If you want to know what the ancient Greeks believed, you should read The Iliad. If you want to know what Americans believe, you should go to the cheapest local barber.

I suppose if time travel were available to you, you could skip The Iliad and go straight to the ancient Greek version of barbers, which was probably a gymnasium, or maybe even just a barber. Koureus.

Probably skip the theorizers and the historians. They are too clouded by anachronistic thinking, ideological capture, and the effort to differentiate themselves from peers. The actual feelings of a place are best articulated by the people who live and die and work in that place. You get the best feel for it when they don’t think they’re being watched.

Maybe it’s something, too, that barbers touch and groom normal people, relaxing them into revealing the texture of their unconscious. Therapists listen more often to naval-gazers with expendable income trying to uncover “trauma” or force some other pseudo-rite. The barber holds the heads of ordinary people, speaking spontaneously while being petted, with no goal in mind, and so she naturally learns to talk to Americans in a pleasing way.

My barber is a Pentecostal woman named Tiffany. She charges $15, will sell you a cold Diet Coke, and keeps signs around that say things like “Only God can judge me.” If I were to bring her some kind of familial complaint, she would listen and tell me some variation of “you gotta do you,” or “they gotta do them.” If I’m nervous about something in the future, she’ll tell me to be myself. If I’m feeling ashamed of something that happened in the past, she’ll tell me not to worry so much about what people think of me.

The consistency of this advice, the inability to stray from it at all, is kind of incredible. You never hear anything about how you have a responsibility to your family or your nation over and beyond your personal freedoms. Only that you’re both entitled to your pursuit of happiness, and if you don’t agree, well, you’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Tiffany was cutting my hair cut just the other day when an idea uncurled out from my own unconscious: the dream of total freedom from others is the foundational lie, to put it bluntly, that our entire society is based around.

It also occurred to me that it is the central reason it’s so difficult for moderns to understand what’s going on in The Iliad: the ancient Greeks had no conception of this freedom from the constraints of social status. For them, as Simone Weil pointed out, that entire poem is about force. All men were equally subject to force. Men with a lot of power were able, using their temporarily elevated status, to smash through the barriers of other people, who bowed to them and conformed to their will. This power comes and goes by the whims of the gods, who pick who they like for reasons mostly unknown. Even the most powerful men will eventually submit, if not to the force of others, then to the force of nature, which will take them inevitably to Hades. For the ancient Greeks, force permeates every level of reality: social, biological, and natural.

Americans believe most deeply in total freedom from that force and all other limits, which blinds us to certain realities, like appreciating The Iliad. An American wouldn’t readily admit, say, that the mere proximity of one man to another is an imposition of his will. But this is made obvious when you realize that, for some reason, you cannot behave the same way in your bedroom when someone is in it.

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“There will be a revival of Christianity when it becomes impossible to write a popular manual of science without referring to the incarnation of the Word.” - Owen Barfield

A couple of days ago, Michael Levin published a huge scientific paper. Levin had been doing some podcasts a few months back. I understood about 42% of what he said at the time.

What I have since gathered from reading his new paper, basically, is there’s a Platonic realm of patterns that “ingress” upon the physical world. “Mind” seems to be present, and even measurable, at all levels of 3D space, even in much simpler organisms than we previously would have thought. He argues that even the patterns of non-living things, like mathematics, also participate in this patterned “ingress” on our physical world.

I was extremely excited to see how popular this paper is. As a former and disillusioned materialist, it’s good to see that there is now mainstream, highly credible new research being done that offers an intellectually serious alternative. The increasingly inexcusable offense of the materialists, I’ve noticed, is their hand-waving about mind, consciousness, or any non-material phenomena by calling it all “emergent,” which is not much more than an epistemological shrug.

It always feels nice to see your long-held intuitions bearing out in the research, too. Not that I’m a scientist. People with much more technical knowledge on the subject will work out the finer details of it in ways that are well above my pay grade. Godspeed to you, I say.

What stood out as personally relevant to me is how Levin defines the “realness” of his Platonic realm of patterns. Namely, a pragmatic definition. Specifically, he says that he’s not particularly interested in working out how “real” this realm is, ontologically. What he’s discovered through his work on frog-cell robots, and self-re-organizing tadpole faces, and kidney-tube construction, is evidence of its usefulness as a precept. That’s a good-enough definition of “real.” By assuming this realm of patterns he is granted access to new horizons of research that are, so far, very predictive and revelatory. From here, we may also begin to postulate explanations for patterns of higher agency and intelligence that seem to exist without or among bodies, perhaps naming them again gods, angels, demons, or even miracles.

The thing for the next wave of research to do is to test and explore this “realm” by trying different experiments. He’s already demonstrated in new and interesting contours of this realm by showing, for example, that temporarily altering a flatworm’s electrical signaling can cause it to regenerate two heads instead of one, without changing its DNA, seriously challenging the idea that DNA is a mechanistic “blueprint” for building living bodies.

Which, by the way, was all very courageous on his part. This is a type of thing that is widely discouraged and pretty taboo in the modern research world. For him to spend a large majority of his life going down this route was a great risk. It’s still his pragmatic stance that, from my perspective, is the most shiny part of it all. I would argue that it even makes his own epistemic courage possible. Maybe I’m biased, but I feel this way because pragmatism is what personally led me back to religious belief.

I wrote about this two years ago now in my essay “Why I Am Christian Again,” in which I describe the seven levels of collective consciousness and how they developed through history. What I felt I ultimately landed on was a level above the modern and the postmodern ones. I perceived an even-higher level, pragmatism (I didn’t call it that at the time, but it fits perfectly). What was actually most interesting about the Christian metaphysic to me was that it worked. It iterates well through time. In fact, it is itself the bedrock of the scientific worldview that has, in the Nietzschean sense, tried to kill and reject its originator.

Let me make some low-resolution historical claims toward this point:

The modernist view, the seeds of which are all the way back in Plato, started around the invention of written language and subsequent rational, linear thought. This culminates in a society-wide perspective really starting in the 1500s or 1600s, with the philosophy of Descartes and the technology of the Gutenberg printing press, which extended literacy to a critical mass of the population.

From that era until the early 20th century, you see a slow development of a shared modernist perspective, ending in its eventual dominance of Western culture. Its ultimate failure was demonstrated in the Great Wars: the killing factories, eugenics, Nazi experiments. Not long after that, for obvious reasons, you get a disillusionment with pure modernism. Postmodernism arises. Now, in order to understand why pure modernism failed, and why postmodernism took its place, we have to understand the actual cognitive tenets of each.

Modernism is an elevation of an individual human consciousness out of the previously universal tribal mode of awareness. The tribal mode is very sensitive to relationships, the family, the tribe, your reputation. It’s mythical. Very “superstitious.” The burgeoning modernist worldview suggests that there is one objective view, outside of all of the subjective tribal views. You, individually can attain this objective view, through discipline and breaking social norms. Through this modernist lens, we discover non-superstitious and cause-and-effect laws that govern reality, beyond suddenly seemingly silly ideas of gods and angels and demons and so on.

Socrates was killed for having an early version of this orientation. You see the same sort of thing happening to Copernicus and Galileo, too. The modernist idea was, for a long time, considered to be rebellious and only at the margins. Finally, it takes center stage, sometime around the early 20th century. When the modernist scientific view was held as the consensus, scientism as a religion is allowed to unleash itself on the world without any constraint. At its extreme edges, manifesting in the atrocities of the Great Wars.

In the light of that, postmodernism is a step up in orienting fundamental principles. What it suggests is, well, if modernism says that there’s one objective view, we say that there are infinite possible objective views any individual can take. The one that you choose, however consciously or unconsciously, is to give you or your group power. The most horrifying case study is stuck in the imagination of moderns: the Nazis, who used “objective” science to kill “lesser” people.

Heading into the 21st century, postmodernism infects modernist ideals and, importantly, slows them down. For the rest of the 20th century, we see postmodernism seeping into not only all of our modernist ideas, but even down to our more tribal moral and social ideals, below modernism. Moral relativism takes hold in popular imagination.

That’s basically the psychic stage that we’ve been feeling since the end of the war: this tension, or battle, between modernism and postmodernism.

It feels like that era is coming to a close. It’s asking for a new synthesis: How can we continue to do modernist science without that pursuit destroying us? At the same time, how do we account for the fact that we often do take on a “scientific” lens just to gain power, and so on?

The antidote is Levin’s pragmatism, whose seeds were first developed in the 1800s in America by Charles Peirce. Actually, Levin directly quotes Peirce in his paper. Epistemologically, they have a lot in common. They both believe that these Platonic forms are not static and never-changing, like Plato himself did. As a “Logos,” they ingress into our world and “inform” our bodies and shared awareness. They give us the ability to be creative and play within and through our physical manifestation. But we can also have upward causality to them. They can change through “time” and embodied experience.

Levin doesn’t get into Charles Peirce’s famous semiotics. That is okay for our purposes. He’s talking about biological substrates and the presence of mind in all of them, which Peirce would agree with. You could easily place a more developed Peircean semiotics on top of the groundwork that Levin is laying out later (and perhaps have a lot more to say about the nature of LLMs). From there you could ask: What is it about our consciousness that is able to reflect on itself through Peircean Thirdness that makes it unique, perhaps, in the universe? Hopefully more to come on that.

At any rate, we seem to be entering a new age, just as we did at the turn of the 20th century. Some new critical mass, seeded long ago perhaps by the American pragmatists and the ancients before them, seems to be revealing itself as the pattern for our future collective consciousness. The pragmatic pattern seems to “want” to “ingress” as the solution to the postmodern problem. To give us a way to explore the “patterns” of an objective morality, say.

Some people have claimed that our next age will be a New Renaissance or New Romanticism. That could be true. But I find it almost amusing that, so far, the best evidence for the way of the future that allows us to get back to work is pragmatism, which is, in aesthetics at least, almost the opposite of a Romanticism.

Practically, though, what pragmatism affords us is a metaphysic that reinvigorates all the previous levels of consciousness, where modernism and postmodernism tended to cut us off from the past entirely, leaving us stranded and lost in the cosmos. Inverting that is Romantic, in its way.

Pragmatism could be a great enlivening force for our age. It lets us again feel the awareness and the intelligence of everything, while also not losing our modernist reason and logical approach. It’s a wonderful prospect, as far as I’m concerned. Unlike the postmodernist view that just says there are infinite possible perspectives, the pragmatist takes into account that there’s actually one more way to zoom out. It’s the fourth dimension: time. What you have to do is look at all of these infinite perspectives, but you actually have to watch them play out through time and see if they succeed by their own tenets.

Postmodernism deeply problematizes anyone’s claims on universal truths. That’s already self-defeating, because you’re suggesting that there are no routes toward truth. That creates personal nihilism, and nihilism creates an antagonism towards being itself, and whoever is antagonistic towards being wants to destroy being, and therefore does not propagate well through time. So postmodernism, even though it is technically higher than modernism, is a self-defeating psychotechnology, and therefore not true or “real” pragmatically.

In that way, we can now look anew at old spiritual traditions, morality, mathematics, technology, environmentalism, and race relationships. We can also reinvigorate our interest in assessing them and make academic philosophy feel alive and useful again. Instead of assuming that we have the one single objective perspective, or nihilistically believing there is none to find, we can evaluate each of our effectiveness through time, with the faith that we may arrive, if not at “true” then at least “more true.”

As a traditionalist, I believe we will come back to the Logos: the cruciform shape of the cosmos. I have that faith in my own particularities. But I don’t have to impose that faith in a sort of phony-Christian-unconscious-modernism that demands that people accept the strange propositions of an anachronistic pattern of speech. You don’t need to talk funny to believe.

