the threat of tow trucks, and so on.

That’s an easy one.

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Say you’re walking around this plantation, and you notice a pond with a small bridge to an island in the center. There are a bunch of Southern-Homes looking cypress knees and hanging moss to entice you over. You walk across the bridge. You sit in a chair, reading. To your left you notice that there’s an egg. There are several scattered feathers around it. You wonder if a damn duck left that egg there. There are ducks in the water over there. It looks exactly like a chicken egg, but that would mean someone bought an egg from the store and left it on the ground because there are no chickens for miles. That’s implausible, besides, because what about all the scattered feathers? Did a fox kill the mother or are they just from nesting? There is no visible nest, come to think of it. The egg is just laying on the open dirt. You don’t really know what a duck egg looks like in relation to a chicken egg, anyway. Is a duck egg shell leathery or is that a turtle? The questions keep coming.

You walk over and touch the egg with your shoe. It’s heavy and a little see-through like it might hatch. No ducks attack you. You remember that near the entrance there was a giant turkey (he has a name that everyone who works there knows, but you can’t remember [it’s Ivan]), who is about three feet tall and ancient and reminds you that dinosaurs certainly did exist. Wouldn’t his (her?) egg be the size of a softball? You then look around for maintenance staff or tour guides who might know about the origin of this egg, who perhaps have left it there intentionally, who might be ready to scold you for disrupting a protected bird or something.

My question to you: Is it OK to pick up the egg?

The expectation that was clear-cut for the sign is much more nuanced now. If you’re a certain kind of guy, you might reach down and pick up the egg. Or you might be afraid of germs on it. Or if you’re a compassionate type, you might worry that the mother won’t come back if you touch it. If you’re high in conscientiousness, you might avoid touching it for fear of breaking the social contract, as you keenly feel a duty to not being too odd or disruptive. All of these calculations and many more are done in an instant, all the time. You might have a discussion with your wife about if it’s cool or not. Cool meaning kosher, copacetic, you see.

All cognition exists on this gigantic interpersonal, intersocial, contextual landscape. A certain kind of analytic philosopher wants to believe that everything could be understood like the parking sign, but themselves fail to notice that even in the case of the sign there is a sort of bizarre and intuitive social underground. They might have it to place a sign next to every rogue egg saying, “Please only touch if you are reasonably sure it’s a loose chicken egg. Otherwise, contact your local forester.”

It’s easy to have high confidence in plain instructions when and where they are possible. The very practice of thinking that everything could work that way makes you less well equipped to handle it when you have to rely on a vast array of hypercontextual cues to know what to do, which is almost always. When it’s okay to read a magazine that’s been left in a chair, or when it’s okay to try on a hat in a store, how far to stand from someone you’ve just met vs. known for ten years, and so on.

The masculine principle tends to take these common sense sort of wisdoms for granted (if at all) and seeks to find new and more asymmetrical sources of information. The feminine principle tends to play by the rules of the existing context and will only instantiate asymmetrical information of the men she most trusts and depends on. The masculine without the feminine tends towards a technical sort of social autism, and the feminine without the masculine tends toward rule by committee and sometimes mob.

Nietzsche said that if wisdom was a woman, and it is, then philosophers have failed in their task because none of them have understood women, which is true and hilarious. The task of the good philosopher is sort of like a more detailed poet. The metaphysics have been already established by nature and in our behavior. They are true as far as they have worked. Our intuitions are, by and large, correct, insofar as people who have followed the wrong ones destroyed their society, or the people who followed the right ones poorly also destroyed their society. The job of the philosopher is to give those intuitions credence with the sort of more precise semi-poetry to fortify it against regression. If philosophy is not doing its job to justify good, prudent, practical, pragmatic, and long-term intuitions (read: religious), then it is failing.

Occasionally, it finds something counter-intuitive and also true, but that is rare. Even when we all think we know the ideas that sound wrong but are actually right, we’re still usually wrong. Specifically, philosophy begins to radically fail when it is only done by increasingly odd guys who remain isolated by their inability to understand women. What we get without them is a metaphysic that provocatively seeks to systematically undermine our intuitions, and therefore implicitly hates the women who are the best at abiding by those intuitions, for better and worse. Women usually avoid this sort of thought by nature, unless they are trying to impress a certain type of boy. They are, for the most part, completely disgusted by the vibes of most philosophers, which Nietzsche also knew well.

But philosophy is not useless. Philosophy is best when it’s something you do with your family. Walker Percy said that the greatest advice he would give a kid is to learn to love to read before it’s too late. If you don’t, you will have missed out. Learning how to read good philosophy and good fiction, after all, is the only thing that will protect you and your family from the onslaught of the waves of dynamic cultural vampirism that try to eat them at every turn, through their phones and through the TV, through social media, and whatever.

They’re coming for your kids. Without a robust, serious, thoughtful, playful, fun philosophy that, importantly, passes the smell test of your wife, you will lose them, and you will lose them badly. They will lack a way to connect their rational faculties with the sacramental and intuitive rituals. They will play out dark pagan patterns that have been repeatedly shown to lead to death and infertility. To the extent that you fail at that, your family line will die. That is a practical failure of your working philosophy.

A rule of thumb: If, for example, you attend a philosophical summit where there are no women (which my wife and I did a few weeks ago), the men will tend to revel too much in their anti-social conceptual purity. If you go to places where there are no men around, the women will revel in what sounds nice over what’s true, as they tend to want to maintain a safe space.

What we need is the masculine faculty to pierce into discomfort where necessary (which, to varying degrees, is found in both men and women). That drive wants to go out into the unknown specifically to bring forth treasure to impress a woman. She is then able to place it in just the right spot in the contextual home (or not), which is to capitulate that new information into the existing structure of the family.

If my wife happened to be with me, I would have looked at her and asked “Should I pick up the egg?” I honestly don’t know what she would’ve said.

What makes a person want to become a writer is a mysterious thing, maybe bad. There’s a quote I vaguely remember that says something like “A writer is a person for whom writing doesn’t come naturally.” The reason for its online popularity is probably at least a little to do with assuaging the inferiority complex of wannabe writers, but I also think there is some genuine truth to it. When you have a slight difficulty with what comes naturally to others, it’s like an irritative particle of sand that, in the right clam, may be bothered into a fine pearl.

I remember once I was waxing poetic on a Zoom call with my friend, I think about Heidegger, and he said something to the effect of “Why do you think like this?” My inner eye scanned for an origin story: I had several left-brain seizures when I was pubescent. They scared the hell out of me and made me temporarily lose my language abilities. That put a little sand in my shell.

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It was an event nearly as mysterious as the birth of my own consciousness ten years or so previous. The last thing a delicate developing ego needs is a total disruption; a hard shake of the etch-a-sketch to call into question all the stable first principles other kids were happily building their book reports and times tables on. Suddenly, I’m asking weird existential questions at pep rallies like, “What does this all mean? Why are we all cheering?” and getting odd looks from other twelve-year-olds and teachers alike. I wasn’t trying to be a little Nietzsche, either. It all suddenly seemed strange to me (a lot like Sartre’s concept of “nausea”). I felt like I needed to explicitly understand the rituals in order to play along.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The seizure I can best remember, although there were more than a few others, occurred just after I got home from a camping trip. There were always two requirements to kick-starting a seizure: 1) I had to be extremely tired from days of light or little sleep and 2) I had to experience that falling sensation you sometimes get right as you’re about to leave consciousness into sleep and your body jolts you awake again almost as if from a physical drop. We used to call it a Devil’s Shove. That hypnic jerk, for reasons mysterious, was the seed of violent electrical incoherence.

The left half would catastrophically fail to come online. What happened for the next few minutes would be the panic of my brain trying to restart itself like it had a dirty carburetor. My right side (the brain is cross-wired) would spasm; every muscle would flex so hard I would bruise myself. My mouth would chatter like novelty teeth and I would moan and clench and just hold the hell on. The spasms would increase in tempo and intensity like a demon resisting exorcism. The culmination would knock me totally unconscious on most occasions. On a different occasion, I stopped breathing, so my dad rushed me to the hospital. I came to in his truck, him driving it through a ditch to get around a blockade of ambulances who had failed to find our house. I was fine by then.

This time, the worst of the tremors left me dazed but still awake. Or, at least, the silent watcher had managed to stay conscious. I’ve read a lot about hemispheric differences in split-brain patients. It has given me a way to put words to what I experienced, which is beyond normal language. By the way, if you think hemisphere differences are “pseudo-science,” that’s fine. They are cartoonishly exaggerated in pop-psychology, one side being about “creativity” and the other about “logic.” This is mostly false, but differences certainly do exist. You can read all about them in hundreds of split-brain studies, the best commentaries of which are written by and Oliver Sacks. The closest instance to my own I’ve found is the famous “Stroke of Insight,” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. We both experienced, for a time, what it feels like to suddenly be without a left-hemisphere.

Mine, however, did not onset during a silent stroke, but after a neurochemical laser show. The convulsions culminated beyond tolerability, flashing lights and visions of things I could not begin to understand or remember. Dostoyevsky wrote about his own full-brained seizures, which would come on in a similar way. It would be as if he were gaining more and more cosmic insight until it would become like the face of God: too powerful to look at. He would be knocked out just as he was about to grasp everything. He remarked that his life would be worth sacrificing in exchange for just one of these seizures. He borrowed the intensity of his epileptic insights to write his novels. I can see where he’s coming from, but perhaps I had too little grasp on normative reality to gain as much insight from a sudden rupture of the fabric of my own developing mind. Or maybe I just can’t remember well enough what it is that I experienced during the convulsions as well as I can remember what happened next.

Like after an intense storm, the next thing I can remember is thick quiet. So far, nothing indicated that only half of my brain is working. I have since run across the idea that the left brain holds the language of man and the right brain holds the language of the gods. I would add the emphasis of gods, meaning the pre-Abrahamic gods of dreams and shadows. The right brain is more like what it feels like to be dreaming, I mean. That helps explain why I didn’t immediately notice a profound difference in my cognition, given that I also happened to be nearly asleep a moment before the fit. Also, of course, you can ignore all kinds of perceptual weirdness after your brain has just gone haywire. Still, I can remember dimly that it felt much more like a dream than being awake. Namely, I would not have known my name if you had asked. I would hardly have been aware that I was an individual, set apart from everything around me, at all. I knew the dim orange slats of streetlighting coming through my blinds, the sound of the AC, the feel of my green waffle blanket, all as if they were an unbroken part of myself. There was no separation, but there was also no ability to be aware that there was, just minutes ago, a sense of separation that was now dissolved into the ether. I just was, if you can forgive a touch of woo.

In patients with a functioning right hemisphere and no left, there is notably much less of a deficit than in cases of the reverse. The right hemisphere seems to be in charge of receptiveness to reality itself, less in charge of abstractions we use to manipulate that reality and forge a separate self from it. Patients with an intact right hemisphere can still do relatively well on most measures of general cognition, and even sometimes outperform those with a fully functional brain. Patients with a damaged right hemisphere, on the other hand, are prone to delusion and suffer severe deficits of insight that are made worse by the fact that they are confident nothing is wrong. Some will go so far as to deny that their left side is paralyzed, not even aware of the self-delusion. If you ask them to pick up something with their left hand, they will confabulate a reason they won’t, like “I’m too tired.”

With my fully awake right hemisphere, I was dreamy and pre-verbal but totally aware of what was going on. When I tried to get out of bed, I noticed that my right side was paralyzed. I knew that I needed to somehow alert my mother in the other room. It was dark now, maybe late. I tried to speak and couldn’t muster more than a grunt. I determined to get to her bedroom. Walking, of course, was out of the question. I pushed myself upright and hopped on one leg, shocked by the alien weight on my left. I found a wall to balance against and hopped all the way to my doorway. There, I ran out of wall and promptly thumped on the (luckily) carpeted hallway. By chance, my brother was coming out of the bathroom at that very moment and saw me fall. He woke Mom and she came out and held me in her arms, searching my eyes with heartbreaking concern. “What happened?”

I fully intended to answer normally, just as when you are motivated to speak you fully intend to find the words to correspond to the unnoticed urges you wish to fulfill by speaking them. If you’re an intuitive person, you may be able to sense that you don’t really think in words, but what kicks off your search for the right words is, I think, a dream-like desire that emerges in your right hemisphere, who then cooperates with your more verbal left hemisphere to find the right language blocks to approximate that desire. Learning to make this transition from right embodied feeling to left language construct is the process of becoming a person, both in personal development from childhood and in the evolutionary development of all of humanity. If what made us human was raw cognitive horsepower, why would our brains have a massively inefficient bifurcation with two halves who do a lot of overlapping cognition, but differ importantly in their apprehension of the world? Moreover, why would the connection between these two halves decrease in proportion to our development, not increase?

Hopefully that helps you understand what I mean when I say that I fully intended to answer her normally and had no clue that I was not able. What actually came out of my mouth, if you can believe it, is something more like singing. Tone and melody. I had completely forgotten English but was still able to speak in a babble that roughly sounded like a musical or imitative of what American English might sound like to a Chinese person. It is interesting to note that anthropologists have figured out through clever deductions about the shape of early human skulls that we evolved to sing before we could speak. That’s why birds can mimic human sounds despite having a tiny brain but chimps can’t. That’s also why ancient stories like The Iliad were sung before they were written and spoken.

