I hope this finds you well.

That phrase struck me as funny this morning. It’s what we call a dead metaphor, in that the sensation it was once meant to evoke is now so tired that it no longer evokes anything beyond the assemblage of sounds.

It sounds like something a certain sort of person would say. It’s easy to reach for when what you really want to express is, for example, “I am beginning an email!” If you examined the feeling you’re expressing through “I hope this finds you well,” and realized that what you were really saying is “Eh-hem… I’m beginning this email!” you would probably just get on to what it is you’re trying to say.

I hope this finds you well.

It sounds like a phrase invented in the times when far away meant months of horses and hunger and weariness, and perhaps never seeing that person again. As if to say: wherever you are in the world, I’m thinking of you. I’m yearning for your return. I hope that, at whatever point in your adventure you’ve stopped to sit down and read my letter, you are well and you are fed. I hope no highway bandits robbed you. I wonder if you are someplace good in the world that I can only imagine. Please describe it.

My wife and I were at karaoke at the nearby brewery, talking to the superintendent of the school district. She was complaining that she now gets a lot of AI-generated emails from parents. They usually, she joked, start with “I hope this finds you well.” I wrote that as an anecdote in one of my pieces, “We Know You’re Using AI,” and it seemed to ruffle some feathers among people who are fond of using the phrase to open their emails.

It harks to the idea of yearning for your home, or writing to someone who is far away from theirs. We invoke some unexamined sense of olden days because in reality, we feel homeless of places like a true home. We no longer have a shire we would kill to get back to. So, if anything, “I hope this finds you well” almost feels like a taunt. I hope you’re enjoying your fourth coffee and your horrible posture, Sharon. I have an invoice for you.

We put a lot of conspicuous effort into hiding from ourselves the fact that we still very much occupy a place, and do rituals in that place, and those inform most of who we are and what we value. We don’t like thinking about what we look like when we’re on the computer; what it is we do all day, seen from the outside. There’s very little romance in that.

The other day, I was sitting on the couch arguing with someone on Substack, and my wife looked up at me and said, “Careful. You’re hunching over that thing like a turkey.” She was implying that, for one, my posture was bad. Also, just generally, what I was doing, and what I looked like while I was doing it, was unsexy. I was indulging in wrath over something dumb with a stranger, while she was sitting there waiting for me and we were about to have dinner.

I didn’t want attention called to the fact that a ritual I’m performing a lot of my day is an ugly one that also doesn’t cultivate home. I work damn hard to not know what I look like when I’m doing what I’m doing so as to better focus on what I’m doing. Really though, over time, it informs exponentially more about what I believe and think than whatever it is I’m typing to the idiot in my comments. These are uncomfortable truths.

So I can understand why people like the postmodern line: religious rituals are something only peasants could do unselfconsciously, long ago. There’s no way you can truly believe the rituals they performed in their old-fashioned church. You’re just doing a self-conscious trad larp. We live in too much of a technological/democratic/scientific world. People in the medieval era couldn’t know to believe anything else. They were too provincial, too local. They had no choice but to go to church and say the prayers and get on their knees. They weren’t like us, who can go off into cyberspace from the comfort of our toilet.

This is an understandable objection. But it’s wrong, because the turkey neck typing thing is still a ritual. I’m in a place. I’m on the couch. I’m with my wife. I have a computer on my lap. I’m even kinda bowing. I’m only imagining I’m in a different place in my head, which makes what I’m actually doing physically ugly. The postmodern still has embodied rituals. You can’t not. Ritual precedes thought. It already did, in the case of your toilet nihilism.

We are just as provincial as our peasant forebears. We’re just a lot more dangerous, because we think we are lost kings in wastelands, in meaningless universes, in seas of stars. When in reality, it’s the rituals we perform, and the state of our souls, that we’re actually perceiving as meaningless and then projecting out into the cosmos.

Solving the postmodern problem is as easy (and as hard) as changing your habitual rituals. There’s an enormous amount of courage required here, unique to the postmodern age, perhaps. You have to be willing to accept how you seem to those who really see you as an indication of the efficacy of your rituals. You have to deny the part of you that wants to project your soul, mangled as it is by its attempted disembodiedness, onto the world and pronounce it odd and broken. Instead, crack yourself open, even just one percent, to the notion that perhaps you are the one that’s broken. That if you just told your intellect to shut the hell up for a second, and acted out what you know to be the better thing, your intellect would eventually come along for the ride.

I hope this finds you well.

I’m writing to you from Jackson, Louisiana, the town I was born in, which resides in East Feliciana Parish. Louisiana calls its counties parishes, a word it kept for the church districts from its letter-writing days. I’m the chair of the beautification committee. My wife is the president of the Feliciana Theater Project. I want my kids to live here, and I hope they might benefit from what we build and the relationships we cultivate. I go to Mass, and I like my friend’s kids. One of them has a brown bowl cut and likes to talk during the homily and so we call her Coconut Head.