I believe that the Logos is behaviorally and therefore pragmatically true. It causes the most flourishing through the longest timeline (dovetailing into eternity, actually). I can just relax and let people play with ideas and see what conclusions they come to. I don’t have to impose myself on any part of that process. I can trust in the generative, strange, contradictory, and revelatory experiences that the wild pursuit of Truth sometimes produces.

I don’t have to worry about what conclusion we’ll come to, because I believe that the Logos prevails. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t know it to be the true pattern. I can only hope I fully allow it to ingress upon my life.

It’s 1:22 a.m. I’m sitting on the couch in the living room. I can’t sleep. This is not totally uncommon.

Half an hour ago, I was quite tired, drifting off. Then, I was struck with an idea. I wrote it down right away, so I wouldn’t forget. And then I was too fired up to go back to sleep.

Reflecting on that now: in my waking day, I avoided the loose playfulness that might have afforded me a stroke of insight like this. I was looking at my computer too much, refreshing my notifications. I didn’t believe in anything beyond avoiding suffering and smallness. Any possibility of overcoming this was hamstrung by my own soothing explanations, which manage my pain but don’t point to a better destination. So as soon as the grip of my waking consciousness loosened on me, something else finally got my attention.

Now here I am, up at one and a half in the morning, when I should be sleeping. But I’m not too mad about it. I’ve always been a night owl. My mind protests: You need eight hours of sleep. You have too much cortisol in your brain. You probably need more magnesium. Early morning sunlight.

First of all, it’s interesting that none of these protocols give me the actual ability to slip into sleep, which comes so easily to any animal, even those ones bathed in LED lights. Sleep is strange. Sleep is a glimpse back into a lack of rational consciousness; a step beyond a veil where archetypes and strange TV commercials go to dance in front of REM while you lie there paralyzed. What is meaningful about dreaming itself is not any particular mechanism, but the meaning of the images, which themselves cannot be reduced to a mechanism without destroying their primary function.

Which also explains why people who are in general overly fixated on mechanistic metaphors can’t sleep. To sleep, you have to be entirely yourself, unguarded by comforting diagnoses and categories and strategies. The plans and the fears and the hopes and the frustrations all have to slip away from you, and so you just have to lie there pretending to “get” this until a sort of spirit of sleep smothers your wakefulness to death.

It’s no wonder we have so much trouble doing it that we have to sedate ourselves. We are diagnosed with insomnia. With that, still more categories, more frustration, more not being yourself. Less sleep.

I don’t have insomnia. I like being awake.

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Earlier this year, there was a big stir about the unexpected surge in Deep South public education.

I’ve always known my home state of Louisiana as either 50th or 49th in public education scores, jostling back and forth with Mississippi. Alabama was always hanging down there with us as well. Magically, it seems, we all just leaped to the high-middle. If you adjust for demographics, whatever the hell that means, then you could argue that Mississippi was close to number one in the country.

Some people have since tried to downplay and discredit some of the more miraculous claims of the Mississippi Miracle, the most damning evidence being that a lot of the gains are lost by 8th grade. That is partially true. I looked into the numbers, and actually, not all of them regress and it’s getting better over time. Between 2013 and 2022 Mississippi roughly halved the 8th grade gap between itself and the nation, which is smaller than the 4th grade gains, but still good.

Critics also claim Mississippi juiced its numbers by retaining the lowest decile so those kids don’t have to sit for the test. On the surface it seems reasonable to say, well, if you just erase the held-back bottom decile then all your statistical improvements mostly vanish. Poof, no miracle. In real life, those kids aren’t erased. They come back and take the test again the next year, with substantial improvements. We know that because the average age is not meaningfully rising. On top of that, all deciles are improving here, even the top deciles.

So, there certainly is at least some hard-to-explain sudden improvement in deep south public education, especially in relation to the rest of the country, which itself is suffering a decline in education outcomes, particularly in literacy. Both of these facts, I think, can be explained culturally.

Most have tried to explain the Mississippi Miracle or the Southern Surge by the details of their policies. This is neither convincing nor interesting to me. There happens to be a great real-world comparison case to bear out my intuition: Michigan passed very similar policies as Mississippi, and they have seen almost none of the same improvements. The teachers, AFT-Michigan, the MEA, the Michigan Association of School Boards, and Michael Rice, the state superintendent of education in Michigan, were all completely unwilling to enforce those reforms. In fact, they did a political campaign to repeal them because they were worried that holding back would “traumatize” the kids. Even when the reforms were law, they allowed nine out of ten kids to go ahead by “good cause” exemptions. Nobody “sophisticated” wants to suggest that any child is dumber than any other child, ever. God forbid.

This points to the real underlying mechanism. Policy and the science of learning are fully downstream of the mere fact that education, particularly literacy, is something that happens to young people because you force it to. Southerners can do force, if nothing else.

The people who run our education system have, through a now mandatory ideology, given up on the idea that education is something that happens through an act of diligence, and instead succumbed to some kind of vaguely Rousseauian delusion that academic achievement happens when children are allowed to unabashedly follow their “natural” passions. In New York, they implemented a reading education system where the children were allowed to read whatever books they were interested in and were meant to learn the meanings of the words by guessing. This was publicly declared a total failure in 2023.

Phonics is a style of reading instruction that is, without a doubt, most effective. The reason “progressive” educators don’t like it is because, in order to teach children to read by this method, you have to force them to sound out meaningless phonetic portions of written language until they finally learn to associate it with natural speech after a long and tedious period, which you basically just have to force them to endure. Every child intuitively learns to speak, but unless you make them, they don’t really learn to read and write. That’s an important bridge to cross, obviously, because reading and writing is the only reason that we have a shared culture across distances. If you stop disciplining young children to learn to do it, people stop making a coherent culture. Surprise, surprise.

Still, the most incredible anthropological artifact of the Southern Surge is that it is an educational boon originating in the Deep South. It didn’t start in the usual cultural hubs on the coasts, and then maybe five, ten years later, bleed its way down through the Sunbelt. What’s unique about the Southern Surge is that while the rest of the country seems to be sinking, something bright seems to be originating from our normally murky depths. This is most unusual.

I remember an inferiority complex humming under the surface of the South when I was a kid: trends came here about five years after they hit the coasts. Believe it or not, though, Southern sensibilities were not always considered to be a mild retardation of Northern ones. The Southern accent, as my high school history teacher used to tell us, was seen as closer to the British aristocracy than the vulgate of the North (according to linguists, this is complicated and only sort of accurate, but true enough to be interesting). “Redneck” speech is, of course, crass and slurred, but so is the working class variant of any given dialect.

Southerners were once thought of as more interested in art, beauty, and the education of great people than were their Northern counterparts, who were more likely to bear the indignity of factory labor (and who, as a result, had much more total wealth and social mobility). The industrial revolution was more keenly embraced in the North, so the school systems were set up like factories, after the Prussian model, to train a sufficient working class; with rows of desks and bells and long working hours. Ellwood Cubberley, the guy who shaped American school administration more than anybody, put it like this: “Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.” On its own terms at the time, the system worked: it trained poor people to run the factories, which made the later abolition of slave labor not a total economic disaster.

By an ironic twist in the fabric, the very factory school built for the machinery that helped end slavery is now, in the post-information age, badly failing our children. We mostly no longer work in factories. We hardly work in offices. AI is here. Wisdom, tutelage, deep literacy, and classical morality seem to be returning as the most important skills to have. There is still a withered memory of that around here.

In my little town, there was once a college called, at the time, College of Louisiana. Today, it’s an abandoned historic site where I sometimes go to write. A Northern abolitionist named Stephen Pearl Andrews came to teach here around the 1830s, thirty years before the war. Andrews would attend dinner parties with doting Southern women and was surprised when they would lament the evils of slavery and the desire to end it. He himself was radicalized against it during his time here. The ladies knew everyone by name in the town, even the slaves, and were bound to them by obligation. What was coming down from the North was more like the interchangeable cogs of a factory. A man was his wage, his child was a “raw product,” and nobody was from anywhere. A few decades later, when northern industrialist reformer presented himself as a moral superior, they felt proud standing against him. Pearl seems to suggest that a lot of them believed slavery was wrong, but they just weren’t going to let a rootless Yankee tell them that. On the historical arc, obviously, they were wrong. But there is still a thing there.

Southern honor and localism getting badly tangled up with what is now America’s original sin, really, is the key to understanding this. The historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown made the distinction that the puritanical North ran on conscience, which meant that how you individually felt about your actions is most important. The Old South ran on honor: morality was not only an internal affair, but a public artifact. You had to stake your beliefs in front of your community, which was perfectly entitled to judge you.

When this honor attached to race after the war, it was curdled nasty by defeat into an inferiority complex disguised as racial pride, which has kept the area economically and culturally dark way beyond its due. A man of the Old South could not have known his cursed place in history from the low vantage of being a man of his time, but he was harshly punished for refusing to learn it long afterward. Humiliated, instead he lashed out with lynch laws and demands for continued segregation to maintain white superiority in lieu of any other kind of superiority. That resentment mutated over time into the cross burnings and the cartoonish hatred spewed from our otherwise folksy and charismatic politicians. Faulkner captures their spirit well, drawing from his real experience as a member of this dying Southern gentry class in Mississippi. Our noble aristocracy turns incestuous as race humiliation and stubborn agrarian pride slowly take away everything we once were proud of.

When that same honor was better attached to stewardship agriculture, nature, beauty, and the raising of moral and talented children, it was obviously good. Atticus Finch is the archetype of this kind of Old Southern honor, who famously had the courage to be publicly unpopular for the sake of what he knew he owed his neighbors and children. That’s the same brand of Southern courage it takes to risk being temporarily hated by the child you have to force into being educated. I’m picturing people like Wendell Berry, too, who stood nearly alone against the ideologies of technological progress. This is what I think we are seeing re-emerge now in the Southern Surge, coupled with the simple fact that we were never “hip” or “academic” or, frankly “wealthy” enough to have the privilege to become delusional Rousseauians.

The uncomfortable must be reckoned with: George Wallace at the schoolhouse door in Alabama is a dark twist of the same stubbornness that is willing to hold a child back a grade to make damn sure he gets it.

My parish (what we call counties in Louisiana), was hostile to integration in the ‘60s. As a reaction to the laws passing, we built private schools for the white kids. I went to one of those (no accident that it was a Civil War hospital with massive and then-crumbling neoclassical columns). For most of my life the public school I avoided had one of the worst districts in the state. Dropout rate over 20%. By extension and reactionary guilt about my private schooling, my own life was marred by a fixation on race. In college, I obsessively read critical race theory, trying to assuage some of my guilt, in the process infantilizing black people and wasting large portions of my time and energy. Interestingly, the very next parish over from ours, for various reasons (mostly involuntary and after protracted battles in the courts, to be fair), did not create white flight schools, so those kids had to stay in the public school. Sixty years on, it is now the top-ranked school district in Louisiana, first in the state two years running. Its success is distinct from the Northern afterglow of somewhere in the Sunbelt like Atlanta, and you can tell that because it’s a deeply rural and therefore truly Southern parish of about two thousand kids. They recently dethroned Zachary, the wealthy Baton Rouge suburb. Its elementary schools were just recognized by the state for high-dosage, one-on-one tutoring. That’s a touch of Southern honor, now untangled from racial wounds.

