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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Read more

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.

Share

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?

Share

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.

This essay is being republished with new edits (and a banger new voiceover by my wife) because it was chosen as one of the finalists in the “Best Internet Essays of 2025.”

You can buy the resulting anthology as a physical book here. Get your first edition copy before March 31. Huge thanks to for putting it all together.

Thanks for reading,

JTF

Riley and I were married on a Saturday in a small Los Angeles church.

We had only been engaged for a month when, at the counsel of our close friend, we decided to have the wedding in three weeks, right before we planned to move away from LA to live in a small town in Louisiana, where I was born and raised.

Initially, the wedding was going to be an incredibly humble affair. I pictured us and a couple of friends in the first few pews. To our surprise, three weeks later, with the nearly-free and movie-montage-esque help of friends and family, eighty-something people showed up (some from clear across the country) at the behest of a mass text that said what amounted to “I know you probably can’t make it, but…”

It was a strange and beautiful wedding, not least because it was also a goodbye. It was a little like the final episode of a beloved sitcom. Also, thirty minutes before the wedding, I was helping my groomsmen clear away shelves of Narcan and lube for the homeless program in the very room where our reception was going to be about an hour later. This is that sort of perfect memory that arises from unplannable imperfection that no amount of time or money can reproduce.

Pronounced man and wife, we ran outside to be showered in rice. Cars horns erupted and windows rolled down to release pumping fists. People just can’t help it, possessed by the spirit of a cloud of cheering witnesses.

Share

My argument for marriage starts and ends with that image. Even jaded LA people sitting in traffic automatically know a good thing when they see it, before they can rationalize their way into thinking something else. Generally, language makes us into casuists, able to twist ourselves into believing whatever helps us avoid the pain of making a permanent choice. Automatic responses remind us what we really must think and what should be attuned to with gentle attention. That’s a long way of saying why we know stories are truer than data.

Speaking of The Data, it suggests the opposite of happily ever after. Divorce is more than likely. My parents got divorced. That whole ordeal nearly ruined me. But the end of my parents’ marriage being catastrophic did not convince me it was a poor institution. If anything, it made me think that the force of the catastrophe could only be produced in the destruction of something good. What kept me living the bachelor’s life into my 30’s was not fear of repeating my parents’ mistakes; it was the lie of eternity promised in fleeting relationships. It was Swiping’s Lie: hookup culture and the corporate hustle that we all know is its conjoined twin.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is held captive on an island after the Trojan war. Holding him there is the goddess, Calypso promising him eternal life, eternal youth and eternal sex. This is the image of hookup culture, in case you thought it was something new. It’s the age-old promise of never having to grow up—the ability to continuously find newness and youth in others and to therefore renew the youth in yourself. You can easily imagine how a man like Great Odysseus would be tempted to rest on his laurels. The dream of Calypso, after all, is only available to those brave, chosen few men who have risen to the top of the hierarchy. She, then, is the spirit within the droves of young women who would share a hero instead of settling for a man. That image is also still alive and well. Think of DiCaprio. It’s maybe not a coincidence that you might also picture him on an island with his girls, or a yacht at least.

The first part of a man’s life is occupied by the desire to become worthy of Calypso’s island. For Odysseus, that took place in The Iliad. Once the war is over and he is well-known as a brave man, the rules change. The very desire that drove him away from Ithaca to go on a grand adventure now threatens to keep him trapped on an island of his rewards. What the gods conspire to inject in him now is a new kind of courage: the courage to choose his eventual grave. The temptations against this odyssey are great: Calypso is more beautiful than any mortal woman could ever be (because she is the essence of youth and beauty itself, expressed only in part and at times in individual women). His wife back home, Penelope, though very beautiful, does not compare to Calypso. Worse, she will quickly become old and ugly and tired, like Odysseus himself would, if he left the island.

He chooses Penelope. He chooses to go home. And he is punished for the length of the novel as a test of the graveness of that choice.

Riley and I had a strangely old-fashioned wedding, which was made even more strange by its setting in the infinitely hip neighborhood of Silverlake. An artist friend of ours, who, in my opinion, is very hip indeed, said the aesthetic was cool, almost “gothic.” I liked that. Riley’s antique dress made her look like the Virgin Mary. Mine was a navy-issued, double-breasted felt wool suit, authentic from the 50’s. We’ve joked that we should have done it real old-fashioned and gotten married in our own graves.

What’s romantic about a wedding is not the passing promise to pretend we’ll feel puppy-love for each other for the rest of our lives (e.g. “You’re my person”). Or else the even-sadder and more common promise to always watch TV together, as if we know all adventure is over and we have firmly settled for less than we once dreamed of. What’s romantic about a wedding are the parts modern weddings cut out or downplay: the “til’ death” part. That’s not to be morbid. The opposite. Given that we both have the choice to stay on the proverbial island with Calypso—forever looking for something new and better—we both look each other in the eyes and choose our eventual decay. We’re going home. As a result of this sacrifice there are no immediate riches; storms will rage and probably a cyclops will try to eat us, but we are going home to be with each other, come hell or high water.

People love romantic love, especially when it breaks rules, because it has no “why.” The moment you put a “why” on love—economic reasons, reasons of convenience, or because you’ve finally accepted that you just can’t do any better—it dies. So people yearn for the reckless and reasonless love they think can only be found outside the bounds of marriage. They have associated marriage with necessity, and cannot conceive of any other way it could be.

But, before-you’re-ready marital love has a lot more in common with puppy love than co-habitation. Both of them lack a “why.” That’s why one leads to the other: puppy love wants to proclaim eternity by entering into a lifelong commitment. Death cults of reasonableness tell you this is irresponsible. They repeat the cliches of Scientism like, “Your brain doesn’t even fully develop until you’re 25!” I don’t even know where to start with that. No, when marriage is done rashly and youngly—and long before you are “ready”—puppy love is multiplied by some strange extradimensional powers. Life’s responsibilities and challenges unfold as gifts to be navigated together, rather than stodgy commitments done since time began and, through you, must be muddled through once more. Having kids, for example, somehow loses its predictable cynicism and becomes infinitely personal and yet universal.

The number one reason young people give for not getting married is money. It seems likely to me that this is a convenient substitute for the real reason. If you have enough money, after all, it can make commitments go away when they become inconvenient. Money makes kids go away when they annoy you. It can even get you a younger wife down the line, which is to say that money makes for a false sacrifice. At the same time, people damn well know they shouldn’t stay in Calypso’s cave forever. They sense they will wake up one day as an old child and with either no children or estranged ones, but they lack the courage to choose Penelope outright. So they try to have it both ways: to keep the island as a backup plan. We can all guess what half-measures avail us.

Speaking of money, it shocked Riley and I how much people wanted to help us once we announced we were getting married. Dozens of people worked for free to make our wedding happen in less than three weeks. There is an old Italian saying that married couples always have bread under their arm, which, you could argue (cynically), is just a way to encourage poor people to get married. It has proved to be incredibly true for us.

As a man, it has also been incredibly humbling. Had I continued searching for more and more ways to win friends and accumulate resources before I got married, it may have never taught me that provision is better gained as a gift received than something to be wrestled from a hostile world. Marrying a woman taught me what women know intuitively: that the world wants to help you. When I was still a single man, the sentiment was more like that it hated me. And it did, in the sense that young men, unlike young women, have to prove their worth. Joining flesh with a woman means that my personal war against the Trojans is over. That courage is not wasted, it has just outlived its usefulness and it’s time for me to develop a new kind of courage. The kind that takes me home.

Home, here, also means that I have to become a king of my own house rather than the defender or servant in another man’s. I say “king,” despite it being language people don’t like anymore, and I mean it, too. Monarchy is innately human and cannot be discarded any more than a left leg. As Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. Democracy is not the evolution away from kings, but the freedom to put them at different scales. Democracy (at best) affords you a choice: your king could be the president, the CEO of your remote tech company, God, or your husband. But there is no getting out of bending the knee. The metaphor of home as castle and father as king may seem old-fashioned but it is actually more like a modern marvel. It distributes power structures into fractals, decentralized. It is only very recently and occasionally tolerated because, when taken in aggregate, a family-centered country is a more prosperous country, on average. Still, politicians are always playing at how much sovereignty they can steal back from the family and relocate towards themselves, but never so much that their country as a whole falls behind its competitors and we stop making kids. This all plays out mostly unconsciously, of course, as power games are transpersonal patterns.

That’s all to say, the intuition that “the family is the bedrock of Western society” speaks to what we all feel to be true: without the sovereignty of the families, we go back to feudal kingdoms. It makes no difference to me if these would-be kings are on the left or right politically. They all want as much of the power of the family as they can steal, and, unlike your family, they don’t care about you.

Unconsciously, also, Riley and I originally moved to LA looking for a king to serve: a big Hollywood king who could bestow power and fame on us if we pushed the correct sycophantic buttons. From that high place, we dreamed, perhaps, our king would die (or something equally fortuitous) and then maybe we would be king. This is the unspoken language of the American dream. We, of course, unlike every other person who has ever existed before us, would use our power for good, our world uncorrupted by our slobbering pursuit of pleasing those corrupt kings we claim to despise. Articulating it like this makes it plain to me now that this plan doesn’t even work in theory, much less in practice. It is also plain to me that we were on a pathway of likely-forever frustrated mediocrity because our spirits were at odds—we wanted what we also hated. And a house divided cannot stand. If we had managed to fully abandon ourselves to our ambitions (which some do manage with the help of some mixture of new age sorcery and hard drugs) we would have been so spiritually mangled that our fates would be something worse than death. What does a man gain if he gets the whole world but sacrifices his soul?

I can forgive myself (a little) because patterns like these usually can’t be apprehended from within. Perspective is required. Waking perception can’t see the forest for the trees, so we sometimes have visions or dreams. These are vague, counterintuitive, and don’t play by the rules of the game you are currently fixated on. So, most people ignore them, most of the time. We also have lost most of our sophisticated language to understand visions or dreams, seeing it all as arbitrary or unscientific. The language didn’t go completely away (it can’t), so it just became unhelpfully simplistic. We’ve settled for, “Follow your dreams,” which now means something like, “Get what you already think you want at any cost and ignore any subconscious warnings against that, especially in the form of other people (aka ‘haters’)” when it probably ought to indicate something more like, “Do that thing you have a strange sense you should do, where people also seem to want you around, even if you lose whatever you once thought was important to you.”

Riley and I found each other in LA as the former type of dream follower. Funnily, though, we met each other as a direct result of a small act of the latter type of dreaming. For in the midst of all our big dreams in LA, we had both followed a still small voice to go to that little church down the street. It was uncomfortable to keep going, I now realize, because it was at odds with the larger part of our spirit that was looking for a good earthly king to serve. But we just kept showing up and volunteering at the food pantry. Right outside of that church was where I first broke the news: “I think we like each other.” And with that, old dreams began to lose their power and new, strange, and humble dreams started to crowd in.

When we visited my hometown in Louisiana last year, something about the place resonated with us, which still comes as a surprise to me, given the swamps, memories, and poverty. I started having dreams about finishing my father’s house, something I had started working on with him when I was a teenager. As of a couple of weeks ago, we have done the unthinkable as a young LA couple: moved to a small town in a red state. I frame it like this not because this is how I think of it, but this is how I am constantly reminded others see it. Not just by our LA friends, either. Around here, too, when we tell people where we moved from, we get blank stares of amazement. “Do you know where you are?”

These, to me, are good signs that we are where we ought to be. Maybe that is partly my contrarian personality. I’ve always felt that if a place is well-known enough to draw a crowd—much more so if it is a hip crowd—then it is already too late and that place no longer has anything of genuine value to offer. The spiritual frontier is already settled by the hipsters who are ready to sell you the veneer of provincial quaintness for a considerable mark-up. No true leverage in life can be gained without the courage to see potential before hipsters come to assure you that you’ve made a high-status choice.

My father’s house was built in 1885, originally as a funeral home. I can’t help but feel that this “works” symbolically, given we came close to being married in half-dug graves, after all. Modern people with all their obsession with newness and loss of context are really just afraid of the past and its ghosts. Even people in this town are afraid of our house. To be fair, there are still crates that once shipped coffins and old glass bottles of formaldehyde (good Halloween decorations, too). I’m not haunted by these things, though. I feel about them what my artist friend said about our wedding: “gothic,” in the sense that in the context of a postmodern world, there is something a little calming and countercultural about remembering and embracing the messy ghosts of the past. That’s not to say that this is all a fashion statement. If it was, I’m sure we would be happy to settle for the “farm-house chic” found in some Millennial home in some otherwise safe suburbs, rather than going home to face the genuine decay of my historic childhood home.

I have to remind myself, that although what I’m trying to do here is make some sense out of all this, there are aspects that go plainly beyond sense. I doubt I will ever recover them with language. One example would be the dream that led me here in the first place, another would be my wife’s exceptional character in the face of these circumstances. For context, she is not just some aspiring actress from LA who, on some level, wanted an excuse to leave the thankless grind behind. She filmed a movie this year and was part of a Disney project last year. She had every concrete reason to stay in Hollywood. She left only because of my weird dream. Now that we’re here and living in the old house, I am the one who is much more likely to forget the dream and fret over some concern of status. Or worry that she doesn’t want to be here because there are too many blighted and abandoned homes on our street. She is usually the one to remind me why we are here: to be involved with people and to do what we are told. This is a special place. There is real history here, and that’s part of it, but what I find remarkable about the town is its aliveness and relative beauty in spite of its total lack of economics. Once you dig a bit, you realize that this town is kept alive only by the good will of a few wealthy families who care about the community.

I should probably disclose at this point that I see our house and the town as an extended metaphor for our marriage. That’s not to diminish the idea, though. The whole project of my Substack (The Metaphor) is that saying something is “just” a metaphor betrays a serious misunderstanding of the shape of things. The explicit is not “more real” than the metaphorical, it is just an expression of the metaphorical with most of the meaning trimmed away in favor of a limited and temporary but useful purpose. Those things that contain the most rich layers of metaphorical substance are the most real. Perception without metaphor, if you could even imagine that, is not a perception at all, but something unwitnessed or forgotten. For to notice something at all is to attach meaning, and meaning—a message within a larger narrative—is a metaphor. When I say fixing up my dad’s house is a metaphor for our marriage, I’m saying that the act of cleaning and organizing the house is our marriage, at least in part, at least for now. This is something Riley and I take very seriously as a belief system. We always say that everything you do matters. Not only that you do it, but how you do it. It’s as if we see life as a big play. Everything you do has valence, character, voice; it all gives off a vibe, which at the very least you witness, and which, if nothing else, shapes the delicate curves of your face. You get away with nothing.

It also keeps us attuned to how our broader environment may be shaping our inner environment. We notice, for example, that to the extent there is unexplored territory in the house—places filled with dust and cobwebs—there is also unexplored territory in the mind. It is important, then, to intentionally clean every corner of the house, slowly and consciously, literally getting your fingers in every nook and cranny. While you do that, your psychology changes. You master the domain and your nervous system regulates to a more calm, resting state. Until the motions are embodied physically and dramatically, the cobwebs remain also in the marriage. This is not to say dust and cobwebs should be eradicated. Just that the opportunity of their maintenance should be perceived as a privilege rather than the terrifying indication of inevitable decay they are usually seen as. In fact, the modern compulsion to eschew all signs of rust incur an ever-increasing debt that I, at least in this phase of my life, am no longer willing to subsidize my time to afford. I’m thinking of clean, glassy, modern architecture; I once heard someone joke about that sort of place—I can’t remember who said it or where I read it—that those places would be perfect if it wasn’t for all the people in them. The cost is not just in the anti-people aesthetic (which brings a psychic cost probably higher than anyone reckons), but the literal salaries of uncountable maintenance, janitorial, and security people, all built into the ever-increasing hours demanded of the email workers inside. And all that for what? To avoid looking at some dirt, to avoid the realization that you were once that dirt and are quickly becoming it again. And by avoiding those realizations, our resilience to them gets lower, and so we erect even more walls and glass to keep it more securely away, and the cost of it all rises and rises and so we are forced to work our email jobs for longer and longer hours while someone else, also paid for with more and more working hours, makes life-long memories with our children in our stead. You start to think that a little dirt is a small price to pay for freedom.