The internet is part of my work, and truly part of my ability to enrich my soul with mentors and wisdom and literature. It is also, however, a great, dangerous room of filing cabinets. An archive of every negative thought coming out of every person on the planet’s asshole, 24/7. An easy way to know when I’m participating in the second thing and not the first is when my wife catches me hunched over and muttering to myself, and says to me, “Ew.” Then I know to force myself to get up and go do something else.

There is no crisis in the West from loss of ritual. It’s impossible to not have rituals. As always, there is only a crisis of the rituals that work. It is perhaps only now possible to not know that you are doing rituals, and therefore be deeply protected from realizing how stupid and destructive your rituals are.

I’m already doing a bunch of weird rituals, I might as well do the ones of the people I most admire. If you do that, your ability to admire the right people will increase, and your ability to imitate the rituals of those better people will also increase. I happen to believe that will lead you the right way well enough, without my having to guess at where you’ll end up.

The internet is not a parish. It’s an archive. A warehouse, a room full of indexed files and resources. You cannot live here. You must live in the parish you are. And the parish where you are needs you, wherever it is.

I hope this finds you well.

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Warren Buffett is perhaps the least magnificent rich guy in history.

This is to say nothing of his other virtues: thriftiness, industriousness, intelligence, and so on. I’m sure he’s a nice guy. But he is decidedly not magnificent. In fact, he is purposefully not magnificent. He’s enriched himself into an ahistorical demigod while strictly seeming a doddering boomer, eating McDonald’s and reading the newspaper for eight hours a day or whatever he says he does. He’s built or invented no great public work with his name on it. He desires to imbue nothing with his own image except funneling his pile of accumulated wealth into “philanthropy,” which just amounts to emptying his bank account in the name of a conveniently intangible and distant “good cause.” This is generous, but not magnificent. He carefully makes no claims about what he thinks is good, true, or beautiful. He has no artistic protégés.

This is a perfect defense mechanism for the 20th century, and he’s a man of his time. The industrious American from last century needs to believe that as long as you work hard and save your money, you too can become fabulously wealthy. By risking no vulgarity in spending, he protects himself from the danger of the public consensus that his wealth is a grotesquely self-sustaining phenomenon, a vulgarity in itself, gotten by luck and circumstance and talents of birth. He must act like a peasant, to prove to the peasants that if they could just be as thrifty and hard-working, they too could be kings in rags. That is the very clever defense mechanism for Buffett’s public image. Also, it’s hideously ugly.

It’s understandable, though. Since the turn of the last century, people have had to deal with extreme new levels of public, global wealth. Now, of course, Pareto distributions always existed. Clan chiefs are buried with all of the clan’s gold. This pattern is deep and everywhere. The sun in our solar system has almost all the matter. The city has almost all the people in any given area. And so on. But the new mass media starting in the 1950s made wealth inequality very uncomfortably public. A very tiny minority of people accumulate all the wealth, thanks to these very predictable mathematical feedback loops, which behave suspeiciously as if orchestrated by an cabal of the rich, and which the rest of us all must endlessly spectate, green with envy.

For a bright, short stint near the beginning of the modern economic explosion, you have what we now call “The Gilded Age,” which is that time when the Titans of Industry built all those Art Deco buildings, libraries, and colleges. Magnificence “peaked” here, but that was more like a convergence of forces with different trajectories. Wealth was exploding, funding a historic crest of otherwise declining magnificence. Mark Twain coined the term “Gilded Age” as satire, as in a layer of gold, covering rot. Magnificence risks vulgarity and modern scorn by its mere glamour, drawing too much attention to disparities in wealth, and so rich modern men slowly unlearned it as we marched into the 20th century.

In general, we’ve had a terrible time dealing with the idea of visible global industrial wealth, psychologically and culturally. Some try to explain it away with merit: those at the top must deserve it. Others try to explain it away with class warfare, but then struggle to make sense of all the terrible poverty and violence they cause by “fixing” it. Buffett’s answer is at least a relatively stable one. By acting like a person who doesn’t have money, he’s allowed to keep his money and we’re allowed to think we are just him in the past. But this is an older, boomer-y defense mechanism. People aren’t buying it so much anymore. We’re feeling around for a new story. What else could we do to protect ourselves from the unbreakable math of runaway wealth accumulation, the resulting envious masses, all of which is as numerically inevitable as the orbit of Saturn?

Here’s a new idea based on an old idea: the virtue of magnificence.