As a whole, top-down, authoritarian, and impersonal factory models have become wildly unpopular and ineffective across the country in the last few decades. The progressive answer to that has been to abolish any and all forms of authority. Only pockets of the Deep South have somewhat retained a tolerance for adult hierarchy, repetition, and discipline. My wife had experience working in education in Los Angeles a year or so ago where the celebration of lack of authority is at an apex. Their Rousseauian dreams have had the most time and space to ferment into a nightmare. The kids are freer than ever to express themselves and have the most conducive “learning environment” that money can buy, and are therefore miserable, diagnosed, and not learning.

The much more effective policies are not Southern secrets. Everyone could put them in place, in theory. But this isn’t theory: they have to be passed, funded, and tolerated by the parents and teachers. Plenty of Northern states have passed science-of-reading laws (phonics) in the last few years. What they still don’t have is the ability to make the painful parts stick when it counts. You’d have to stare down a fleet of helicopter parents, which I could only imagine a Southern lady having the balls to do.

I grew up having to say yes ma’am and no sir, which is a holdover from what was almost abolished by the Northern sense of factory equality. We know from experience that you better not call a middle-aged woman “ma’am” above the Mason-Dixon if you want to keep your head. This cultural distinction seems to be a token of the Southern Surge as a whole, as kids seem to thrive when they know who’s in charge and worth listening to. Southern culture also seems to gain an unlikely edge in the AI context: we alone are willing to be the unpopular one who states the obvious: reading is something that happens to kids because someone with authority makes them instead of just allowing them to cheat with GPT. That idea has been enacted into policies most practically down in the South and is now bearing first fruits as the wider culture shifts slightly in our favor. By nudging its education away from these coastal extremes, the South has gained an easy edge.

We will almost certainly squander that edge. I doubt policy-makers will learn anything from this. But some parents, at least, might.

I remember reading Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent when I was in college. I felt like I had learned a clandestine secret about the way the world “really” works.

Chomsky demonstrates the “will” of the American empire by showing how regimes aligned with our interest get more American dollars, yes, but are also more likely to be positively reported on in the New York Times. Regimes that conflict with the American interest are more likely to be the victim of American military intervention, of which there will be little to no reporting in the New York Times. All of this is plain-as-day in publicly available data. They aren’t even trying to hide it, man!

What Chomsky would like you to explicitly believe is that your consent to this machine has been manufactured by market and institutional demands, no conspiratorial cabal of bad actors required. He doesn’t need to point to the real shape of his enemy, the reader’s imagination supplies it: Some nasty, greedy capitalists are repressing the possibility of utopian socialists because they want to enrich themselves.

This was a near-perfect maneuver for Chomsky. What’s almost darkly ironic is that none of the most ingenious maneuvers he’s making are stated explicitly. They’re built into shared assumptions about how the world works, particularly in academia, particularly at the time. It taps into our hunger for cosmic drama, without ever lowering itself to what academics would think of as the naivete or superstition of cosmic melodrama.

The worldview underlying it is that everything is like a machine. There are, of course, no such things as gods or titans. Further, this inert world-machine would work perfectly toward our collective flourishing if it weren’t for the bad incentives (who makes the incentives bad is, again, left to your imagination). Now we may approach the text feeling very smart, clear headed, and rational. Academics and intelligent lay people can share the book to confer the status of intelligence on one another, driving sales and positive critical reception. But what really drives the enormous interest in this otherwise inert phone book of information is that unspoken daemon.

You, the reader, are allowed to imagine this spirit however you like. You can incarnate it in a man like Dick Cheney, who helpfully plays the role quite well. Or you can just allow it to remain the shadowy cabal of some mystery thriller, like The Da Vinci Code in your unexamined imagination.

I wouldn’t want to make it seem like the left, however you’d characterize that, is the only side capable of playing this game. In fact, the right has recently begun to acquire a real aptitude for it, most prominently starting around 2016 after the rise of Jordan Peterson.

For most of post-war American history, the right were the adherents to the American style of capitalism that was making us so darn wealthy. They didn’t need to be savvy at naming the dark animating spirits of those on the left. In turn, the left saw themselves as noble rebels against this rising world-order with basically all of the intellectual clout and less of the economic power.

Then, there was the somehow cosmos-shattering Cathy Newman interview with Jordan Peterson. She was a hapless recipient of the worldview that took for granted a gormless right wing, so she had no memetic defense against the incursion of someone like Peterson, who was not right wing in the sense that he merely defended the economic and social powers that be, but had spent the majority of his career thinking about the negative aspects of the spirit of the institutional left.

Before 2016, and it’s hard to remember this, the right had very few compelling memetic weapons. Only rants about political correctness on AM radio. Now, ten years after the rise of Peterson, it has new more native weapons in its arsenal: Luxury beliefs. Virtue signaling. The replication crisis. P-hacking. Even seemingly unrelated things like the food pyramid and seed oils are now right-coded.

The political landscape has become more dynamic. Probably because the slow decline of post-war exponential economic growth has made it necessary for traditionalists to be more sophisticated than just red-blooded capitalists. You now have highly online terminology like woke versus chud, which in some ways has pushed these dynamic poles to more extreme opposites. People are observing this radicalization and echo-chambering in faux wonderment. The old left just names it all misinformation and hopes it will go away.

That is to say, the entrenched old guard of Chomsky-style academics have largely not caught on to the new dynamic. In fact, a new wave of right wing academics are making their careers by humiliating these people, unawares, in the public sphere. It started with Cathy Newman and the fall of the New Atheists, and is perhaps culminating grotesquely with the Jason Arday affair at Cambridge.

What’s being missed in this current landscape, still, is that it’s the same trick that Chomsky played on me all those years ago: pointing out gods and titans in a conveniently limited way. Giving them a catchy name. “Woke.” Allowing the reader to fill in the gap with smoky cabals of evil enemies, and their vision of the neglected and abused good.

They rightly notice that seemingly machine-like interactions of a bureaucracy or a state, if investigated with a want in mind, will reveal themselves to somehow bend their very machinery to achieve that want. If you decide that what the state wants is to disenfranchise you, you’ll find plenty of evidence because that is, in fact, part of what the state or capitalism or the machine wants to do. Insofar as it is a true part of the personality of the spirit of the age, data will reinforce your idea of almost any conspiracy.

The problem with this approach goes perennially unexamined. You could say it like this: The personality of a spirit can be factually described, concretely, through revelatory data, to affirm the relationship between that spirit and the thinker who is observing it. But that description, however true and factual, does not exhaust the personality of the spirit nor the observer.

What these thinkers tend to abuse is an unspoken occultist theater: the feeling that the revelation is exciting because it gleams; because it suggests cosmic drama with enough plausible deniability to not abandon the empirical feel. It’s perfectly deceptive because it’s all true, but incomplete.

Cultures and states and ideologies have persistent tendencies and demonstrate top-down agency, so calling them “systems” is a weak metaphor. They are much better apprehended as personalities. Like our own personalities, they have emergent patterns and competing processes. It’s not a question if America has a little “mind” somewhere in central South Dakota doing its wanting, but, for our purposes, only if treating it like a personality predicts more than treating it like a machine. Because of its nature and ours, what we expect to see in it in part determines what it is and who we are. If you’re a good faith reader of history, at some point you’ll have to concede what was obvious to every human being before the modern age: gods and titans clearly exist, and they contain within themselves personalities composed of dynamic opposites, just like any human being you happen to know. I don’t care what you make of the phenomenology of these personalities, acting like they “exist” works better than not.

There does not need to be any cabal of conscious conspirators for there to be a desire of these larger personalities to achieve their ends. It’s completely plausible that no single person on Earth wanted us to spend thirty years arming Suharto, tilt a US presidential election, or whatever else. The incorrect bit of the culture warrior explanation is what you ought to do about this, as an individual who seems to find himself in a landscape of gods and titans.

Your personality and temperament are more predictive of how you identify politically than any argument, anyway. If you begin to notice grand conspiracies against the group most like yourself, you’ll be drawn further and further into a caricature of your own temperament to appease one pole of the spirit of the age, which is by definition one radical pole of two necessary opposites. If you’re talented enough, you can make yourself a public avatar of a resistance against that interplay. This, put plainly, would be political commentary.

What being an avatar of the fight against a great enemy affords you is legibility in the marketplace. Power, status, and wealth. Because, unbeknownst to you, what’s happening is that you’ve aligned yourself with a personality that is much more powerful than you. It wants things and is happy to use you to achieve those ends.

If you allow yourself to be used like that, you will eventually succumb to what we commonly call audience capture or partisan derangement. These are named as if they are benign sociological phenomena, but it’s really more like aligning yourself with half the dynamic of your age at the cost of your own local internal balance of opposites. Your sanity. Arguably, this is what happened to Peterson. He initially made a courageous and principled stand, and helped millions of young men make non-political choices: to be grateful for their place in life, to make their room better, to do slightly better at their job, to be humble, and to not sell out to activism or whatever the universities were offering. He eventually succumbed to a shadow of what he fought against by making himself an avatar of a fight against the cultural left.

It would be too easy to convince myself, particularly at this point in my life, to follow the example of Peterson like I did earlier in my life with Chomsky. Or I could just notice that on a civilizational scale these are more like the hemispheres of the mind of a god that will gladly rip my soul apart in its own struggle to find its dynamical balance. It needs to walk its own razor’s edge, as Peterson says, between chaos and order.

When I see that terrifying and unbeatable landscape of titans before me, I can only reasonably choose to walk that edge between chaos and order in my own life, no matter what they threaten to do to me. That would be much more humble and grounded, and I wouldn’t get to have the quick payday of polemic or ideologue takes, and would probably have more to do with listening carefully to the worries of my wife or not saying the thing at work that I’m “supposed” to say but don’t believe. That would protect my soul, meaning my body, self, and progeny would flourish over a longer timeline.

The temptation there too, I think, for someone like Peterson or Chomsky, or any of their cultural warriors, is the sensation that if they just keep attacking, at some point they can win and then give up the sword. That their version of the good would be fully manifest in the world, if everybody they hate would just get out of their way.

The thing is, you can’t win a culture war. Because the culture war doesn’t want to be won. However cleverly you attack your opposition, and however many battles you win, it will only cause them to adapt to your tactics, evolve, and come back and hit you harder. The spirit of the age wants to balance its opponent processes, not total victory. If one opponent ever wins, it regenerates its own opposite. This dynamic knows more than we do, as becomes clear when we finally look back at history and see how political squabbles of the day were less interesting than the people having them.

It’s still okay to be affiliated with a political party, depending on how you see the world, again mostly as a result of your disposition and circumstances. But a wiser recognition demands that you hold it lightly and without loyalty. Realize that the supposed enemy is also seeing the way that things seem to manifest to them, and that it’s completely rational and comprehensible from their perspective. There has to be sort of a post-rational bipartisan respect, despite the fact that we must also have a local political perspective we believe to be true.

None of this is quite as exciting as it was for me to read Chomsky as a philosophy major and feel that I had some secret knowledge about the way the world is, and therefore a clear enemy to fight. I don’t think that’s totally intractable, though, because the new battle I’m talking about is a battle against categories, against easy explanations and world-closing solutions. That is a deeply personal battle against the fear in your own heart. Constant leaps of faith forward in a world without end. That’s exciting, too, if I can just get my head around it.

Every great thinker I continue to truly admire through the decades, despite all of my evolutions and changes through life, were in their own way struggling to give voice to the preference of the personal battle over the cultural one. Socrates, Kierkegaard, Lewis, Percy. That humbles me, because if they haven’t already convinced the whole world, I’m not very likely to do it now. I probably can’t push anybody away from rabid political takes if they’re already getting a lot of validation and meaning out of that.