Jackson does not have a PR department or an office building with fancy email jobs. If you were to drive through town, you would see a few homes and businesses of genuine historic beauty, a few places that could easily soon shine again with some care, and also abandoned trailers and derelict houses well beyond repair. In Louisiana, the divisions between chaos and order are more like a suggestion. Because of the constant rain and humidity, walls and fences quickly dissolve back into the earth in the absence of care. Grass and trees quickly overwhelm all places even a month absent human attention. As a result, it is plain to see who’s still tirelessly cultivating the walled gardens we’ve negotiated with nature, against her universal chemical solvent: water, which also happens to be the substance which gives us life. It’s all very salient to me. In the places where she has partially or fully reclaimed our efforts, I try to be grateful for the reminder of the impermanence of all things. In the places where 200+-year-old structures still continue their tango with decay, we remember how miraculous that is.

At this point, I realize that in writing about marriage, I’ve talked a lot instead about the town we’ve moved to. That has to be right—there is no way to “be” in a marriage in isolation. Marriage can only exist insofar as you act it out in the world. I could go on and on about the magical kismet that has resulted from this marriage and its odyssey home: the happiness or small moments and the inside jokes, the healing of familial relationships and old friendships. But synchronicities, like dreams, are endlessly interesting to the affected party, but difficult to explain and usually pretty boring to others. That just must be magic’s way of keeping its secrets.

By choosing Riley, I have made the decision to leave the island of Calypso forever. I went home, in my case both figuratively and literally. That means we have both sacrificed the illusion of eternal youth and have intentionally chosen to have kids, make a home, get old and ugly together, and then eventually die. By making the choice in full consciousness, I feel that I have received a better kind of eternity in exchange.

In the final part of the Odyssey, Penelope wants to know for sure if the stranger is really her triumphantly returned husband. She tells him he can be with her as long as he relocates their bedroom. What only the real Odysseus would know is that he built their bedframe from the tree that grew out of the foundation of their homestead. At her request, Odysseus flies into a rage. He refuses to (literally) uproot his bedroom, his place of sanctity and rest. His rage is how she finally knows it is really him and he is really home.

Marriage is nothing without a place, home, roots. This is worth sacrificing everything for—even immortality. These roots extend not just into the earth, but connect us to all the people we know and care for, and whose love and care cultivates us into being. Without that, you risk no pain of loss or the dust and rust of eventual decay, but you never truly exist either. The choice, once fully understood, is obvious. Still, we are given that choice.

I choose Penelope.

Within the first few minutes of Marty Supreme, synths swell behind a billion sperm racing toward one egg. A crescendo as the winner burrows into the microscopic lattice.

All of life is a furious competition, this film tells you. Each of us alone won the race to be born and so we were born to continue to win, alone. To lose is to betray your birthright and forfeit the privilege to exist.

The egg smooths itself into a ping pong ball. Timothée Chalamet, himself famously striving to “be one of the greats,” plays table tennis with genuine mastery after six to seven years of real-life practice (motivated, no doubt, by a synchronist meta-hope of winning the Oscar). He plays the character Marty Mauser, who is based on a real-life Jewish international ping-pong player from the 1950s.

“I’m Hitler’s worst nightmare,” the character says to a group of reporters.

Share

Already we are made to understand the meaning of the film: Marty is the pure embodiment of the mythos of post–World War II America: a group of loosely associated individualists, each working toward his own actualization, somehow overcame the tyrannical unity of Nazis.

Fundamentally, we all believe in the sacredness of the individual over the group. Outwardly, we say we believe in the radical equality of those individuals. Privately, we know this means we each must be better than all of them. This film is going to shock you by revealing to you your own private beliefs:

Just a few seconds after the Hitler comment, when asked about his rival and an older Jew who survived the concentration camps, Marty says he will be “wishing he was back in Auschwitz.” When the shock lands, he adds, “Don’t worry, I can say that. I’m Jewish.”

We’ve been telling and retelling more rose-colored versions of this story, constantly, since the end of the war: the rebels versus the empire, margin against the middle, the underdog against the jock. And although this one is set chronologically nearer the beginnings of that storytelling tradition, Marty Supreme is its purest distillation and its end. Only possible to conceive of today, really, after decades of incremental intensification.

Really, Chalamet’s impossibly modern rizz contrasted with 1950s America is what makes the movie so thrilling. Hapless mid-centenarians are shocked and bamboozled by who could conceivably be a time-traveling hustler from 2025.

Unconsciously, we feel they deserve whatever he can manage to do to them because they don’t yet accept the ramifications of their own worldview. That is, except for the childless famous actress, the only one able to keep up: “I don’t care if you stole from me because I would have done the same to you.”

Contrast that with the poor girl carrying his child, Rachel, who loves him helplessly no matter how much he lies and manipulates and cheats. We sympathize with that love because of the blinding swagger produced by the coherence of his worldview. (I was sweating I wanted Marty to win so bad.) But she can’t commit herself to how he operates, as much as she wants to. The mere fact of her female fertility partly foists a more ancient purpose onto her: with more biological urgency than a male, she must rely on other people and take care of the people who rely on her, including Marty. Marty finds this repulsive.

She would do anything to help him, to be like him, to hide her dependency, but this only works to prove she is trying to “trap” him. “I have a purpose,” he finally tells her. “You don’t.” By this he means, I can accept the implicit rules. You have to pretend.

From the perspective of our revealed values, Marty is the most honest man alive. All his actions are unusually “true” to his goals. As Kierkegaard wrote, purity of heart is to will the one thing.

My heart is nowhere near as pure. I want to be one of the greats. But I also have theological beliefs and feelings of compassion and so on. Not only are these complex, they sometimes inappropriately shift levels. Meaning, I’ll sometimes put social comfort over truth. Or money over integrity. These frame-shifts weaken my “charisma.” Marty would never do that. He merely fabricates forensic details in service to “his truth.” In the grand scheme of his worldview, those are white lies. In an important way, Marty is a revealer of the hypocrisy of our age by being the perfect embodiment of what we desire to be but can’t admit. Our involuntary celebration of this in the unironic marketing of Marty Supreme reveals these implicit beliefs.

We can’t help it. He puts his pursuit of greatness at the top of his hierarchy and won’t move it for anyone. We only wish we had the ping-pongs.

The movie also reveals, however, that even in the case of obsessive total commitment by a genius with hyper-fidelity, it doesn’t work. Every single one of Marty’s hustles backfires. He gets into the nice hotel, but has to foot the entire bill; he gets the money he needs to fly overseas at gunpoint, but is arrested by his uncle when he gets home; he beats Endo, but he doesn’t get to compete in the tournament. And that’s the thing, too: Marty is truly great at his game. He could conceivably win.

So, why doesn’t it work?

The counterpoint to Marty is his Jewish rival who was in the concentration camps. While defusing bombs outside the camp, he followed a bee back to its hive. He smoked out the bees with his cigarette and then covered himself with their honey. In one of the most shocking and genius images of the film, he allows his starving friends to lick honey from his body. It is the inversion of the opening image: Instead of devouring honey for his personal gain, he allows it to be consumed from his very flesh.

Maybe Marty doesn’t believe the moral of the story because he’s better at table tennis. From his perspective, old-school Jewish morality doesn’t get him where he wants to be. But if you’ve been paying attention, the opposite is happening: despite the genius of his game and hustle and ability to manipulate others in real time, nothing ever works out for Marty.

You could think of information, attention, status, money like meta-calories: the information required to obtain food. It turns out, his pre-WWII friend knows something he doesn’t: “food” is best stored in the bodies of others, in the form of reputation over time.

What Marty is doing, then, is wrecking his ability to obtain “meta-calories” from others in exchange for small amounts for himself, now. This doesn’t work out in the long run, no matter how much rizz you have. Trust is more valuable than any particular resource—even talent—because trust is the ultimate meta-resource.

Our post–World War II culture fears and denies this because our founding mythos demands that we deeply distrust group affiliations and hierarchies of any kind—you don’t want to be a Nazi, do you? We also fear losing our private pursuit of greatness, our “dreams.” So much so that we even admire Marty for destroying his life and everyone around him for a small chance to be rich and famous. He’s good at it. We fail to notice that it’s like a circus trick: only impressive in a very isolated way and destructive in every other way.

“Everybody wants to rule the world.” With that ethos, social trust decreases slowly over the decades. Loneliness increases. In a vicious cycle, the need for a singular identity; to “find ourselves;” to be great, becomes an ever more urgent necessity to make up for the gnawing spiritual isolation.

The resulting existential dread sometimes feels cosmically romantic, like we’re the first beings in history to float alone in a sea of stars. Really, though, selfishness is nothing new, as the Shark Tank guy reminds Marty: “I’m a vampire. I’ve been around since 1601. You will never be happy.”

After the endless waterfalls of compounding and interlaced stressors that you expect of a Safdie movie, Marty is finally presented with what irrevocably and forever connects him to other people: His child.

Family, particularly for men the birth of a child, reveals that we are never fully separate from each other. This moment cascades through Marty’s belief system, breaking him open in an instant: everything we aim to achieve is hopelessly interconnected. The opening image of the egg and sperm is undone by it’s human manifestation and the final image of the movie: Marty weeping at his smiling baby through glass.

Chalamet says he wants to be one of the greats. He also claimed it isn’t something people aspire to much anymore. Maybe it’s not. Maybe the reason is that aiming at greatness above all means you end up alone.

Gen Z is splitting into two factions, with about half of them doubling down on their looksmaxxing grindsets to a clownish degree and the other half going trad and starting families. Whichever way, the previous age seems to be coming to an end. We have no idea how the next one will start. Tensions are high for everyone.

This film manages to appeal to both groups. And maybe it is possible for a synthesis. To strive for greatness from within a family. For the sake of a family. I don’t know. That’s pretty much what I’m trying to do, so I hope so. If not, at least I got the family.

When a culture is in the midst of a great transition, we sometimes produce media that has this strange Schrödinger’s cat effect: people thought “Fortunate Son” was a celebration of the American military in the 70s. In the same way, people think Marty Supreme is a celebration of a personal greatness above all.

It is, but it is also the opposite.

Most of the discussion about writing that I see floating around online is how to not write like AI, how to write better/different than AI, or whether AI is or will become a good writer.

Very little of it touches on what writing is, what it does, or why we do it, which I think would better allow us to approach the source of the fear of losing human writers.

An analogy:

There are fifty taxidermied animals, at least: a bison, a bear, a lion, a baboon, many deer, an elephant foot (made into a waste basket), and several exotic pelts on the floor.

I used to play Xbox with my best friend in that corner (on that same TV) pretty much every day after school. This is his parents’ house. I only think about how unusual it all is when I bring a new visitor to see the racquetball court. I play here every Tuesday night since I moved back to the area.

Racquetball is like if tennis were in a giant cinderblock cube: You get your rubber ball, racquet, and protective eyewear (there are plenty to choose from already at the house) and head into the cubic cathedral.

The object of the game is to hit the rubber ball (sometimes going about Mach 1) and make it strike the far wall before it bounces off the floor twice. Once you manage it, it’s now up to the other guy to do the same. Whoever fails either loses the serve or the other guy gets a point. You play to fifteen.

Echoes of rubber whacks, Serena Williams grunts, and slapping feet all merge into a pandemonium of constructive and destructive interference, making intelligible sound only possible between volleys.

Unlike tennis, there is no obvious disadvantage to bracing your organs, summoning a profound wellspring of repressed rage, and trying to make the resulting impact sound like a buckshot, except maybe exhausting yourself. You don’t really care about that, though, because it feels good to really hammer that thing.

The older guys, like my friend’s dad, do that less. They tap the ball with a deft hand, bouncing twice long before anyone could possibly sprint up there to get it. The great equalizer is that the younger guys just can’t resist taking out pent-up aggression on the poor rubber ball. The statistical outcome of that approach, I would guess, is about -15%. Enough to not notice in the short term, but to cost you 3-5 points over the span of a game and roughly make up for loss of youth (only within the game, mind).

In my defense, there is something magical that happens when you get two young lunatics hitting the ball as hard as they can. Your spinal cord is forced to operate the racquet instead of your neocortex. Exhaustion overcomes your thinking mind and suddenly you realize what a liability thinking normally is. You do things you didn’t think you were capable of. The racquet is an extension of your arm: your consciousness literally engulfs it. It is as much “you” as your fingernails, at least.

What’s really good is when your awareness seeps into the room.

When the ball is flying high and fast toward the back wall, you learn to turn and run forward to rendezvous with it, for example. Many such heuristics you learn and then forget you learned. Over time, the physics of the game leaks out of your head and into your bones. You can “feel” where the ball is going to be. A trance comes over you, if you’re lucky, and you forget yourself as a body and allow the spirit of the game to play you. Then, you forget the technique of your swing and the score and you do something wild like hit the ball behind your back with reflexes only possible if you’re “The One.”

Get too proud of that, the next one is going to hit you between the eyes. In order to slip into the “mind” of the game itself, you can’t “watch” yourself play, because that shrinks your awareness to the boundaries of your skin. From your now shrunken perspective, you’re not in “the zone” and can’t find the tempo of the game, at speed. Seriousness or trying hard won’t get back in—thinking about yourself too much.

Have fun, and if you’re lucky, you’ll slip back into the zone, have the time of your life, and maybe also win the game.

This is a very good parallel to how I aspire to write.

Share

Writing is trickier than racquetball from its inception, though. All the sitting and laboring and thinking gives the false impression that writing is a dead act. Something you get “right” by following the rules, like a taxidermist of once-alive ideas.

I’m not against rules. The rules are great because they allow for the game. In fact, add more rules: pick an album and write an essay where each paragraph starts with the titles of the songs; write all first drafts by hand; only write about grass. But don’t think that by merely following those rules you will be rewarded. The rules allow for the game by giving it a foundation upon which to transcend yourself in real time. At the highest levels, not breaking rules (or at least waving through them) is a sign of middling performance, not mastery.

Writers have more tools than ever before, but have never had such a hard time with their identity as “writer.” What even is writing anymore? AI can write, so is it a writer? Why or why not? Can you use it to help you write? How much? Are you an “expert” or not? By what pedigree? If not, do you stick only to subjective experience? How is that different from a personal journal and why should I want to read your journal? If you do venture out into intersubjective thought, what is your philosophy? Are you analytic or continental? Have you read the entire Western Canon and also the most recent scientific literature? Can you interpret data? What are your sources for that claim? Do you know that someone already thought of that in 1972 and most people agree that it’s wrong?

If you want to sidestep the tangle of non-fiction, you’ll have to do poetry and fiction, and that’s a relief in one way because at least no one will read it. How would you even know if it’s good enough for broad market success, anyway? There are many theories, most of them entail becoming a hack, and down another rabbit hole you go...

It is very difficult to play the game of writing without being henpecked to death with endless reasons why it’s already done or wrong or not marketable. How could you possibly loosen up enough to “play” in this arena? much less let it play through you.

If you’re really determined to “make” it as a writer, though (and not just someone with a journal), there is a narrow pathway cut out for you in the marketplace. It appears “scientific” in framing, but really is just a result of the modern market’s constraints. It was a literary tradition pioneered by the work of Danny Kahneman.