Aristotle gave us the word. It’s been bastardized to merely mean “very neat indeed,” but originally it meant “greatness that fits.” Appropriate acts of enormous spending in the public sphere. It’s different from generosity. Anybody can be generous. Magnificence is specifically when rich people spend big money on public things that are tasteful and good.

Aristotle knew that every virtue is a mean between two vices. The vice on one side of magnificence is your Warren Buffetts: stinginess, smallness, pettiness, lack of vision. On the other end, the vice is vulgarity: selfish displays of wealth meant to show off the power of the spender. The appeal of Donald Trump’s vulgarity, come to think of it, is an overcorrection for the implicit lie of old-school liberals like Warren Buffett: you can nickel and dime your way into billionairehood, or at least to upper-middlehood. Trump’s whole vibe screams, no, that’s a scam. You’re never going to become rich like me. But I’m the sort of guy who’s at least rich in the way that poor people want to be rich. That’s to say, honest.

The reason we swing so wildly between these two extremes is because balanced magnificence is not a liberal virtue. Magnificence suggests that your wealth isn’t yours. In a liberal state, you are sovereign only over yourself, so the acceptable mode of magnificence can only be an extreme of either of its vices. The deeper truth is that if you are lucky or talented or hard-working enough to become one of the people who attains runaway wealth, you gain a new responsibility and its associated virtue that only exists in your tax bracket.

If you’re rich, you are obligated to develop taste for spending fabulously. You are meant to identify projects and protégés of beauty and public good: not monuments to yourself, but also not rent-seeking, uninspired office buildings meant to glorify nothing but your bank account. They should be projects and people of lasting beauty. The more the beauty elevates everyone, and the longer it lasts, the more magnificent you become, and the more honor you receive, which can last generations. If you fail to develop your virtue of magnificence, if you nickel and dime the construction of whatever you’re investing in, you fail to generate many times the value of the bare resources deployed, which negatively compounds over time. You actively hurt the people who have to live with your manifest ugliness day to day.

A lot has suddenly changed in the last 100 years, which contributes to our collective confusion about this simple, ancient idea. We stupidly don’t understand the value, even the brute economic value, of beauty. At the same time, we’re dealing with amounts of money we’ve never seen before as a species. That still doesn’t change the nature of the virtues that we’re working with, but it does make the sliding scales more sensitive. It also gives more opportunities to ideologues who manipulate our vices (typically envy) to get us to participate in “resistance” that hurts everyone.

We, for example, developed copyright and intellectual property and patent laws shortly before the rise of global economics. As it turns out, being able to patent and protect a mere idea, rather than invest in a physical creation in the world, encourages industrialists and artists to become obsessed with abstract and replicable forms, which leads to products that are extremely temporary and have no lasting value as permanent objects.

We’ve gotten very used to the patent world, each of us thinking we will one day become a famous screenwriter or inventor, so we will resist their destruction. One potential upside I see of AI: by making nearly any software or IP reverse-engineerable, it may bring the practical, if not legal, death of IP culture. You may feel it: A vacuum is forming for where to put our ambition and our visions and our creativity. What’s still missing is a practical patronage model to funnel our desire for magnificence.

Now, there are still institutional grants for geniuses and artists here and there, but your average suburban millionaire has no local, personal place to put his generosity besides faraway “good causes” run by people he doesn’t know or trust. A lot of his money is sitting useless in tax shelters at this very moment. He has no way to show off his taste and therefore no reason to develop it. This has been a brutal loss for culture, especially locally: patronage of artists and local public buildings was an excellent way for rich people to show off their magnificence. They got to partly choose and foster generational talents, geniuses, to make these objects. The geniuses get to focus on creating without having to bend to mob rule.

IP culture forces most of us to be not only an artist but also our own marketer and business person. No matter how talented we ever get at this, we’re still always having to make sure that we appeal to mass sensibilities. It lowers the beauty of our outputs because what is popular is not always what is beautiful. You sometimes need to create things that people are uncomfortable with for a short period of time, but that change the way people see things over a long period of time. Some modern films have managed to do this with the quasi-patronage system of the studios, but those are now slowly failing in the streaming wars.

I have also known a few people, and I’ve heard of many more, who have been funded by that shadowy cabals of billionaires. This is a sort of patronage system, but also a suboptimal one. The most representative of this type of billionaire is Peter Thiel, and it seems to me that what he is trying to get out of patronage is a return on his investment. Specifically, he’s trying to maximize forming global “mimetic” worldviews for the greatest amount of personal leverage. He (reportedly) forbids his protégés from talking about certain topics. They themselves tend to keep their funding secret. Worse, to stay funded, they still have to hit certain audience numbers to remain relevant and go viral. This is a very short-sighted and cynical way of doing patronage. It has all of the downsides of mass appeal media and none of the upsides of patronage. The only thing you really get out of it is more power for Thiel and short-term financial security for the thinker. We, the public, get almost nothing, except manipulated.