Part of me still, maybe irrationally, believes that if I can figure out the right combination of words, suddenly somebody might see that impossible horizon of lumbering titans and tricky gods, ancient and immortal, ready to eat us, use us, or destroy us. That we are, tiny, with no chance in hell. Only there I can know that if I believe something seems so obvious that everyone who disagrees must be stupid or evil, I am probably the stupidest and most evil person I know.

Maybe with that realization I might, after an appropriate time of despair, start to wonder what tools could possibly be available to tiny mortals like us. Old gods and titans are famously afraid of certain mortals, and we need to try and remember why that is.

There is a performative contradiction at the very heart of the American psyche. It functions best when not examined. If it’s ever brought to consciousness, it’s usually because it’s either not working or suddenly stops working for you. Once seen, the contradiction can drive you insane.

Here’s a common example. A star athlete of a high school has unconsciously absorbed, through his classmates and American media, the need for him to be casual and cool about his status. He wears the letterman jacket, because it was given to him, but otherwise he’s James Dean. He doesn’t care.

When he goes to college, though, he continues to wear the letterman jacket, assuming, unconsciously, that it’ll confer the same status on him as it did in high school. Here, though, he’s bullied for wearing the jacket. With that, he’s given an impossible choice: Keep wearing the jacket, demonstrating that he still doesn’t care what people think of him and yet still hoping this will make them think well of him. People will continue to think badly of him. Or take the jacket off because he cares what people think of him, thus losing his ability to not care what people think of him, making him effectively uncool. People will continue to think badly of him. Either way now, he can’t escape. Whatever he does, he is consciously doing it because of what people think of him.

That, in essence, is what it means to be an American, summed up in this one paradoxical sentence: be cool, and don’t worry what people think of you, and people will think highly of you. Built into the sentiment is both the notion that it matters what people think of you, and also that it does not matter what people think of you.

Once you’re aware of this contradiction, you will start to see it everywhere.

Historically, it began with unnatural abruptness. It’s easy to see this abruptness visually, if you go looking for it. Type in “common menswear in the 1940s” and you’ll see someone that looks like Jimmy Stewart. Same goes for the 30s, 20s, and 10s. Then type in “common menswear in the 1950s” onward, and you’ll suddenly see guys looking like James Dean, undershirts and cigarettes in the sleeve. The ragtag and rebellious Americans won the war. Now our idea of coolness, for the most part, has become the ideal of the entire world.

Before that, the ideal was more something you could probably describe as elegance. It was a given that we owed something to the public sphere. Instead of denying that we cared what people thought of us, caring what people thought of us was the central thing about life. You weren’t allowed to dress or act certain ways in church, home, with mixed company. To not know these delicate mores was to be considered a brute, low class, inelegant.

In fact, you can feel the stitching of this seam, nearly the exact moment of the transition, in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, where the depiction of Stanley Kowalski’s brutishness and inelegance is frightening and violent, but sexually charged, extremely attractive, especially because it was played by Marlon Brando, and the emerging ideal of cool. Blanche, on the other hand, was an avatar of the collapsing aristocracy of elegance.

As an aside, the reason Southern literature had such an international moment around the times of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy is because Southerners had been feeling this collapse of their aristocratic class a hundred years before it was codified into the world consciousness after World War II.

Blanche is a member of this crumbling Southern aristocracy. Her phoniness, costume elegance, and concern for her untoward behavior is to keep the whole charade afloat. She secretly becomes a prostitute to pay upkeep for her family’s dynasty plantation for a little longer. It literally drives her insane.

These days, there’s a subset of people who are extremely nostalgic for the age of elegance. There is some good reason for this, most notably because elegance at its core doesn’t contain the same performative contradiction. It’s honest with itself that it certainly does care what people think of it. However, it’s very easy to be nostalgic for something that you no longer have to live with day to day. The great difficulty with elegance culture was the pressure to keep up appearances, even when things were going very wrong. It was so great that people were prone to phoniness, lying, fits of hysteria. In fact, this is what was so well depicted in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s novels: what happens to people who fall from grace and try to keep up appearances until they are deemed insane and forcibly removed from the elegant classes.

If I’m being completely honest with myself, being an American to my core, I would instantly fold under the pressure of keeping up appearances. In practice, I much prefer the performative contradiction of coolness, even though I have, like almost every American, struggled with it many times in my life.

As a person whose habit is to bring unconscious things to consciousness, coolness was always very difficult for me to figure out. When a new trend would hit, and all the seemingly and supposedly blase cool guys and gals would immediately participate in that trend, I was always confused by that, wondering, sometimes aloud, hey, aren’t you guys supposed to be the ones who don’t care? So why do you care about trends? Of course, as I said in the beginning, making this contradiction conscious makes it painful, and so people, especially cool people, hate to be made aware of it. If you’re, say, in high school, you’ll get bullied for trying.

Only now do I realize that there’s no solving it. I don’t have a better answer. You can’t think your way into coolness. You have to somehow trick yourself into sinking below the level of awareness of it.

Now, some people, I can feel, will say, no, the trick is that you just don’t need to care about what people think of you. This is the most common piece of American advice, and a total delusion. You can’t not care about what people think of you. In fact, saying “you shouldn’t care what people think of you” is an unconscious bid for the person listening to you to think that you are the sort of person that doesn’t care what people think of them, and is therefore cool. Which is why it’s bad advice: it’s not really about the person you’re giving advice to. It’s about the coolness of the advice giver.

What frustrates me about that is that that lie has made our public places so ugly. It’s the old line that people used to wear suits to the airport, and now they wear sweats. You can see videos from the 1930s where practically everyone in New York City is wearing a three piece suit and a top hat. They’re not doing it for themselves. They’re doing it for each other. They believed that they have a duty to elegance, to make the public square a more beautiful place, and to shirk that responsibility is to give a middle finger to everybody else that can see you.

Fundamentally, we build with this idea in mind, as if buildings were mere shipping containers for the individual’s freedom. We refuse to take a chance on the specifics of beauty, because they might contradict the coolness of the individual to decide for themselves what beauty is. And so practically all of our public places are flat and lack any theory of beauty by the builders. Hospitals and malls and movie theaters are like architectural sweatpants, a shrug that says, I don’t know, who cares?

My wife is a Zoomer, and so when I first met her, she texted in all lowercase, as they do. Now that she’s married to a millennial, she’s made the somewhat uncomfortable decision to turn off that setting and to text her Zoomer friends with the auto cap on. That itself speaks to this performative contradiction: in order to text in a way that suggests I don’t know, who cares, it’s just off the cuff, you actively have to go into your phone settings and turn off the feature that automatically capitalizes your letters.

This Zoomer communication style has started to infect the way people write. On places like Substack, people will write entire essays in all lowercase. Which is an interesting little performative avant-garde, I guess. I don’t think it’s particularly unreadable or anything. I’m being careful here not to be an old man shouting at a cloud. What it suggests to me is the same thing that hoodies suggest in Silicon Valley, and what James Dean’s T-shirt suggested to his suit wearing parents, which is resentment: Not only do I not care what you think, but I’m not even going to act like you’re here in the room with me.

What capital letters suggest instead is, I know you’re reading this. Because I know that you’re in the room with me, I’m going to class up the joint a little bit, out of care for your existence. Which I think is a little bit more honest than the all lowercase, which suggests both that you can screw off if you don’t like this, but also, I really hope that you think I’m cool and nonchalant and that you like this.

The problem with that performance by now is that we’ve already seen what the dominance of coolness does to the public square. It makes it ugly. It’s no longer a social experiment. It’s just, finally, rebellion totally without a cause. The thing about James Dean and the Beatniks and the hippies was that they actually had something to lose: jobs and standing in their society. For all their faults and foibles, they were at least willing to sacrifice for what they believed to be an increase in personal freedom. Now it’s just kind of pathetic. It’s total self-regard, self-protection, a way to try to say what you really mean but have plausible deniability.

This isn’t a sort of young Republican plea to wear ugly cheap suits to business seminars and be a little out of the loop and feckless. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that being cool, or being perceived as cool, is still a huge and important part of our lives. Instead, this is to say that, given our circumstances, what we’ve seen play out over the last seventy years, it actually seems a little bit more courageous to class up the joint for each other. Not out of a sense of yearning for the past or stuffy rules, but because it looks nicer. I know that you’re reading this. It’s not just my personal self-expression. It’s a risk to say that I believe this belongs to all of us. I hope you like it. I try to make it good.

Working against me, of course, is the whole AI thing. You can stick your essay in and it’ll tell you exactly where to put all the right punctuation and capital letters. It’ll even tell you what to say that the most people will like. So I can understand why the lowercase thing has invaded writing recently. I still don’t think that the right reaction to that is to further atomize and to further make everything ugly. That, perhaps, is the real meaning of slop. The antidote to slop, or the right rebellion against it, is maybe to make handmade things nicer for each other.

Americans invented AI as the culmination of the power of the free individual. When something culminates, it usually means that we’re finally ready to reintegrate what we left behind. As far as I can tell, what we left behind after the war was the idea that we do actually care what we think of each other.

Every time we leave our bedroom, we have a moral duty to remember that we’re not just showing up for ourselves. We’re showing up for each other.

When I was a kid, I would get off the bus at my friend’s house so that we could sit right next to each other on the couch and watch each other play Pokemon on our Game Boy Colors, until we were forcibly separated because I had to go home for dinner.

We still cut the grass and did our homework. In the summer, we went on long hikes and camping trips away from the Game Boys. But the entire time, we were talking or thinking about Pokemon, or whatever other video game or piece of cutting-edge technology we were interested in at the time.

I remember a vague disgust this behavior elicited from our parents, and also how they had basically no way of stopping us. They and their parents had grown up in a time before all this. They had personally watched the entire world transformed before their eyes by post-war technological advancements. It made a lot of the Boomers rich beyond belief, and it had granted them, and by proxy their parents who had lived through the Depression, the ability to give their children everything they never could have afforded, and so much more. Even though they were annoyed that we were looking at the stupid Game Boy and talking about the stupid Game Boy practically all the time, they still felt, somehow, like they owed this to us.

I remember that I had a Gateway desktop computer. I pulled it apart and discovered an extra couple of slots for more RAM. With the help of the local computer repair guy, I brought my bedroom’s computer up to a whopping 768 megabytes of RAM. That was still relatively modest even for the time, but since I couldn’t afford the multi-thousand-dollar gaming computers, it at least was enough, I knew, to play Call of Duty. So the next time my mom took me to the mall, I got the boxed CD-ROM, and on the way home I read the back of the box and the entire manual, and recited passages of it to my mother like it was Whitman.

Then, one day my stepdad came into my room and told me we had just gotten high-speed internet. He got it to connect all the high-tech security cameras at the convenience store we owned, which was, helpfully, just a short walk across our front yard. Suddenly, I could play the even newer Call of Duty 2 online with strangers from all around the world. I did that so much I would dream about it every night and one time had an anxiety attack about my kill/death ratio (really).

I remember also that I had a GameCube, and I tore open all the little flaps at the bottom and saw ethernet ports, plug-ins they had included for potential online games in the future. This was a magical promise to me. I dreamed of being able to play Animal Crossing with my cousins who now lived far away. These sorts of dreams of non-local hyperconnectivity were getting better and more possible all the time. It felt like it was all headed somewhere better than merely here: to the stars or virtual reality or downloading ourselves into a computer. That stuff was more inarticulate than it is now, but it was certainly there. That was what was so exciting about technology, and particularly video games: it was always getting closer and closer to simulating a better reality. As the dreams of these video game developers shaped our minds and our aspirations, we wanted nothing more than better graphics, better connectivity, more realism, faster physics engines.