The horror in my mother’s eyes was enough to shut me up after a few attempts. I also remember my calm bemusement at my own inability. I suppose my right hemisphere was hanging on by its fingernails, because I quickly lost all consciousness in the safety of her arms. The next thing I remember was being fully awake again, both hemispheres online, aware of myself again as a self separate from the world. Aware of the names of everything in the world, too. You don’t realize how much names seem to make things “exist” in any real sense until you suddenly lose them and gain them again. It was over with no lasting physical damage, but I never got over what had been revealed. From that day on, I became obsessed with naming everything: the reason for Southern racial divides, types of stars, the meaning of a dialect. Less could remain comfortably unnamed to me, even if it was socially destructive and painfully self-conscious. I now wanted to know.

Something similar happens when a young child realizes that when you point to the crayon, you’re not just saying “get me that,” but you’re also saying, “that is a crayon.” There is nothing in the universe quite like that moment, and yet it happens every day. When a child realizes that things have names, he will suddenly want to know the name of everything: “What is that?” When he realizes that the linguistic symbol and the associated glottal stop somehow is the thing, he really knows the thing for the first time. After that dawn of consciousness he feels absolutely compelled to construct an entire cosmos of symbols.

This is what was actually so profound about Helen Keller’s story. In a moment, despite being deaf and blind, she is made to understand that the wet liquid is water. “Water” does not mean “perform the action of drawing the well.” It is a name. The name, in an uncomfortably real sense, makes it exist to her. After that moment, she is suddenly inducted into a “selfhood.” Like a child, she becomes obsessed with naming everything around her. I suspect that this also is why Adam’s first task is naming everything in Creation. In a more profound way than I can really understand, names pull things out of the shadowy mist and into being.

The reason I became a writer is because I had an extreme disruption in my world of names right as I was first solidifying it. This stress was like a second early childhood and a deeper suspicion that the names we give many things are flat, stale. Names reveal things, but they also hide them. Like when you say, “That’s just a crayon.” Unlike the child becoming aware of the thing for the first time, here the name is used to hide the object from your noticing. We even sometimes refuse to name things for fear of what it might reveal about us. If we name the pep rally as a sort of extravagant teenage mating ritual, for example, how can conservative parents go on allowing it? I am the sort of person then, because of a deficit, I name at a surplus.

The left brain is the crystalline labyrinth where we construct and store our sense of self. It is not a bad thing, it simply must have its names updated by the raw data from the right brain. When new experiences conflict with old names, structures must be destroyed and rebuilt. We literally feel this as pain. So, we learn to avoid that and thus fall into greater webs of delusion and estrangement, self-obsession and denial.

It would be wrong to conclude, based on this, that the left brain is the lesser or more evil of the two hemispheres. It is certainly the more dependent one, being much more likely to fall into dysfunction by itself than vice versa. But it is the seat of our humanity, too. Without it, I feel we would have a lot more in common with chimps or dolphins.

A good metaphor, I think, is that the right brain is like feet and the left brain is like hands. You’re much more likely to be able to “get along” with just your feet, but it is the hand that has really made us human, with its tools and writing and art. We just can’t get too arrogant and forget, to stretch the metaphor, our connection to the earth.

The ghosts of men with cigarettes, short ties, greased hair are so easily pulled to imagination they almost materialize on the other side of the glass.

Tube TVs to my left and right play documentary footage of the events leading up to the moon landing. An ashtray is built into the armrest of my seat, the same seats where the wives of the astronauts held their breath as they sat sentinel over the smokers and their spinning and blinking “computers,” whose technical mysteriousness they hope are somehow keeping the boys alive against the inhuman vacuum.

That incredible audio clip plays: “One small step for man…” I feel tears in my eyes and don’t even need to turn to my wife to know the story is the same. Then, of all people, the grumbling and awkward President Nixon comes on the screen to make an on-air phone call. “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world, and as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man all the people on this earth are truly one—one in their pride in what you have done and one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth.” Now the tears are outright rolling, to perhaps the mild surprise of our less sentimental neighbors. I try to repress sniffles.

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The reason we beat the Russians to the moon seems simple to me: little boys want to be astronauts, not cosmonauts. The distinction is subtle: The cosmonaut is a secular governmental cog who looks into the ordered and post-Christian “cosmos” which on the surface actually may seem like an explicitly more religious term, but really only worked to imply that the rational faculties of men could put that great mystery into bureaucratic and manageable order.

The astronaut, on the other hand, is a sailor on a sea of “stars.” To the more Christian mid-century American man, this has a probably unconscious Luciferian (Morning Star) spice to it, which works as a vitalizing tension to our more consciously Christian cosmology. The American writer who most informed the American religious sense was Emerson. Emerson himself was most deeply influenced by Milton, specifically Paradise Lost, which is the first of western literature to feature Satan as an almost tragically romantic figure. In the story, he is given a specific warning by Raphael to not wish for other worlds to conquer. Then, in some of the first literary images of space, he descends from heaven, through the hostile sea of stars, to find somewhere his own outside of the bounds of his place in Creation.

It makes sense, then, that Americans would borrow that romantic frontier energy to make all of space an extension of the endless Western ocean off the coast of San Francisco. The Astronaut, it is obvious why, is symbolically a space cowboy. You can smell that in every word in Nixon’s phone call: Neil plants his flag on the alien world for the benefit of all who follow in his trail. We are scandalized and yet enthralled by the audacity of that stake.

That Space Cowboy is fundamentally a loner, secretly fueled by the spirit of Milton’s Satan through the American tradition, borrowed from the European secular Christians and made more extreme, more courageous, more romantic. The Russians never stood a chance, their own post-Christianity clumsily borrowed from Enlightenment Europe and slapped on Eastern mysticism. A cosmonaut was never much more than a KGB agent for space, motivated to be granted bureaucratic access to power, but with little of the romance of risking life and limb for family back home, to make everyone proud, and to master creation as a loner hero, temporarily elevated above that of even the American king; Nixon bowed to Armstrong in front of the world. I can’t picture Khrushchev doing that.

Our mythological tradition reaches down into the spinal cord of each of us and turns our eyes to the stars, who are suddenly shining with the possibility of going to them and being quite brave. Every boy can feel that story almost before he can speak, seeming to float on the American air waves and ready to crystallize his brain cells in a lattice that won’t ever be melted into its previous configuration.

We stopped going to space shortly after that. This has caused a permanent irritation about lost potential in the American mind. Any time a piece of technology did not work as intended, my parents used to mutter “We can send a man to the moon…” The reason we stopped going, of course, has nothing to do with technology. Famously, all of the compute power on the Apollo mission could fit easily on my first Gameboy or something. The reason we stopped going is because the American mythos was already dying of irony by the 60’s and was fully asphyxiated by the late 70’s.

The late American mind has a hard time believing a rocketship could be fueled by a story written by a blind guy a few hundred years ago. We think that rocket fuel fuels rockets, naturally, so maybe it was a lie we ever went at all. My wife and I getting emotional at NASA is strange in light of the fact that most Americans carry around thick incredulity. Why?

It was at once the rise in the powers of self-conscious mythmaking by global media and a world-wide secularization. America went to the moon to beat the Russians and to show dominance to the world. On some level, it wasn’t really about the romance of exploration, it was about harnessing our authentic feeling as a weapon of media warfare to help win the Cold War. Once the American public realized they had been used, their vulnerable feelings of awe and the brotherhood of men had been made into soundbites, they got cynical, and the American myths began to lose their force as they were bought and sold as commodities.

By the time Vietnam was in full swing, it was really over. We just had to watch the gas tank empty for the next fifty years. We were already a fully ironic and cynical nation who could no longer send a man to the moon. To those less able to think symbolically, this sudden crippling will be so mysterious that they will come to conclusions like that we faked the moon landing and that Paul McCartney died. The Artemis missions are not a new spark, but more like an endlessly replayed radio hit: retrospective mythic force borrowed to fuel enthusiasm for a short, hacky jolt.

Media and cynicism have been in an arms race. Hollywood started as the place where creatives went to make powerful myths about the American cowboy hero. We in the audience had the great pleasure of having our favorite mythos projected back onto us. We were happy to make the storytellers rich. They slowly get more cavalier, though, more disdainful of us their audience and therefore lazily rehashing what they think we want to see. They become, in this way, kitsch and old-fashioned. To correct for that, moviemakers had to go into cynicism and social taboo further and further. Over the decades, we go through short periods of returns of sincerity, but ones quickly made gauche by hacks.

The image of the cowboy never fully dies, because he is the one who can ride these waves of cultural madness and make sense of them for other people. On a meta level, the cowboy himself becomes the auteur film director, the brutally honest author, the jazz musician. He promises to not “sell out” but to ride the bucking bronco of the battle of irony and sincerity and to share his little victory with everyone else, if he survives. To fail, as many have before him, is to become a hack and give the people what they think they want, or to never find his audience and die in obscurity, never quite sure if it was because he refused to sell out or if his worst fears are true and he indeed never had the talent.

When people would visit the Buddha, they would ask “Are you a god?” and he would say no. It’s easy to read that and imagine that people saw a man floating six inches above the ground or glowing with ethereal light. But I suspect it was something closer to the feeling we get watching a great jazz player completely in the zone, fully inside himself and his craft, doing something so extraordinary that it seems to shine beyond the crass material of the body and suggest connective tissue to the source of all things. My wife and I watched I, Tonya the other night, which is mostly a deeply mediocre film, self-consciously mythologizing but unable to quite land the Axel. But at the end, they show actual footage of Tonya Harding skating, and it immediately brought tears to my eyes. She was so instantly, recognizably gifted at that sport that it was an embarrassment to the movie. The real thing humiliated the imitation. Every movement contained that strange grace that only appears when someone is perfectly fused with what they are doing. And so when people asked the Buddha if he was a god, I think what they were really saying was: every movement you make is so balanced between order and chaos, so graceful and inevitable, I perceive it instantly as beautiful. My hair stands on end like a cat seeing a snake. That is what we feel when we watch a great film. It is what I felt watching Tonya Harding skate.

Sometimes foreign artists understand America even better than we do. Something about seeing us externally allows them to distill us into symbols with terrifying purity. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains one of the greatest westerns ever made precisely because Sergio Leone looked at the American myth from outside of it and extracted its core. And Clint Eastwood, especially at that age, in that film, at that exact cultural moment, glows with something almost supernatural. If you saw a man like that in real life, fully inhabiting himself that perfectly, you might genuinely wonder whether he was some kind of divine being. We lack the words to say how we feel and so chalk it up to “good actor” or “handsome,” which is embarrassing in its understatement. Every movement, every shift of his hips, every lay of the poncho feels exactly correct for that character and that world. We perceive a connection to something beyond the material, he straddles the bull so perfectly. That is the true cowboy of the modern media landscape: the figure balancing irony and sincerity, disclosure and performance, authenticity and theater.

It is that exact dilemma (the performance/disclosure paradox) that I believe finally killed David Foster Wallace. He was trying to fight his way back to sincerity through irony itself, and the irony eventually consumed him. He was a space cowboy too, impossibly far from anything recognizable, drifting out where the atmosphere gets thin. We were proud of him. But his shuttle exploded. One of the hazards of the job.

This is also what makes jazz feel spiritually unique. Music had always been composed, arranged, perfected. Mozart obviously reaches transcendence through time, but jazz introduced something else entirely: the possibility of revealing a transcendent individual character improvisationally in real time. The jazz musician becomes a cowboy poet riding a bucking bronco on his instinct alone. He responds moment by moment to mistakes, tonal shifts, interruptions, new leaders, sudden openings. And through that improvisation we are not merely hearing music; we are watching his character unfold live in front of us. We see how he reacts, and just as importantly, how he refuses to react. He is alone out there in space and we are proud of him and pray for his safe return.

Again, foreign media captures this American metaphysical structure more clearly than we do: Cowboy Bebop, which is where the title of this essay came from, is a Japanese story explicitly about space cowboys, fusing in American jazz, American loneliness, American racial harmonies and disharmonies, melancholy wandering, improvisation, and the strange romantic belief that a person can step outside the structure of Creation itself and briefly turn himself into a beautiful explosion of light.

See you space cowboy…

I wrote a piece about how there is a huge and mostly unidentified group of thinkers who were secretly influenced by Jordan Peterson (me). They don’t tend to identify themselves because associating yourself with Jordan Peterson has become low status.

The response to the piece was almost as illuminating to me as was writing it. For one, it had the most views of anything I’ve written, but about half the likes, proving my thesis in revealed behavior: people were interested to click on his name, but more reluctant to share a public “like” and broadcast themselves as associated with him.

The more interesting response, though, was people scolding me for even bringing up the concept of status. Some said it was crass and brought down the seriousness of the entire piece. Others said that it was pathetic of me to concern myself with status and I shouldn’t worry about what people think.

The first complaint I can at least understand: it is indeed crass to bring up status, especially an estimation of your own. Status isn’t something you give yourself, it’s woven into the tension of the collective mind of all the people who know and remember you. You cannot force people to see you how you wish to be seen, you can only influence it indirectly by nearly everything you do and are: how you dress, your posture, your speech, who you associate with, even unconscious mannerisms and facial qualities that reveal inner beliefs and habits and rituals to the intuitions of those that perceive you, more accurately in the first five seconds than in the next five years.

The actual reason it’s taboo to talk about, I would imagine, is because all that is overwhelming and terrifying to bring to consciousness. The next reason is because making it too explicit only works to make you self-conscious, which is both painful and, as it happens, low-status.