Patronage is not about a return on investment. That’s just venture capital. Patronage is about leaving public artifacts of beauty to elevate the consciousness of everyone. Making genius more numerous, but also making ordinary life in the commons more enjoyable.

To the creative and ambitious: Stop trying to be like Warren Buffett. Rich is something that happens to the lucky, the elite, the talented, and the exceptionally hard-working. Those people never needed to watch inspirational YouTube videos to achieve that. Seek instead to create beauty and let the cards fall where they may.

To those with some money: patronize the people and projects you believe are beautiful. Develop taste, or fall into vice. Build lasting monuments. Become magnificent.

You can’t take it with you.

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If you were a journalist living in the 1960s, I could give you a great headline: The Countercultural Movement That Wasn’t.

You write: I know you see all the hippies on TV and in the movies, talking about the free love in the Age of Aquarius. The fact remains: statistically, it is still the 1950s. Almost everyone goes to church. A fleeting fraction of people identify as having no religion. Although there are some indications that girls are running off into the woods and you can go with them, it’s really more style than substance.

People would eat that up. Some were vaguely excited by hippies, some feared them, but almost nobody was them. It would have been reassuring to most, or at least grabby as an headline, that their whole deal didn’t bear out in the numbers.

We now know that the fervor of that tiny minority changed the air quality forever. It imbued itself in the clothes and the hair. Even the quality of film is somehow steeped in the sensation. If you look at a picture of someone in the 1960s, you know, in a way that the person in the picture could never understand, that this person is in the 1960s. Everything about what you’re seeing somehow belies its quality. It is the water he is swimming in, and he has no contrast or perspective to see it about himself. What you can see, as his light refracts into the different water of your time, reveals all the psychological implications, and even where things were headed.

In our time, there’s a similar thing going on, in the opposite direction. Young people are interested in traditional religion. They are returning to the Mass and having adult baptisms at record rates.

We’re writing the requisite articles: Hey, actually, the revival’s not in the data. It doesn’t bear out in the numbers. Keep calm and carry on, everyone. Yes, there are lines down the street to go to Mass in New York City, and France, and all over the Western world. Gen Z’s are veiling at the Mass and looking for a husband on social media, but that’s more LARP than touch grass. Head counts are not meaningfully rising. In fact, the only truly growing denominations are the ones that dovetail most elegantly into the remains of the counterculture.

You can nitpick with this if you like. Ross Douthat explained it best: there can be both a revival and a departure happening at the same time. If you flatten all of that into one number, it fails to capture exactly what’s going on. His is, sensibly, more representative — a more appropriate use of two numbers when one number is not capturing the vibe.

Either way, I’m not impressed. In the context of sociology, there are endless ways to stop searching for numbers once you’ve reached the answer that you’re looking for. What’s always most relevant is what you’re looking for and why. What is the vibe of our time? Who gets to decide that? Historically, it’s the disaffected young men who seed where everyone heads next. It doesn’t take many, either. That hardly matters. With this sort of thing, it does often boil down to: if you know, you know. And if you don’t, you don’t.

All I know is that something strange happened to me: I was reading Peter Singer ten years ago and donating a large chunk of my meager income to Effective Altruism. I was a rationalist, a materialist, trying to be Less Wrong, as it were. So you can imagine my surprise, as much as anybody else, that ten years later I find myself a Catholic, married, child on the way, living in a small parish with many close friends. There is the sensation among us that something is happening.

We know a young couple, for example, lawyers, who have similarly moved into an old house built in the 1800s with 15-foot ceilings. They’re renovating it while also having a child. We met them and a few like them in our OCIA class, which are experiencing record numbers across the country. We notice that younger people are generally more reverent than the older people. They want to sing in Latin and Greek. Our parish has a young priest who is putting several million dollars into making the church more traditional, like it was before the avant-garde, asymmetrical architectural movements, implemented in the Catholic Church by some bad interpretations of the Second Vatican Council in the 70s and 80s. We’re even putting in an organ, a real organ, without electronics.

The fact that overall head counts are still decreasing does not pertain to this, exactly. But it also doesn’t necessarily drive me to want to squabble about the data — to make Douthat’s finer point. It would be too much in the mode that I left behind: Wanting to maximize, with the greatest numbers, what I have decided is the correct ontological orientation. Everybody who isn’t convinced that bugs are more important than people already knows the limits of data. Sure, it missed the obvious nuance: engagement, average age, and momentum over sheer numbers. I still say, let them think whatever they want.