I think of these types of writers as taxidermists of ideas: a mix of journalism, self-help, pop-psychology, behavioral economics, and literary postmodern nonfiction. This style of writing, for various reasons, has managed to maintain a profitable niche in the modern marketplace. You’ll see it everywhere: Malcolm Gladwell, Yuval Noah Harari, Sam Harris, James Clear, Jordan Peterson’s self-help, Steven Pinker, Ryan Holiday, and so on. Once you realize that this is a particular literary style in the tradition of Kahneman and not “objective” as it wants to present itself, it becomes impossible not to notice. It is also the sort of writing most threatened by AI.

The prose is bright, clear, unambiguous, and carefully edited down to a third grade reading level. The claims are always working to a “point” which is implicitly “What does this have to do with me?” because “modern” readers are well-known to be incredibly selfish and stupid and so must never be kept reading something that is not explicitly helping their “self.”

At the same time, your contemporaries are going to read this not looking for help but for a foothold to humiliate you. So you must couch even the most obvious and banal claims in “research” only the most bad faith and hateful readers will dig into. They will certainly find fault (because most studies are either too small or not reproducible) but mostly it will be too much of a deep dive to reach mainstream attention, so your reputation will hopefully be safe at least enough to keep selling your books. Google critiques of your favorite book if you want proof of this non-fiction pagan underworld.

Downstream of all that is all the “educational” content on social media, which devours the excess blubber of hyper-taxidermic modern writing like a whale carcass. Take something someone who was great did and “deconstruct” it in an explainer video essay or Substack article. Like having a taxidermied elephant foot in your den, this produces the feeling of proximity to life without the risk of being alive or near life.

From a safe distance you can learn about how Nobel invented dynamite without ever smelling the sharp sulfur of lit TNT. Instead, channel your deepest desire to be in the world into the obsessive fastidiousness it requires to make a convincing forgery of the world. Never once write from your balls and so rightly fear AI, which is a master taxidermist. Instead, identify a memorable aspect of available data, reproduce it in delicate and beautiful detail, then contort the body of a once untamable natural beast into the awkward strictures of the CNN moral order, making the reader feel adventurous for “learning something new” while also not wrecking their moral ontology so much that they don’t fit in with normal people.

You can’t find any big ontological claims in the data, so they’re too “sweeping” to make, anyway. If you ask your editor (probably GPT), it will tell you to take it out or find better sources or “do more research.” Keep at this, slowly you’ll get Kahneman-brain and develop unconscious contempt for your readers (stupid and selfish) and your contemporaries (stupid and bad faith) and yet tailor everything you write to please them.

All “sweeping” claims are pared down until all you can do is use the data to sublimate the worship of self. No one has the audacity to tell you not to do that because there isn’t sufficient data to prove that self-worship is hell. All the better, because I can now sell you a book with 59 simple hacks to endure the fifth level.

I don’t want to get too down on the taxidermists. They can see the beauty of aliveness and reproduce it in fine detail. They have their place. The problem arises, as it has, when we begin to believe we can recreate the whole forest with animatronic baboons and foam rubber loam.

This is the state of the writing world as I see it: writers think they are only allowed to add humble little well-researched imitations of life, unless you explicitly err on the side of memoirist or novelist, which no one will read. The result is that we have mostly forgotten how to write like lunatics.

In fact, the entire project of philosophy has eaten itself in analytic philosophy departments at the universities: the obsessive practice of taxidermying every single word until you drown in madness of definitialism and lose the ability to prove that you even exist. “Continental” philosophy died last century as the amount of time it would take to master all the relevant material became too great and so thinkers lost their ability to write poetry because they were too busy catching up on what recent scholars thought that Hegel thought about whether vegetables participate in the Spirit dialectically or whatever. Meanwhile, poets lost cachet as revealers of wisdom as the worship of science loomed ever larger in the modern imagination.

People still crave wisdom and poetry, but they fear subjectivity, so hide their sad poetry in faux-objective pop-sci self-help. This is an anemic replacement, leaving us ever searching for the next big advice that will enrich our pale blood. We have forgotten that this is supposed to be raucous and dangerous and fun, and writers are supposed to be seeing how hard we can make the rubber slap.

We writers have failed. We can’t master every domain, so we’re too shy about getting humiliated by an “expert” in one field or another. So what? We need wild writing more than we need to uphold impossible standards of being technically correct, which only serve a hidden subjective drive anyway. Let’s stop hiding behind a rampart of faux-objectivity. Let’s swing as hard as we can just because it feels good. Let’s judge each other on style and grace and humor and not citations.

I see it happening here and there: I don’t agree with a single clause of Bentham Bulldog’s utilitarian writing, but by God I respect his swing. At the other extreme, Sam Kriss is unassailable to rationalists behind his decadent labyrinth of somewhat intimidating performative chaos. Although practically polar opposites epistemologically, both are playing the game well enough that it occasionally plays through them and they do something amazing.

This isn’t about laziness or anti-rigor. It’s a disposition more like art or sport than a faux-science. As an athlete, you have to train more than anyone if you want to be the best. Read and write for hours a day like lifting weights or practicing a jump shot. Not so you can memorize sources (I can’t even remember the title of the book I read before last), but so you can be ready to play through what has formed you when the moment emerges.

The taxidermists tend to think they are working toward a unified “Theory of Everything.” A perfectly stuffed hyper-knowledge-object that will unravel all domains of wisdom by its touch and also not need to move or change and just sit there, looming all correct-like.

I reject that frame. I see writing as good because it is both fun to make and read. All this talk of “compression” confuses me. What are we compressing? Why are we trying to fit so much into so little space? Do we really need to become neutron stars of information density so that anyone who reads will be pulled into the gravity of our insight?

The deep irony of the compressors is that, in my experience, they don’t even read. They don’t know that they need to be transformed by what they consume, so they believe they can grok the gist of a compressed output and don’t even bother with the source. They don’t understand that reading is also a living, participatory act. Summarizing any book worth reading is just as useless as summarizing a symphony.

Understandable: Pure information overload has made finding a true phenomenological frontier backed by research the work of multiple lifetimes. Popular modern writing is mostly phony Disney frontiers, playing at the boundaries of wisdom without the social risk of actually going there.

The only way I see for human writers to continue to meaningfully exist as a category is to say “screw it” and risk being wrong. Start writing more like a rockstar than a professor cloying for tenure. Start a feud with someone. Make up a word (I made up one somewhere in here). Do phenomenological leaps like athletic flourishes that couldn’t be reproduced with ten lifetimes of perfect reproductions of writing like Hemingway.

Good writing, like a sport, requires hours of immersion into the context of the greats and then hours more to practice. None of this is done to pitch faster than a pitching machine or write correcter than a writing machine. Rather, it’s that short, shining moment or two, here and there, where the whole arena of the writing world plays through you, you forget yourself, and you do something amazing. For a brief moment, you are not representing life, you are life.

That’s writing that lasts. It doesn’t happen if you’re prompting or compressing or researching because a writer is above all someone who writes things down.

When people see it done masterfully and yet effortlessly, they clock it as great in their monkey brains before they even know what they’re looking at. Here, authenticity is not the highest value and neither is technical mastery. It is a dance between them, both being required at their absolute limits, each forgiving the deficits of the other by the pureness of an all-out attempt and years of cumulative effort, neither of which can be faked.

Writing is the practice of finding the rhythm of that swing. At first, reckless jerks between the poles of structure and authenticity. With a lot of time and intentional practice, more like a gentle sway.

We lull ourselves into a courtship, and the gentle waltz imitates the dance between heaven and earth.

I admit that I, a grown man, sometimes fear that a ghost is in the next room when the apparent sound of a limping gait wakes me up in the dead of night in my 200-year-old funeral-home of a house.

Ghosts, insofar as they do exist, are apparitions - meaning, they can only exist on the perimeters of awareness: in the vague terror of a half-sleeping mind or in the unmapped swaths of reality in childhood. They vanish, as it were, under the cold gaze of our analytical mind - that hunter’s gaze turned language-user.

If I had simply gotten out of bed and walked into the other room, I would find the mechanical cause of the sound, and my terror would vanish along with the spirit. I could even comfort myself with the notion that spirits don’t exist but are, in this case, squirrels scampering in the attic. I won’t notice that the very same spirit will appear again on the horizon of some other unknown, ad nauseam, until I believe enough to exorcise him. This would, however, require me to accept reality on his terms.

Share

Years ago, I had the worst existential dread of my life. Only now do I notice that it functioned under the same rules as ghosts: life’s meaninglessness seemed always to lurk in the next room. In my weaker moments, I was paralyzed by the fear of it and unable to illuminate the proverbial bump in the night. I remember one particularly bad episode my roommates literally dragging my limp body into the sunlight. In my stronger moments, I would simply apply my analytic mind to the issue: depression is just a chemical; life is meaningless anyway, so I might as well be happy. And the dread would vanish. For a time.

We all have this habit of soothing ourselves with a quick and cynical deconstruction to make sure everyone knows that ghosts are not real. This habit of self-soothing, in aggregate, has made it impossible for us to believe in anything beyond ourselves. We inoculate ourselves and each other against the resulting nihilistic horror with a blasé attitude that says, “Don’t worry. I’m not foolish enough to believe anything. Are you?” and an involuntary Californian vocal fry which suggests “Who cares, anyway?”

Everything emergent is henpecked to death. We are never able to sit quiet, but are always listening to some podcast that “explains” or “debunks” some shadowy corner after another. We scroll and scroll, always flitting our attention from one clear and legible explanation to the next, tirelessly and vigilantly searching all the cracks with LED light. Despite the nocturnal glow, there are still infinite places for the ghosts to hide - infinitely many things we don’t know, and so our terrible search never ends. We started out thinking we could bust the ghosts by bringing them all to light, but we have instead become monsters of searching, never able to rest in the murk or play in the mist.

There was a time in my life where this all got so bad that I even considered myself a utilitarian, believe it or not. I thought something as human as morality could be reduced to calculation. I believed that if I made these calculations correctly (by reading Peter Singer and then donating to Effective Altruism) I would become, mathematically, a “good person.” No one in the cosmos, not even God Himself, (though I didn’t believe He existed) could accuse me of any wrong. All that existential dread, the ghosts, would finally fade away forever.

In hindsight, utilitarianism was a sort of death rattle of my nihilism. It always collapsed into an even more mundane sort of “nothing matters.” One that, at least in the relatively-insulated-from-consequences-of-lived-beliefs West, quickly becomes that more run-of-the-mill nihilism of “my phone was made by slave labor but I don’t care enough to do anything about it, but neither do you so it’s OK, I guess” sort.

This, though much more common, was way worse. With utilitarianism, at least I believed that the battle for good could be fought, although my battlefront had been badly misdrawn. But at least I had some fight left in me.

The real fight for meaning was in the last place I wanted to look. If the sprawl of shopping centers, for example, were indeed “meaningless,” why then do they take on such a negative meaning? Why the dread? If they were truly meaningless, you might predict a neutral valence. Cosmic horror would be replaced with cosmic adequacy; Cthulhu with a friendly fellow named Steve. But, you suffer there, and that very suffering betrays itself by revealing the possibility for positive meaning.

Nietzsche said that all philosophy was a humiliating and accidental personal revelation. In other words, no matter how far away from your personal ghosts you try to place the moral center of your world, your ghosts ooze through the gaps in your language and the cracks in your work. Utilitarians, for example, accidentally reveal perhaps an un-repaired relationship with the father, specifically by their very hiding behind emotionally distant yet entirely reasonable calculations. What I don’t trust about utilitarians is never their rigor - I believe wholeheartedly in their rigor - it is that what fuels their rigor is hidden from me, and the fuel is the medium and the medium is the message.

We oscillate between these two seemingly opposite delusions: the existential doomer who is powerless to the ghosts that haunt him, and the optimistic ghostbuster who believes that all can be brought under his control and apprehension with enough data and perhaps some private gnosticism. I do have a preference for the doomer, though, if I had to pick. One, because studies do suggest that clinically depressed people are better attuned to the facts of reality, being more statistically accurate in their predictions. And two, because they’re funnier.

Sorry, you can’t bust a whole cosmos of ghosts. You have to allow yourself to notice that not only are ghosts real, but everything is positively infested by them. You may only delude yourself of their absence by brushing them away to isolate, for a moment, a small portion of seemingly sterile cosmos. Inevitably, though, their noise pushes in where you aren’t looking. And a good many of them want to consume you. They will even abide your belief in their unreality in order to steal your life’s attention. These tricks are manifold. Above all, they would love you to think that what you believe “out there” has nothing to do with what moves you “in here.”

Next time you dip into despair, don’t rush to explain it away. Ask yourself this instead: What would it take to not be afraid, if it was all real? You will get an answer. It will point to the great and terrible adventure of your life.

Don’t be afraid.

Arcade Fire in a rental car and a sunrise somewhere over Peoria - unnatural American flatness but still glorious.

I parked at a rural hospital, which reacts to my presence as if it only even expected to be visited by the local elderly. How strange, I also feel, that it would know the likes of me.

I’m wearing a polyester polo shirt with my company’s logo stitched to the breast, and a pair of wing tips originally bought for my brother’s funeral. They have salt water stains from walking in briny snow on a different business trip to Kentucky. A messenger bag hanging across my chest has a small computer and some dongles to hook up to conference room projectors, if the need should arise. I am nervous, but well rehearsed. Tired, but extremely caffeinated.

I walk down some God-forsaken linoleum hallway that looks like every other God-forsaken linoleum hallway in every half-forgotten hospital from Springfield to Miami. The lady behind the front desk has already pointed me toward the administrator’s office, perhaps not getting enough salespeople coming this way to have defenses, and maybe assuming I’m his nephew or something because I do look about fifteen.

Really, I’m twenty-two. This is my first job out of college. I need to find the office while not letting the existential void swallow me up. It is almost all I can manage, by the way, to not always be overwhelmed by what always seems to be shrieking bloody murder from these ordinary places.

The office door is already open, dimly lit inside. Behind a desk is one of those massive middle-aged corn-fed midwesterners: loud and big teeth. He asks who I am. I tell him I’m a salesman. He asks what for. I tell him about the software. He’s happy with what they’ve got.

Now is the moment that human social rules demand that you drop the issue and move on. However, the job of a salesman - the real labor that he performs when you get down to it - is to break these rules. Not carelessly - any street huckster can do that. Rather, with artful bullying. A playful attack with just enough plausible deniability to maintain goodwill.

Share

My CEO, himself not a natural at sales, believes in me and so has paid for my executive sales training. I know what to do next, in theory. But the giant already has the upper hand. I try the ol’ one-two: Of course you’re happy, sir. I’ll be leaving now. But… hang on, I have just one question, you know, out of curiosity… I ask about his day-to-day life with his current software. I’m hoping he will reveal what we in sales call a “pain point.” See, you want to find their pain, like a playground bully, and then twist the tender arm with a jocular spirit that somehow feels like a win-win-win.

Horrifically, he answers with practiced avoidance. I’m very nervous now, visibly running through contingency plans in my head, standing there awkwardly, saying nothing in his doorway. “Kid,” he says, “I used to do sales. Come sit down and show me what you got.” By the time we finished talking, we shook hands.

Once I got back to the office and emailed him for the first payment, he dropped off the face of the earth. I never did land that sale, despite months of following up. Nobody, I now soberly realize, spends money (much less a hospital’s budget) for some kid with a touch of chutzpah, especially once I leave and his own stresses foreground again. How would he explain having to pay for and then train his entire staff on a new software? a kid in which he saw a little of himself walked in? I don’t think so. So he ghosts me. I can see now that it was the right move.

Real sales requires you to do no less than to put the fear of God in strangers. Any pity evoked is total failure. When you leave, they must continue to believe that the absence your product will result in something bad happening to them. In order to create what we call “urgency,” this belief must be total and trusting, as if it was incepted into their dreams and they just woke up and there you are, wise sage, to guide them through their stupor.