What I’m describing is what it was like to grow up in America in my age group. To buy a PlayStation 5 these days (and notably it’s mostly people my age still playing these types of video games) would be a sad imitation of the excitement of possibility we felt back then. That’s not to say people don’t continue to play lots and lots of video games. But something has been lost about that exciting frontier that was unfurling in front of us back then. Kids now don’t play Game Boys and dream of Pokemon being made real. They don’t look forward to the next newest thing in the same way we did. They’re just handed an iPad and go slack-jawed, for the most part, watching other kids play video games for them.

There is some saturation happening, we must notice. We’re bored by promises of better technology and now looking elsewhere. We’ve gotten pretty much all we can consume. We’re informationally obese and looking to go on a diet. Millennial parents are more likely to restrict their kids’ access to technology. The more they understand the technology, the more likely they are to restrict it. They’re understandably horrified by the now clearly negative effects of it, how it’s making kids depressed and anxious and unable to be in the world. Kids today aren’t like we were, forced to spend time away from already limited technology, out in the woods, seeing the real thing while fantasizing about the fake thing. Now it’s all fake things, all the time. Parents can hardly help it, because they are also caught up in being entertained by all the fake things they are now too afraid of the real world to send their kids off into it. But the important change is that now at least we want to want it to stop.

My wife and I were discussing this on the couch the other night, talking about our future kids. For us, it seems obvious in a way that just wasn’t to Boomer and Gen X parents that we wouldn’t just hand our kids the latest technology. This seemed to have shifted around 2020 (with a sad, lost generation of young Gen Zs who had the full blast of the best technology and none of the restrictions). It’s also interesting how disinterested in better technology we’ve become ourselves. She joked about seeing an Apple Watch on sale for $200 and briefly feeling a pang of excitement, like she was a child again and might get herself something good for Christmas. Then she realized: what would she even want with an Apple Watch? She already hates her phone. Why would she put it on her wrist so people can text her even more often? We even have “bricking” software installed on our phones to make them inaccessible and dumber in certain ways.

This is not to say I hate technology. In fact, I am in my backyard as we speak. It’s a beautiful day, the sun is shining. It’s largely thanks to technology that I can be out here comfortably while I write down these thoughts. There’s a distinction I want to make between Technology Is Over and being Against the Machine. I find myself very much feeling that Technology Is Over, but definitely not in the camp of Against the Machine.

The way to make sense of this, I think, is by making an analogy to other resources. Technology distills information. In the case of video games, it synthesizes social storytelling into a format you can do by yourself. You are participating in civilizational myths, almost like being around an ancient campfire, but it’s optimized for the convenience of one person to do that alone, in the most salient way possible. The primary unit is information: information about good storytelling, about electronics, about whatever else you need to make that happen to get the most salient thing for least effort. At a certain point, presumably, you get enough of that. When that happens to enough people, the exponential graph eventually becomes a sigmoid one. The demand flattens, as it did for many other commodities like, say, hot water.

Our hot water heater broke the other day. It was about twenty years old; the input spigot had rusted through and was pouring water all over the utility room floor. So my dad and I went to Home Depot and picked out another one. It’s pretty much identical to the twenty-year-old one we already had. We replaced it, connected all the same tubes and pipes, and once again our hot water was 100% functional, in exactly the way it was twenty years ago.

Long before hot water heaters, people had to boil water over fire if they wanted hot, clean water. This required enormous amounts of energy and motivation, so hot water was used sparingly. People took very few baths. They washed clothes by hand in cold water. Then, we invented small versions of the hot water heater, making it much more convenient to run a few gallons of hot water through pipes in the house. New things were invented (the dishwasher, the laundry machine) to use even more hot water, which expanded our need for more of it. We made the heaters bigger. Then, we invented hot showers, and non-leaky faucets, and all this other technology that made the convenient use of more hot water possible, and so expanded our desire for more.

This was once an exponential graph, very similar to the exponential graph of computing power we’re undergoing right now. If you were making the same assumptions about hot water that people make about compute, you would assume that the quantities of hot water we desire, and the new uses we invent for it, would grow exponentially forever, creating infinite new jobs and new uses for hot water.

The reality is that at some point, we got enough hot water. However many gallons the tank was twenty years ago is the same number of gallons the tank is today. We’ve thought up all the reasons we would need hot water. It plateaued, and now hot water is “over.” We still use hot water. We still appreciate hot water, when we even think about it. But the exponential gain of more and more hot water is no longer. There’s no gold rush. It’s just a steady part of our lives.

Scott Alexander wrote “The Sigmoids Won’t Save You.” He reasons that historically it’s basically impossible to say when the exponential will flatten like it did with hot water. We have a record of being wrong about birth rates and solar energy. So when I compare hot water to AI and its quickly growing data centers, I can’t say at what point we will have enough information and intelligence to satiate all our desires for it, or for how long it might help us invent new desires. That would be to make a prediction about the future, and people are notoriously horrible at making predictions about the future. I don’t know when or how the curve will flatten; in a hundred years or less than one. What I do see, however, are indications that we are reaching some important limits of information satiation in the social realm. Scott’s own example cuts this way: the airspeed record didn’t flatten because ramjets hit the walls of physics. It flattened because people didn’t want to pay for the next generation of technology. He says the best way to understand when an exponential will sigmoid is to understand the mechanism of the trend. Great. The demand for this trend is capped by our appetite for information.

The best technologists have always known that technology is not about the best possible tech. In a famous Q&A, a very technical audience member grilled Steve Jobs about his refusal to use the “best” technology in his products. After a very long pause, Jobs calmly explained technology is not about making the most advanced tech ever and then working backwards to find a place for it in the market. It is about finding the demand in the market and using whatever technology you can find to make that market dream manifest. So the “susceptible population” for AI isn’t compute, it’s an unsatiated human desire. When parents start taking away the iPads and bricking their phone and it’s embarrassing to be caught using AI, that’s a real indicator that some seam of a limit is being felt. The social world is where you are going to see the first signs of this saturation, not the technological one, which is the exact space the technologists tend to overlook.

In video games, there seem to be massive diminishing returns on increasing compute and graphical fidelity. Not only that, but it takes exponentially more compute to increase the resolution marginally. At this point, most people are pretty much satisfied with phone games, or just playing Jackbox games with their friends. It’s not that high-fidelity video games go away as a source of entertainment, as a way of bringing that ancient “campfire” desire into more private access and higher fidelity. We will still probably be somewhat excited by technologies that foster or enhance that. But we’re now at the point where we’re actually limiting the input rather than seeking the infinite horizon. That seems to be a fundamental shift in our relationship to technology. My kids will perceive tech much differently than I did when we were kids.

Because unfettered personal access to technology, we’ve now realized, makes it more difficult to learn certain embodied skills. Skills that, importantly, transfer from one context to another. Being able to play Spider-Man at the very highest levels on your PS5 (which I could) doesn’t translate to being fun at a party or telling a good story at a bar. Kids today, Gen Alpha and Gen Z, are much more depressed by their inability to be fun at a party or get a date than by their inability to buy the latest video game.

I wouldn’t want to forget that there is a very committed crowd of people who quite passionately do not think Technology Is Over. They are mostly in Silicon Valley. If they’re wrong, they’re going to take the longest to accept it. They’ve dedicated their lives to the infinite horizon of exponential growth of intelligence as a source of their power and wealth. AI, like the written word and the printing press before it, attempts to make organized information easier and more accurately acted upon in the world, which is the definition of intelligence. Like Jobs, they should intuit there is a point of satiation for even that. All of this technology has to be for something, after all. It has to entertain us, or feed us, cure us, protect us, or whatever it aims to do. Those desires could be invisibly fulfilled by AI-powered research and development for many years to come. B2B and government applications, as abstract as they sometimes seem, still have to cash out in reality somewhere. For them to be right about infinite exponential growth, the technology itself would need to become an infinite consumer of its own outputs. They do think it will do this, but there is, so far, no real evidence for that.

The techno-optimists, as they’ve so conveniently named themselves, have bet their lives on an infinite exponential. An exponential curve going on infinitely is necessarily a singularity. To them, the “singularity” actually means that all the sacrificing they did of their ability to be normal in the real world will never have to be paid for. A lot of them semi-religiously believe they’ll get to live forever in some abstract super-world where they never pay the cost of being weird at parties. Maybe. But that’s a suspiciously convenient thing for them to think. Go and read AI 2027 with this in mind, or whatever papers where they’re predicting these various sociopolitical apocalypses and runaway self-improving technology. It becomes a little more just-so. Wouldn’t that be nice for you?

Now, again, I can’t accurately predict the future. Any attempt at doing so will certainly be wrong, probably in an interesting way. Still, it seems to me that AI in particular, as the self-proclaimed culmination of Moore’s law, is a threshold we can’t come back from. As it becomes more and more clear that these machines are nothing like conscious people, that they don’t do runaway self-improvement, and that they won’t foment the apocalypse, there will be a great disappointment among the builders and a permanent disillusionment in the rest of us. In a twist of fate, the apocalypse the techno-optimists are predicting is probably their own apocalypse. Their lifelong abstraction and rebellion from embodied living created the machines that satiated our desire for those very machines, causing us to become more and more uninterested to further improvements of them. Intelligence will at some point become a utility, like hot water, that we use when necessary and shut off when we’re playing in the yard. When that happens, you’ll be better off if you know how to play in the yard than if you know how to code.

I know a lot of normal people worry about the tech people, that they’ll usher in a technological surveillance state where we have basically no usefulness as humans. That we might “get” to live in virtual reality masturbation machines for all eternity seems intuitively evil to anybody not already deeply immersed in that perverse hope. Really, though, if I go outside and see the sun, and my backyard, and the house my dad fixed up and that my wife and I are living in now, I am strongly reminded of the fact that it hasn’t changed much in 200 years. The only difference between me and the people who built this house 200 years ago is a few small pieces of nearly invisible technology that are, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, merely extensions of my human senses and desires. Our ability to communicate with each other, our ability to see, our ability to hear, and so on. If I get real, so to speak, I become a lot less worried about all that. The thing about reality is that you can’t beat it for long.

Maybe it seems like they can beat it forever because we’ve all seen exponential technological growth for our entire lifetimes. But it’s much more likely that this is a historical anomaly, and that the actual day-to-day future will be much more mundane than we think. Predicting that the future will be relatively mundane is the one prediction that often turns out to be true (but is not very clickable).

Just like all the people who were worried about the nuclear bomb earlier in this age: the thing to do is to get on with living. Building a house, having a family, and being useful to people, and making things beautiful: making a garden, making a little hut where you can write your essays, cutting the grass and weed-eating. When all is said and done, twenty or fifty years from now, I have a strong feeling that most people will wish they had been doing that all along. That is what it practically means to believe that Technology Is Over.

Even if that’s not true, and everything is suddenly taken away from me in an AI apocalypse, at least I’ll die with people I love, doing normal things.

Imagine a vigilante who stalked philosophers who had concluded, in some form or another, that non-being was preferable to being. That life was absurd, or everything was about power, or it’s impossible to justify the suffering of existence, or whatever flavor of that.

This vigilante would follow that philosopher for days or weeks, finding out where he slept, where he ate, where he smoked his cigarettes. One night, dressed as some hulking, monstrous figure, maybe a bat, he would sneak into the philosopher’s bedroom, yank him out of his sleep, haul him somewhere no one would hear, and believably threaten to end his life.