What started in the ‘60s is still very much the dominant cultural tide in the world. That can be true, while also recognizig that a 60-year-old phenomenon maybe doesn’t have as much life left in it as a new one. You could even speculate that new one, perhaps, is pushing out the hangers-on at an even faster rate; the spiritual-but-not-religious cradle Catholics are leaving at the arrival of the weirdly intense trads, and now their kids aren’t getting baptized, either. There’s the data in a more flattering light, if you like. That’s still not going to be a very convincing story to the overwhelming majority of people who believe progress is inevitably the liberation of the individual from all social and familial ties.

Unlike some of the more radically “trad,” I don’t pretend to have given up on the idea that history is a progression, either. I just don’t claim to know what constitutes “progress.” I just personally no longer want to live in a world where I am totally free to go and do whatever I want. The vibe shift I’m experiencing is that the heaviness of being is not only bearable, but preferred.

As people are suffering from their atomization and loneliness in the peak of abstraction, most of them are still hoping that the next technological breakthrough will cure them of its disease. Slowly, however, a certain small, more desperate cohort seems to be giving up on that idea altogether and choosing to bind themselves to spouses, and to children, and to communities and churches.

I see them doing that in my real life. When we meet each other, and shake hands, and talk about the YouTube videos we watched and the books we read that led us to these places. There’s some kind of understanding between us. You feel it too. Yes. Something seems to be going on.

When I see the headlines that tell me that my life is not bearing out in the numbers, part of me wants to fight them. There are two numbers, not just one, you see. But maybe then they tell me there are actually five numbers. Really, there are as many numbers as you need to be right. One of us must be like the suit-wearing, conservative father of four in 1967 who had no idea what was about to happen to his children. Both think it’s the other. Mostly, though, I just feel that that’s fine. Think what you like. It’s not a revival. It’s a reversion. Why not?

Maybe we climbed too high along a single axis, and now we have to climb back down a little, into each other and with each other. Get a little bit more provincial and agrarian. When we look back in 60 years, we will see how the light looks from there and how our new Age of Aquinas actually played out.

Not to stupefy ourselves back to the Dark Ages, but to gather who and what is necessary to go higher.

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I was administered an IQ test when I was a kid. All I can remember is a nice lady in a green room who asked me how far I thought China was from here. I guessed four thousand miles. I remembered America was two thousand miles across and on a map it seemed like China was about two of those away. Wrong. But she seemed impressed, anyway.

In some ways, IQ as a concept is obvious to the point of tautology. If I sit you down and give you an abstract goal, say, to do well on this test, that would be an indication of your ability to achieve any abstract goal, writ large. I mean, obviously. Turns out, that’s roughly g, or general intelligence. It’s the most stable, replicable, and useful measure that psychology has ever produced.

Despite that clarity, or perhaps because of that, it is rejected, despised, feared, misunderstood, weaponized, and willfully contorted by public perception. We redefine it over and over with nice-sounding bullshit like EQ, trying to escape its cold number. In the shadows, it is inflated beyond what it could possibly indicate, like the size of your soul. To assuage, people claim that there must be another, more mysterious sort of intelligence. You could say, oh, well, I’m emotionally intelligent, or I have common sense, but those are just another means to achieve an abstract goal. If they work, then they load on g, which is, again, merely your ability to achieve a measurable goal through different means.

Then there’s the IQ fanatics, who believe that because so much of what we aim to do loads on this one measure, that must mean the measure itself somehow constitutes consciousness, or what it means to be a person, or intrinsic worth. This is an even dumber mistake than the former, made obvious if you’ve ever spent any time with people with extremely high IQ. They are impressive, yes. Fast, facile. Physically well constituted, even. You’ll also notice that they’re not obviously more human. In fact, the great danger is taking too much pride in IQ and using it for mere personal gain, and not, as it were, giving it away.

The extreme: Ted Kaczynski. Genius IQ, psychotic and resentful. Wants to be elevated above others because of his IQ, becomes the unabomber. Then you have your Albert Einsteins, your Mozarts, who, for whatever reason, develop a commensurate ability to be childlike as a counterbalance to their extraordinary powers, grateful toward the social systems that allowed them to exist, humble enough to work slowly from within a structure set up by people dumber than them. High IQ is only materially useful over multiple generations when its products are given back to the tribe as a gift. Understood this way, IQ isn’t really a phenomenon of one individual, but is a group-level pattern of bets.

Still though, IQ is a scary thing. I can’t quite get over it. It’s so judgmental. You can even get a good sense of someone’s IQ with a quick assessment, with only a small margin of error. Test something like their vocabulary, or how well they can rotate shapes in their head, and there you go. It terrifies, I think, modern individuals who want to believe we are in charge of our own destiny and can “grow” infinitely. We all want to be outliers, the Chosen One. We also hate when it implies certain groups having different average IQs, or whatever other radioactive implication.