All this, keep in mind, despite a world increasingly wise to the tricks of salespeople and therefore extremely unlikely to allow them to manhandle their frames of mind. With that growing hostility, traveling salesmen have become a shrinking elite, if not a dying breed, with more and more money going toward the more subliminal warfare of the marketing and advertising departments.

As if that isn’t enough, sales training is useless - probably worse than - because what makes a salesman effective is total ontological violence, and they can’t seem to bring themselves to put that in the sales workshop powerpoints. Without being an etiquette berserker - either by natural temperament, mentorship by an actual master of sales, or being a blind zealot for your product - you are doomed to fail. The lexicon gestures at this implied warfare: “pain points,” “pressure,” “urgency,” “crush it,” and so on. Explicit sales training, though, won’t outright say by what forces it actually succeeds, and therefore fails to do anything but occupy the time of weak salespeople who don’t have the killer instinct. Worse, if you are silly enough to outright ask, you will get the opposite of good advice: “be kind,” “emotional intelligence is key,” “people buy from people they have a real relationship with,” etc.

This accounts for the fact that good sales teams are the last to be fired and great salesmen often rise to the dictatorial seat of CEO. The implicit rules here are the same as war: If you can prove your courage down in the trenches, you gain honor and valor and even earn the right to give orders.

The entire ecosystem of commerce depends on its violence being unspoken, and so is very difficult to understand as a naive inquirer. Fundamentally, everything that you now pay for has been somewhere along the way “sold” to you by a salesman who has simultaneously made you believe, to this day, that it was your idea. This false sense of agency mixed with the semi-conscious fear of what happens if you can’t afford it gives you a strange double-sense of “I need this thing that used to not know about,” which resists questioning with incredible calcicity. Nobody really “needs” their stuff in a strict sense, but because we fear what losing it would mean for our “identity,” we all work together to uphold the network of lies crafted by a culture of ad men.

This is why we think we hate salesmen. Really, we just hate bad salesmen who make us feel pain and we too easily identify them as the source. Perhaps they also subconsciously remind us that more successful salesmen have sold us.

There are, of course, people of genuine goodwill in the mix. Some of them even make a good living. This line is blurred further, too, because the more sophisticated sales becomes, the more closely it imitates genuine goodwill. As if along a logarithmic curve, it never fully contacts goodwill because someone’s gotta cash out eventually. In fact, the first of the 48 Laws of Power is to (pretend) to be humble and never make anyone feel stupid, and the rest of the laws are similar injunctions to imitate trust for as long as humanly possible until it is time to strike. This does not erase the fact of spiritual warfare, but just makes it more sophisticated. I’m also not saying, to be very clear, that winning battles is bad, except perhaps insofar as it the rules are non-explicit and therefore confusing to people like me.

The understandable reason it is all verboten, though, is because the atomic bomb forced a sublimation of violence just last century. If you want to know where the soldier phenotype went once the bomb made overt warfare a mutual death sentence, they have been consumed and channeled into sales and advertising departments. This is what the entire show “Mad Men” is about, specifically the early days of this transition, and why Don Draper was a soldier in the war who changed his name (to hide his true nature as a failed killer). Their inherent and inexorable double nature, built on the foundation of a necessary lie, is what makes them “Mad Men.”

My dread of the linoleum hallways was really the sublimated dread of this warzone, made even more terrifying by the fact its invisible violence kills millions by bleeding out their meaning. We don’t even know we are in a warzone, and it’s not just because there are no bullet holes in the cinderblock and sheetrock. It’s because pointing out the emperor has no clothes may destroy your only chances of paying the bills.

What actually bothers us about the frantic cordiality is that we all sense in our reptile brains that there is some deeply vicious pagan underbelly. We easily roll our eyes at the doublethink of a vague concern for our “mental health,” but don’t dare to fully dismantle the facade. If we stopped satisfying it with abstract violence, it would come out demanding physical violence again.

I sensed this back then, but that very sensitivity made me not a killer. It also now seems germane that all the salesguys on my team who were successful were literally gigantic - three-hundred-pound ex-football players with a voice like a hammer. This was the ancient morphology of a soldier in a polyester polo. I was a David to these corn-fed midwestern Goliaths. My intuition was that sometimes David wins. What David had that I didn’t have was clear vision and the will to kill. I was just outmatched in a strange land. I grew resentful as this continued not working.

The one nice thing about not winning is that it gives you time and distance to step out of the fray and see just what forces are at play. This presents another danger, though, and probably one worse than the first.

Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, represents this very common re-frame. His character Dilbert is a self-insert: an engineer and highly logical and perceptive in a sort of non-intuitive way. Although my personal source of abstraction is writing, the effect is basically the same: Dilbert, like me, is constantly rebuffed for his rational and earnest straightforwardness. His much “stupider” bosses and colleagues (in the unflattering way Adams characterizes them) get raises and promotions while Dilbert is left in the low-middle.

Adams, like me, was sensitive to doublethink of the corporate world, mostly because he, like me, had no talent for it. Instead of realizing he was bad at the game, he made an entire comic strip about why the game itself is stupid for not recognizing or rewarding his sort of cleverness. In a marvelous act of resentment jiu-jitsu, he finally became successful in business by selling this worldview to other resentful noncombatants. It was a smash-hit.

Unsatisfied with this legacy, though, Adams continued trying to become a genuine success in business by writing self-help and learning all sorts of occult manipulations like hypnotism. Check out ’s excellent retrospective on Scott Adams for more detail on these corporate seances and such. Adams and guys like him are standing in the middle of a football game, sneering at the sweating players for their irrationality, and also moaning about how they don’t get cheerleaders.

For this same reason, self-help books generally don’t work and are also embarrassing. By merely picking up the book you reveal that you envy the “fools” who just seem to win. Those people would never need a book to explain it, and so by the very act of reading it you prove you aren’t like them. Worse, to sell you the book, the writer (like Adams), on some level, knows how to exploit this discontinuity by assuring you of catchy untruths that make you feel clever or spiritually advanced. By this manipulation, you have been “sold” to make the writer wealthy in the way you secretly hope to do to others.

This Russian nesting doll of spiritual violence and dishonesty is why you tend to hide these sorts of books from the gaze of strangers at the airport. Or, you become brazen and write your own self-help (tried it), but this also still just covers the shame of a split identity that projects harmlessness but desires dominance.

Meanwhile, the corn-fed giants chip away for thirty years, go to clients’ weddings, have a family, and quietly become multimillionaires, with no infamy or serious spiritual disorders to speak of. They are like Odysseus, forgiven for their extreme violence by the mere fact of their berserk courage. We do not read their self-help books because they don’t care to write them. They have all the regular human problems, I’m sure, but none so mimetically viral as someone like Scott Adams.

Mastering abstractions like writing is, in general, very likely to corrupt your soul and those of your readers. Bukowski’s warning to potential writers: “If you can do anything else, don’t write.” Writers tend to forget themselves as subjects in the world and instead think they have successfully floated off into objective space. We never ask ourselves, “Why would someone like me want to spend a bunch of time alone in a room away from other people?” The answer is mostly unflattering - closer to “Because I’m a little awkward and a late bloomer,” than to “Because I’m so brilliant.” And so our writing is infected with covert resentment, either in the guise of the more hip literary deconstructions of everything people enjoy, or hyper-optimistic salesmanship that covertly hopes to convince you to buy their widget or worldview and therefore save themselves from the yawning abyss and leave you holding the bag.

It was maybe an accident of fate that these big salesguys were so nice to me or that normal people showed me so much kindness that I never fully allowed myself to believe that my reading and writing gave me some secret gnostic power over “normies.” I just can’t bring myself to do those things proven to get more paid subscribers: clickbait titles and those one-sentence paragraphs. I don’t want to position myself as a pretend expert of some made-up ailment, itself a symptom of modern malaise made worse by the sort of behavior that would make someone legible enough to attain someone’s money on the promise to heal just a symptom of the larger problem they’re actually contributing to. If I succeeded, it would have made you a sucker, and that might make me feel strong for a moment but it would cost me more than it did you, in the end. Live by the sword, etc.

The problem with this approach, as clean as it keeps my conscience, is that the mechanisms that allowed for a new voice to overcome their market illegibility and rise to the mainstream have mostly disappeared. Gatekeepers, as much as we may not like the word, were that odd breed of Mad Men who would take a chance on a noncombatant like Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace. They bore the risk of putting dangerous thoughts (dangerous if your goal is to sell people stuff, that is) in prominent places. Because of that risk, once or twice in a generation, they change the way ordinary people think (and sold a whole hell of a lot, justifying the risk).

For the part of the writers, despite being lonely abstractors, they found a way to bring their abstraction back down to earth, providing something beautiful to the very people who once rejected them. They transcend both the raging bull natural warrior and the resentful covert noncombatant to become David-esque warrior poets. Through an act of forgiveness they spark a transmutation of their resentment into wisdom and violence into temporary peace.

Without gatekeepers or patrons, though, the necessary periodic transmutation of our covertly violent sensibilities are left in the inhuman hands of the algorithms, which are themselves tuned to the lowest common denominator for the greatest overlap of the most amount of sales prospects for the meanest warlords.

Even if there were some perfect symphony of thought for you somewhere out there, it wouldn’t generalize well to others and so you won’t see it. After a decade or two of that, nobody would even bother to make good stuff anymore. That is enshittification, technically. It also explains why new cultural artifacts have nearly stopped emerging and why everything we make now seems like it’s either a sequel or a remake or a Pokemon.

Still, human beings need for transcendence and so will always invent new ways to find it. I have personally seen billionaires and millionaires patronize interesting new artists, thinkers, and writers. The reason this modern patronage system has broadly failed so far, I think, is because all their money still can’t sway the algorithms directly and therefore have limited ability to set new taste.

This is why you sometimes see a name blow up online, then they start posting all the time (they got funded), then the posts become more repetitive and higher signal legibility and finally, more and more rabid, self-referential, and insane. The investor wants a return at some point because they are still Mad Men, in the end. Since they can’t directly gatekeep the outlets to push for depth and taste, their protégés eventually fall to audience capture and themselves become the worst sort of Mad Men.

I wouldn’t pretend like I know how to solve this. Thousands of rich and brilliant people are working on it as we speak, and none have managed it yet.

Read more

Old school Martial Artists were not into bro-science or TRT, but subtler things like Chi.

“Chi” and things like it don’t cut muster to be “real” by our reckoning, and so they are, at best, interesting artifacts of early pattern recognition that could potentially be imagined into a more “real” force like in a Marvel movie or something. Beyond that, they are only of mild anthropological interest, if not just laughable ignorance.

The all-seeing eye of the iphone camera has proven this again and again. The results go viral: Some Kung-Fu master from some small village is shown to be able to defeat enemies with only the wave of his hand or his students go flying backward with an effortless push. He is invited to “prove” his powers by some Western fighter, who turns out to be quite immune to his Chi. The poor village master is beaten and humiliated, and we laugh at justice against silly superstition.

What we actually have here is a monstrous mismatch of Chi, just not in the obvious way: The Western fighter is the unwitting beneficiary of unprecedented levels of hyper-Chi.

Share

For one, the global village that backs him is so powerful that he would never have to fear the retribution of the village master’s local government or students. Further, the Westerner, thanks to 500 years of specialization, is allowed to focus on which chemicals will increase the pounds-per-square-inch-per-second-per-second of his right hook by half-degrees. All of these advantages (and many more too subtle to be listed) mean that he senses total epistemic dominance in his balls. The villager might as well be trying to kickbox a medieval knight.

However, in order for the Western fighter’s power to manifest in any meaningful way in his own society, it can only be expressed in an enclosed octagon at highly standardized times and places, artificially (read: fake) frantically semi-sealed off from the social and charismatic forces that still play into the outcome of the fight nonetheless - fighters with a powerful “x-factor” (read: Chi) are still at an advantage. Conner McGregor made an entire career out of winning fights with swagger. Of course, in a place like this, you still need plenty of pure materialist pounds-per-square-inch on your side, but Chi still, uh, finds a way.

In the village, by contrast, the boundary between physics and psychology is much blurrier. If a try-hard does some jiu jitsu he saw online, he will be shunned by his classmates for being, among other things, inelegant. In this way - and in many subtle others including poise, gravitas, wisdom, popularity, age, and attractiveness - he does not have enough Chi to even come close to winning.

In the West, we still implicitly know that it is necessary to keep the fight beautiful. Poking someone in the eye, even in the octagon, is against the rules on account of a lack of gracefulness. You won’t be able to practice much if you’re no fun to play with, either. Chi, as a concept, better takes into account the fact that in order to be someone who is good enough to win many games in the long run, you have to be fun to play with in the short term, therefore it is actually irrational to win one particular game at any cost. This also explains the public’s visceral disgust to the brutality of the UFC when it first emerged in the late 90’s. They didn’t necessarily have the words for it, but they just knew something was off about guys knocking each other bloody.

By contrast, Bruce Lee mesmerized as an archetype of the old village martial artist; He would not have done well in the UFC. Our unconscious collective judgment of his Chi - and we are extremely well-attuned to do this - is more a reason for his dominance than his mass or musculature.

If you think I’m putting a lot of words to make something esoteric sound practical, I would ask you to imagine who would win in a fight, you or Hillary Clinton. Not in the artificial situation of an octagon, but on the streets, as they say. How many people would attack and restrain you if she jumped you unprovoked on a park bench? Dozens of extremely well-trained people would assume you had done something wrong and incapacitate you before you even understood what was happening. Even if for some reason you could get a punch in, would you have the nerve? Paraphrasing Mike Tyson, “Everybody’s got a plan until they gotta punch an old lady in the face.”

As I find myself doing grotesque comedy to try to make a point, I’ve stumbled on a perfect segue into professional wrestling, which is your one-stop-shop for grotesque comedy and all sorts of similarly bizarre antics.

My feeling about it, maybe predictably, is sort of hipster-ish. I admire it second hand, for seeming blue-collar authentic, but I’m not going to actually watch it because, for one, there is too much lore to learn, and two I don’t like commercials. In my experience the sort of person who watches professional wrestling looks a lot like that midwit bellcurve meme: both rubes and sensitive geniuses love it, midwits like me are in the middle, crying, “you know it’s actually fake!”

My working class uncle and his son loved it, I remember, and my more middle-class father told me that they just didn’t realize it was fake. My cousin cried when I told him it was all a lie one Christmas at Grandma’s when I was seven. On the drive home, I was chided for breaking the comforting illusions of rubes.

Later, my midwit superiority was challenged when I met Tom Kenny, voice of SpongeBob Squarepants. He told me that he was about to make a trip down to Mexico to see some live pro wrestling. Not for the first time, someone who felt superior to me in pattern recognition and artistic sensitivity expressed liking something I felt was beneath me.

What dawned on me then is that my cousin, even with his tears, was right. The dramas expressed in the wrestling ring, although ballooned into cartoon-like legibility, are more real than if they were sterilized.

Actually, what the octagon tries to achieve is itself an illusion. It is the “what if” of a nerd’s imagination: what if you removed all the social and spiritual factors (which, incidentally, he has difficulty accounting for) and isolated what was “real.” Who would really win in a fight?

But of course, there is no escaping the context of the crowd, the pressure of the bets, the eye of the world on the other side of that unblinking camera lens. It all factors in, and we know it, but we pretend we don’t.

Pro wrestling, on the other hand, makes no attempt around this illusion of objectivity. It allows all of it, so even celebrities can step into the violent dramas to test their Chi against the great big wrestlers. Here, you may hit Donald Trump with a folding chair, but only if you have greater charisma, if only on your home turf with your own roaring fans. Trump, in his turn, is allowed to show he is a good sport and maybe even get a whack in. This, my friends, is the real fight, if you know what you’re looking for.