The general failure of the genre of self-help is that it tends to bring more and more awareness to what people think of you, which is the easiest way to have people think less of you. It can easily spiral into something like obsessive bodybuilding, money-making, or anorexia: obsession with a particular measure of how others size us up as a way of soothing for the fact that we have no control over millions of other subtler and more meaningful measures. The cure proves incurable as increased focus on self-improvement commensurately increases self-consciousness, birthing those many strange creatures you see out in the world whom your intuition clocks as, on the whole, stilted and awkward, but in one measure at least have become super-human. Nietzsche thought that most of the people who we think of as “genius” are inwardly little gnomes with one giant ear.

Of course, part of the profound taboo of status (and our inborn ability to gauge it quite well) is that what I’m even saying now is quite uncomfortable or maybe outright taboo. We are generally not allowed to say we notice what we notice about other people, to avoid being cruel or stereotyping, but really for fear of being so harshly seen by strangers ourselves.

So, to the second complaint that I should worry less about what people think of me, I say… yes and no. No, because everyone cares about what people think of them. It is not an optional emotional response, but our direct connection to the minds of other human beings. Concerns about status are the very fibers of intersubjectivity. Without them, you are not just lonely, you have no functioning sanity. The people who have ventured the farthest from caring what others think are not swashbuckling rugged individualists (who are actually quite successful at the status game), but the men on the street who talk to themselves for lack of anyone else to remind them who they are. Sanity is something you must just leave in the unguarded banks of other people’s minds.

The sort of person who tells you not to worry about what people think of you is themselves hoping that they will be perceived as the sort of person who is above caring about what people think of them. Just one layer deep it is a self-contradictory bid for a certain type of status in the minds of a certain type of people. Otherwise, why would they communicate? We speak to be understood, and to be understood and paid attention to is a measure of status. No escaping it.

Similarly, the advice “just be yourself” comes from people for whom being themselves unreflectively gets them praise and admiration. They’re like the people with money saying they don’t care about money. You can only not care about money if you have it. When you don’t have it, you will forever struggle with the devastating double-bind that it would be much easier to get it if you had it. Hence, also, the rabid temptation to be engulfed by envy to those who do. There is a sort of universal law of accumulation: it is always easier to get more of what you already have. It is also a law that everyone eventually loses everything, though, so let’s not get carried away with our bitterness. Jocks get old and billionaires die.

Yes, though, because an even subtler takeaway, almost to the point of seeming like a trick of the light, is how this brutal law reveals why the rich get richer: Their current stores of wealth make them sufficiently unconcerned to trust their own intuition for further gain. It is not only that they have money to invest. It is that they possess the freedom from self-consciousness required to move decisively toward opportunity without being paralyzed by the fear of loss.

The same is true of status. People who are naturally confident tend to accumulate more confidence, prestige, and social ease precisely because they are less self-conscious of the possibility of losing them. They move through the world unburdened by the constant self-monitoring that afflicts just about everyone else. This is a delicate power because any person may be cast into a spiral of self-doubt with a single reminder of their fallibility. One deep-enough social wound can suddenly make someone awkwardly conscious of themselves for the rest of their lives. Every attempt to free ourselves from that self-consciousness originates from the self itself, and therefore cannot escape it. The self cannot will itself into un-self-consciousness.

So we fantasize about catastrophes in movies and TV. Our concern with our position inside the minds of others would, in those imaginary times, abate and our intuition would swell as our self-consciousness recedes. The cramped theater of self-monitoring reveals itself and through that revelation, the means to reenter the world directly.

Being the sort of person who is able to always be “awake” like this has been one of the central concerns of religion and philosophy. Kierkegaard’s solution was not rational mastery or dreaming of the crash, but a constant leap. Faith. You can’t reason yourself into freedom. The leaps only appear coherent in retrospect. Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward.

This becomes increasingly difficult still because liberal society is built on concealed status-seeking. We pretend to lower ourselves in order to elevate ourselves. We call this sophistication, emotional intelligence, branding, diplomacy. Explicitly calling it status games is deeply taboo. When an actor wins an Oscar, he says “I’m humbled.” What he means is: I have been elevated above you. He knows that overt displays of superiority would themselves lower his standing. Since it is almost impossible to tell this from the real thing, it makes the rest of us incurably cynical of the genuine fact that humbly accepting what is in front of you will paradoxically raise you up.

We all also tend to carry these private archetypes of a very specific sort of fear of failure: being forty and not famous, being on the poorer side of the rich neighborhood, too short for hot women. Whatever. Entire lives are organized around avoiding these apparitions. We keep these hand-crafted ghosts a profound secret from others not because they are too painfully true to be known, but because they aren’t. What is actually true is that our excessive self-concern is ruining the potential of a real life.

If you are at all wise, the people you instinctively recognize as truly admirable are not the people obsessed with status. In fact, at a certain level the word “status” no longer even feels appropriate for these people. It becomes Reputation. Presence. The crassness of the term itself dissolves in its own actualization.

What these people share is a willingness to endure temporary humiliation, obscurity, toil, and service without collapsing inward. They are capable of high adventure because they are not constantly calculating themselves, nor are they pretending to not care about their standing. They have just learned to invest more trust in something like a perfect measurer somewhere in the sky.

This is the first entry in a series called American Archetypes, where and I explore artifacts of the unique mythos of Americana. Check out Eddie’s first entry in the series here.

When we would play cowboys and Indians as kids, you were just as likely to want to be an Indian.

My dad had a house a ways off the road. My cousins would come over and we had some of the best times of our lives running and hunting each other in the shadows with toy weapons and homespun rules about staying dead if shot.

The point of the game, the thrill of it, which we would have never been able to put our fingers on at the time, was the drama of the European mind confronting the fundamentally foreign American wood. Our ancestors had not adapted to these creekcut hills and we knew in our blood. The cowboy is the self-sufficient loner who confronted that heart of darkness with some grit. The Indian delighted in the rhythm of that chaos and the terror it represented to the abstracted man. There was pleasure in playing both roles. Both spirits exist in all boys, more or less.

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Personally, I was drawn to being the loner cowboy. I liked having only light baggage, my toy pistol and the soaring freedom to rely on my wits. The sprawling shadows pressing in on me from the outside felt like the comforting pressure of a heavy quilt, one that kept me feeling alert and energized by the very presence of a primal threat.

I found that the kids you would probably now diagnose with ADHD tended more to be drawn to the woods itself, the adventure of being one with what causes fear in others. They would sprawl themselves into tall grass in pitch dark shadow of the sodium lamp opposite the house, popping out to tag you with a Nerf dart when you least expected it. We knew a kid like that, let’s call him DuBois.

In science class we did an experiment where one kid would hold a dollar bill between your open fingers. You, like a gunslinger, had to pinch them together when the other kid dropped it without warning. Only DuBois was fast enough to catch it. Reflex speed is strongly correlated with IQ, which makes sense because it is a quick measure of how quickly and efficiently your nervous system can process inputs and produce the right outputs.

I doubt DuBois would have done well on a paper IQ test, though. I don’t recall him doing very well in school. His shoes were always worn through the soles because he was always moving around. He would climb bell towers and do backflips into the endzone. He would laugh with you, bite you, then punch you, and that was if he liked you. He was great to be around, but untamable by parents and teachers. He was a good and loyal friend.

Camille Paglia said that the reason there are no female Mozarts is the same reason there are no female Jack the Rippers: genius of the highest degree requires the harnessed energy of the male killer. This is a bit of a paradox or maybe a natural bottleneck because most wild males like DuBois don’t usually encounter the cause nor the means to channel that energy up the many layers of abstraction to produce something like world-class art. It’s very rare.

My suspicion is that the stereotype that the most intelligent people are frail contains a half-truth: the frail are more often given a reason to channel their limited energy up through abstractions by the mere fact that their options are narrow. Theirs are not the highest potential nervous systems, but merely the ones likeliest to tame.

Although it is the most predictive and useful measurement we have managed to produce in psychology, tests of general intelligence (g) will almost certainly mislead at the margins in that fashion: they report heavily on the average Western ability to sit still and work with pure abstractions on paper. True outliers will confound that average.

To great controversy, this January large amounts of metadata were compiled and released on race differences in IQ. If you believe that a standard measure of average IQ is a good measure of something existentially important for the freedom of your “group,” then these findings will be unacceptable to the values of the Rousseauian West where everyone must be, at least in terms of natural potential, the same. They will be ignored, discredited, and buried. If, however, you believe that there is something to loving others besides their ability to sit still and move abstractions around in hyperspace, then these findings are both unsurprising and non-distressing.

The French postmodernists were great critics of the West, even if their solutions were bad. Or, I guess, their solutions were nonexistent and therefore bad. Still, though, it was from them I learned to appreciate that the way we tend to measure intelligence is itself biased toward Western outcomes. That there are things more important than dealing with abstractions. Raucous idiot genius (which beguile measurement) like in Shakespeare and Mozart, to name one. Wild philos like I felt from DuBois, to name another.

What ultimately confounds standard measurements of IQ, which, make no mistake, are still highly predictive of how successful you will be in a Western bureaucratic state, is that an overall well-functioning body and therefore nervous system indicates an agile mind better than anything else. Therefore, the greatest minds will be fundamentally unlike those who are “above average” in the standard Western sense. A great artist is nothing like a competent lawyer.

Taking this seriously opens up some doors of inquiry that are normally shut tight behind taboo. Namely, why researchers who live with tribal peoples sometimes come away with the sense that they may be more intelligent, in a way. Jared Diamond, who wrote the famous book “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” had this intuition after spending time with islanders.

What struck him was that these people could remember 10,000 plants and multiple square miles of landscape, down to the inch. I struggle to get to Starbucks without maps. Drop me among those men, I would be dead in three days. Thanks to the harsh pressures of survival, they are all healthy, strong, and embodied. Their intelligence wasn’t built for abstractions, it was built for aggressive movement in a non-hypothetical landscape. That’s what Diamond was picking up on: they would catch the dollar bill. They had wide jaws from chewing meat and raw fruit and never needed braces and never lost their adult teeth. Like an extrapolation of my friend DuBois, they are also much more violent (in the case of ancient Illinois tribes, seventy times more than in the modern US). They murder outsiders and ritual victims without a hint of guilt. They often even eat them. (They omitted that scene from Pocahontas.)

From the other end we approach an incomplete truth. Are they noble savages or stupid cannibals? One thing American natives first noticed about Westerners was their faces: a kind of visible misery, a haunted abstraction. Being more attuned to embodied life, they could perceive something wrong with the Western soul, even from a distance. So, are Europeans sophisticated and civilized, or are we abstracted, frail, bureaucratic colonizers? Useful truths here require us to hold opposites in tension without letting them collapse into a simple binary, which is the definition of propaganda.

The James Cameron Avatar movies, for example, are propaganda. It panders to the Rousseauian picture that the state of nature is a pristine good only troubled by the forces of culture. The “natives” in the movie have all the positive qualities of natives without any of the uncomfortable negatives, that is, their extreme violence. This lack of symmetry in his storytelling pings our deepest intuitions as wishful thinking. It makes sense of the fact that these movies are gigantic mega-blockbusters and yet somehow have no impact on our culture. We don’t seem to remember them.

The fact is, living with tribal natives would be unthinkable for a modern liberal. The violence rates are higher than the worst nightmare of New York’s history. Brutality to outsiders is common, and frequent mimetic disputes are resolved with a scapegoat, often a child or a virginal sacrifice. In fact, a large part of the irreligiosity of modern people, especially those who have been protected by it for hundreds of years like Inner and Northern Europe, is that they have no idea what waits for them outside the walls. Brutal ancient kings guard the perimeters of their now soft lives. We can get so comfortable that we sometimes genuinely believe things would be better in the “pure” state of nature. As Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth!”

Western researchers trip all over themselves to avoid noticing this. Jane Goodall was so shocked to find that chimps (we’re not even talking about people yet) engage in bouts of seemingly sadistic violence that she hid her findings for years. The author of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” also avoids making a note of this fact, despite that he certainly encountered it. He instead focuses on the qualities of the “noble savage,” which, as I have covered above, are indeed there to be seen. Reactionary types would perhaps refute me here and suggest that if they were so intelligent and in harmony with nature, how come they don’t have a civilization like ours? They’ll point to IQ as the major cause of this deficit and think of themselves as brave for being able to tell the truth about it.

I can see why they come to these conclusions because Rousseauian types are so dishonest, even with themselves, that it can be tempting to dismiss all their findings. If we know what motivates them, though, (a compassion for the marginal) then you can more easily separate the wheat from the chaff. They are not maliciously anti-Western as some of the more paranoid rightists would suggest. They just genuinely care for the poor in spirit, which is a good quality as long as it doesn’t come before the truth.

“Guns, Germs, and Steel” offers this good observation: the reason that Europe and Asia were able to advance in culture and technology is because the continent of Eurasia is very wide. That means that if you manage to breed a highly edible plant in Portugal, you can also easily grow it in South Germany and even China. If you domesticate an animal in Mongolia, you can also shepherd it in England. The chances of finding the right plants and animals upon which to build a civilization are much higher because of pure surface area. Places like the Americas, Africa, and Australia, however, are more tall and skinny. If you happen to find a suitable crop in South Africa, you can’t plant it in either Chad or Egypt. The same goes for domestic animals.

The book is more subtle and complex than this, not to mention the ongoing disputes about the reported facts. The upshot is, at least, a very plausible reason to doubt that the advancements that took place in Eurasia were only to do with the relative intelligence of the people who lived there. That, and a host of things not listed here, known and yet unknown, give credence to some epistemic humility and a respect for the world’s natives and even to the primitive within you. I’ll also remind you that pre-Christian Europeans were famously some of the wildest people on the planet. They gave rise to the terms Barbarian, Gothic, Berserker, and Viking, with all their attendant primal violence.