IQ is the Logos of the great cult of the modern day. We’ve named our great machines, after all, artificial intelligence. We pride ourselves above all on our score (which most of us are too afraid to measure), and yet fret and pray about the day AGI comes along and renders even the mightiest of our IQ scores puny by orders of magnitude. But already, these things score better on our most well-devised IQ tests than almost anyone. We’re basically just standing around, waiting to see what that means.

Now, I know what it means as little as anybody. But a strange assumption is that you can scale a measure like IQ linearly outside of human relationships without it losing meaning or efficacy, or at least accumulating diminishing returns. High IQ seems to be a contextual interpersonal phenomena, a product of the very tension between society and rebellion. By definition, rare. It cannot become a universal without defeating itself. Even within the animal kingdom, humans aren’t the smartest because we have the most grey matter of all time, but because we developed complex interdependent language systems and then learned to make social sacrifices. I get no sense of what IQ means without what the holder is using his big brains to do and for whom.

An IQ test, converging as it does so perfectly on g, still does not actually tell you all this interplay that gives rise to exceptional human intelligence. Nor does it tell you what that human intelligence is aimed at. It’s like a statistical analysis that can intake a quarter of a second of Mozart and identify it as Mozart. That is impressive, but it doesn’t tell you what gives rise to Mozart or what Mozart is for. In fact, it can give a dangerous illusion of mastery of Mozart and tempt you to do away with anything but piano fingers. The emissary, in McGilchrist’s terms, tries to become the master. The emissary loves abstractions that give him power, the master prefers ideals like virtue and beauty, which we’ve stupidly lost a taste for due to their immeasurability.

By naming g, we feel like we have a grasp of it, as it converges around this one handy number. We easily succumb to the delusion that the abstraction means everything that what it is abstracted from means. Of course, it doesn’t. IQ is just a snapshot of many converging phenomena, some of which are “computational power” but much of which is vast combinations of known and unknown histories of ancestral telos and unconscious pantheons of psychologized gods that deem a multiple-choice test worth enormous cognitive strain. The problem is not that IQ is wrong, it’s only when we assume that the snapshot is the thing.

This is the motivation of the honorable, but usually technically incorrect, impulse to discredit IQ as a measure. Nassim Taleb, for example, tries to prove statistically that it reliably measures unintelligence but not high intelligence. Anywhere above average it fades into noise. In cases like lifetime earnings, for example, the top 1% of earners score slightly worse on IQ than the ones just below them. But money is not the only thing about IQ. There are scientific and creative benefits all the way up the scale, as the top .1% of scorers win more nobel prizes and such than do the top 1%. As long as you’re still within the relational interplay of other people, there seems to be only a soft upper limit to how meaningfully smart you can get.

Sociologists and psychologists have famously failed to do anything to reliably raise the intelligence of individuals, too. Study and practice only make you better at what you study and practice, but don’t raise g. There are some ecological indications that it can be raised across populations. The Flynn effect over the 20th century might be attributable to better nutrition, or to more years of schooling. Both seem to be plausible from the data. Genetics, certainly, is a strong factor. But there are also things going on at a much larger scale that confound the measurers of IQ, namely that if you try to optimize for IQ through the measurement of IQ, you will only do damage to your ability to produce exceptional IQs. We’ve had, for example, far fewer geniuses over the last 100 years or so, just as measures of IQ have become standardized. You’d assume the opposite would happen after the discovery of a measure as stable and useful as g. Really, you’d hope it would trigger a renaissance of genius. It didn’t.

After all, people with exceptionally high IQs have always emerged, somehow, from normal people. In fact, people with exceptionally high IQs might even be dangerous to the well-being of general populations. They are only tolerated and provided for as an anomaly because they occasionally produce something exceptional. The family lines of Shakespeare and Joyce are not only gone, but perhaps destroyed by their own generational genius. They can at least make up for it by being a father to us all, spiritually. A great sacrifice of exception that we cannot make the general rule without killing ourselves.

Fixation on the IQ of a single individual makes us fail to notice and appreciate these larger patterns that are not causal in only one direction: the human animal quickly developed a high IQ much faster than selective pressure on genetics would seem to indicate is possible — we shape the environment that shapes us, the patterns of culture put pressure on our genes. From Levin’s recent work, even in individual bodies, patterns above the genome select what the genome builds. This is not something that suddenly ended, so your “genetics” is not the only limit on your potential for transformation, nor your children’s, just like it obviously didn’t for our ancestors. The felt limits are likely more socio-spiritual than wetware.

Too much obsession with high IQ also devalues normal experience and ordinary people. It plays this game of trying to optimize for outliers, which is disruptive for the very stablity that gives rise to outliers, and so is also self-defeating. Now measurable in the 21st century: the reverse Flynn effect. A culture obsessed with everyone being a eccentric genius contributes to lower familial stability, for example, paradoxically lessening the chance of fostering an exceptional outlier here and there.