Trump’s video of him professional wrestling is supposed to be humiliating. But of course, to the great consternation of midwits everywhere, it isn’t. Like it or not, Trump knows how to harness vast amounts of Chi, which is far stronger than your muscle’s ATP. Trump is like the professional wrestler of politics (yes, someone wrote that essay).

This is, of course, less than ideal in some ways. But what us midwits tend to miss is that pro wrestling is larger-than-life as a compensation for the loss of life, caused by our strange love of sterilized abstraction. We’ve over-indexed on “real” in the sense of a police forensic report or a security camera, and so we’re yearning for “real” in the sense of the highly subjective - i.e. “You had to be there,” “He is the real deal,” or “You can’t say you understand until you’ve experienced it.”

For the villagers getting knocked around by their master’s Chi, really, dude… you just had to be there. You can still mock, if you like, but you might be unable to explain how you act if you ever ran into someone with hyper-Chi from your own culture - for example, a celebrity. Strange forces make you unable to talk normally, and you might even involuntarily duck to a wave of their hand. If caught on video, you would look funny. “You just had to be there!”

Our discomfort with the fact of celebrity (and our celebrity president) explains our unwillingness to accept what is obvious. We live in a global village, where geography has been flattened and absorbed into a hyper-region. Our hyper-village masters of Chi, then, are granted incredible and unprecedented powers, unmatched by even Caesar or Alexander. To ease our mostly unconscious envy and fear, we resort to all sorts of ways of “explaining away” their incredible influence over us, one of them being that Joe Rogan-esque musing: “Yeah, but who would really win in a fight?”

This also helps explain the fascination with which martial art is most useful in the “real world,” which gave rise to the UFC. By “real world” we actually mean “The most artificial circumstances you could possibly imagine.”

When in your life, have you ever heard of or could even imagine a fight breaking out (it’s always a bar in the fantasy) that had nothing to do at all with status, charisma, psychology, circumstances? and only came down to which rock-’em-sock-’em robot had the most XP? Yes, in these imaginary worlds of all things being equal, BJJ is the most “useful” martial art. In real life, it’s actually probably something more like not accosting drunk strangers in bars, which is a subtle martial art indeed.

“You know a chimp could fuck you up, though!” they say. Yeah, well, if the realist deal is physical force, after all, why not just let the animals fight? Put a gorilla and a great white in the ring and we can really sell some pay-per-view, boy.

But, unfortunately, MMA is too brutish and dumb for an animal, even. Wolves don’t just outright attack each other, they circle each other in a subtle status dance, growling and raising hackles, judging the reactions of the pack, until it is clear who the alpha is, not a drop of blood spilled. The beta drops to his back to show his belly in a ritual display, and in a similarly ritual way, the alpha chooses to not kill the beta. This way, pecking orders are established and costly fights are avoided. This is primitive martial arts. MMA cutting out the ritual of it all does not make it “more pure,” but actually undoes its most fundamental reason for having developed.

To be fair, MMA does what all games do: it constrains real life variables in order to produce predictable play. But MMA’s problem is that it doesn’t recognize itself as a ritual and therefore can’t correct well for its excessive brutality. Thus, it tends toward revolting. I would guess this is also the “taboo” that makes it very exciting to some.

Pro wrestling is also ugly, but in the exact opposite direction: a gaudy overcorrection. However, it is, in the final analysis, more in the natural lineage of ancient dances, which organically evolved into complex dramas. Fighting should be visually striking and entertaining, hence martial “art.” Nobody here is allowed to overly brutalize each other, because, under the very “realest” of circumstances, the tribe wouldn’t allow that. In this way, also, pro wrestling is genuinely participatory with its fans.

Pro-wrestling is much more effective at producing high-charisma Chi masters of the global village like The Rock, too. The UFC also occasionally produces celebrities, despite trying to isolate itself from ritual, because you can’t escape ritual.

We’re going to produce hyper-Chi masters, so we might as well hope are wise and cool. So give up on the fantasy of measuring reality without context and go get drunk at a pro wrestling match in Mexico.

Besides the extraordinary technical mastery and sportsmanship required, I don’t love the MMA. It feels “fake” because, in real life, nobody would allow two healthy young males to brutalize each other like that. It activates some ancient part of my brain that makes me want to pull them apart and fight with some dignity and grace.

But I can’t, so I just look away.

Unlike Paul Kingsnorth, I don’t hate “the Machine,” although in many ways my life has been defined by what it destroys.

My little home town, like many others across the middle, had its spirit partly consumed by titans of the Machine working under backlit plastic banners in the night: Wal-Mart and Dollar General.

Worse, maybe in my case, was the backlit glass in our living room, pumping the Machine’s dreams into my head. All corners of local embodied living, down to the dialect, were made irrelevant in the world’s most effective propaganda campaign. Young people left the farm and the community to go off to college and the city for a “better” life. The result was mutual destruction, with only old people left in towns like mine, and young people suffering mostly alone in sterile studio apartments, with only a phone screen and porn to keep them company.

You’d think, then, that Paul Kingsnorth’s new book “Against the Machine,” which articulates the devil inside the Machine with great clarity, would be right up my alley. I actually first discovered Paul because something like 25% of my readers also read his Substack, my biggest overlap. Why, then, is this not resonating?

Most of the criticisms that I’ve read of his book amount to, “We can’t abandon these large swathes of mainstream culture, as corrupt as they may be. We have to improve them from within.” Which, if you go by Kingsnorth’s own frame, makes them “cooked barbarians.” They are living right outside of the city of the Machine - Mammon - but maintain a certain freedom through resistance and wilderness. In Paul’s frame, this is a compromise to the freedom of the more ideal “raw barbarians,” who are truly wild and in no way shaped by the Machine. His detractors, I suppose, make the argument that being a cooked barbarian is not just a one-way relationship - they make the city more sane, and therefore more ideal than total purity, which is not possible, anyway.

This is not exactly my criticism. First of all, I reject the barbarian frame. Second, this is boring, and that’s not just to be glib (although it also is) but to give my gut reaction, which I think I can also put more words to.

It’s the undefeatable enemy of it all that I just don’t buy. It would be like claiming you could fly if it weren’t for gravity, writing a book called “Against the Gravity” and then spending all of your time clenching your butt-cheeks to fly like Superman and convincing others to do the same to fight the good fight. And then other people write a bunch of articles about how we should keep a little bit of gravity, so we can still drink from a cup without a straw.

This is, of course, an exaggeration: not to mock, but to magnify the issue so we can more easily see it.

“The Machine” is, fundamentally, a mode of apprehending the world. True, a bad master but, very importantly, an excellent servant. Since I know that Paul and I have both read “The Matter with Things” and I think both agree with the conclusions, we know that the left brain is responsible for the world-view that gives rise to his Machine. The left hemisphere’s take on reality may not be as fundamental as gravity (although, maybe it is), but an entire half of the nervous system is pretty dang fundamental, and declaring war on it (or, at least, to idealize totally withdrawing from it) feels almost exactly as futile.

And that’s also the thing: I agree with Paul’s excellent poetry about the faults of the Machine. It abstracts and therefore destroys Edenic flow. It tends us toward soulless automatons. AI will exaggerate these fundamental mistakes to the extreme, which may very well indeed turn out to be fatal. These observations, while true, are also easy to get applause for being a Doomer about.

What is less popular to notice, but is also true, is the unbelievable good the Machine affords us. I’m thinking sewage pipes and dollar bills, for one. I could go on. These very words, for another. These things, at their best, free us from machine-like labor so we can get busy being human. The failure to do so seems to me personal and moral, not an inherent fault with technology.

What Paul is raging against, more specifically, is our culture’s growing left-brain-as-master outlook of the last couple of hundred years which says, “It would be best if everything was treated like a machine.” That’s what both he and I hate because we’ve both watched it eat what we love.

But to say that the exact opposite is true is to make the same mistake in reverse. You can’t declare war on or abandon the Machine as a category. You’re using the Machine at this very moment: symbolic language. If you think that’s too broad a category for “the Machine,” you’re probably reading this on a screen, anyway. If you think that’s a nitpick or a very recent necessary evil, remember that Socrates disliked the advent of the written word because “nobody would be able to remember anything anymore,” which is exactly the complaint made about the phone, now. Fundamentally, technology always has a price and philosophers have always complained that the price is too high.

What is maybe a more accurate position to take in relation to the Machine (and, understandably, probably won’t sell many books) is a slightly different connotation of the word “against.” Instead of meaning the devil who should be destroyed, but is unstoppable, it should mean “against” in the sense of opponent processing. Meaning, they are indeed mutually incompatible worldviews - Aliveness and the Machine - but still must both be held at the same moment. By their mutual exclusivity being held against each other, we create the tension that fires the arrow.

I don’t want to sound naive. When I look out at my world and see the heart-shattering ugliness of ruthless and inhuman abstraction, I understand anew, over and over, Paul’s rage against the Machine. But the solution isn’t in total war with the Machine, which is impossible anyway, but in finding small ways to make the Machine principle the slave of the Aliveness principle once again. These are necessarily deeply unique to each person and not manifested as machine-like ideologies (as Paul likes to say, “I don’t know what you should do because I don’t know you”). Going a level deeper, declaring unwinnable wars against half our half our phenomenology would be, if I was feeling conspiratorial, a great way for the “Machine” to further distract and divide us. It would also be a great way to sell books, too. The more “human” approach is therefore full of balance and paradox.

Instead of not having a smartphone, for example, setting reasonable limits on their use. I have one and I use it less than an hour a day, mostly for texting and reading in the grocery store check-out. Instead of living in the woods, obsessively off the “grid,” maybe just move out of centralized urban hell to a slightly smaller town where people generally know each other and there’s a town hall.

“The West has fallen” is boring theatrical fussiness. At worst, it is unhelpful Doomerism that encourages impossible fantasies of living ten miles away from the nearest microchip instead of the more reasonable aim of getting off Instagram and calling your mom.

As an Orthodox Christian, I would think Paul would believe that being a saint in the City of Mammon (aka Nineveh) is far more valuable than being a “free” barbarian of any sort, merely for the perceived purity of your and your family’s spiritual life. In fact, that seems somewhat like a selfish ambition, in Christian terms. One that Paul isn’t actually pursuing, I think, given that I read his book on my iPhone, which struck me as funny more than a few times.

His cut-and-dry category of “the Machine” hits me, ironically, as pretty machine-like in its simple binary and certainty. The enemy is never so easy to categorize in my experience, and when he seems very clear, it’s probably something wrong in me rather than a dramatically external demon.

For Paul, this great external demon is tightly aligned with the concept of capitalism, which he argues is something recent, machine-like, and categorically new in human nature - something that did not organically develop from human tendencies. This strikes me as both implausible and convenient if you need to create a wholly distinct enemy you can be morally justified in devoting your life to its destruction.

Implausible because, from a purely logical standpoint, you’d have a hard time explaining how something emergent like capitalism arrived ex-nihilo. Nevermind that historically you’re also going to have a hard time explaining merchants, currency, and the fact that ancient chiefs were buried with all the tribe’s gold. As a Christian, Paul would also need to account for the “Matthew Principle,” which is an observation made in the Gospel of Matthew that seems to communicate the fundamental reality of wealth inequality caused by something like capitalism.

That’s all to say, there is no historical justification that capitalism arrived out of nowhere in the last few hundred years. You would only hope that was the case if you were trying to prove that your enemy is recent and extraneous, not deep and fundamental. One requires an all-out spiritual war, the other requires a site-blocker and some self-control.

What personally strikes me as the strangest is the implication that we are inevitably victimized by our technology - if you touch your phone, it will ruin you. It reminds me of documentaries like “The Social Dilemma” which take on this apocalyptic tone as they tell me about all the billions that urgently go into keeping me addicted. As someone who has an iPhone and is mostly not addicted to it, the fatalism strikes me as a little funny. I know the buttons are colorful like a ripe strawberry - you can still just put it down.

Sure, I’ve blocked and deleted pretty much everything my phone could do to suck me in. I know it’s incredibly powerful and so I am careful with it. I don’t have social media and I only check email on my computer once a day, etc. It has taken work, yes. But it’s far from impossible, and the implication that it can’t be done seems to me like convenient moralizing from people who actually don’t want to stop scrolling Instagram and would rather live in a fantasy world that suggests the only way for them to personally stop doomscrolling is to burn down the West.

Which, I think, may be at the heart of the popularity of this book. It is also why I tend to distrust these black and white apocalyptic narratives. They are a great way to hide from the fact that building a good, normal life in an evil, fallen world is tedious and difficult. It’s easier to pretend you have an unbeatable enemy and live in some off-the-grid fantasy than it is to have a balanced relationship with your iPhone and nature and your kid’s friends.

So, yes, I am against “Against” the “Machine” - in the sense that I hold the Machine and its demands for quantification and measurement against the paradoxical demands for love, God, and humanity and often also deeply fail at that. While not being radical in its outlook, it is allowed me to be normal, which is radical in its own way.

The Machine’s ugly utility longs for our creative attention to reimagine it, little by little, into something as paradoxically beautiful as the screech of a Theremin.

Share

The most interesting part of the myth of Narcissus is usually left out in its retelling: The beautiful boy doesn’t think he’s fallen in love with his reflection - he thinks it is someone else in the water.

The illusion of Other is what keeps the reflection so spell-binding. If he had known it were “just him,” staring back, the allure would presumably fade. This is not straightforwardly a story about taking too much pride in the status gained from appearance. Those elements apply, but not as something primary but rather a tell-tale side-effect of something much deeper.

Greatness, as opposed to something like excellence, requires depth. That means most people will spend their whole lives avoiding greatness for fear of becoming what also lurks in the depths: madness.

Put roughly, if all preceding types of animal awareness are a bullhorn, then human consciousness is a mic and sound system. Louder, but also categorically different at least in one particular way: if you stick the microphone near the speaker, a feedback loop causes a mind-bending shriek.

This sort of self-referential madness is everywhere. It is the reason people don’t “listen” but instead glassy-eyed wait for you to stop talking. They can’t see you, but only their own reflection.

I once gave a ride to a homeless guy in LA to help him figure out some government assistance requirements. In the backseat, he was babbling about how gnomes had taken the “electronics” in his brain and plugged them into themselves. It struck me that his insanity was just an extreme version of the feedback loops that make me a bad listener.

This is also the reason writing platforms like Substack are always threatening to become writers’ platforms for writers to teach other writers about writing. This is an example of corporate insanity because no one wants to stay on a platform where everything it produces and promotes is about how to succeed on itself. No one, that is, except the writer writers writing about writing writing.

I grew up across the street from what we used to call an “insane asylum.” We don’t call it that anymore, not because insanity is no longer a thing, but because the insane are actually overly well-adapted to society’s basic assumptions, and we simply can’t acknowledge that. The first principles of any society are in essence, insane, precisely because they are self-referential.

We became terrified of asylums because they represented the horror of our own collective madness. Then, we blamed the institutions themselves for the fear they represented. Then, we defunded or renamed them something softer like “mental health centers” and thereby neutered or eliminated their actual purpose. Then, we gave the now-free insane life-long meds (which do often work quite well at making those outliers closer to the norm and therefore better able to tolerate society’s implicit insanity), and then release them into that society. Many of them stopped taking their meds, reporting that the voices in their head told them to. Those ended up becoming the sort of people who talk to themselves on street-corners, which we all still ignore and fear, just like we did with the asylums.

A man like that named PigBooty sometimes rants in the church parking lot across the street from my house. He’s there today. It is the sort of town where everyone knows PigBooty, but there is no longer a place for him to go. Even my dad, a very small-government type guy, thinks it was wrong to defund the asylums back in the 80s. We know what most people won’t allow themselves to know because all the insane people in Louisiana were bused to our little town.