The philosopher would, every time, beg and plead to be spared. The vigilante, well versed in his philosophy, says he will quiz him first and kill him afterward: If everything is about power, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a vigilante using his power to do whatever he wants with the philosopher. If being is worse than non-being, the philosopher should be thrilled at his impending exit. If you can’t justify the suffering of being, the vigilante is about to do him a huge favor by making it quick.

Inevitably, each time, the philosopher would disavow his ideas, begging for the chance to continue living. At which point the vigilante would fire his weapon, seeming to make good on his promise. For just an instant, the philosopher would truly believe his time was up. But the vigilante will have missed. The philosopher does not know the miss was intentional. Then, without a word of explanation, he vanishes into the night.

Right afterward, without fail, the philosopher sees everything anew. The stars shine with some kind of meaningful glory. Each breath is a tremendous relief from its previous exhale. Distant air conditioning units hum with the reassurance of a miraculously cooperative society. Tears swell in his eyes. He shouts for joy. He calls his mother. If everything goes according to the vigilante’s plan, he’ll begin to backtrack his public nihilism. If not, at least live more knowingly of his lie.

I borrowed some of the details here from an episode in G.K. Chesterton’s Manalive, mixed, I think helpfully, with some Batman flair. Because when I was in college, I studied philosophy, and that department is like Gotham. It has largely failed as a social project. It is now the home of fear, hypocrisy, and social parasites. You could imagine that if a Batman-like figure were philosophically inclined, he might see some potential in dressing up as a personification of all of these fears, and showing these people, face to face, exactly what it is they’re succumbing to. That might wake them the hell up and give them a chance not to abuse their influence on the minds of young people.

I find that philosophy departments tend to blame everything but themselves for their bad reputation. Some of that is understandable. We are a culture uniquely impressed by the expertise of the scientific inquiry as it investigates the natural world. More accurately, as our scientists unconsciously devote themselves to the beauty of uncovering the true form of the natural world. The reasons for that aim, going unquestioned for a while now, have still produced glorious and admirable thinkers: Richard Feynman, John Wheeler, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan. They were men who not only uncovered and communicated wonderful things about our natural world, but presented themselves as good and courageous and worthy of imitation. Not so much for what they say they believe, but by how they act and the things they achieved.

To the great embarrassment of modern philosophy, philosophy departments, by contrast, are full of chain-smoking neurotics who conclude that none of that is really worthwhile. They have become neither the sort of person you would want to imitate, unless you were feeling particularly resentful about your place in the world, nor uncovering anything much of interest lately.

The historical reason for this failure, perhaps, is that as science gained its great power and popularity starting around the 1500s, philosophy departments became less interested in the well-lived life. That is to say, in ways for individuals to better pursue what is self-evidently good, true, and beautiful. They instead started to imitate the scientific method, out of some jealousy of its growing prestige. What both the modern scientists and the philosophers failed to understand is that what you find in an investigation is partly set by who you are. This has been a much worse disaster for philosophers because that is particularly true if you are investigating the investigator himself.

You could imagine some fantasy world where the project of philosophy did not seek to imitate the scientific project, and instead continued to write, and actually live out, the example of a well-examined life. To talk more about what scientific discoveries had to do with each of us, personally, say. This would have required great humility early on in the universities, which, knowing human nature, was never likely. But if they had stuck to their humble aim of describing how to live well in and through each subsequent age, they would have produced a cohort of people who were extremely effective and admirable.

You see flashes of this, of course. It’s the reason philosophy is still a thing and not a total joke. Despite the bad incentives, a few philosophers have continued to be great. Chesterton, Lewis. Both notably mocked for the simplicity and beauty of their prose. Even when philosophers failed catastrophically, some were at least great enough to be interesting, anyway. Nietzsche. Some of the great philosophers of the last few hundred years have also been extremely prescient, able to predict the future of further material investigations by the scientists. Kierkegaard. In its best form, philosophy is the tip of science, pointing its imagination where it might want to investigate next.

The most abject failure of philosophy, though, is the one that most ardently imitated the scientific method: analytic philosophy. They obsess over the precision of each word, mistaking that precision for meaning, and thereby reducing all of their writing to the trivial and also somehow incomprehensible. They fully mistake philosophy for science and therefore sever it from anything to do with the philosopher. Everything they produce is seemingly devoid of the central questions. Namely: what does this all have to do with me? How does this take me where I want to go? Does this help me see the stars better at night, or properly hear the hum of an air conditioner, or call my mother?

They have at least spared themselves this humbling truth: philosophy is best when it is clumsy poetry. It is the imposition of linguistic violence to help us remember why we care about the things we’re saying and doing at all. In fact, by its very nature it is violent and clumsy, which explains how it can so easily go bad when it badly uses its questioning violence on itself. It attempts to fully undo how you apprehend the world, which if not guided toward a higher way, is the source of nihilism and despair itself.

What’s worse, philosophers of the modern age have been so terrified of being understood, and therefore scrutinized and rejected by the trite well-actuallys of analytic philosophers, that even the ones who had something interesting to say had to veil it in walls of incomprehensible prose, with abusively little attempt to ground it and make it apprehensible by the reader.

All of this combined makes it very difficult for any novice with a burgeoning interest in the good life to even set foot into this mire. Even what is good and true and beautiful in the great modern philosophers is so hidden behind a quagmire of nonsense that novices have almost no chance of getting to it. If they do train themselves over many years to be able to get to the good stuff, they will often ruin themselves and their simple ability to understand that the point of philosophy is to enumerate the good. It is most basically the love of wisdom: love being the primal sensation that being is good, and wisdom being the means by which we use knowledge to make the good manifest in the particulars of our lives. It’s a crime, really, what’s been done; how difficult it is for anyone to write or read good philosophy.

As many people have noticed, philosophy of the ancients is certainly a step up from the current situation, in general. Aristotle and Aquinas and Augustine are really much simpler because there was less of this parasitic mind game going on. They’re only obscure, not by intention, but by the fact that they are ancient. Their language is no longer our language. Their examples are no longer our examples. They are of a different age, and so there’s an accidental veil between them and us. A veil that philosophers of our age are supposed to be tearing open, making their search for the good new and inspiring again.

Given the halls of veils we find ourselves in, you now have people who were acolytes of Sagan and Feynman, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, saying that studying philosophy is a waste of time. Which, on the surface, is a philosophical statement about philosophy itself, and therefore a sort of performative contradiction, and also not very insightful. But I can completely understand why he would be driven to say it, because the philosophy departments, as they stand, are basically a waste of time for young people. They attach themselves to the desire for young people to know something and give them complicated teenaged cynicism as the only answer.

However, the idea that young people should only go into scientific pursuits is also completely absurd. Scientific pursuits can be used to make nuclear bombs, AI to wipe out entire species, or for eugenics. It doesn’t matter who you are or what part of history you’re in: everyone has intuitions for the good and will personally find the limits of that somewhere along the way. Philosophy is supposed to be the tool for handling that. Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking should have had access to better modern philosophers to help them assign correct value to their desire to know more about the physical universe. They got by OK without it, but they were lucky to be so entranced by self-evident beauty. We should have philosophers to question people like them when they’ve gone off the rails in their suppositions, when they’re headed toward dangerous territory, or a dead end, or the destruction of their own vision of the good.

We need philosophers, as evidenced by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s bad philosophy, and many like it. Also as evidenced by the fact that our most beloved technological achievements in the modern world seem to be making us, by and large, miserable and stupid. They are making us wealthy and doing a lot of positive things, but they also seem to be making us depressed and suicidal. Civilizationally suicidal, at times. Correcting all of that would be, in theory, the purview of good philosophy.

Good philosophy doesn’t just have to do with cutting-edge scientists and thought experiments about whether Oppenheimer should create the nuclear bomb or if Sam Altman needs to beat China to AGI, though. It, by and large, is about the human condition in its normalest sense, which even great scientists have to deal with. They have relationships with family, brothers, wives. They have kids, or don’t. Even they need a good philosophy that protects them from the lies of despair and nihilism. They might even need a vigilante to come into their room at night and point a gun at them to make them see the most basic fact of all: being is good.

Philosophy, I think, is the discipline of clearing bad ideas out of the heads of the rest of us, so that we can, in our own way, more clearly focus on what’s good. In some ways, Socrates was an ancient version of that vigilante. He was famously annoying for questioning people about their unexamined beliefs, disrupting what they already thought was good for the possibility of something even better. That process is always painful. Often more so than physical violence. As evidence, what they did to Socrates for trying to do that is kill him.

So the project of the philosopher is a project not only of clarity and simplicity, but of courage. People will always hate you for saying they’re going the wrong direction. Like Socrates, and like the vigilante, the project of the philosopher is to do it anyway. We often misuse that same courage to settle in the in-between and say everything is meaningless. I don’t think that’s really so brave anymore.

Hopefully more of us can wake up to these simple truths. Then maybe more philosophers can do the hard work of helping the rest of us put them into practice in all the details of our lives, in a great defense against the hordes of parasites who try to blind us to that. Maybe we can even do that without needing a gun pointed at our heads.

The uni-context neatly explains a few different things: the attention economy, why everything is so flat and ugly, why all architecture looks the same, why we’re so anxious about all the horrible stuff we see online.

I like the uni-context framework. I like most of philosopher Agnes Callard’s conclusions about it, too. As far as I can tell, though, she does a couple of historical inversions that, if we look at it a little more closely, might better show us what we could do about the “problem” of the uni-context.

The first is that she says the ancient tribal world was not uni-context — that how you behaved in the home or the church or the town square would change depending on the context of that place. This I think conflates two different things: reputation and the context of place. Your behavior across all those places was still constantly being evaluated and stored in your reputation. You had only one reputation. In fact, there was a scrutiny of reputation through time that we moderns would find unbearable.

The difference is that it was confined to the local tribe. But for them, there was nothing outside the tribe. The tribe was the universe. They hardly had a sense of a private inner world away from it. Other tribespeople were dangerous unknowns, not conceptualized as human beings in the same way their kinsmen were. Their world was smaller, and that made adherence to the shared norms easier in some ways, but the uni-context was still utterly pervasive as far as they were concerned.

The distinction between context of place and reputation matters, because what Callard is pointing out is that we are now being evaluated morally by the distant gossip of a much larger tribe, which is basically now the entire planet. The various contexts of place, though, still remains just as it was in the tribal world. If you post something on Substack or Threads or Truth Social, it’s evaluated differently on each. If you post a video from your room, or from church, or from the town square, your behavior is evaluated in that context insofar as the context is disclosed. We still pretty much know how to do context of place. What we’re really re-submerging into is a sense of universal reputation through time, very much like the ancient one, in which everyone is always trying to evaluate how you behave across all contexts.

And with that, we come to one of the central confusions: the concept of privacy is really the new thing, not the uni-context.

She herself says that in the early 1900s, thinkers like Heidegger said the modern world was fragmenting the individual. She thinks this was a misreading. She says they were unifying all these incompatible ideas under one framework. Really, they were unifying under a central idea, but the emerging central idea was that there was no central idea. This is the loss of uni-context from the tribal world. They were largely experiencing the fragmentation of the individual in the wake of print. It’s the same fragmentation we’ve grown so accustomed to, with hard-to-beat benefits like experts and privacy, that makes re-tribalization via global communication technology now feel strange, painful, and maladapted.