Now, when we talk about the American natives, we can keep a cool head and resist flying into pseudo-religious outrage. Speaking of, Matt Walsh just released a documentary on YouTube about the “real” history of the Indians. He lays out how most of the things we are taught about this period in school are just not true. The Trail of Tears was built on misleading figures and named decades after the fact. The American natives were brutal, violent, and merciless to a much higher degree than most of the Westerners they fought (with a few notable exceptions). It’s true, Matt Walsh is a provocateur. He wants to spark outrage because it gets him more attention online. That’s how the internet works. Still, he’s showing us something at least partly true that we have trouble looking at.

We have found other ways to bypass these taboos and depict tribal and pre-Christian violence in literature, like in the novel Blood Meridian. It takes a totally different tack than Walsh. What allows Cormac McCarthy to depict the violence of the natives in that bloody Western is that there is no redeeming order in the cowboy, either. He is revealed to be just as violent and primeval as his native counterpart.

This is meant to be disturbing. Characters like the judge, who represent the pinnacle of Western sophistication and education, use Western Christianity as a façade to become an even more powerful force of death and chaos. He functions like an organizing principle that gathers primitive drives toward violence and magnifies them rather than restrains them.

That is a sharp observation. It shows Christianity at its worst. Or more precisely, Christians at their worst: using it as a way of magnifying violence rather than transmuting it. This is what we would call Machiavellianism, or the spirit of the Antichrist, which the judge exemplifies well.

What McCarthy cannot fully articulate, however, is what Christianity does when actually adhered to. He gestures toward it: he notes that the new land is “thirsty for blood,” so much so that it could not be quenched by a thousand sacrifices of Christ. In that small moment, he recognizes something real: that the Mass, the Eucharist, is meant to satisfy the primal bloodlust of the pre-Christian savage inside all of us. As René Girard argued, early human societies are always caught in cycles of mimetic violence that resolve themselves through scapegoating. Christianity presents itself as the ultimate scapegoat, not to eliminate violence outright, but to redirect it toward what is highest, through the sacrifice of the perfect victim. In theory, this allows us to stop enacting scapegoat patterns on each other through senseless, nihilistic violence. To aim that impulse upward toward the proverbial Mozart and away from the danger of Jack the Ripper.

This forces a recognition that McCarthy wants to ignore: that we are all capable of savagery, but that this can and has often been ritualized, acknowledged, and redeemed. At its best, this produces a people who confront their inner violence regularly and, ideally, transmute it into civility and courage. That is the ideal. It is not even close to how it often plays out in the West, but it is what Christendom is meant to do. To the extent that the West is not stuck in cycles of primitive violence, it has succeeded. McCarthy cannot quite land here because he is constrained by the implicit Rousseauian reflex: if you depict Native Americans as savage, you must depict Westerners as even more savage. In other words, you may either depict the state of nature as pure or show unredeemable nihilism all the way to the bottom. It is totally taboo (ironically, only in the highly Christianized West) to suggest that Christians ever succeeded in abating their fallenness, even a little.

Still, the real story is not that natives are savage and Westerners are civilized. Nor is it the inverse. The real story is that there is something like a pre-Edenic harmony, being “one with nature,” is indeed more alive in the native. That really is partially lost in Westerners. The Westerner, in aspiring to a merely comfortable rather than rigorously true Christianity, fails to become truly moral. As Nietzsche observed, we mostly rely on the façade of Christianity to restrain overt violence while still expressing it in sublimated forms whenever we can get away with it. We are only moral in the West mostly because we are cowardly, frail, and comfortable.

Westerners, in that fashion over centuries, developed more “sophisticated” modes of sublimating our drive to primal violence: technowar, bureaucracy, colonization. Those can be just as brutal, only abstracted and without the need for savage courage and embodied intelligence. Indeed, when Westerners first encountered Native Americans, they were often outmatched because natives were not obliged to veil their violence. The Comanches, for example, repeatedly defeated the more “advanced” American forces by mastering a sort of guerrilla warfare on horseback. Small groups of wild American vigilantes had to relearn how to fight more primally. They learned directly from the natives, and some also learned how to live in deeper continuity with nature through contact with indigenous life.

The native thus represents both unity with nature and its shadow: unselfconsciousness that produces both vitality and tribal violence. The Westerner represents self-consciousness and individuation: the lone figure, which produces order and clarity, but also abstraction, alienation, and a kind of spiritual dislocation. Our deepest obligation is to fully transmute violence into genius by making conscious sacrifices.

Imbalanced stories like Avatar, as much as they hope to do the right thing, entertain but fail to transform a culture. We can feel its lack of gravitas like an epistemic fake wood plastic siding on a suburban house. We only like it when it’s new. Certainly, Matt Walsh correcting the propaganda of the noble savage will allow him to ride the wave of new propaganda in the opposite direction. That will also ultimately fail to satisfy us.

What makes both cowboys and Indians so salient to the American imagination and by extension the entire world is the tension of incommensurate opposites. Inside every boy is the spirit of both the cowboy and the Indian. Sometimes they war, sometimes they learn from each other. Neither will ever totally destroy the other in their search for answers.

Twins each contain a light and a shadow. The problem is not choosing one over the other. It is integrating them. What is required (always) is a kind of callosum, a connection between these two modes of apprehension. Feet in the dirt, head in the stars.

That is the better story: the Indian who becomes literate, a spirit guide between worlds; the cowboy who goes native, becoming a protector of what is sacred, natural, and real.

This is always a negotiation. A temporary peace treaty, if we’re lucky.

Note: This was originally published in The Dispatch as a part of the “Where I’m From” series.

There was a time when Louisiana was considered part of “The Wild West.”

Men came here from the colony states looking for frontier opportunity, which really meant steep upsides for the price of mortal risk. These were not your reliable family men; they were the West-bound opportunists and snake oil salesmen. It’s the trope of characters like Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood and the land-stealing villains from Chinatown. It’s the sometimes ignored shadow aspect of the loner cowboy hero, revealed by simply wondering what exactly it is John Wayne was always running from.

In the early 1800s, a man like that named John Horton came to Louisiana with his business partner looking to strike big. My parish (Louisiana’s version of counties) at the time was short and wide: Feliciana. It had recently been sold to the U.S. by the Spanish. The courthouse was established in the town of St. Francisville, which bordered the Mississippi River and the westernmost edge of the ruler-thin parish. If you happened to live somewhere on the east side and you had legal business to tend to, you would have to spend a fortnight trekking through the un-European forest swamps, over endless rolling hills, each decrementing in a creek full of soggy quicksand liable to swallow up your horse and leave you to go the rest of the way on foot without your supplies.

These were the circumstances observed by John Horton, who quickly made connections with all the local power brokers. He soon gleaned information that motivated him to leave his family in the colony states: The power brokers planned to erect a new town in the geographic center of Feliciana and re-locate the courthouse there. And Horton wanted in.

So, Horton acquired the assessor’s map and measured out the exact center of the parish, which happened to be on the bluffs of the largest creek, later known as Thompson Creek. He contacted the owners of the then-wilderness and struck a mighty bargain to buy huge swaths of their land. Sure enough, a town was founded there. He sold parts of it to the state for a steep markup and kept other portions to see what further opportunities would shake out. Already, he was rich.

Many friends of Horton who later settled in his town had fought the British with him in the Battle of New Orleans. They named their new town after their tough old general, Andrew Jackson, who was the sort of guy who would let someone shoot him first in a duel, withstand a bullet to the chest, and then still kill the other guy. The people in the new Jackson were not looking to establish churches and start families. They had come here looking for an opportunity. They had survived the war and were told they could hit it big. But as second-comers, they mostly had to settle for poker and hookers.

The wrong sort of businesses opened all over town: pool halls, gambling dens, bars. The Jacksonites were so rowdy and violent that people hated coming to our courthouse even more than they hated the trek to St. Francisville. So, the politicians hatched a new idea. They split Feliciana right down the middle into East and West. Again, St. Francisville would be the courthouse for the western side. The more central and wholesome town of Clinton would be the new courthouse on the eastern side. Jackson was left out in the middle. Horton was ruined. He sued the judge for $50,000 (almost two million dollars today) but lost. He died poor and far away from his family.

On Main Street in Jackson, the largest live oak by far has a plaque out front: John Horton, founder of Jackson. He is still the guiding spirit of my little town, whether the locals know that or not. It plays out over and over through our strange history: A great Southern college was started here, but was moved across the state after too much political chicanery; the South’s largest and most beautiful asylum campus was placed here, but was later defunded by corrupt and short-sighted Louisiana politicians and partly abandoned; films like a Twilight sequel were shot here, but the people who ran the local studio had such a bad reputation that they eventually ran the Hollywood producers out. Our opportunism has created unlikely windfalls, and that same unrestrained opportunism has overplayed its hand.

If this were an appeal for Jackson tourism, so far I’d be doing a terrible job. The more subtle sale I want to make here is to show Jackson is not some aberration to avoid, but as an unusually pure and honest distillation of the American spirit and therefore a place to rebuild our most complete redemption. We are all John Horton, looking to hit it big. Here we have the opportunity to go home and fix his mistake.

Growing up in Jackson, my dad (himself an entrepreneur) said that he was always running West, apparently dreaming of some frontier before I knew or cared about anyone named Horton. I did end up in California, living on Sunset and chasing the shadows of the last hyper-frontiers in Silicon Valley. I was willing to endure risk for a possibly uneven upside. That’s where I met my wife. But was I willing to see how that pattern typically shakes out in the end? Maybe I’m still becoming willing.

Not to get too mystical, but I had a dream that I should move back to Jackson, and my wife and I eventually did. I don’t know how to explain it, but other people seem to have had the same intuition throughout the years: They keep coming here and spending millions to fix up the historic homes, theaters, and the college. Their style is neoclassical, so the richest benefactor here tried to coin the town “The Athens of the South.” That hasn’t caught on yet, and so much of the beauty here is still unnaturally cheap and in need of new families and stewards.

The ghost of John Horton still haunts this place; he has unfinished business, it seems, and I’m drawn to finishing it. I think that means I have to stop running West and stick some roots in the ground where Horton tried to put a straw. I don’t know the first thing about reviving a small town, but I just have a feeling I’m supposed to live here, raise kids, and not try to get mine and go.

For the first time, it feels like there is a new type of American frontier in going back east and reclaiming the middle.

This is:

The first image is meant to illustrate the arrogance of beginners (mount stupid), the despair of intermediates (valley of despair) and finally the slow rise of actual competence along a long tail.

Feels right, doesn’t it? It’s catchy, hence the famous and yet mostly made up chart. Really, it mischaracterizes the actual effect so badly that you wonder if there’s some willful ignorance there.

Now, you can understand where the gist came from: Low performers are indeed overconfident in their skills and high performers are a little underconfident. Low performers do rank themselves consistently lower than high performers, just not quite low enough. But the actual disparity is not nearly as dramatic as the meme’d data. There is also no mount stupid nor a valley of despair unless you get incredibly creative with your axes.

The overconfidence could be an arrogant blindness to reality, sure. Or it could be just a measurement artifact: maybe people rank themselves somewhat near the middle for almost anything. You would expect low performers to reasonably err toward the low middle and high performers toward the high middle, both extremes being off. This could be explained with modesty, social awareness, reasonable unwillingness to be too down on yourself, the fact that a middle guess is more likely than a marginal one, number-two pencil bias, or some mysterious fifth thing that will be reported in-depth on This American Life in ten years.

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To jump to wanton delusion, in fact, feels to me like a data-Rorschach onto which our culture has projected its distrust of intuition. It suggests, for one, only “experts” may have opinions on any given subject. It also suggests that you can “grind” your way to expertise with enough “education.” Neither are strictly true, in my experience. The implications are comforting, though, if you see yourself as a under-appreciated intermediate who will one day be a master.

Actually, if I think about it, it goes completely against experience. I don’t know the first thing about ice skating, and yet, if you show me people ice skating, within a minute it will become absolutely unambiguously clear who is the best at it. If you compared rankings with non-experts and experts alike, you would find clear consistency, which researchers have demonstrated. Likewise, if I put you in some skates and told you to compete in the Olympics, in no way would you be on top of some “mount stupid,” thinking you had a shot at gold. You would rightly evaluate yourself as “not good,” along with anyone else watching.

As with any comfortable lie, Mount Stupid has some truth to it: Beginner’s luck is a thing. Also, the chart aligns with what it subjectively feels like to learn new things: quick progress when starting something new and then a slowdown in the intermediate phases. That’s a real thing, but it has little to do with delusion.

I don’t want to be naive: Overconfidence does happen. I’m reminded of that talentless break dancer from a couple of years ago in the Olympic games. How are we supposed to explain that?

Good Lord, her name was Raygun. The cultural reaction to that event proves that we lack some important digestive enzyme to deal with delusion. We can’t say she’s immoral (antiquated, intuitive), so we’re forced to come up with a more “scientific” explanation of how someone who plainly can’t breakdance would somehow bend reality with her self-deceit profoundly enough to win the rare opportunity to humiliate herself on the world’s stage.