Here’s what you’d actually notice about insane people if you could allow yourself: they are insufferable. They are your thoughtless aunt times a thousand. They are the final boss of soulless bureaucrats. Generally, they are not spooky, mystical, or insightful. They are paranoid and selfish to the extreme. They never see you, but only themselves in you, and they both hate and love themselves. If you let them, they will take everything from you and make you hate and love yourself, too.

What makes insanity so disturbing is not its alienness, but its familiarity. Go to an asylum fifty years ago and you would have seen people struggling with mundane pride, never humiliated. To be humiliated, actually, would be a good first step. One woman was cleaning her entire home with a toothbrush. She also made her kids sleep on the floor so they wouldn’t mess up her beds. To protect this delusion, she was convinced that everyone who tried to help her was secretly in love with her. When asked, “Do you know cleaning your house with a toothbrush is not normal?” she replied, “Who wants to be normal?”

Insanity is not when you won’t play by the rules of society; it’s when you play by the rules too closely. Insane people prove that “first principles” always eventually destroy themselves through a foundational paradox. Insane people just collapse before their civilization does. To even make a safe place for them to go would be to dangerously acknowledge that unspeakable truth.

G.K. Chesterton said that modern people deny the reality of sin, even though it is as obviously real as dirt. However, he thought that we would never deny the reality of insane asylums as proof we still knew that mental collapse is possible, if not moral collapse. I’m sure he would be surprised that, a hundred years later, we’re denying even the existence of lunatics.

When I see homeless people dragging around plastic mountains of trash in their shopping carts, the reason irritation arises in me, if I allow myself to notice, is because I see myself in them. I can see it most clearly in photographs of myself - slightly sullen and heavy. Why am I hauling all that trash around?

Really, what is it about humans that we can so uniquely “fall” into ourselves?

Douglas Hofstadter said human consciousness is a “Strange Loop.” He uses the image of a camera pointed back at the screen its output is displayed on. If you’ve ever done that, you know the effect it produces: an infinite regress of hallways of cameras on screens that worms to the left and right edges when you tilt the finder.

He then points out how the things we think of as most real and reliable are also, in fact, Strange Loops. Mathematics, for example, cannot prove the validity of itself without invoking assumptions from within its own system. Euclid’s first formulae - the foundations of all of mathematics - is full of self-referential and unfalsifiable assumptions like infinitely thin lines and imaginary points in infinite space. Mathematics was never meant to be a universal ontology, as some take it to be today, but only a tool to achieve pragmatic ends, built on the foundation of “just pretend with me for a sec.”

Hofstadter wants you to see that these Strange Loops are what make humanity unique and beautiful. He uses Bach as an example, whose music creates a motif out of nothing, and then a counter-motif, nested, and then spiraling upward, like Jacob’s Ladder.

I, of course, didn’t know Hofstadter and it’s been a while since I’ve read his work. But this all strikes me as a flavor of 20th century Romantic nihilism; “Do not go gentle into that goodnight,” Imagine Sisyphus Smiling sort-of-thought. To them, all truth claims are, in the end, spurious, but we should go on fighting, anyway, like a good Brit during the blitz. This quickly falls apart into 21st century un-romantic nihilism when we realize that the “romantic” part is also based on nothing in particular.

I don’t think Strange Loops are most fundamental to our consciousness. They uniquely appear in human consciousness, yes, but not because they are so wonderful. You could say, in fact, they are our very capacity for mediocrity and madness.

Kierkegaard thought that his own work, poetry and philosophy, was essentially evil. He sensed that the Strange Loop created by language was, at best, only gestured toward escaping its own hall of mirrors and at worst, hell.

Here, now, we have to try to remember that we are currently using that very hall of mirrors - this Strange Loop of English - and are crafting for ourselves an ever-more-convincing prison of potential madness. If you look here hard enough for long enough, you will fall. You are only seeing yourself in these words.

Language can lead us to ever higher levels of understanding, oscillating between what we theorize and what is experienced, but all too often, we insist that what language has convinced us is all there is to know.

Most of the time, most of us manage to avoid the worst of this madness by what amounts to a thoughtless nonchalance. Basically, we never examine anything hard enough to realize everything falls apart into self-referential contradictions. We skim the tops and therefore stir up no depths.

The problem with this approach is that greatness, you may have gathered, requires depth. That is why the two, greatness and madness, are often found playing together. They are, nonetheless, not at all the same.

Madness peers into strange loops - anything: language or a sport or a vocation - and finds there the birthing contradiction, and allows that realization to break everything above it. It is existential, it is self-aggrandizing, and it is boring.

Greatness, on the other hand, picks a vocation (any vocation) and both falls in love with its rules and also learns to take its contradictions lightly. The water that drowns the insane is where the great gently float on their backs.

This is much more difficult than it sounds because it is not possible to lie to yourself in the depths. All Strange Loops break down there, even language. If I managed to, for example, write the most encouraging sentence ever, it would lose all meaning to you as you realized the inherent absurdity of language, down in the depths - the only realm where greatness can possibly emerge. The only thing you can do down there, then, is something like literally getting on your physical knees.

Nothing but what is Singular survives down there: not society, not personality, not your income - nothing. And so most of us stay on the surface, only lightly insane and therefore mostly mediocre. We settle for the hall of mirrors near the entrance - seeing endless reflections of ourselves, convinced vaguely that they are that fascinating Other.

There is a way out of this madhouse, but all the words in the world can only point you to the door. You alone can open it.

Share

Out of the fog appeared an Australian Shepherd.

“No, that’s a Border Collie,” said my wife. The black-and-white stood out against grass on the side of the road, then seemed to evaporate into the mist in my rear-view. “It is a beautiful dog,” she added. “Because he has a job… Well, actually, now he’s probably unemployed.”

I knew what she meant: the dog’s beauty was made - cultivated? evolved? It’s an odd case for dogs - designed? - in relationship with an embodied need in the world. In this dog’s case, shepherding livestock - you can almost sense some rolling shire and the pure love of an English schoolboy in the dog’s DNA.

I also knew what she was contrasting him with: lap dogs, or the perennially unemployed breeds. The dogs in bags at the airport and the vibrating companions of shut-ins who yip pointlessly at all moving objects.

Of course, those dogs do have a job. We just don’t respect their work, which may speak to our character more than anything. Really, those dogs are in the business of cuteness, which is to say, technically, they imitate human babies. Besides your rare drug sniffer or hunting retriever, cuteness is practically the only profitable line of work that’s left for the dog these days. How did we arrive here?

Subscribe now

You could imagine the primordial woods: Howling, you sense, is the wolves’ way of triangulating and communicating your location and of your tender children to every hungry wolf in a five-mile radius. If they happen to wander into the moonlight, they are loudly devoured.

You could imagine a precautious boy who stumbled across an abandoned pup, out exploring when he wasn’t supposed to. Maybe, fearing his father’s retribution, he kept the pup a secret and fed it table scraps. Maybe his mother found out, but out of her compassion for her child overlapping with the furry mammal’s human-baby-like eyes, she helps keep his secret.

Then, when the wolf is no longer a puppy, an accident happens - someone gets bit. Maybe they were asking for it, but the reason doesn’t matter. The father banishes the wolf. The loyal boy goes with him.

That is, until someone vulnerable is attacked by wild wolves and the cries for help are answered only by the boy and his wolf. Now, the tribe accepts the power of the dog, and even his reluctant father makes amends.

A key bit is that the original wolf has to be a baby when the boy adopts it. Its “cuteness,” that is, its likeness to human babies, helps override our predator-detection system enough to kickstart an evolutionary relationship.

Just as importantly, though, in order for the father and the rest of the tribe to accept the full-grown wolf, he has to be more than just cute - he must also have a job. His most primitive job title is alert system for other wolves. That’s why all dogs bark. They can sense and alert us to wolves better than any human could, obviously, because they were the enemy. Thus, they are ever-eager to prove their worth to the “father” with their most fundamental display of good-faith: barking all the damn time.

The third key element: the boy, symbolically, has integrated the shadow of the wolf. He is able to comprehend and therefore thwart it, saving his tribe from the ancient terror. He is the proverbial border-walker and that’s the basic pattern of the hero, millions of iterations of which formed the DNA of modern dogs, and is still woven into the mutual genetics of our relationship. Sometimes, the wolf is a dragon (How to Train your Dragon) and sometimes the boy is a man living with apes (Tarzan), but the essence of the story is always the same. It’s why “dog” is one of the first words children learn and poking at a bored husky is one of their favorite activities. It’s also remarkable to watch how dogs “know” to play gently with human children.

Our stories go way back, indeed.

It strikes me that the people who have lost the most faith in other transcendent structures like God, country, and family - presumably even more profoundly interwoven into our being - are the people most likely to most strongly “believe in” the love of dogs. The sort of person to have a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” bumper sticker is more likely to also have one that says, “Say hello to your dog for me,” if you know what I mean. Rational materialism has a limit, it seems, and it stops firmly at their “pupper.”

Of course, if I wanted to make a reductionist argument for the “love” of dogs, it would be easy: it has been demonstrated that domestic dogs’ genes have literally made them perpetual puppies by blocking adult growth hormones. So, you could say, dogs evolved to be a harmless parasite, using our deeply ingrained infant-protection-systems to make us swoon at their baby-mammal-like faces. In exchange, we feed them scraps and keep them warm.

In a study, some Russian scientists bred foxes. Actually, what they did was go up to wild foxes and shoot the mean ones with a revolver. They kept the most social ones and bred them with each other until, after only a few generations, the now-domestic foxes would pee on themselves because they were so excited to see the humans. Interestingly, the foxes also developed other qualities of domestic dogs: floppy ears and “socks” in the fur of their feet. They even developed bigger eyes, making them “cuter.”

There you go: the love of dogs re-created with nothing but wild foxes, a revolver, and classic Russian non-sentimentality.

But of course, I don’t “believe” that story. I believe the first story - the “myth.” I don’t think you can sum up something as powerful as “A boy and his dog” with one artificial metric and claim that you understand it. Everything is contextual and interrelated and it’s brutal and inappropriate to collapse meaningful relationships down to one perspective. It would be like saying best friends only cost a handful of Cheeze-Its. Maybe it did that once, but that’s not really what friendship amounts to, is it? I believe in myth because, among other reasons, it’s more accurate (although sometimes less precise). Reductionism, because of its obsession with precision, leads to far worse accuracy.

That is all to say, I agree with the dog lovers, in so far as they sense that our relationship with dogs is a sort of mythical-genetic-cosmic partnership and therefore beyond some cheap cynicism. But I disagree, of course, that a dog’s love is the most important thing for a meaningful life.

In fact, ever since the love of dogs has become a high good-in-itself, we have dropped any presumptions of usefulness, and our relationship has gone a bit weird. We’ve become like their Oedipal mothers, consuming and retarding them to make them ever-more helpless and puppy-like until they can barely move or breathe. In exchange, they are never able to leave our “loving embrace.” Some of them have become like a grotesque mockery of the precious infant.

We’ve fully embraced the first part of the story: where mother and son conspire to hide the puppy from dad, but we’ve rejected the second part. Dad is supposed to rightly banish the outsider until it can prove itself by doing a job for the tribe that feeds it. We’ve decided that that is oppressive and wrong in all cases. We want to believe that the third person of the story, the hero (us), would bloom in the absence of the oppressive father; but, no. The absence of the archetypal Father makes jobless pugs of us all.

To be a beautiful dog, like my wife said about the Border Collie, is to be built for a job. To be a beautiful person, for that matter, is to have sort of a job - a purpose, a telos. The same goes for everything from a serving spoon to a graveyard. Telos glimmers through form in the guise of beauty, which can be clocked by your intuition in less than a second - even on the side of a foggy road.

Richard Dawkins wrote a paper about how if you gave a bird to an alien, the alien would be able to deduce almost everything about the bird’s environment: the size of the planet and its gravity, the atmospheric composition, and the climate, and so on. The bird, in some sense, is like an inside-out mirror of the environment.

Dawkins is right, but he doesn’t go far enough. It’s not only physical qualities that create the representation of its inhabitants, but psychic, moral, and archetypal as well. This is especially true for dogs, whose “environments” are more the mental landscapes of their masters than the incidental physical surround. Ideas floating in the heads of human beings have shaped the DNA of dogs more than hills or ducks. When we look at them, we are really looking into our own souls. It is not coincidental, then, that when our motivations for owning dogs turn ugly, our dogs get ugly, too.

Jobless dogs allow us now to “have” a child without the responsibility of children. Collectively, we are sublimating our innate desire to reproduce onto our dogs, who are purposed as permanent puppies. We know it’s wrong because when we see a dog in a stroller, we are revolted. That is a far better indicator for what is true than whatever we explicitly claim we think.

The nihilist’s nihilism tends to stop suddenly at their love for dogs, not because that’s rational, but because it allows them a harmless source of higher meaning but demands no responsibility and therefore no sacrifice, unlike real people.

How often do you hear someone brag that they “like dogs more than people?” Sure, your dog might pee on themselves because they’re so happy to see you, and that’s nice and all, but the Russian foxes loved their owners, too.

Deep in our being, we desire real moral growth toward a higher purpose - to prove ourselves useful and good to a judgmental Father. Dogs just don’t provide that, and so, with them, we devolve into an excess of mercy and therefore mutual ugliness.

Our animals can outwardly manifest our own moral cowardice. But they also can become as beautiful as a Border Collie, but only if we busy ourselves doing beautiful and useful things.

Share

I had a dream that I was in Jordan Peterson’s attic.

He and his family were down below. I had to find a way to carefully cross over a large gap in the ceiling to “get to the other side.” To fall down into his household, I knew on account of dream logic, would mean to be fully associated with him, which I intuited was bad. I needed to find my way toward my own house, which was somewhere across the gap, into the darkness - what I assume was something like Jung’s collective attic space (ha).

I’m tempted, right here, to tell you exactly what I think is wrong with Peterson’s outlook and therefore his “household.” I could do so in a lot of detail, not because he’s so obviously wrong, but because I know more about what he thinks than anyone but my wife knows about me. I won’t. There are many, many people more than willing to play that game.

Share

That fact is explained by Peterson’s fame reaching critical mass; a tipping point where there is no more status to be gained by being associated with his ideas. This phenomenon also explains the hipster urge to “like things before they were cool.” If you say anything positive about Peterson, you mostly stand to lose. If you manage to humiliate him publicly, you mostly stand to gain. Even for the people whose lives have been positively transformed, I notice an interesting dynamic: we tend to dogwhistle Peterson to one another. “Carl Jung” is the most common stand-in.

I get the sense that an entire genre of Substacks and Twitters exist because of this dogwhistle - posting Dostoyevsky and Jung quotations with what would otherwise be run-of-the-mill wisdom, except for the unspoken implication of being associated with the worldview Peterson made popular. They also tend to downplay it with Millennial-style humor, something like, “Jung was COOKING when he said this.”

To people unaware or less influenced by Peterson, this whole ecosystem and its origins all seem pretty strange and improbable, I’m sure. Nevertheless, he started a massive cultural shift back around 2016, which was the catalyzing point for all current interest you’ll probably have noticed by now around “re-enchantment,” myth, family, virtue, classic literature, relevance realization (via his friend, John Vervaeke), Christianity, the West, and so on.

It’s not like no one was writing about these: David Bentley Hart, Charles Taylor, Iain McGilChrist, Robert Pirsig, and many more. Eliade was blowing the lid off this stuff last century. But Peterson was maybe the first to connect how the fundamentally incorrect modes of apprehension pushed by the modern scientific “consensus” directly caused suffering in young people, particularly men. He spoke directly to the hearts of those young men in his classrooms, in their own language, and then, probably most importantly, was one of the first famous intellectuals to publish his lectures on YouTube, which are now arguably the most viewed lecture series in human history.