Callard says the “techno-determinists” miss why we are drawn to these re-tribalizing technologies in the first place. I think who she means by techno-determinists is the group of thinkers that conglomerated around Marshall McLuhan and his idea that the medium is the message; Walter Ong and several others. Her own answer is that re-tribalizing technologies caught on because of the human hunger for “world openness.” The “techno-determinist” thinkers certainly did understand that and had a lot to say about it. For example, the reason we are so hungry for “world openness” is because we crave tribalization. We want the uni-context. Fundamentally, the evaluation of our reputation by others, as oppressive as that sometimes is, keeps us sane. Privacy is just the freedom to be insane.

The experiment of the modern world toward radical individuality drove us insane in very particular ways, culminating presently. The uni-context is the attempted correction for that, but we are suffering now for lack of a universal moral framework of the good, so in our media we tend to focus on the negative, the flat, the geometric and therefore seemingly universal.

Her other claim is that we don’t have a good way of naming a universal good in the same way we can name universal bad; or maybe more strongly, that there is no universal good. Callard herself later references Aristotle, saying that virtue ethics “naturally has a positivity bias that is precisely the opposite of the bias we have now.” In other words, we actually do have thousands of years of attempts at naming universal goods. In fact, the modern project of radical individualism threw most of that out in favor of freedom of the will. Again, refusal of that inheritance is a purely modern phenomenon.

The new uni-context feels painful because we are still deeply hung over from this project of radical individualism. As she says, we don’t remember the meaning of the word “character.” We’re more obsessed with “identity.” That is specifically because the very project of radical individualism puts all value on the authenticity of one’s identity.

A century or so before Heidegger, Ralph Waldo Emerson took the European philosophies of the liberated individual from a few centuries before him and codified it all into a sort of American religion, which is now worldwide. Emerson writes this shocking poetry about total personal authenticity, even going so far as to say even if what you desire is evil, you should pursue that desire with your whole heart, because the highest good is freedom of the will. “If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”

Emerson is still powerful because his is the direction America decided to go. The idea was that there was no one true moral framework, and so the radically liberated individual seeks the objective framework of science or else his own definition of happiness. Then there was a correction to that via postmodernism, which said, still from the perspective of the radical individual: actually, there are infinite numbers of objective frameworks you could take, and therefore none of them are ultimately true. And now, as we enter the culmination of this American religion, we’re looking for a way beyond. What I’m seeing emerge as an answer is the forgotten counterpart to Emerson: the mostly forgotten American pragmatists like Charles Peirce and William James, who said you can evaluate which values, which kinds of character, work through time, by seeing if the people who live by them become people worth becoming, by their own definition.

We are drawn to a pragmatic reunification into uni-context, Callard’s “world openness,” and yet terrified by the idea of the end of total privacy. So we engage in new sorts of media in the interim. Podcasts are the most symbolic media of our twilight age. They are long oral conversations. Tribalizing. We get to see how these supposed experts respond to questioning of their ideas in real time — if they can play, if they’re cool. We get to see what they look like, what they sound like, and ultimately if they are people we want to imitate. As individuals, we can’t evaluate all possible frameworks anymore. There’s too many and most of them are too negative to bear. But we can watch people act, judged by their entire reputation, and decide over time whether they are people we would want to become.

You still have to deal with the fact that we have a massive group of people still in the expert class of the modernist age: their many contexts, fragmented personalities, and privacy of acting one way in one situation and another way in another. Against them, you have this new and younger cohort of people who are less interested in the supposed facts, and more interested in talking about the good, character, and how those qualities manifest not only facts, but good humor and a good life. The current disharmony is that the short-form expert class continues to play their old game on the new system. They pull clips out of context, report them on the TV news, and mock the people on these podcasts as misinformation or pseudoscience, without understanding that the larger project is to put all ideas on the table, watch them play out, and see which ones are attractive when embodied.

These are growing pains. One of the things holding us back is that the massively successful podcaster of 2026 has to do this trick of performative credulity: every time he has a new guest, he erases the slate, goes back to zero, and talks to the person as if he doesn’t know anything at all. A fine sort of semi-scientific approach, in theory. The problem is, if you’re the podcaster and you’ve talked to hundreds of people and you’re still not forming your own opinions about what ideas you admire based on how the results are playing out in their lives, you’re lying to yourself.

At any rate, yes, we are entering a new uni-context, and it’s painful and awkward, but it’s not totally unique. It is a resurgence of shared morality from the aberration that was modernity. There is no going back to modernity and there is certainly no going back to local tribalism, at least without the total destruction of our society.

What the uni-context is demanding of us now, I think, is to redevelop our conceptions of a universal good. We are shoved into this by the anxiety about our constantly shared concepts of universal bad: the fact that everything you see online is mostly horrible. Universal evil, after all, suggests the existence of its opposite. As we start dipping back out of the modern anomaly of privacy and freedom of the will, what first emerges as a universal is the pain of badness. This is completely logical. It’s easy to discredit good, because good is a positive order that takes effort to maintain, while bad just happens when you do nothing in particular.

By the end, Callard says she doesn’t know if the uni-context is good or bad. I think she’s having an intuition that it could lead to something good. She says, at least, we keep choosing it over and over. I agree with that intuition. You don’t keep choosing something you know is bad. By experiencing a universal recognition of what is bad, with no real way to stop it, we have to redevelop and rediscover a universal conception of what is good, or continue to suffer whatever the consequences are of our continued stupidity. I’m sure we will do both.

It is a confusing and transformative time. If we look back, every transformation in human thought was, before it arose, totally incomprehensible to the people evaluating it from within their age. Keeping that incomprehensibility in mind, we can feel our way into this new synthesis, using clues of history as a guide. We may slowly get over our fevered obsession with personal identity, develop character again, and slowly build a positive vision of the good.

If we do a good job of that, with all of this in mind to prevent us being saccharine and naive, it will be just as viral and interesting as the current obsession with negativity. A global tribe just means the call to good character is more strenuous than ever — everyone on earth is watching you.

Most of what I’ve read, I’ve completely forgotten. Whatever it all was about, it turned out to not be relevant enough to remember.

Occasionally, though, while reading, I will be shocked with sudden insight. My heart rate will rise. I’ll almost not be able to read fast enough. The thinker in question will become a new fixation for me (most recently this was Walker Percy). I’ll go on to read many books’ worth of his material and his influences’ materials. When the frenzy ends, I’ll hopefully have added one or two essays’ worth of worthwhile insight to my worldview.

I’ve noticed a power law: it takes the average prolific and committed writer approximately one lifetime to produce the equivalent of one good essay. It’s impossible for them to know from the outset what tiny fraction of what they write will be worthwhile. If they had set out to directly write their lifetime essays’ worth of material, they will have only produced what is entirely beside the point. A writer has to spend most of his time writing wrong things in order to learn to feel what it’s like to write the right things. That isn’t even to say he will necessarily write the essay that perfectly circumscribes his essay’s worth of material. More than likely it will be dispersed across their corpus like the members of Osiris.

He has to rely on the readers doing a similar power-law navigation to interpret and identify his relevant material. As a reader, the vast majority of what you read is practically useless and irrelevant (as far as you’re concerned), except insofar as the practice of reading itself is your journey of blindly circumscribing your interest. And as you read all of this mostly irrelevant material, you gain, by those seemingly random frenzies of insight, the direction and sense for further insight.

After all the hundreds of books and essays I’ve read, and given how they’ve developed my ability to see what is important about what I read next, I have only distilled from all of that about ten essays’ worth of insights that formulate my entire worldview. That number could be anywhere from five to a hundred, depending on how you define it, or on how often there’s churn: when reaching that new level destroys the previous insights’ value.

Only once they’re in hindsight, those foundational insights are fully digestible in one very human-sized portion: thirty minutes to four hours. A sitting. These things have a natural rhythm to them, based, I’m sure, on our circadian rhythms and gastrointestinal limits and the resulting scale of waxing and waning attention spans. The relative length of sustained attention reveals the relevance and interest of the subject matter: You have a very long and steady attention span for something that’s relevant to you, and a short and sharp attention span for something that’s probably irrelevant to you, but has a small chance of being extremely relevant. Looking at it this way, social media feeds are hypothetically like micro-essays that may, in theory, lead you to a longer essay, which might lead you to a book, which might lead to a change in your foundational beliefs. More on why that doesn’t happen later.

The essay is a better format than the book or short form when you first start looking for these insights, specifically because it fits into a more natural rhythm of human attention. When not stricken by a total immersive interest in a particular writer that lasts for days or weeks, a good thing to do is to read essays and short stories until something really grabs you.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just know what material we needed to read, and be directed straight toward them? This, unfortunately, is impossible, because your ability to even recognize the right information only comes in random explosions of insight after long slogs. This is the Mr. Miyagi wax-on-wax-off idea: you’re not capable of doing the cool karate move until you’ve bored yourself stiff with the basics. Short-form does not cultivate this, but both books and essays do, I find. People are much more likely to finish essays.

At first, I thought I wanted to say that books are too long. That is partly what I’m saying. Even the world’s best books only contain about one essay’s worth of material (although, paradoxically, you will have to experience a lot more than that one book to get at it). They contain much that doesn’t have to do with you, like addressing contemporaries and their research, which is only useful for a frenzied reader on some other bender. Your aim is to somehow become a reader like that, not to seek his summary. Books are usually too long (when in doubt) because nobody knows exactly what is relevant until much later, and so books are themselves partly exploratory. A nonfiction book is written for many audiences simultaneously, so most audiences who read most books would be better served by reading essays of that same author, and then deciding whether they want to invest the time to get to know his entire thought processes that would fortify and complete the ideas.

Books are traditionally valued more than essays because they are beautiful physical objects and status markers. It would be impractical and unsatisfying and wouldn’t even make anyone jealous to fill a library with essay pamphlets. In this way, a little counterintuitively, there is something admirable about the people obsessed with distillation and skimming and summary, but not for the reason they think. They think that the information in a book is entirely propositional, and that once they attain the relevant proposition, they’re done. This is almost never the case. You almost always have to have an experiential understanding of a set of ideas, which is only attained by spending a lot of time with those ideas, and by meshing those ideas into the narrative of your life.

At the same time, the people who say that reading is all about pleasure or the aesthetic, or that it’s an end in itself, are reaching for the intuition outlined above: reading is not directly propositional. But they’re also wrong in the sense that all books, even fiction, should ultimately lead to a better belief that helps you live a better life and be generally better at apprehending the world. That’s why we’re interested in them.

Really, the problem with short-form content is not exactly to do with the medium, although it is true that the medium is also the message. What’s wrong is the belief that puts short form as the central mode of consuming information for modern people (or perhaps the mode of information itself creates the belief; there’s a chicken-and-egg thing going on there). Regardless, the belief behind a short-form addiction is that it suggests by its behavior that you can’t find the right beliefs to assuage the pain of doubt. Peirce called doubt the irritation caused by uncertainty of what to do next. We have a looming cultural moodiness that doubts you can find real truths, so you should just titillate yourself constantly with the false possibility of an inkling of truth (a good definition of “entertainment”), but never pursue anything beyond that, because it won’t be worthy of your prolonged attention.

Now, this in itself is not a true belief. You can, in fact, arrive at true beliefs that work better than false beliefs. The fact that you have yet to arrive at an unassailable set of all-encompassing beliefs is a shortcoming of the human capacity for knowledge acquisition, not a fixed quality of the cosmos itself. The cosmos can be understood, with more and more sets of more and more true beliefs. The problem is we don’t even know enough to identify who knows what we need to know. The obsession with clips and short form is a parasite on the desire to sample thinkers in our search for truth. It’s fine if we want to maximize surface area, which is especially helpful when you’re at the beginning or when in doubt. It’s bad when we think we can’t go beyond the initial search to culminate in an idea that will lead to better flourishing.