There of course was the predictable reaction of the compassion-above-truth crowd: who’s to say what’s “good” anyway? Nothing matters and so please let’s all be nice. Those voices were quickly shouted down by the commonsense crowd who said that her lack of talent is objective and she should be ashamed for taking the spot of someone who actually worked hard. Once that dust settles, it’s time for a viral video essay from Vox or something explaining how “cognitive biases” “actually” work and how if you’re not always on high alert, you may fall victim to delusions, too. I don’t know if that video was produced in this particular case, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

The commonsense style reaction has gotten louder and more explosively reactive in recent years (the New Right), but they ultimately don’t win the intelligentsia, so they don’t get the last word. The fashionable cultural sensibility, on the whole, was pioneered last century by Danny Kahneman with his work on cognitive biases, which culminated in his massively popular book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

If you haven’t read it, you probably have absorbed it through unconscious osmosis: System 1 is fast, intuitive and prone to error, System 2 is slow, painful, and takes effort. The book goes through all the common and likely errors and delusions of cognition produced by System 1 (intuition) and how you probably can’t even correct for it if you tried. It paints human beings as hopelessly irrational (how one of them managed to write this very rational book is left a mystery). I won’t go into the examples he shows, but suffice it to say they are very convincing. It was a devastating blow to my intuition in my 20s. You come away from the thousands of video essays inspired by it with just a little less vitality in you, less ability to trust yourself.

You are invited to replace your instincts with knowledge: a little memorized chart of common cognitive biases to prevent you from being a normal person and instead be Less Wrong. You’re just a little more prepared to argue with your Fox News-watching uncle, and a little less in love with humanity. Maybe this would be a sacrifice worth making if it produced highly rational and effective people, but it doesn’t. Hordes of young rationalists flock to Silicon Valley with the idea that they will make themselves Less Wrong until they are hot, cool, and rich. I’ve seen them try. It doesn’t work.

Danny Kahneman himself observed this in his own students. No matter what he told them, they were still prone to biases. Probably everybody thinks they are the exception to the rule. Or maybe people look at that Dunning–Kruger chart and believe they can grind their way to the far right tail of that curve. But, remember, that chart is made up. Even according Danny, you actually can’t do much to change your System 1 thinking with System 2.

If it’s so hopeless, Danny, then why are we deconstructing our intuition in the first place? The vast majority of the time it’s right. He knows it. He spent his entire career finding edge cases where it fails. Fair enough. But maybe we should think of those as analogous to optical illusions: just because you can construe an image that momentarily confounds your automatic optical reasoning, doesn’t mean you should swear off trusting your eyes.

Researchers too often come to the conclusion that we should distrust our intuition. Perhaps that’s because they think real life is like their lab. In a lab, a subject is given a pre-determined task within tight parameters that has correct outcomes as determined by an omniscient third party, who is observing and resisting intervention. Overconfidence “bias,” for example, assumes this omniscient third agent capable, in real time, of assessing what is objectively true. But this isn’t how things unfold in reality.

“Overconfidence” in a moral person is just a statistical artifact of the necessity to reach beyond his grasp in order to fail iteratively toward developing a successful and embodied understanding of a given project. In real life, there is no “correct” vantage from nowhere. Action always must be approximated by more or less limited subjectivity. Reality ultimately requires leaps of “faith” to even interact with enough to produce useful “data” to be measurable in hindsight.

We have been deeply conditioned to distrust what I’m about to say, so bear with me: If our cognition were built on a seriously systematically “irrational” bias, given the state of the cosmos being filled with infinite unknowns contained in unknown unknowns, it would be phased out by natural selection. It isn’t, so we should assume a pragmatic function (even if it is beyond our ability to describe with linear logic), and work backwards to try to explain it from there. Instead, moderns assume irrationality and work to “debunk” from the vantage of how they assume things would be best arrayed if they were the clockwork god of Descartes. Then they sell a million books teaching the masses to all be better than humans by being like a machine, which isn’t possible or even helpful. The cosmos isn’t set up like a laboratory or a computer. If you hoped to control things, you might hope it were, but it isn’t.

This doesn’t mean we can’t still notice that some people are prone to make errors in their perceptions. For example, imagine four candies spread out over a large area next to five candies bunched close together. If you ask a child which one is more candy, he is likely to select the four candies spread further apart. Basically, he is taking a low-resolution heuristic that says something like “more space = more candy” and misapplying that. As a wiser adult, it’s easy to see his cognitive illusion and help him amend it. You could call it the More Volume Does Not Necessarily Equal More Mass fallacy, but at that point what are we doing?

At various levels, the error of improperly mapped heuristics happens to me and you probably every day. More wise people may be able to help us “see” our mistakes: the adult is to the child what the sage is to the adult. None of this implies there is anything fundamentally wrong with the way we perceive. It only implies that perception always takes place at different levels of resolution. Higher levels are less precise in detail, but more accurately capture the gestalt, and lower levels reveal illusions but sometimes mistake a forest for trees.

My wife has been acting since she was four. She has done the hard work of looking at the art of human expressiveness under scrutiny that I can’t imagine. Thus, she can literally see things in the details of movie performances that are invisible to me. When she points them out, I squint, go “woah” and then suddenly a pattern is revealed to me that I now see everywhere in other movies.

Master painters have trained themselves to see three hundred shades of blue where I see three. It’s not that my low-resolution impression of blue is wrong. It’s actually necessary for my cognition because I can’t process every quanta in infinite detail. I haven’t made it an embodied practice to know the fractal unfoldings of the relationships of color in the way that I have in, for example, language. We all have the ability to move up and down levels of resolution, but not infinitely and not instantly. There is no View from Nowhere that can account for all levels simultaneously. Human consciousness is a constant negotiation of these levels. Being good at that is what we call wisdom: the ability to know which level to be at when.

The Kahneman worldview undermines our ability to move up and down levels of perception by positing a universally true machine-like perspective we should all aspire to take. Unfortunately for that worldview but fortunately for us normal people, there is no context-free perspective. To the extent that you assume there is, you cripple your ability to negotiate frames in real time.

Think about the fact, for a cultural example, that we still have hedge fund managers working today, despite the fact that it has been statistically proven that they lose in the long run compared to just plopping in a general fund like the S&P 500. According to the Kahneman thinkers, we should be able to demonstrate how the entire industry is built on a cognitive bias and millions of rich people would stop wasting their money.

Except that doesn’t happen. Hedge funds are thriving. From the higher level of wealth over decades, this is irrational. But when you zoom in, subjective fear and uncertainty comes into play, which the hedge funds are specifically designed to assuage in the near-term. It doesn’t matter if you might become technically richer over a thirty-year period if the way to do it is to stick a large sum of money in an index fund. The people who depend on that money would not think kindly of that. Maybe they are wrong like the children with the candy, but you’d need to be an incredibly wise and trustworthy person to shift a cultural bias away from short-term certainty and toward long-term trust. We used to call those people prophets.

The “cognitive bias” outlook is nearly void of wisdom. It fails to see that all choices are deeply contextual, at various levels of depth, and intersubjectively moral in nature. Sticking a billion dollars in an index fund affects many interested parties, all operating at various levels of resolution. Real wisdom is realizing that these externalities are just as much a cost to factor in as dollars are. Stop aspiring to calculate all that and grow your wisdom. Grow a chest as well as a head.

Raygun is not an innocent victim of her cognitive biases. She weighed the contextual web of her options and realized that she could take advantage of a connection and her sport’s partial reliance on taste rather than the hard numbers of, say, a 100-meter sprint. That was an immoral choice, not a “biased” one. We know because it added up to a performance that we clock as icky.

And why can we judge it as such? Because we actually have a highly attuned intuition for morality. It is extremely reliable and useful. The crowd perceived her life choices to be opportunistic and self-aggrandizing. She may not have fully conscious of her moral failure, but hopefully her humiliation was a wake-up call.

So, no, you are not likely to fall for a similar delusion. You can’t protect yourself from it with materialistic vigilance anyway. Fundamentally, these are moral choices. If you lose faith in that and instead try to “game” the system by doing things like memorizing a list of cognitive biases, you will become an evil weirdo, and anyone with a functioning intuition will clock it instantly.

You wouldn’t say that the Colorado River stressed the otherwise faultless surface of Arizona. We tend to use a vaguely artisan verb: Carve. The Colorado River carved, over millions of years, the Grand Canyon.

Language is so perfectly revealing. You wouldn’t go so far as to say that the river crafted the canyon. That would give it slightly too much agency. But you wouldn’t use an overly mechanical verb like “stress.” We want our clockwork universe, but not so much that the Grand Canyon can’t still be beautiful in a vaguely artisan sort of way. So, we’ve settled on the reverent-but-not enough-to draw-attention-to-itself verb: Carve.

In that linguistic concession, we reveal our hand. “Carve” still implies intention. We suggest, through our unconscious verb choice, that the canyon is an intrinsic good. Human excavators scar and stress the ecology; the Colorado River alone may carve it like a cosmic whittler.

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Modern people are themselves very stressed and traumatized and scared. We would like to carve out some time, but mostly we are overworked and overwhelmed. We don’t seem to notice that the difference between stressing and carving is only a matter of intention and timeframe. That is to say, the difference is the implicit metaphors.

Like a solvent, modern metaphors tend toward breaking themselves into the smallest functional bits to find “base reality” underneath the metaphor itself. The images shrink toward ultimate precision, but somewhere along the way they mistake banality for accuracy. Words like “cortisol” are thought to be very precise atomic units of stress, but really they are so flattened of the surrounding context they have become practically void of content. That metaphor refuses to identify itself as a metaphor and tries to project itself as a self-evident fundament, along with an array of other self-evident fundaments, discovered and yet-to-be-discovered. The bits then turn around and blame the cosmos itself for their own poverty of meaning.

It all really is just bad poetry. Iain McGilChrist describes it like a man who discovers that he can study the details of pond scum with a magnifying glass. He turns his looking glass toward the stars and declares what a shame it is that ancient people didn’t have access to this wonderful technology. It makes the heavens blurry, though, so he concludes that stars don’t exist.

Through the looking glass of chemical metaphors, the intricate qualia of of negative emotion becomes mundanely “stress” caused by “cortisol.” What was once tragedies with morals and arcs that spanned lives and histories, is instead systematically flattened into a single fancy latinate noun.

In fact, cortisol is a mostly unhelpful metaphor because it makes what might be a formative experience a purely “stressful” one. We could imagine that we are being carved into a grand and purposeful beauty over time, rather than a collection of dead car parts which should be used carefully for the longest possible functionality.

I can feel that I may be blaspheming by suggesting stress isn’t a chemical. If so, everything that follows will seem “fluffy” or “woo” if I don’t clear something up: I would never deny that cortisol can be measured at the time of stress. I also wouldn’t deny that you could manufacture stress by introducing a chemical. When patterns manifest physically, they always reveal their causal means, which can themselves be exploited by the higher pattern of scientific inquiry. What I am denying is that cortisol is the same thing as stress.

Saying “my cortisol just spiked” is just as impoverished an expression as me saying “I need to put ink down” (I’m writing this first draft by hand). Yes, it’s nominally true that when the ideas start flowing, so does my ink. In fact, it helps visually that the ink is a liquid and might offer some helpful viscosity to my sometimes chunky ideas.

Importantly, though, the material ink is incidental to the writing. It could just as well be done with charcoal, finger in sand, or hen-pecks on a Qwerty. The ink or its corollaries are an indicator of when the ideas are flowing, but it is not the ideas. Ink isn’t ideas. Cortisol isn’t stress.

You can’t fix bad ideas at the level of ink, and you can’t fix a bad life at the level of cortisol. That’s tricky because if you’re studious enough, you could definitely find some helpful patterns in ink: bad ideas are maybe associated with rushed handwriting or cheap pens. You could waste your whole life, actually, trying to optimize your writing by looking at what is revealed in ink, in grammar, in sentence structure. In the same way, there are a billion youtube videos on how to lower cortisol, none of them approaching a point. They’re built on the foundation of a metaphor at the wrong layer.

A better metaphor is an ecological one: the place where meaning happens is best thought of as a landscape. This makes sense, because we evolved on a landscape, developed our first languages on them, and those languages continue to be complex metaphors for an now imagined landscape of meaning. Locations for food sources become information which we forage for in essays, predators become stressors which we must choose to fight or flee.

It was popular like ten years ago to say something to the effect of “Your body reacts to an email like it’s a tiger,” as if your biology is just so hopelessly confused about the modern world that it can’t be expected to formulate a proper emotional calibration to an email. Even this line of reasoning, though, fell out of fashion as it was too loquaciously narrative and we chipped it down to the much more sterile and therefore controllable chemical metaphors.

I think the tiger metaphor was closer to being helpful, but it still wasn’t taking its implications seriously enough. Yes, getting an email (it would need to be a consequential email from your boss or something) can feel like encountering a tiger. That’s true. The metaphor still fails because it suggests that that response is inappropriate.

We have climbed the abstraction ladder so high that this is not obvious, I know. Let’s look at an intermediate example to better see why that might be. Imagine a farmer who has spent years building a farm and gathering grain for the protection and livelihood of his children and their children. Now imagine his grain silo catches fire. He will certainly have cortisol in his brain. Is he in any present bodily danger? No. Is there a tiger nearby? No. His meaning-making systems, which are indeed built on ancient emotional systems adapted to hunter-gatherer relationships with natural landscapes, are properly calibrated to the destruction of a meaningful symbol on the “landscape” of his future flourishing. The fact that the farmer’s emotional system is so deeply attuned to these metaphors that he could panic as if he were being physically attacked is actually a sign of their attunement and sophistication. He knows that the burning silo means struggle and suffering not only for him now, but also for himself in the future and even for his offspring long after he is gone. Semantic abstractions allow him to feel that pain and threat as if it were a tiger here and now, which is the fundamental reason humans are able to plan for the future.