Those who he has influenced (if you look at the numbers, there must be millions and millions), if they are socially sophisticated, keep the source of their conversion secret. “Peterson” became a name you only bring up in a private conversation if someone says “archetype” or “clean your room” a few too many times.

In this way, Peterson has become the ritual scapegoat for the cultural demons he helped reveal to our consciousness. The demon(s) are a fuzzy cluster of scientific materialism and post modern identity politics spawned from cultural Marxism. Despite (because of?) giving us a way to exorcise ourselves of them, we are obliged to humiliate and destroy Peterson. This is a metaphor, and it also seems to be happening.

In the old days, a man like him would be forced to drink hemlock for “corrupting the youth.” All the better for Socrates, probably, because at least he got to die with some dignity and finality. Here, through my words and millions of others, he lives on, still corrupting the youth with impunity.

Our dramas have become more psycho-spiritual, so we ritually murder each other’s reputations instead of the fleshly bits. It turns out this is more effective, anyway. By keeping Peterson alive and therefore mundane enough to do something like a podcast, anything resembling idolizing him is mocked. Comparing Peterson to, for example, Socrates is lame, which I have just done. Oops.

Through Socrates’ death, his reputation becomes incomputable. Through Peterson’s continued life, one spiritual destruction (and resurrection) after the other, his reputation takes on superhuman size. His ability to live up to that reputation, though, would be much easier if he were dead. His every choice and movement is scrutinized to death by mad mobs. I wouldn’t be so bold to claim that this explains his health troubles, but I would also be surprised if they were totally unrelated.

I remember the first time I encountered Peterson’s face. It was that infamous GQ interview. I watched the entire thing, then I immediately watched it again. I hated him with unreasonable passion. But I could not stop bothering with it, like poking my tongue where a tooth used to be.

Predictably, my head at the time was filled with po-mo ideas about Marxism, Will to Power, moral relativism, systemic oppression, and what have you. My eyes are nearly rolling out of my head as I even write these words, but not because those ideas are boring and wrong. They are, in fact, so boring that people who spend their time griping about them are themselves almost exactly as boring. However, both of them, I have to admit, are sometimes not technically wrong. It’s all a bit beside the point.

Or maybe this is just dirty work I don’t wanna do anymore. Peterson was the first time anyone educated dared to tell me something outside of the great hegemony of the universities. A hegemony, by the way, whose manifestation in my life was a total disaster. Peterson pulling me out, despite it being low-status to admit, probably saved my life.

My reaction to him at first, though, was anger and hatred.

Which, I suppose, is how I imagine a college-educated liberal would feel about me if I told them what I really think: I no longer believe in progress as a universal good, I no longer think everyone in the past is evil, and I don’t think science provides a working ontology. That doesn’t mean that I suddenly feel myself to be a “conservative,” which seems more like the sort of temperament that dislikes ideas that don’t connect directly with personal experience, rather than an ideology. Without that sort of person, by the way, you don’t get consistent electricity or plumbing. I am however, for better or worse, pretty much defined by not being like that. I write essays, for God’s sake.

There is a third cultural category that has quietly congealed around the time of Peterson’s rise to fame. By one simple definition, it is a cohort of traditionalists who also happen to be high in the typically “liberal” trait of openness. From within this new cohort (and its auxiliaries), the Boomer binary of crew-cuts and hippie hair is breaking down. Most people have no idea about this Great Psychic Rezoning. For suburban moms with mildly conservative husbands, for example, being liberal in the sense of “I don’t judge anyone’s lifestyle choices!” is still a mark of status. For them, social conservatism is akin to their husband’s involuntary disgust response against foreign concepts, which would be properly mitigated with “education” and “tolerance.” Conservatism, in this view, is like a child who doesn’t like cheese because he won’t try it.

That’s not to say that small-minded hicks no longer exist, and that occasionally conservatism is nothing but the expression of a cultural comfort zone. But this binary no longer captures the reality of the current culture war, so to hear people communicating this way increasingly feels embarrassingly out-of-the-loop. And yet, it is a difficult topic to broach with them. They literally cannot see outside of their binary frame.

The forcing function for this persistent cognitive blindness is easy enough to locate: when all else fails, out come the Nazi comparisons. Old-guard comedians like Marc Maron, for example, can’t understand what’s going on with the new mega-fame of comedians like Theo Von, who are, at least in part, riding Peterson’s unspoken cultural wave. The bizarre enlightened hick sort of character is endlessly confusing to very “tolerant” and “informed” cable news-watchers. Theo is willing to do things they categorically can’t, like interviewing both Trump and Bernie Sanders, to great success with his own audience. Maron makes fun of Theo for this by saying, get this, “He would interview a NAZI and still be nice!” Wow. That’s fresh stuff, Marc.

He lacks a certain in-the-know, which is particularly humiliating for liberals, who have traditionally been the hip ones. However, to those fully committed to the status they accrued by conforming to a pre-Peterson worldview, understanding here would mean self-destruction. So, they go out of their way to not understand. This helps explain their compulsive comparisons to Hitler long after its peak effectiveness. For them, Hitler is their devil. If his name loses power by endless repetition, the wheels start to come off the wagon.

I see this everywhere: A writer on Substack (who I really like) posted a Note about how the big anti-reductionism thinkers like Eliade, Jung, and Neumann (he’s implying but can’t state it outright: all major influences on the Petersonian worldview): “all flirted with fascism.” Which, to me, is just a more sophisticated way of expressing, “bad bc Hitler.” What does he even mean by fascism? If we only mean that they were interested in unity as mythological concepts, a Nazi that does not make them.

But, by noticing how this invisible gravity pushes all objects toward this same orbit, we can infer that modernity’s center of gravity is the story of World War II. It is, without a doubt, Modernity’s Creation Myth, in which a plurality of rag-tag Allies beat the homogenous and tyrannical Axis powers. It created the cultural consensus we all still operate within - it is the image of faceless Hugo Boss uniforms vs. a corn-fed Iowa boy sharing cigarettes with a New York Jew.

Unification, tradition, and order can obviously go wrong at the extremes, because… well, Nazis. We are very aware of that danger. But so can diversity, individuality, and fragmentation - at the extremes. History is full of tyrants, both left and right (in fact, the left probably has a larger body count). Hitler just happens to be one example of a tyrant gone wrong toward an excess of order. The polar opposite of Hitler is not Jesus, though - it’s Stalin.

Being aware of that danger, according to the very tolerant, is the same as being a Nazi. That line is no longer convincing to this growing third cohort, which, again, just so happened to have culturally catalyzed around Peterson, and which, again, you are not allowed to notice.

Because of modernity’s unquestioning worship of Progress as always being positive steps away from Nazis, an iron curtain fell between me and the “unenlightened” past. I could see the literature and the art, sure, I could see it with my eyes, but it could not penetrate me. Its only interest, if any at all, was how it gave rise to the present moment and therefore to the hopes of a more tolerant future.

There was a feigned interest, occasionally, if some thinker was “ahead of his time” (and how annoying about the past that it’s usually a “him,”) but there was the deeper sense that some more modern thinker was probably better - they had more up-to-date data from which to draw. The interest in the historical thinker, if I could have been honest with myself (I couldn’t), was really just to give myself a sense of superiority and maybe to be prepared to throw the name out in an argument with someone less “educated.”

My unconscious religion was something like scientism, which parks its implicit “Eden,” not in some ideal past, but in the future’s utopia. All must be sacrificed to bring about this utopia; and so knowledge about the past was only useful for finding tools toward this sacred destination. The more recent and anti-tradition the thought, the more “good” it was, therefore, implicit in this set-up, too, was the necessity of rebellion.

Since the future here is pure potentiality which makes us free from the past - collective and personal - all structures built in the past are therefore obsolete and probably also tyrannical. They are best rebelled against, constantly. The smartest people, then, are the dysfunctional and probably alcoholic “geniuses” of rebellion. Sometimes they are autistic detectives or hyper-logical scientists. Hence, the left’s cultural fantasy of George Carlin, Rick from Rick and Morty, or Sherlock Holmes and his many network-TV incarnations.

That is also to say, this is not some exotic quasi-religion I’m talking about. This is what I picked up from NPR, popular non-fiction (Danny Kahneman, Yuval Noah Harari), post-modern literature, and some from my college professors. It was the water I was swimming in, and so I did not see it as a very particular way of seeing the world. To me, it was the world. In that sense, it was a “religion” to me, therefore anyone who questioned it would be felt to me as a heretic and blasphemer. What is stranger than that, maybe, is that I never heard anyone convincingly question it! I seemed to only come across those who were clearly just not “smart” or “open-minded” enough to accept The Science. I genuinely thought that the only opposition to my views were conservatives in the “comfort zone” sense.

But then, along came this man - the Canadian who sounds like Kermit - who was making a big fuss about my invisible assumptions. He must be, I thought at the time, a comfort-zone conservative disguising himself in cherry-picked scientific data and some big word salad. Although I hated him, something about him caught my attention. I could not stop, after that interview, hate-watching, and then hate-reading his stuff. Hate slowly turned to disagreement, disagreement to confusion, confusion to questioning. Finally, in a more earnest way, I went looking for reasons why he might be wrong.

What I found, despite my hope, was that his detractors - at least the ones I could find from a good-faith search - didn’t understand him. This is partly because Peterson speaks the language of Jung - that is to say, a right-brain and metaphorical way of speaking. They tend to do things like pull Peterson’s quotes out of his context and slap them in their reductionist one (arrogantly and boringly to boot, I find), which, from their perspective, makes him seem absurd, and then assure you that you can safely ignore the man.

It was too late, I already had not ignored him. This tact only works if you don’t already understand Peterson. People like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who I thought the most qualified sort of people to help me understand why Peterson was wrong, were also frustratingly dismissive. What was especially annoying was how embarrassingly little they know about Peterson’s forbearers like Jung, Eliade, and Neumann.

All claims that he speaks in meaningless word salad or is “drunk on symbols,” I knew from personal reading and revelation, were at best dismissive misunderstandings, and probably just lies. It would be like claiming jazz was just a bunch of noise to a person who enjoys jazz. Clearly, they are able to find coherence in the cacophony, even if you can’t.

On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, detractors also said that Peterson’s claims are obvious and therefore banal. This is actually true, in a sense - especially if you are a temperamentally conservative person, which I am not. Part of what he’s doing, basically, is showing the complex origins and deep meanings of normal behaviors, and therefore why they should be preserved. It’s like writing a book to explain why and how to dance at a wedding. If you already like doing that, it’s going to seem, as my dad says about Peterson, “wordy.” But if normal behaviors have been attacked very thoroughly by your culture, and you’re the sort of person who takes thinking seriously (high in openness), then you may actually need to read a book explaining the cosmic significance of cutting up a rug. I did.

To people outside of this whole Peterson thing, again, this all probably seems a bit strange. But for men of a certain age and disposition, we were abandoned by the world and given no way of accessing wisdom from the past. Peterson came along and, like Thor himself, held the iron curtain open and let the light of the sun shine through. It was the first time we had seen it, so we squinted at and cursed the light. But he held it open anyway, and he burned up in the heat.

To a certain group of lost millennial men, it was like the archetypal dad finally coming home. Those men, now coming of age as leaders, fathers, and artists, are currently shifting the way we all think, as this next great cultural shift is underway. What’s interesting to me about all of this is how so very little Peterson’s name is directly mentioned. I suspect a good portion of these people, like me, feel a pressure to downplay the effect he had on their lives.

We can get by without mentioning him - we can just read Dostoyevsky and Homer and the Bible and claim that we knew all along how much wisdom was there. And why not? This scapegoating seems a little inevitable. There will probably be some in the comments below. The first person to say the ship is sinking is usually thrown overboard for mutiny.

It is still a little cowardly, though.

My wife was the first person to point out to me that I get embarrassed when Peterson comes up with strangers. I have a tendency to linger on his faults in a way I don’t when she and I are in private. If I am afraid of sharing a tiny fraction of the mob’s ire with Peterson, I can’t imagine how he feels. Again, I’m not saying that his bouts of illness are a result of spiritual warfare - but I’m also not saying the opposite. It all feels too neat to be a total coincidence. And I do hope he recovers soon.

These days, I avoid Peterson’s work. The door has been opened to me and original sources are now my main interest. Peterson’s great sacrifice was devoting his entire life to a system of thought that destroys life to try to defeat it from within, for the sake of those it hurts the most. He helped me see, by a materialistic framework, why the materialists are wrong.

Thanks to that sacrifice, I can sidestep his battle altogether and just fight my own. Should I have already known that though reading great literature? You could say so. It does seem somewhat obvious to me now. But I was drawn in by materialism’s promise to gain power over reality. I had to know for myself: Will this save me? It didn’t. The next thing I needed to learn: neither will Peterson. That’s why I can criticize Peterson in great detail if I wanted to - I’ve worked hard to differentiate myself from him. Through that, I have avoided falling into his house. But I won’t use it to humiliate him here, even if I could.

I am grateful, Jordan Peterson. I think it’s right to risk saying as much.

If a child were to point at an analogue clock and ask why the hands move around it all day, and you answered “electrons in the battery turn a little motor inside,” it would be fair to say that you’ve missed the point of the question.

Given that, it’s weird to me that when we pose questions to ourselves, like, “Why am I so addicted to my phone?” or “Why can’t I stick to my New Year’s resolutions?” we tend to give ourselves an answer that clearly misses the point: “Dopamine in my brain.”

To get to the actual point of the question, the batteries or the plastic gears would be pretty low on the list of things to explain. In fact, you’d probably need to start with a highly contextual and cultural explanation of what “time” is. Maybe you would then explain how to read the clock and how that number relates to the position of the sun outside. You could even explain how time is one of the four dimensions according to relativity. Never would you think to say that the electrons in the wires “create” time. They are very incidental within the grand network of interrelated phenomena that is time.

And yet… dopamine.

Subscribe now

Dopamine has an official-sounding Latinate name, not a guttural Germanic work-a-day sound like “meaning.” It describes a measurable chemical, not a vague metaphysical concept like “joy.” It invokes the very calm and reasonable curiosity of a Huberman podcast, not the rambunctiousness of wonder or wisdom.

Most importantly, dopamine can be categorized, optimized, and controlled. It is like Thor in the catalogue of latinate chemicals of life - their king and leader. Others in the pantheon include Testosterone, Serotonin, and Oxytocin. Dopamine is their king because it most directly signals motivation, which is the ultimate state of being in the self-help pantheon. His is the state of control and certainty. His eternal enemy is Cortisol, the king of early-aging and burnout.

What’s lost in this chemical cosmology, as we will see is probably intentional, is the vertical dimension. Its absence only becomes obvious once we realize how easily we access the vertical dimension when doing other stuff. Trying to optimize well-being by worrying about dopamine levels, for example, is like trying to express yourself better by using more vowels because, studies show, that language with more vowels, on average, contain more meaning than language with comparatively more consonants. While that may be true (I just made it up), and you may be able to find comparable correlations with a chemical like dopamine, the information still only stands to do nothing but confuse you.

I can’t increase the transfer of meaning from me to you by worrying about vowels, in the same way that you can’t improve meaning and therefore motivation by worrying about dopamine. It’s not that the chemical’s role as reported is factually incorrect; it’s just Not True in a “higher” sense (up the vertical dimension). It does not get you “where you want to go,” and I have proof because the more YouTube videos you watch about optimizing dopamine, the worse you feel.

And, after all, if dopamine was really a meaningful lever to improve meaning, putting it directly into your body ought to do the trick much more efficiently than protocols. People have been doing it for ages, with great success, actually. And they love it, actually, sometimes more than life itself. It’s called cocaine, and it’s cheaper than a dopamine detox retreat, and a hell of a lot more fun, too.