The problem is not that modern people have short attention spans. I’m not interested in cynicism in that regard. That most people struggle to find fleshed-out good beliefs is both understandable and itself something that could be assuaged with better beliefs. Some people have experienced those breakthroughs of belief from reading since they were young, so to them it seems self-evident. There’s a much larger group of people who either don’t believe they can arrive at true beliefs, or know it’s vaguely possible, but find books too long to plow through without seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. For them, the transition from short-form to books is too harsh. They aren’t going to do it. Or they’re going to pretend they’re doing it, and really they’re just scanning words without letting them have the possibility of transforming them, just for the sake of having “read” a book. They don’t have the sufficient set of true beliefs that suggests that all this work toward those beliefs would really be worthwhile. You know you have this balance right when reading becomes not just difficult, but difficult and worthwhile. You have to have many, many sufficient beliefs to enter that flow zone with something like James Joyce.

My suggestion to people who want to read more: when in doubt, much more often than we already do, read essays and short stories. Essays by living thinkers you admire, but maybe even better, the great essays of the great thinkers of the past. Start something that you can finish in one sitting. Even though it most likely won’t spark the frenzied search that would make reading huge books feel difficult but worthwhile, with every essay you read, you increase the possibility of that surge happening to you. That is the biological reaction to your doubt being assuaged by the possibility of better beliefs. Most fundamentally, it is the feeling of entropy, represented by doubt, being turned into order, represented by belief.

The circumstantial constraints of the market and object preference have too-long neglected essays. As far as I can tell, the actual niche that Substack occupies is that people want more essays to test the beginnings of true beliefs. Substack solved the problem of making essays marketable, through the subscription model, which has only recently become possible through easy internet payment. I sometimes wonder if the founders really know that they’ve resurrected the natural unit of serious thought and that’s where they should continue to grow.

Still, books are great. Just as with the reader, though, the writer should only write a book when he can’t help but write the book. There are already too many books, because most writers want to publish a book not because they are obsessed with an idea, but because they want the prestige of having published a book. For this reason, most books, especially contemporary ones, are worthless, which still further clouds the ability of daunted readers to navigate this terrain.

Essays are better. They’re less precious. You can make many soft attempts. You can skim the ones that partially grab you, and read deeply into the bibliography of the people who seriously grab you. By reading and writing more essays, a lot more writers and readers will be able to find the essay of their lifetime.

About a month ago, I was sitting on my couch, scrolling through recommended YouTube thumbnails.

I was on the hunt for what my wife jokingly refers to as Boy YouTube. If you don’t know what I mean by that, you can get a good sense by clicking on a Veritasium video and then scrolling through all the subsequent recommendations. She doesn’t like them because of, as she describes it, the monotone narration style and overly abstract subject matter. I usually don’t mind that because I’m just there to nerd out with the dudes.

I have noticed lately, however, that the vibes on Boy YouTube are nearing intolerable. There are more explainer-style video essays than ever before, but vanishingly few of them are weird and messy and wrong in an interesting way. Long gone are the bizarre days of early Vsauce. They don’t necessarily have those very-obvious AI-isms, but an overall crispness that makes me feel, more and more, like I don’t know who’s talking to me and why. There are a few cases where I’m outright sure the script is AI-generated. Even where I can’t be sure, though, there’s just a hard-to-explain, disgusting glaze on everything over there lately. I’ve been indulging less and less.

This particular night, I ran across a Hank Green video. It was about AI, I think. I hadn’t watched Hank Green in a long time, so I clicked. About halfway through I was almost certain I was listening to him read an AI-generated script. Now, you can’t always prove these sorts of things. And it’s not necessarily even the AI as such that I dislike; it’s just that the prose style is not especially fun to listen to. So I turned it off. I didn’t think much of it beyond that.

When the controversy happened in the last week or so, I was not surprised. If you haven’t heard, Hank Green seems to have accidentally left an artifact of his conversation with AI in his script. Specifically: “I appreciate the pushback,” at a moment when no one was giving him pushback. Then, Hank came out and said that particular piece of dialogue was an ad-lib, but admitted that he’s been overly relying on GPT for his research. He thinks that it’s addictive because it activates his “dopamine,” so now he needs to pause his channels, take a step back, and reevaluate how he’s going to handle his work going forward.

A few more wrinkles have emerged since then. One is that the claim that the line was an ad-lib seems unlikely, given the context of the clip. It seems much more likely that it was a forgotten artifact of an earlier conversation he was having with GPT. Can’t prove it either way, but that’s how it seems. People also went in and transcribed his narration and tested it for AI, and they indicate that a lot of it is AI-generated, for whatever that’s worth.

But I don’t want to participate in some weird witch hunt here. Hank seems contrite, and the fact is, most of us are using AI more than we would readily admit in public. Most of us think we can spot bad-faith uses in other people, but that we uniquely (but privately) know how to use AI correctly.

The reason AI is so tempting to use is exactly because it is not, as some people claim, stupid and useless. It will probably be remembered as a great transformation in human cognition, just as the alphabet and the printing press were before it. Maybe more than those tools, though, it tends to encroach violently on our ability to distinguish where we begin and it ends. If you’re the sort of person who thinks you know how to wield AI without it corrupting or humiliating you, you are probably not that person.

Take my own admission of guilt as an example: I’ve been writing for a long time. I handwrite every day. I am obsessed with language. I like crafting sentences, and how crafting them transforms how I think about those sentences, and therefore transform me. I’ve experienced that probably millions of times by now. Writing is just how I think, and so I’m not really tempted to use AI prose. However, I am aware that thousands of people sometimes read these dumb little essays, and will sometimes come after me for what I say. So, I am beyond tempted to pop these into Claude to verify my facts. Really, to make me feel safe. Because, at least from my limited perspective, the stakes feel high. I have to admit to you that if that behavior is not wrong, it is at least a dangerous line to walk.

I wrote a piece called “We Know You’re Using AI,” in which I said, based on a text I received from a family member, that using AI causes a phenomenon someone later named LLMbarrassment: when you detect that someone is using AI, but you don’t want to tell them because it would embarrass them. So you’re stuck in a catch-22 where you socially can’t reveal that you know you’re actually talking to ChatGPT. A lot of people thought I was saying it should be embarrassing, or that I was mocking any and all AI use. That’s not what I meant. I was just observing that in obvious copy-and-paste instances it just is embarrassing. That reflexive embarrassment and desire to hide it reveals the bad motivations of the user, despite whatever they say explicitly.

What we still have to work out is: at what level can we even use these tools without them corrupting us? It’s probably not none. It’s also probably not any and all usage. What is most surprising to me is that the use that I feel is aligned and good is actually far more limited than I would’ve thought.

Nothing is “just” a tool. The tool also wields you. The One Ring is a good symbol for all technology because it corrupts us by its very purpose: concealing our deepest vulnerabilities. It gives us the power to transmute the fear of vulnerability into control of ourselves and others. Given that, if I look at myself honestly… Well, I’m using the power of this tool to try to control how people who might disagree with my work will react. I’m hiding my own squishy humanity, my ignorance. By doing that, I’m really only hurting myself. Like Hank and probably many other people, I am also very likely to convince myself that I have a total handle on it. I alone know how to use it without it corrupting me. I disclose my own hypocrisy by the mere fact that I would be embarrassed if you saw an open chat window with an essay in it.

Everyone thinks they can use the power of the ring for good. They always start by protecting the “right” kinds of vulnerability. Their family, their home, their reputation. It always, given a long enough time frame, corrupts. So the wisest people know they probably shouldn’t even touch the ring, especially if they’re already powerful.

Hank Green is a powerful person. He has a lot of cultural pull and maybe he feels that could go away with a factual slip. He himself said he’s under a lot of pressure, that he’s addicted to the dopamine these tools give him. By that admission, he shows that he knows his usage is wrong. He’s just using very modern language (dopamine) to indicate why he thinks that.

Dopamine, for a lot of brainy online people, is the closest they will come to the concept of sin. We don’t like those antiquated words anymore. But the problem with the dopamine metaphor is that it’s only applicable on the chemical level. It’s not applicable on the level of social responsibility, and it’s no good at solving at the level of pattern. The concept of sin, on the other hand, solves for a much larger pattern, which also encompasses whatever chemicals you have going on in your brain.

Hank is saying: I’ve made a mistake, and I need to stop making videos for now, because I’ve breached the trust of the viewer. But at the same time, he’s also saying: I’m not really responsible for the chemicals these tools induce in me. That’s where the dopamine metaphor fails. Hank Green alone is responsible for how he uses his tools, no matter how they make him feel. The reason nobody wants to say that is because once you try to take responsibility for everything you do, you realize that it’s impossible to be good.

Going back to the One Ring: the only person capable of wielding the ring in order to destroy it, Frodo, is the person humble enough to admit that he can’t. He’s a hobbit. He has no power to begin with. So, paradoxically, he’s able to carry it. But even he still fails. The reason the story is so salient is that it really understands the near-impossibility of the task.

I have a lot of sympathy for Hank and for the pressure he’s under. He’s like Boromir: he wants to protect Gondor; his career. That career feeds his family. It also does a lot of good, and maybe even guards parts of the world from various sorts of evils. He could feel very justified in using the power of the machine, and therefore breaching trust with his audience, because of all the good it does otherwise. Until one day when he realizes it has gone too far when he gets caught purring over his precious.

Which is all to say: none of us are likely to use this tool very wisely. Any tool that vastly increases our power to manipulate the world and each other is going to corrupt most people. Practically everyone. Even those of us who never personally touch the tool —maybe especially those people because they will be more easily manipulated by AI-powered manipulators. Either way, the less we realize that we have no chance, the less humility we have, the less likely we are to be the sort of person who can do what is right.

I wrote “We Know You’re Using AI” right before the Pangram integration with Substack, and before the AI witch hunt really hit. Since then, many of us are sneering and pretending that these machines aren’t powerful, useful, and therefore very tempting to use. None of that is what I was saying.

It’s very powerful and I can’t deny that. I can take long walks and have AI listen to me and transcribe my voice into word-for-word text. I no longer have to spend ten hours clearing out the ums and errs in my notes. But somewhere along the way that is incredibly hard for me to distinguish, I start to cross the threshold where the tool is no longer helping me further express my humanity, but to hide it.

To establish new social norms, there will be many more scapegoats. So the Hank thing is predictable, but maybe not entirely proportional. His response was at least partly honesty and contrition. If we continue to witch-hunt and punish people for honesty, all of us will be more and more incentivized to hide the fact that we alone think we know how to use these tools right, which only pushes us further into the shadows.

It’s just a tool. One of those sayings that’s unhelpfully true. Atomic bombs are just a tool. As it turns out, they can’t be used at all, because their character as tools alone assures mutual destruction. To the extent AI is like that, I actually do not know. It, after all, sources every piece of evidence to defend any flawed and fallen position we already want to hold.

So maybe the more productive thing is to just accept how stupid and evil we really are. Only wear the tool around our neck when it wouldn’t be shameful for others to see it there. To accept, also, that we will all still make mistakes and overstep constantly.

As people living in history and almost certainly not at the end of history, we should aspire to be one of those few, and not resign ourselves to hurrying our own destruction and the loss of the ability to trust each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This movie is going to be a trick.

The trick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zeus’s law

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparent magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The return of the king

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparent modernity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because that person is a Child of God in disguise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading is hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Porn is easy.

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

• All babies are illogical.

• Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.

• Illogical persons are despised.

Therefore:

• Babies cannot manage crocodiles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll give you another dumb example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s an easy one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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