I wanted to be one of these outliers, but even in the microcosm of my being, I find that whatever genius tendencies I may have are much more likely to emerge when going about living an ordinary life. If not in myself, then maybe in my children, or in their children.

IQ, in this way, is too short-term a time horizon to build a society around. It’s an interesting measure, and it’s probably most useful when measuring diminished intelligence, so we can better accommodate those people. But no truly great outlier would need a test to confirm his outlier status. The numbers provide no theory of true transformation, which is the minimum required of greatness: geniuses will always be those few who confound and reshape measurement trends that the rest of us later assume to be inevitable. Even though IQ may be quite predictive of those extremes in hindsight, contrary to Taleb’s thesis, knowing it is much less useful toward achievements of true genius, affirming his intuitions.

On top of that, artificial intelligence might be about to fully commoditize intelligence. As the apotheosis of the IQ-as-religion worldview, it will either be the end of what makes us human, or much more likely, clearly reveal what exactly we are besides intelligence.

Strangely, now is the best time ever in human history to quit optimizing for IQ, in ourselves and in our children. If commoditized with no subsequent apolocapyse, it was perhaps never quite as valuable as we thought.

Focus on what remains: What increases over time when consciously aimed at: Virtue.

It was considered common knowledge that this particular lawyer was a mean lady.

I had gotten a job as a runner at her law firm due to what I thought was a pretty slick little scam: I Googled law firms near my apartment and then just walked into the nearest one. I confidently declared that a lawyer (who I named) had recommended me. This particular lawyer was the father of a friend of mine. He had made no such recommendation. I had not even spoken to him. I didn’t know they needed a runner. I wasn’t even certain they knew him.

It was a Friday afternoon, I remember. They invited me into the back room right then and there and asked me a few simple questions. I was hired on the spot. Now, I know lying is wrong. Or at least it is more wrong than it is cool, even when it’s very cool, as it was in this case. They even ended up hiring about six or seven of my friends. What can I say, I was a kid.

We all agreed that this one particular lawyer was a mean lady. She always seemed to have some issue with where we set down the folders or in what order we picked up her documents.

One day, my dad stopped by for lunch, probably on the way to a doctor’s appointment. We sat down at a sandwich place across the street. Sure enough, in comes mean lawyer. Before I have a chance to warn my dad about her irascible nature, I’m forced to make introductions.

To my great surprise, the woman is laughing and smiling and saying what a wonderful runner I am. The best they’ve ever had, she ventures. This is wholly news to me.

It’s just one of those things: Sometimes you realize, all at once, that someone very close to you is way better at something than you ever noticed. It dawned on me then that my dad is incredibly charming and quick on his feet, in that mid-century Southern man kind of way. I had bluffed to get the job, but totally failed to make an ally. He made a few simple and banal observations, which achieved more in a minute than I did in a year of working there.

Struck with a new curiosity, I asked him, “Dad, how do you do that?” “Do what?” he said. I explained the deal with the normally mean woman. He gave the question some bemused thought, in the way you might give some thought to a question like, “How are you speaking English?” or “How do you come to know how to ride that bike, sir?” He looked into the middle distance and, I guess, worked to put some propositions to his participation. Then he said, “Well, it’s easy. You just look them in the eye, and you just say whatever it was you were thinking the last time you looked in their eye. If you’ve never met them before, you just say whatever it is you’re thinking.”

To this day, that is some of the profoundest advice I’ve ever got. Still, in other ways, it’s deeply obvious. It’s not even particularly helpful, if you happen to be hopelessly out of the habit of looking people in the eye and making neutral observations. If you suddenly start, all of your observations are going to tend weird and off-putting. The problem is, you’re thinking all the wrong things. When you’re not properly socialized, you go increasingly crazy in the sorts of things you habitually think about.

Good socialization is something that happens naturally when they’re forced to be in proximity. It’s also something that atrophies in a vicious cycle. It’s hard to escape: once you’re prone to being weird, you naturally avoid the sort of practice it would require to stop being weird. Given all our opportunities for isolation, and very pleasurable isolation at that, with the phones and everything, more and more people are poorly socialized. To become anywhere near as natural as my dad, who was born in ‘46, we would need intense rehabilitation.

It’s a very interesting modern problem with many unexpected knock-on effects. For example, it seems to more deeply affect males. “The male loneliness epidemic,” they’ve named it. What most people don’t realize is that men are not reporting feeling more unhappiness from their isolation. In fact, most of the time it feels quite good to cancel plans and stay at home and play video games or whatever. Meanwhile, the measures of isolation, like how many close friends people have, or how often we invite people over for dinner, are all plummeting. Meanwhile, diseases of despair are sharply rising. Men are dying of loneliness that doesn’t hurt enough to fix.