The reason we (mostly?) don’t just do that is because we actually do understand, when push comes to shove, that meaning doesn’t live in the fancy latinate names of brain chemicals any more than Mozart’s Lacrimosa is found in one E-minor note. Meaning, like time (and music), is contextual, cultural, and historical.

We hide this realization from ourselves. Tellingly, not all the time, but only when it comes to finding purpose. We know how to answer the child’s question about the clock, but suddenly forget how to climb the vertical dimension when asked about our doom scrolling problem. Hm.

“Dopamine,” in this way, is an ontological dumping ground, where difficult questions about our choices and resulting virtue go to hide in highly-convenient spot-nihilism. Huberman is good-looking enough and the chemical names officially-scientific-sounding enough to produce a low-level anti-religion to keep the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future from haunting us year-round.

The trouble is, we all believe in the vertical dimension, anyway. We all know how to dance without thinking about our toes and we all know how to write without thinking about vowels; it’s called fluency. This disconnect, as it becomes more and more starkly obvious, creates some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. People, you may notice, have a tendency to lose fluency in other areas as they become more committed to their horizontal dimension in regards to meaning. They become too proud to dance, too busy to go for a walk, too serious to laugh.

And here we land on the motivation behind making dopamine a dumping ground for uncomfortable questions. We don’t actually want an answer to the question, “If meaning is a ladder, then what’s at the top and what does it think of me?”

Saying “God” or “judgment” here would, in my opinion, be about as effective as “yes-huh times infinity!” - only to the already-convinced or extremely credulous, and off-putting to anyone else. I haven’t earned the invocation and I don’t know what I’m talking about, anyway. As an aside, most of the time people bring up God in an argument, they are making this mistake. And I have a feeling that it’s a serious error that fits in the category of “Taking the Lord’s name in vain.” That could just be my bias against certain evangelical types, though.

What this intuition of a vertical dimension does confirm for us, at the least, is that we all sense: there is something higher than us, even if it is just a “higher self.” From that naturally higher perspective, it would inevitably have notes about our life and choices. Judgment, it turns out, is a natural consequence of moving up the vertical dimension, which we call gaining wisdom. It’s not a coincidence that we don’t like those words anymore (judgment or wisdom).

Instead, we prefer “smart,” which is the ability to move objects around efficiently in the horizontal dimension. That is very useful, unless you’ve got the wrong framework, and then you’re just busy moving deckchairs around the proverbial Titanic.

When pressed about this, people tend to respond by moving deckchairs faster. By that I mean they spend more time and money and frenetic energy trying to get their brain chemicals right, which would all be better spent looking for wisdom. They don’t do that, not because it’s so impossible, but people just don’t like to discover that the ship is sinking and radical transformation is required.

The most terrifying thing about being human, I think, is our ability to lie to ourselves. What starts out as an innocent fudge for reasonable comfort, quickly turns into an invisible and habituated lie that is nearly impossible to see outside of.

This fact is something you know very well about other people, if you’ve spent any time with them. You learn to dance around the lies people tell themselves, or even, if you’re a certain type, to reinforce them to create false intimacy. A real friend, by the way, is someone who is willing to point out delusions (in wise times and with kindness) and then help you suffer their absence. By this metric, most people have never had a single true friend in their life.

Sad, but true. Anyone with a little wisdom knows you generally can’t help people escape their lack of wisdom. Even when you think you can, you usually can’t. This helps me understand why wise people tend to speak less. A word to the wise: never try to wake a sleepwalker. What you may begin to notice is that it is very easy to see the problems of those with less wisdom than you, but those people, in turn, could not know the difference between your wisdom and a car salesman’s.

Yet more wisdom, though, would suggest to, “not look for the speck in your brother’s eye, but take the plank out of your own eye first,” which is the realization that there are people out there, right now, who can see, clear as day, your lack of wisdom and know exactly how to help you, but you don’t know their advice from a hole in the ground. This is a humbling realization, but an exciting one.

What wise people do has nothing to do with facts or evidence. Give a researcher enough budget, he will find all the data in the universe to justify his lack of wisdom. No, what wise people do is shine. Meaning, they evoke admiration and wonder. These states can’t be replicated with data and they can’t be reliably invoked with any protocol. Wisdom does not come in pieces to be assembled, it comes as a rapturous transformation of the whole - sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but never one piece at a time.

So, it’s not the blue light on the phone or the fluoride. Anyone who has ever done anything interesting would have done it anyway, even if they suffered a little leaded gasoline in the air or micro plastic in the balls. They didn’t need pink salt or morning protocols or saunas, either. Anyone who is trying to sell you those things, while probably presenting their “vital” life online, we have to assume is only gaining their vitality from your money and attention. The only chance you have, then, of attaining the same life is to suck in even more suckers like yourself, and you’re already pretty low on that pyramid scheme and the bottom grows exponentially.

That’s why people feel stressed and “burnt out.” Because the entire ecosystem around “dopamine” is a parasitic feeding frenzy. They sense perfectly well everything else described above, and yet they tell themselves the lie “Maybe I’ll be the exception.” Yeah, and maybe the Titanic will sink, but you won’t.

No information I could produce here could possibly save me or you from our own stupidity. Even if I knew the absolute truth, and I don’t, if I said it here, you would think it was arbitrary and improbable, and maybe the dumbest thing you ever heard. All we can afford each other is a disposition that may, if we’re lucky, induce an episode of wisdom. That disposition is extreme humility and an openness to wonder. Not curiosity - screw curiosity. Have you ever had someone ask you something “out of curiosity?” It’s never a real question, but just an opportunity for the asker to tell you what they already thought once you stop talking.

Wonder and rapture are key because they transform. And that’s what we all actually need - transformation.

Share

A friend asked my wife and I, “Are you going to let your kids believe in Santa Claus?” To which I said, “Well, I currently believe in Santa Claus, so, yes.”

He looked at me like I was trying to be cute and said I was talking about that Joseph Campbell stuff. He actually wanted to know if I was going to lie about a man literally living in the North Pole with elves.

If you know me, you know this sort of discussion gets me fired up. I had the idea for this essay about a month ago, but decided not to write it for fear of becoming a parody of myself. I changed my mind after this conversation with my friend, who is generally aligned with how I see things, but apparently not on the Santa Claus question.

His concern with the whole Santa thing is more the child-only elements: a fat guy doesn’t actually come into your house at night. When the kids find out, what else will they think is a lie? He’s personally heard things like, “I found out Santa wasn’t real, so I figured neither was God or the Easter Bunny.” A fair concern.

Subscribe now

First of all, and I’m not being cute, of course Santa is real. He is a spirit that we all know how to embody and participate in. If I put a Santa suit on you and put you in front of kids, you would know exactly what you could and could not do. Not like a script or a machine, either. You would be able to play and therefore truly inhabit the spirit, proving that you both know and believe in Santa. You wouldn’t pull out a bottle of Jack or light up a cig, because you know that’s not Santa and it’s also wrong for kids to see Santa acting “wrong.” Further, we all fully participate in Santa’s yearly flight, buying toys and setting up the tree and stockings, and everything else I don’t need to list. In this, we embody the spirit of his elves, sometimes even against our will or own best interest. Collectively, we’re all totally possessed by his animating spirit, and we couldn’t stop it if we tried.

It’s not wrong to participate in that spirit for the delight of our children. What is wrong is sitting them down to tell them it’s all a conspiratorial lie. That is itself a vicious lie. He’s real - the magic is just subtler than we can get at in ordinary speech.

Here I feel like I run into a brick wall, because we are all at least somewhat materialist in our outlook. There is just a tic in the modern mind that wants to be like, “But if I literally went to the North Pole…” as if that’s the most important level of truth or revelation, even though you don’t act like that’s the case. If I told you that I know my wife loves me in my heart and pointed to my chest, would you try to convince me that my brain cells are actually in my head? Or would you just know that what I’m saying is truer than any facts about anatomy and that probably “symbolism” around the heart is so deep in the human psyche as to mean a multitude of things we can’t quite bring words to bear on but we know by intuition is more meaningful than a technical definition could ever be?

We all know this is how things work because we all know how to act this way without having to explain ourselves. You wouldn’t sit your kids down to explain money isn’t real, it’s just something made up that we all happen to believe in. You can tell yourself money is a lie if you want, but that’s not going to be very convincing to the debt collectors. And it’s probably a bad idea to tell your kids to not “believe” in money because we’ve been off the gold standard for decades and you think that makes it not real.

So, if you (or someone else) tells your child that Santa isn’t real and suddenly their belief structures all collapse into playground nihilism, maybe, actually, there is something wrong about what you said, not what the kid believed in before. Maybe their despair is a reflection of the fact that there is seriously something wrong with the way we think and talk about belief.

For us, the existence of the historic Saint Nicholas contrasted, say, with the current Santa Claus who has the elves and delivers the gifts - his design finalized by Coca Cola - again contrasted with those proto-Santas in Germanic myths where a creepy guy with a switch steals your kids’ toes in the night, is solid proof of it being a lie - and a silly one at that.

However, rhyming incarnations of the mythos is actually proof it is real, not the other way around. His pattern plays out in our culture in a particular way - but that doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary. The North Pole and the Elves and the sleigh - those images mean things that I wouldn’t pretend to have a full grasp of. All I know is that when I see a kid and ask, “What is Santa bringing you?” my conscience is completely clear. It is true in a pragmatic sense because the pattern of Santa works. It is stable and good, and the proof is in the fact that he keeps popping up to make us more generous and fun.

Importantly, Santa requires our participation - he needs us to believe in order for his existence to substantiate. We are his body and his elves. Not everything depends on your belief to exist, of course, but more than you might think. Seeing is not always believing, because believing sometimes literally changes what you are able to see. This, you may have noticed if you’ve been watching Christmas movies like Elf or Miracle on 34th Street, is their central claim about belief in Santa Claus. Done right, Santa doesn’t collapse belief. He demonstrates how belief makes possible what unbelief categorically can’t.

If we are to be disturbed by Santa, it’s not the whimsical details of his mythos that only kids believe (North Pole, etc.) Those are not lies, but carefully crafted cultural images that communicate more things about the spirit of Santa than we could say if we were too fixated on a forensic truth. My proof is how eagerly we all reproduce those images in the minds of any young people we happen to come across in December. The real lie would be to pretend you don’t already understand this.

The problem, if there is one, is the way that the commercial world has made Santa into entertainment-to-sell-toys above all, which sometimes makes all belief feel mawkish and childlike. That, it is good to remember, is an artifact of commercialization and TV, not the nature of belief, and is probably the actual source of our intuition that something about “lying” to kids about Santa is wrong.

There is a time to sit our children down to have a talk about Santa, not to destroy their belief, but to grow it. To help them see how their parents participated in Santa, and one day they will do the same for their own kids. In this way, belief transmutes from receiving to giving - and that, you may notice, works on a few levels.

I still believe in Santa because I am now become Santa. By this transmission, I am not made cynical, but I look still higher, with the heart of a child, toward the source of all belief, and there I see something I cannot here describe.

Share

I woke up enveloped by the sound of sheets of rain on a tin roof. Thunder grumbles like more sheets of tin wobbled farther away.

The first thing my eyes land on is a half-drunk Purple Powerade Zero. Half-awake, the beauty of the thing mesmerized me. The corrugated plastic was more like impossibly thin glass, turned stained glass in the lower half by the unworldly vibrant purple liquid inside, which rested in perfect stillness like an amethyst, carved platonic geometry only witnessable by royalty up until about a hundred years ago.

Subscribe now

Then, as the world beyond the sleep and sheets of rain crept back into my brain, I recognized all this as pretty funny. It’s a Powerade Zero bottle - mass-produced plastic crap soon to be haunting some cursed landfill for the next thousand years.

It is incredible though, looking closely at the thing, really how sharp and faultless and beautiful it is, objectively. You can hardly find the seams to indicate its factory origin. Only modern context tells me that it would be inappropriate to admire it - cynicism is practically mandatory to not be crushed to death by ubiquitous ads for super-stimuli. Pure self-protection has muted my ability to even notice this strange bottle, what would have boggled the imagination only 150 years ago.

We happen to live in a house built in 1885, which contains a very different kind of beauty - hand-hewn wood and irregular iron door handles. Probably, the original builders had not much sense of what we would even appreciate about their little house, so far in the future. Those people would probably be much more amazed by my perfect purple bottle than their noticeably human handy work.

To those people, I’m sure this place was cold, dirty, messy and filled with little upsets, tragedies, and discomforts. What I see here now, though, is their small triumph against the march of time. That they, however incompletely and resentfully, muddled through and made a home. To the extent they managed it, they imbued their faith in the future in the wood and brick. I am the unknown future that enjoys that labour of faith. So, I get to see the beauty in things that, to them, might have seemed mundane: chair molding and time-smoothed planks. By delighting in it, I almost sense their ghosts enjoying their work for the first time, similar to how children have a way of making things new. Though they are long gone and I don’t even know their names, we almost communicate now, to the point where linear causality breaks down, and I’m effecting them ever so slightly to see across the veil: What you’re doing matters beyond what you can know.

Our world, as it exists so mundanely for us today, was the brave new frontier for them. How could they have ever foreseen my wife and I having our first Christmas here in 2025, fixing up their home with the help of supercomputers in our pockets and AI that tells me the best way to deal with lead paint? The heralding of what would slowly become our world was the end of the world for them. Under their feet, despite the hard wood and stone, their whole cosmos was fading away.

To the extent they could sense that, maybe they worried a little less about rising lumber costs or how the neighbor was a drunk or how dreams had been dashed when a brother was killed in the Civil War. Maybe, during this time of year, they could really see each other and realized that one day, very soon, it would be the last time they ever did, here in this place. They may even be able to hope, vaguely, that I sense there was once love here, somehow imbued in the wood-wear or how the shape of a room holds voices.

In this way, the end of the world is the time when things can really come into focus. That’s why we love movies about the apocalypse so much - it’s fun to imagine what it would feel like to really know it was the end.

But, of course, the world is ending. Just like it was for people in 1885, our world is dying to a new world we can’t begin to imagine. We are only ghosts in that world. They can only reach back to us dimly, as if through a dreamy rainstorm wind, trying to show us that despite our temporary grievances, what we made in good faith has persisted into their world in ways we would have never guessed.

This time of year, the end of the world is especially close, as if just across a thin veil. The days are short and it’s cold. Most of the work is done and all the expectations we had for this year are now written on a headstone. Now, it’s only for us to wait and hope new light shines again.

We try to ignore it. The moment a chill hits the air, we are shouting about Christmas and gifts and lights. But Christmas hasn’t come yet, and we all feel that, if we’re honest. On my main street, Mariah’s belt echoing to no one for the 50th time makes the grinning decorations feel like a conga line at a funeral.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in hope. But hope is wasted on the delusional. And love is wasted on those who never realized it is all coming to a quick end. So, hold hands and weep for the short time we had. Let your heart swell with longing that it may last just a little longer.

Only through that sorrow will cynicism finally be stripped away from you, like waking up from a gentle sleep by blankets of apocalyptic rain. Then, you will finally glimpse something mundane, like a Purple Powerade, shine through the eyes of someone 150 years from now; Someone who knows how your world and your story ends. All your unconscious concerns about the bottle - corporate greed, plastic waste, and predatory marketing - all of that is fully resolved history to some stranger in the future, good or bad. All your concerns and worries will die with you, so why live in them now?

The world really is ending; that is most palpable this time of year.

After it is deeply felt, hope might shine like stars in those long cold nights, glimmers from people on the other side: they nudge you through the veil of time, toward what matters, in the end.

Share