This lineage of metaphor never actually failed. It’s just scary, and so we take an easy way out if we can manage to. When you get an email from your boss, you feel like you are being stalked by a tiger. The fact is, that’s appropriate. Your body’s highly attuned situational awareness in your ecological niche tells you that what you may or may not learn is of mortal importance for you and your lineage. The message is a portal to a landscape of meaning. You have the ability to feel the threat of loss of resources in the future as a hyper-predator here and now.

The fact that modern people are stressed and overwhelmed is not a sign that the system is somehow become miscalibrated, but rather that we have a great power to sense a future of possibility and yet have lost much of the epistemic courage that might move us closer to that future. We settle for the low-hum of the fear of a billion possible tigers rather than gird our loins for necessary confrontations with the right ones. We’ve woven a comforting new metaphor that tell us that the modern landscape renders us helpless to all the tigers who don’t exist.

The modern counter-metaphor says that all these fears are merely Paleolithic holdovers. Aberrant chemicals to be medicated away. This is a terrible mistake. Your meaning landscape has actually rightly identified certain behaviors or events to be something akin to super-predators stalking you. The silo that would otherwise feed you and your family is burning to the ground. To medicate or numb the feelings is to blunt your ability and urgent motivation to stop the flames or kill the tiger, to be courageous enough to carve out an even more beautiful and prosperous future, which we must sense is a real possibility in the ecological landscape. We aren’t wrong to think we might do better.

It is still understandable that we would construct an anesthetic counter-metaphor. The meaning landscape has this horrible quality of being able to bring the future’s sufferings and regrets all here and now in the form of an unbeatable psychic dragon (which is an amalgamation of all predators). For most of Western history, the aim was to try to defeat the dragon and win the gold. Lately, we’ve decided that there’s no such thing as dragons, while they eat us alive through our low-meaning email jobs. We can no longer imagine that accepting them as real would have positive effects despite it being painful in the short term. We dull our ability to “see” the meaning landscape with distractions.

Consider: In Louisiana, you’re liable to hit a deer with your car. The deer can see the headlights, sure, but they can’t “see” the meaning of them. They can’t connect the smell of exhaust to the fear of death. They don’t have the linguistic metaphors to connect their primal fear of black bears to the symbol of my wife’s VW Beetle. So, they stupidly make a break for it exactly at the wrong moment. We, on the other hand, are cursed with the knowledge that headlights mean death, that emails are sometimes portals toward suffering or wealth, and that computers may contain tigers and dragons.

The reaction to “stress” should never be the aspiration to forfeit our ability to see meaning landscapes. We can’t, anyway. We can’t aspire to be like the deer because the deer dies stupidly and we at least know enough to know to not want that. Despite wishing otherwise, we can “see.” Even if I blindfold you, you know to not walk on a highway and you know how far to stand from a stranger. To whatever extent, you are a visionary. A prophet.

Stop relying on bad metaphors like “cortisol” that hide the fact that we are well-adapted perceive a rich metaphorical ecology of future predators and promised lands.

Open your eyes, see the horror of the dragons and the promise of gold, and make better decisions.

When I first started writing, my intended audience was myself five years prior.

That is, I wrote with materialists in mind from the perspective of my growing re-enchantment. I was more or less able to wrestle my frustrations onto the page about the worldview I was leaving behind.

As a result of taking that seriously, I live a wildly different life: married and Catholic and living in Louisiana. Like getting kicked in the occipital lobe and knocking a bad fixation loose and breathing from my belly for the first time in twenty years, I realized I had been on the verge of tears the entire time.

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What got me here was a slow walk across a phenomenological bridge, overgrown and nearly forgotten, thinking the whole time that there is no way it had just been sitting there and no one told me about it.

What I used to find extremely frustrating was that materialists either won’t read those thinkers, can’t understand them, or dismiss them as word salad. These days, I mostly chalk it up to a deficit of trait openness: Little Scientists and their communicators are not truly creative like the Great Scientists, who are themselves almost never strict materialists. Oh well.

I find it hard to be mad about that anymore. At least they are committed to their worldview even as it becomes demonstrably nonsense. Perhaps I’m just a little more remote from them now, too. A little less in relationship; and hate is just murderous love. When a materialist leaves a comment on one of my essays, my genuine reaction is surprise that they still exist, and feeling unsure where to even begin to make a connection. We share a lot less ground these days. I suppose I’m also grateful that they still bother to engage with me.

When I got to the other side of my phenomenological bridge, I was disappointed to find that the people on this side also don’t seem to care about our atrophied callosum. A lot of the time, actually, they scorn those connections to mainstream science. From my perspective, here is the only bridge that coherently connects their meaning systems to the brutal and lonely modern world, which is most of their everyday life anyway. I suppose they feel that doing things like dovetailing psychology into theology diminishes or threatens orthodoxy, or at the very least their sense of certainty. My growing frustration (and therefore love) is now with those Christian friends who dismiss the “mythical” or “Jungian” perspective as either dangerous, pagan, made-up, or otherwise not a particularly useful way to spend your time.

My sense, actually, is that the greatest single threat to modern Christianity is our own blasé dismissal of what is likely the only good defense against modern ennui. I gather they feel the myth people overcomplicate questions of simple faith, or maybe just think they’re word salad like the materialists do.

With the stark exception of a literal reading of only the miracles depicted in canonical scripture, they tend to tacitly accept that the world as reported by scientific materialism as the most real and solid ground truth. God, in this view, has severed Himself from earth after winding up the clock, leaving all real enchantment long in the past, abandoning you and your Samsung TV to a reductionist cosmos. That Clockwork God was the God, by the way, Nietzsche proclaimed dead. He was more right about that than modern Christians are willing to see.

On the other side of the gorge, “atheists,” unless they are unusually committed to a clockwork universe, tend to themselves be Covert Theists. They are generally seekers—open to occult explanations of things—but far from willing to settle for the “boring” and “repressed” view of practically any Western Traditional Christianity. They are naturally drawn to the more esoteric and exotic Eastern religions, which promise to satisfy this search beyond the merely material without the cringe and rigid moralizing of their parents’ Church, or the ontological horror of being an Ordinary Religious Boomer.

Those entrenched in religion have the opposite shadow tendency: since the mysteries of everything are all presumably captured by their dogma, they ease into a comfortable Covert Materialism in every other area of their lives. If nothing else, as an ontological convenience, but more likely a defense against the terrors of doubt. They are largely not seekers. All that might otherwise be revealed to be alive and new and enchanted in ordinary life is permanently petrified by performative certainty. Both as a way of never questioning their faith but also epistemic laziness and a very unappealing and unaesthetic lack of wonder.

An Orthodox Christian I generally agree with said in an argument that it’s not possible that AI could be inhabited by a spirit because he “knows how AI works.” It’s just a “text prediction algorithm.” For one, the second claim refutes the first, to put it kindly. Then he said, “You wouldn’t say Google was a spirit, would you?” Yes, as a matter of fact, I would. The early Church Fathers well understood the reality of subtle bodies, as do neuroscientists like Erik Hoel.

Putting that aside, though, what would possess him to insist that just because he can point to some mechanical feature of a phenomenon, he can claim the totality of what it is? That’s exactly what the materialists are trying to do to you. Don’t pull their tricks: just because I can point out the electrochemical nature of your brain doesn’t mean I can say how you work or that you therefore have no subjectivity. Just because I can measure the iambs in a pentameter doesn’t mean I know Shakespeare.

As I am now openly a Christian, I’m officially allowed to say that there aren’t many groups in the world with more half-baked ontological arrogance than us. I’m not immune, either: it’s very tempting to fall into the pride of certainty and dunk on the libs or whatever. More and more these days, too, I would probably be celebrated for it because many people lonely and tired of the decadent modern world crave certainty. It actively pays to be a religious know-it-all. But that only works to further alienate the seekers, in the end. Our job isn’t to be palatable, it’s to be useful.

A systematic mystical philosophy is the only powerful counter to implicit Enlightenment thinking, which has been devastating to all forms of belief in direct proportion to the control it has granted us over the world. If Christians really want to be ready to defend and expand their belief systems and get to keep their iPhones, they should read thinkers like René Girard.

I saw a post recently that said something to the effect of “Reading René Girard as an atheist: this is wrecking my whole worldview! Reading René Girard as a Christian: the Church Fathers said this, but spicier.”

First of all, no they didn’t. The Church Fathers were establishing the Christian metaphysic in a world that believed gods and occult magics to be a given. Their job was to rigorously establish why God was the ultimate God and how and why to worship Him above all others. For uninitiated moderns, though, reading about how sweetness is the compost of warmth and wetness will sound about as outdated as a lobotomy.

Girard’s writing, on the other hand, was written in a Post-Christian era, where believing in no gods is a given. For religious people who take modern scientific thought seriously, Girard helps establish not only how old gods could exist from within a modern frame, but also the many anthropological indicators that it is reasonable to worship the Creator God above all the lower principalities.

Reading the Church Fathers is great. In general, the older the book, the more you will get out of it. I do agree with that on average. However, the Church Fathers did not at all have to deal with modern thought, and so provide basically no immunological defenses against it. If you read only them and the Bible (and probably neither, let’s be honest), you leave your psyche undefended from materialism and so just absorb it like osmosis in every unexamined aspect of your life. Hence, Covert Materialists and their IKEA Christianity.

Practically everyone was educated in the modern style of thinking, so you’re going to need a massive counter-education to allow for any deep belief to penetrate into your everyday life and not just be some vague segregated “belief” you hold in some faraway God on Sundays. Girard, for his part, gave me an anthropological account for the belief in Christ. McGilChrist gave me a neurological one. Neumann gave me a historical one. Heidegger gave me a philosophical one. Jung gave me a psychological one. Eliade gave me a mythological one. Not all of these people were 100% correct and maybe one or two of them was a little evil. Hard for me to say, and it depends on who you ask. Still, their observations dovetailed and dissolve into the ultimately unspeakable divine to induce a feeling of awe as it unleashed in me what I assume was the original feelings the gospels produced in ancients. This allows for a more genuine and vigorous application of the principles in my life because I actually believe it pragmatically works rather than only saves me from some abstract fiery pit in some over-there future.

In fact, the modern Christian obsession with the afterlife is partly explained by a quite recent inability to bring religious thought “down to earth” and apply it to our lives to see that it works now and in perpetuity, even if we can’t always see that in the short term and have to make some hard sacrifices.

I get the sense that certain Christian types feel somewhat scandalized by the profane implication that God exists in and through observable phenomena like evolutionary biology, in the fragments of all pagan mythology, and even in the manner they eat Reese’s rabbits with their half-niece on Easter. Of course, God became the ultimate profanity by manifesting as a man and then being crucified, so that complaint is a non-starter.

Modern religious thinkers should add Girard, Jung, Eliade, and Neumann to the roster along with the Bible and the Church Father. It’s very difficult to actually believe things in a substantiated way unless you can robustly contend with the materialism that is already established within you, trained in you as it was rigorously since you were young through TV and movies and school. It is the water we’re swimming in, and most people don’t even know what the hell water is.

Aligning all of your rational nature with what is highest produces a heat that isn’t comparable to the lukewarmness of repressed doubt.

There are gigawatts of belief pent up in the deepest layers of ourselves, waiting to shake the earth.

A flowerbed grows where the gas pumps used to be. Spanish moss hangs over the parking lot from the brawny arms of multi-centenarian live oaks.

The old gas station has become a Greek and Lebanese restaurant called Cafe Petra. My wife and I are the only ones eating dinner at around four. In the background, some vaguely Middle Eastern music is filling the empty booths.

We’re having a deep conversation, which hushes itself periodically as the waitress comes by to refill our Diet Cokes, which is probably the source of our growing enthusiasm more than anything else. After one such refill, the hush continues after she leaves. The Middle Eastern music suddenly foregrounds itself to me.

Like seeing a stage actor’s makeup up close, the effect is made surreal by its very foregrounding. The music is meant to suggest a vibe of authentic “elsewhere” to spice the food with the adventure you could theoretically have by going there. This gesture is mostly perfunctory. In reality, a white teenager pulled up a “Middle Eastern vibes” playlist or something. And more power to them, I say. It does make the garlic taste a little more exotic than if it came from my pan over date night playlist.

What I’m hearing was probably recorded specifically for backgrounding like this, so there is an inherent artificiality to it. But things don’t come from nowhere. This music may be a desert-mountain motif easily and subconsciously recognized as vaguely elsewhere in the American subconscious, but some vestige of authenticity has to have survived in the sounds I’m hearing, otherwise nobody would recognize it as the places it wants to suggest.

What makes it difficult to pin down is that it is also just American music, but in a meta-textual way. It still assumes the hyper-salient heroic individual, but functions more like the score of his film. When Indiana Jones goes to places unknown, the exotic score isn’t really about their culture, it’s about Indy’s relationship to those places, and therefore it’s about us because we are Indiana Jones.

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Still, though, these sounds must have meant something to a people somewhere. “Tradition,” sure, but maybe the sounds of youth under sunsets echoing off faraway cliffs whose location in space is mapped like exterior synapses. What sounded vaguely Middle Eastern to me was maybe once the mood that would melt a consciousness into homeland.

Last time we were in this restaurant, actually, Hotel California was playing. A more perfect counter-example would be hard to find. The song is about the highly-individualized personal hell of late lonely American cowboy drug addiction, with a soaring crescendo that defies the doomed lyrics to make it all seem rather romantic. On the drive home, I mentioned that that song is so on-the-nose, hyper-salient that it would probably be best if we just, as a people, agreed to never play it again. She laughed and agreed.

Not that the song is bad. The opposite, really. It’s so perfectly attuned to elicit the emotions it deals in that it is almost vulgar by its own success. Hipsters may argue with me here and say it’s trite or obvious or some other lesser known figure did it better. These are just gum flappings of a culture of landless invalids who have mastered the art of manipulating their private emotional states so well that they have accidentally crippled their sincerity, and so they have to signal their taste by claiming to like worse things than better things because good things are so good that even stupid people like them.

I’m officially too old to play that whole hipster game. But my question still lingers: why does specifically American music form the very heart and soul of young people, worldwide? Why do I have near-religious experiences listening to The Killers? (Please don’t punish my candor).

You may be the sort of universalist who believes that all artistic expressions reach toward what is basically the same truth, and our music is just how we happen to express it, but surely you will find a Greek, Ethiopian, and Chinese equivalent. You are going to be very confused if you ever travel. In restaurants in Lebanon, they aren’t listening to some vague Middle-Eastern music. They are listening to Katy Perry. Even what you might hear young Germans listening to in a döner kebab shop is really just American rap rapped in German. Even our rebellion, it seems, is a highly legible global commodity.

The first time I was really shocked by this, I was on a business trip to Guatemala. I remember the fear of imminent abduction at the airport as I handed over some newly converted currency to ride in a thirty-year-old Suburban with a guy who couldn’t speak English over spine-breaking roads as it started to rain. “Lluvia,” the driver said, gesturing to the window. “Lluvia,” I said and he cheered, rolled down his window and put a hand in the rain. “Lluvia.” Electric lines draped over Guatemala City like rats’ nests as endless slums passed by my weepy window. Just a little later, in the remarkably beautiful city of Antigua, I was out drinking with the Guatemalan guys who had just joined our company as SDRs. I might have been in Berlin.

A guy named Alejandro said his favorite band was Arcade Fire. We locked into instant friendship, bonding over the American musical yearning: I had yearned to get out of my little town, and he had yearned to get out of the slums of Guatemala City. I couldn’t believe it. It was a little naive, I suppose, but it is incredible that there seem to be very few places in the world untouched by American sensibilities.

This universalizing effect is so powerful that you will occasionally meet Americans who will claim they have “no accent.” This solipsistic claim always gets my hackles up. Charitably, though, I can understand what they mean: there are regional variants of American speech and if you want to be on TV, you have to learn to smooth those out. As a result, you may come to believe the “TV accent” is universally correct speech. Really, it is the regional dialect of the American Media Hyperscape, with its own set of quirks and distortions but should be learned if you want to sound respectful to the media natives. It also is the dialect most understandable across all American dialects (and probably the world), specifically because people are accustomed to hearing it in their TV and movies. Mechanically it is “designed” to be crisp and audible over mics. (An interesting aside: I was talking to someone from Essex at a bar in New Orleans, and she offhandedly observed that Europeans joke with each other that “you can hear an American before you see them.” The sound of an American accent “carries” better in some hard-to-define way, presumably because it’s well adapted to TV speakers.)

Our blindness to subjectivity is also what foreigners, I am gathering from getting ribbed by the Guatemalan guys, find most annoying about Americans. I can tell it’s only begrudging, though, because if I listened to their country’s music as much as they mine, they would feel the same.

Anyway, Alejandro and I were good friends now and just feeling, generally, like you might if you ran into your cousin by complete chance on a motorcycle trip through Vietnam. From what he tells me about his experience working for American companies, I realized for the first time the shocking arrogance for American white women in HR departments to dub these people “latinx” (which only a single digit of actual latinos assented to—this was a decade ago). It is something we’ll have to try to forgive by understanding the source of the confusion: Americans and similar Westerners tend to believe they occupy a “View from Nowhere” which they believe “objective” and might even go so far as to think they have “no accent.”

Really, we have the thick nasty accent of our native backwater. Our homeland is unique in the history of homelands because the landscape and its ruling gods are invisible to their own locals. Why this is the case in my country and other modern Western ones is complex story that I can only find small vestiges of, like an archeologist reconstructing a forgotten pantheon by finding pottery shards in the soil.

If you mostly operate from within the Modern Western Media Hyperscape you will have heard very little about what I’m about to convey, so I need to start near the beginning.

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Outside the window over my writing desk, as I write these words, a squirrel is shaking his ass in a Crepe Myrtle.

Maybe that’s projection: he is clinging to a branch and twitching his tail with a ba tum-tum that leads me to believe that it may be some kind of primordial pole dance. The apparent lack of utility to the movement and his totalizing focus suggests girl squirrel heat floating on the wet morning air or some other motivational qualia beyond my senses.

Watching him feels inappropriate, to tell you the truth. I’ve never seen such dull-eye’d sexual vigor. I can’t help but think (there’s no way this is true) that he wouldn’t be shooting his shot if he knew I was watching. At least, they don’t seem to do this when I’m standing in the yard.

I don’t even get what girl squirrels find so sexy about this. I mean, I don’t intuit the language: maybe tail size or speed of the little flicks or the grace of the movement or a subtle admixture which amounts to squirrel machismo? I can’t judge his performance either way so I suppose there is no need to feel embarrassed for him.

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I bet you could study to find the triggers for male squirrel hotness, though. I know, for example, that they once studied a goose and they found that she would run faster to chase down a bigger egg if it rolled away from her nest. The bigger the egg, the harder she ran. They found they could even put a fake egg in her nest, larger than any natural egg could ever possibly be, and mother goose would exert a preternatural amount of effort to retrieve it. They called that super-stimuli.

You could find the same levers for male squirrel attractiveness, if you were so inclined. Maybe I could tie a feather duster to the end of my new friend’s tail and transform him into a total Don Juan and every female squirrel in the parish would make pilgrimages to join his harem.

Of course, as far as “real” fitness indicators goes, it would be a trick. The squirrel remains probably an average specimen (no offense to present company). We would have merely discovered, through our high-level human inductive powers, the cues that female squirrels use as shorthand for genuine male-squirrel fitness. We will have hijacked those cues to higher salience than is possible in nature, just like they did to mother goose’s eggs.

The mere fact of super-stimuli seems like a good-enough argument against genetic determinism (which geneticists only could reasonably believe last century, anyway). If we were merely machines running on genetic scripts, then why would the dials go up to eleven, so to speak? The more likely explanation is that living things have a “telos” they aim to fulfill, in all their particular manifestations, expressions, and biological substrates, including but not limited to DNA. Sometimes, symbols of what get you closer to your telos may be exaggerated to salience beyond the very point of reaching them.

Now, lower animals don’t have the sufficient self-awareness to manipulate each other with hyper-salient facades. True, occasionally a species will get caught in a feedback loop of its own sexual selection’s criteria: the antlers of a deer or the feathers of a peacock or the nest of a magpie. But these are all selected below the level of will and so the resulting feedback loop is constrained by the speed of reproduction.

The moment that this changed for humans, actually, works well as one biological and genetic perspective of the “fall” of humanity: by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad (“bad” is a better translation than “evil” here in Genesis. Evil is a meta-capability that knowledge of good and bad makes possible), we suddenly become aware of the parameters by which we are selected as mates. Some we recognized as good, some we recognized as, uh, less than super-stimuli. Naturally, the first thing we do is cover our junk. The second thing males do, presumably, is the ancient version of deleting facebook and hitting the gym.

We are unable to walk freely in the garden with all the swagger of ignorance, and that’s awkward enough, but there is a deeper issue that we are terminally resentful about the inadequacy our self-consciousness reveals. If at all an option, we seek to make ourselves into a great and terrible god in the eyes of others. More specifically, we seek to grok their telos and then devise ways make ourselves into super-stimuli for them. It could be a skill, a golden temple, or a perfect jaw. The Trojan war was fought over the desire to impress Helen of Troy with ever more elaborately impressive bronze members.

It’s fashionable in certain online circles to presume that this primordial pagan war to become sexual super-stimuli is “base reality.” This is the “red pill.” Hard to swallow, but gets you out of the lies and cope of the Matrix. The “real truth” is exactly what we’re most afraid to say: male status is the measure of his right to reproduce.

The squirrel “incel,” at least, has a shot at reproduction by the mere fact that there is a lot of noise and lack of optimization in his mating landscape. The modern human incel, by comparison, is himself systematically compared to practically all male specimens on earth, many with a lifelong dedication of making themselves into Herculean super-stimuli. Used to, you just had to compete with the quarterback of your home town. Now you also have to compete with Tom Brady.

The “red pill” suggests you should become one of these top 1% men or die trying (various other colored pills suggest different responses. The “black pill,” for example, suggest you should curse God and die). Most mainstream punditry about incels refuses to understand unspoken sex dynamics and therefore don’t say anything insightful about incels beyond “ick.”

Mind, a similar arm’s race is also happening for women. However, the biological substrate that scaffolds their potential to become super-stimuli is different. The situation for women is fundamentally set by their exponentially higher cost of reproduction and therefore the choosiness of the most fertile women about which males they will allow to reproduce. At the most practical and biological level, women need a partner high-status enough to protect, but committed enough to help raise her children.

If this were the only balance to strike, the equation would quickly reach equilibrium: men and women would permanently pair with someone of roughly similar levels of attractiveness. They could then turn their focus toward willing the good of the other, raising kids, and making beautiful things. But, a third black object upsets the predictable orbit of pairs: deception. Both parties have various opportunities to defect for shorter-term gain.

For women, for example, a theoretically more optimal situation would be to have the genetic material of an exceptional man and then pair with an average stable man to raise the resulting child. In crass terms, marry the best guy who will have her, have the child of the best guy who will sleep with her (those are different men, always). The only problem is that the cuckolded male would never agree to it, so she must defect to achieve it.

In a traditional society, if it got out that she was “that kind of woman,” then no one would marry her, making the risk of female deception high enough to deter it somewhat. This describes the unfortunately named concept “enforced monogamy.” This leaves pre-modern women two viable ecological niches: become a woman of marriage, or join the world’s oldest profession, which allows men to spray and pray and pay for the chance, almost like a reproductive lottery system.

However, in one of the more recent developments in the sexual arms race—probably a result of some mixture of material prosperity, literary feminism, widespread pornography, sexual liberation, and the pill—the sexually parasitic have managed to bend social norms enough to partly nullify the stigma against their preferred form of selfish optimization. Thus, hookup culture and musical-chairs mating mostly benefits the sexual psychopaths to the detriment of those hoping to find a stable relationship.

Don’t think I’m saying it’s the women’s fault, by the way. It seems to be a chicken (or goose) and egg situation: male sexual deception both causes and is caused by female deception in the vicious cycle. Desirable males are incentivized to lie about plans of long term commitment in exchange for a low-cost sexual interaction, which frees them up to repeat the process with other women instead of investing energy in raising one child, permanently muddling the dating pool for other men.

The “spray and pray” sexual strategy is, in every way, less than optimal, even for those highly desirable men. That’s not an intuitive claim, but it’s clear if you unfold a couple of subtle concepts: Insects optimize for volume by having as many offspring as possible; prohibitively huge-brained mammals do not do this if they at all have an option. It’s only settled for by some males if they believe there is a high enough chance of female deception about the legitimacy of their fatherhood or if they’re psychopathic enough to feel they can’t operate in one community for long.

In a sufficiently low-trust society, the math shakes out that the top 1% or so of human men tend to have the most access to the reproductive years of the attractive women. This is especially true now that we exist in an online global village. Since untrusting young women feel they can’t secure a committed and providing relationship anyway, they are willing to suffer sharing the best of the best with other women for the relative security it provides. Again, not optimal for either party but more like a local maxima in a low-trust environment.

As this behavior ramps up, the other 99% of males are increasingly left out of the guaranteed-legitimate-father marriage pool. They eventually stop doing important things like working. These are the incels everyone is worried about.

Even to the extent that we live in a trusting society with marriage norms and strong social sigmas against cheating, there is still an sublimated sexual “black market.” Even if we don’t actually partake in hypergamy or womanizing, we are obviously play-acting it in the virtual world for kicks. Most of us are chronically looking at or producing porn or near-porn in complete digital privacy. We know it’s about as destructive to the commons as throwing trash out of the car, even if we can’t explain why, which is why we hide it from each other.

Naturally, this occasions shame, which feels terrible. Instead of interrogating the meaning of our shame, we have miraculously decided that shame is an aberrant and universally unwarranted emotion, even though that makes no sense. Shame has become the modern folk devil, and so we encourage shamelessness and also name that sexual liberation.

The actual truth is that total freedom in human sexual relations means total freedom to mercilessly deceive each other and thereby destroy the trust that builds wealth and safety and children, which is to commit ourselves to slavery and death in the long run. This, as a matter of fact, is what Don Giovanni is about. The reason that opera is a tragedy is because, to put it mundanely, his game doesn’t iterate well over time.

Even if Don impregnated six hundred young maidens across the Mediterranean, he would have done it with deception, necessarily, because the women would never agree to his unconcealed terms. Despite Don’s many offspring, he left them all in a world with less trust, and trust is what makes a society happy and wealthy. By the second or third or even fourth generation of his progeny, all that was gained will have been lost and more. His line is forever tainted by the origins of deception, and his offspring will eventually destroy themselves or else succeed enough to destroy their society. Don goes to Hell because Hell takes place over generations (at least).

That’s why science can’t answer questions like: “Are men naturally monogamous or not?” We are both. Both adaptive strategies compete within us and leave their traces in our biology and physiognomy. But one path alone allows our progeny to flourish. The other is a fundamentally parasitic short-term adaptation, built as it is and rationally must be, on cashing out assumed trust, betraying it and therefore undermining it.

Making up new concepts to hide this fact from ourselves won’t work to displace the anti-social and degenerate results. There is no such thing as a functional human “open relationship” or “polycule” any of the other similar terms. The squirrel can maybe be in an “open relationship” because he can’t self-consciously optimize for extreme sexual success because there is far more noise and near-zero deception on the squirrel sexual marketplace.

Because of self-consciousness about our own nakedness and thus our ability to exploit this fact in each other, we are creatures morally obliged to monogamy, despite part of our nature being promiscuous and therefore ever-tempting us toward a quick payout through social defection. If you want your children to flourish to the highest possible degree and over the longest possible time horizons, you are obliged to reject that part of your biological desires, forever. No way around it.

Even the most “liberated” people tend to find themselves in normal monogamous relationship once the turbulence of low-trust relationships burns and humiliates them sufficiently or their powers of youth fade away. A tiny minority do manage to play the low-trust game all the way to their grave, but almost no one envies the final fate of someone like Hugh Hefner.

Mercifully, if you aren’t born average looking enough to reject the underground game, age will eventually make you so. By the end, you will more than likely find yourself in bed next to someone for twenty or more years. My good friend is pushing eighty and his biggest regrets are not about missed sexual adventure, but a lack of even earlier and total commitment. This is usually the gist of old men’s advice.

Generally, as the chances of us becoming super-stimuli were always pretty low and are getting lower by the day, we eventually settle down. But we still don’t want to fully let go of the dark gravitational object. These days, we can easily fool ourselves into thinking we don’t have to. That Phone, the Thirst Trap, the third partner that lies in bed with most couples every night, is a way to feel the thrill of being a sexual deviant with no obvious longterm costs.

“Obvious” is doing a lot of work there, because the non-obvious cost is enormous. For one, our behavior suggests to our partner and ourselves that we are committed to monogamy only insofar as we have failed to do better. Virtual sexuality is an expression of the desire to be Don Giovanni with none of the wanton courage that would even make that sort of behavior appealing in a swashbuckling sort of way. Naturally, we are ashamed and disgusted by what that indicates about ourselves but can’t admit it.

Intuiting this, a subgroup of incel types are always trying to prove the “science” of “no fap” (really disgusting and revealing phrase). They are rebuffed by real scientists who confirm that masturbation does not damage the body like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer, so it must be fine. Both of them just reveal their implicit materialism. Porn is bad for the same reason tearing up photos of your best friend’s mom is bad: something has clearly gone wrong. Neither needs to produce medically dangerous outcomes for this to be the case.

Beneath the phony science, what incels are really doing, which is so baffling to materialist normies, is trying to dominate the sexual black market by making themselves into a top 1% male. They stare and yearn for it on their phones all day and have concluded it would be something worse than death for them to be settled for by a woman who was used up and aged out of the interest of top men.

They have watched other men, like perhaps their father, settled for in this way and then still divorced, financially and reputationally massacred. More subtly, they rightly perceive that most of what we would think of as “normal” modern relationships are fundamentally built on this mutually undisclosed “unless I can find someone better” low-trust behavior, barely concealed with monogamy-for-lack-of-better-offers, which is only tolerated to stave off the worst of the crushing loneliness of the compounding fruits of anti-social promiscuity.

It’s sad: they have never encountered couples who have believably rejected the sexual black market, even the subtle temptations on the phone. They don’t think this is even possible for themselves or a potential spouse. They believe that the only reasonable, honest, and noble course of action is to either master the “real” sexual marketplace or literally die trying.

They think the black mirror, stroked so much more often than spouses as it is, is the portrait of true sexual fulfillment. They seek to become a king there. This explains Andrew Tate and the millions of “incels” he’s talking to. This also explains the political landscape increasingly dominated by incel talking points.

Freddie DeBoer wrote a piece about the overstated influence incels have on our culture lately, and used that as an opportunity to double down on not feeling sorry for them (no one ever will). He claims that incels are full of it: it’s actually pretty easy to get laid. Fat, old, and short guys do it all the time. Even Freddie himself—can you believe it?—gets laid.

It’s hard to know where to start with this. First, the piece is well-written and funny, which suggests Freddie is likely smart and perceptive, which is one of the most attractive qualities in men. It doesn’t matter how much “an shucks” humbleness he lays on it, unfortunately Freddie likely finds himself a “high-value male.”

And yes, that is repulsive terminology. Not because it’s not indicative of something real, but because everyone senses that it speaks to the rules of a social game we shouldn’t be playing. Freddie chides the guys who are the bastard children of a deceptive hookup culture that he himself is contributing to, while also managing to slip in a humblebrag that, yes, he is marginally chad. The incels don’t want what he’s got anyway because they think sleeping with conquered, discarded, and probably now infertile women is cope for losers (not my perspective, to be clear).

He’s right about one thing, though: cries to feel sorry for incels will never work. The sort of people most likely to respond to appeals to pity (women) have already been traumatized by an “alpha” or two. They don’t understand that “alphas” are statistically exceptional compared to your average incel. They don’t care if that’s true anyway, because the number one dream of the incel is to become the exceptional betrayer of women. Not a likely alliance there, then.

Despite their mutual hatred, low-trust men and women still do depend on each other in a mutually parasitic way that increasingly exclusively takes place online. The temptation to participate in this parasexual online sphere starts early and often. Of course, boys are now encountering porn online at a very young age. For women, it’s more insidious: when my wife was a teenager, she posted a photo of herself in a bikini. Older men quickly saved the photo to their phone. Was she supposed to pretend like she didn’t know what for? Girls are of course extremely disgusted by this when they first encounter it. It involuntarily implicates them in the sexual black market, which makes them “that kind of girl,” which we still retain vestiges of traditional social defenses against, and so we must at least pose with our pearls clutched.

The fact remains, though, that huge and increasing numbers of girls devote their entire young lives to seeing how high they can get that number. To that end, they get plastic surgery and makeup that optimizes their appearance for an iPhone camera, effectively making themselves virtual sexual super-stimuli for incels they hate and will never meet. It becomes even more important than reality for them. If you’ve ever seen it, “Instagram face,” is hyper-attractive on camera and yet looks strangely “2D” in real life.

Incels gaze at these hyper-sirens all day, like a goose hunched over her supernatural egg, slowly beating lust and envy into every cell of their meat. They grind harder, isolate more, and now an elite few have even become “looksmaxxers” and dedicate their entire lives to the pursuit of the illusion of some composite virtual super-siren. Their sexual energy is wholly misplaced in a sterile landscape that produces nothing, not even the cursed progeny of Don Giovanni. If you were an alien, you would look at that and decide it was some kind of gnostic death cult.

Those of us not directly involved in all that, for the most part, still stupidly stare at the super-sirens on our phones and compare them to our own dowdy selves and spouses. We’re deeply unhappy and increasingly not getting married or having children because the super-sirens online are making us lonely and unbearably self-conscious and yet historically picky and vaguely obsessed with making ourselves hot.

That’s pathetic, for one because none of us has a shot in hell of looksmaxxing in real life better than self-proclaimed autists like “Clavicular” who’ve sacrificed their lives and endocrine systems to making themselves super-stimuli on our screens. When asked why, the only specific outcome he points to is more swipes on dating apps and better “halo effect.” If society’s Jenga tower was already balanced on one brick, this generation is adding a live horse to the top.

If you’re single and lonely and you don’t know how to change that, I’m telling you: brick your phone, go to a real place, and do something hard with other people. You will notice after about a month that normal people are more beautiful than you thought. Real beauty emerges with time and trust like layers of subtle light. This light is only party and temporarily revealed through instantly legible fertility signals like what you would optimize for swiping. Tie yourself to the mast of your ship to resist those super-sirens, if you have to. There are apps.

I met my wife in a church, among friends. We became exceptionally attracted to each other, not because we treated each other as good-enough replacements of the super-sirens, but because over time that subtle light become too bright to ignore. Still, neither of us is deluded enough to think we are above the temptations of parasitic sexual strategies, so we both have our phones bricked. We have chosen the sacrifices of monogamy with clear eyes. We made this choice to give room and soil for love to grow, to raise kids, and to make beautiful things. That is all much realer than the “red pill.” I legitimately feel sorry for incels because they don’t know that.

The people who make that choice, as hard as it is, outbreed those who don’t. That’s the “flood” of Noah, genetically. It has always won the slow war of attrition, even in the face of overwhelming unpopularity and difficulty. This is not new.

It’s straightforwardly a better strategy, at every level of analysis, than looksmaxxing ourselves to death.

An edited version of this piece was originally published in Country Roads magazine, which is rural South Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta’s fantastically unlikely cultural publication. Check out the rest of last month’s music issue here.

Thanks for reading,

JTF

When I lived in California and I told people I grew up in Louisiana, most of the time they would say, “Oh, like New Orleans!” and then tell me they would love to visit one day.

I smile and nod, happy we have a touchstone, but think, no, not like New Orleans, actually. Los Angeles feels closer to New Orleans than where I grew up. But that would start a conversation that ended with glassy eyes, so I go ahead and let them think I’m a NOLA boy.

When I was growing up, though, New Orleans didn’t feel like it was down the road. It felt like the end of the road; about as far away as you could get. It was both the center of the world, being the biggest city in my state, and also the very edge: a liminal zone full of voodoo dream totems and pushy mediums in layers of purple linen. You went there to get drunker than your parents ever need to know about or hear a fortune about a future wife who lives across a body of water with two sons from a previous marriage.

That slightly hokey and wispy spookiness of the Crescent City solidified into downright dread the day I heard that my brother died in a house in New Orleans. He was working as a line cook someplace and trying to recover from his heroin addiction. So, naturally, the radio hit “House of the Rising Sun,” which is set in a sort of mythical New Orleans, began to stick out of the background chatter of chain restaurants. I am the young brother that the singer warns to not “do what I have done.”

I always assumed The Animals (the version you probably know) wrote the song. But, no. Bob Dylan? No. Woody Guthrie? No. How about Lead Belly, plucked out of Louisiana’s Angola prison by a record exec? Still, no.

Who wrote The Rising Sun?

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I can tell you the short answer is nobody knows. The more entertaining answer, and probably also a true one, is that nobody wrote it. It emerged like a singing ghost from the hills, through the thousands of mouths of Southern and Appalachian folk singers, long before we had radio, recording machines, or even trains started striping the woods.

My first job out of college was a traveling salesman, selling software to hospitals all across the country, mostly in the South and Northeast. I went to Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and even so far north as Illinois. Being from a small Southern town, I was surprised to find that the “South” wasn’t just the place below the Mason-Dixon line. You just had to drive about 45 minutes from any major city, and suddenly people were huntin’ and talkin’ with a drawl.

I drove to many places like these, sometimes with “House of the Rising Sun” playing (I especially liked the Alt-J version at the time), thinking about what this country was like before Walmart and a McDonalds lined every interstate. Because of that universal backlit plastic signage, we can be fooled to think we all live the same sort of lives. But if you do ever drive a little further, which I sometimes did to find a certain rural hospital, a whole different universe opens up. An older one, and one that is probably fading from memory. You can still hear it, if you have the ear for it, through the haunted chords of that song, it’s first singers’ voices still echoing above the burning pines, the heat beneath its wings.

The song probably first started appearing in the late 1800s. The carpet baggers began reconstructing mostly around major Southern cities, so strictly Southern sensibilities tended to survive in small and remote towns in the hills and mountains (hence “hillbilly”). Some of those hillbillies had up to 500 folk songs in their head. This period from about 1865 until the start of the modern era in the 1930s is a period unlike almost any other: the seeds of the American music that the entire world still loves today, practically all of them planted then and there.

It was just before the recording machine and therefore mass media, but just a few years after trains started to connect all those little remote towns to the wider world. It was a liminal time in history, like when you first wake up: conscious enough to know you’re dreaming but asleep enough to dream.

It was the era of the “ramblers.” The sort of men who tended to cut town for various reasons (usually bad) and go on to the next one to try their luck and maybe to share a few songs. They were liable to tempt your kids to run off to the city for “opportunity,” but for drugs, gambling, and prostitution just as likely. Put a few ramblers and rounders together, you had what was called a “Medicine Show.” They would travel from small town to small town, playing music and then selling snake oil and cure-alls, made by “doctors” with names like Doc Hudson, who were also probably sleight-of-handers and banjo players. You may hear Doc’s haunting song, half-remember it, and then never see him again. You make the tune your own, changing the lyrics and melodies slightly to better sing it to your cousins on the porch. Through time and generations, only the most deeply resonant melodies and images remain, spread orally via train hopping hobos.

A distillation process took place through people memorizing the songs that were, well, memorable. But maybe more importantly, by forgetting what is forgettable, music is paired down to its most truly archetypal shapes in a way that just isn’t possible before frontier America or after mass media.

A new world was just waking up; an exciting world of technology and music and city living and its vices. All you have to do is just follow any waterway, from any old mountain or hill town, to its very end. They all eventually lead to New Orleans, where you could record an old family tune that might make you famous.

By the turn of the 20th century (around the time my house was built) if you asked just about anyone across small Southern towns if they knew “House of the Rising Sun,” they would probably say yes or at least point you to someone who did. If you then asked how they learned it, they will tell you a grandparent taught it to them or they don’t remember. It was already there, it seems, like old growth, warning about some permanent fault in our souls.

Near the end, depending on the version, the singer says they “have one foot on the train, one foot on the platform.” There is a moment of hesitation, a possible choice. They do choose to go back, saying, “My race is nearly run.” They, like my brother, will die under the rising sun.

Whatever poor wandering spirit that gave rise to that song wants you to know, for only a passing flicker near the end: you can step off the train.