Adam Mastroianni compared it to a vitamin C deficiency. For most of human evolutionary history, there was never a lack of vitamin C, so we never developed a mechanism for craving it when it was missing. When humans started sailing across the ocean eating beef and biscuits, they died of scurvy. They never for a moment craved the lemon that would have saved them from an agonizing death. Loneliness, in his view, is similar. We don’t have a mechanism for feeling the adequate amount of pain or thirst for socialization, because there’s never been a time in human history when isolation, and the wealth and technology to achieve it comfortably, have been this possible.

It’s not just a personal problem people are having. Networking events, work functions, and colleges have all been infected with the bad habits of generally poor socialization. Nobody knows how to engage in small talk. You see this sort of lurching and uncomfortable status probing. When people say, “Oh, I hate small talk,” I think what they normally mean is, “I hate that what do you do for a living? is everyone’s first question.” But that’s not really small talk.

Worse, the sort of people who claim to “hate small talk” are always trying to have big philosophical, or “deep,” conversations. Or, depending on their temperament, “vulnerable” emotional conversations. Trauma dumping, they call it. These people don’t understand, in a participatory manner, what real small talk is for. They’ve never quite felt it work. It’s so lost on them, when they watch other people do it, they assume that it’s just mindless chatter or a waste of time. But it achieves a lot of things at once, very little of which is communicated in the explicit words of the conversation. Very little of which, also, needs to ever be made explicit.

My wife and I have been going to acting class on Monday nights. We learn the Meisner technique. What it seeks to do is get you comfortable with nothing interesting happening. So, level one would be: I make one observation about you. Let’s say you’re wearing a blue shirt. I say so. You would repeat right back to me (even if I’m not wearing a blue shirt), “You’re wearing a blue shirt.” Then I would say again, “You’re wearing a blue shirt,” and you would say, “You’re wearing a blue shirt.” We bounce back and forth in a staccato rhythm like that, mostly just getting used to the idea that nothing interesting needs to happen. Once you are looking a person deep in the eye and making an observation, by the way, you’ll notice a surprisingly powerful urge to try to force something interesting to happen. Don’t.

Level two is you add in your personal perspective. “You have a nice smile.” “I have a nice smile.” Back and forth like that you go, making neutral observations about each other and affirming the observations received, still rejecting all pressure to make something interesting happen. Up we go through the levels thusly, each adding a new layer of something to do, a further distraction, until you finally cut out the repetitions and just do a normal scene.

An observation: the only way you can be a truly bad actor is by trying to be a good actor. It’s a paradox that needs to be relaxed away with banality. “Good acting” arises like a tide that has nothing to do with the will of either performer. You have only to make yourself extremely receptive to something authentic happening. Listen. Then ride that wave until it naturally dissipates. Rinse and repeat.

Another: Film and theatre are very unrealistic. In real life, almost everyone is a truly terrible listener. Oddly, when you think about it, everyone in movies is a world-class listener. The reason we venerate actors. They are extraordinary at a skill we can’t make explicit. They are what we wish people were more like, if only we had the courage to sit in the discomfort of nothing happening until something magically does.

I am reminded of my dad’s advice. When you’re speaking to someone, all you have to do is look them in the eye and say what you notice. People are absolutely gobsmacked by this behavior. People love being paid attention to. They’re so starved of this these days, even a barely conscious neutral observation tickles them to death. It cracks even the hardest people open, like it did with the lawyer lady.

I spent some time doing improv back in my LA days. There’s a similar rule in that: the easiest way to not be funny is to try to be funny. You’d be shocked by how much of a laugh you can get out of a simple grounded observation: “That’s weird, what you just said.” “Nice shirt.” The audience has no way of expressing what they see. So, by me saying out loud the things we all hope everyone else is seeing, it causes a natural release of pent up tension in the form of laughter.

That’s not to say that conversation always has to be staccato and banal. “Deep” people are always too worried that they won’t get to talk about what it all means, man. They don’t realize that small talk is always the best place to start on the way to the deepest conversations. And people have such low expectations these days, you can not be very good at this and people will still love it. You probably don’t have the chops to start somewhere more exciting, anyway. Talking about the weather is fine. Next time, talk about what you notice about the weather. Even more advanced, look the person in the eye and just say whatever it is you notice about them. Maybe they’re dressed for the weather, or maybe they wore something nice today. Emotions are more beautiful when they’re restrained.

My wife and I were sitting on the couch the other night, talking about texting people back. People who love “growth.” She blurted out, “I hate talking about personal growth. Text me about your crown molding or something.” I agree. Texting about your goals is like bad acting. It’s trying to make something interesting happen. It’s probing for status, too, or trying to excite or flatter the other person’s sense of status. The urge to convey the important people you’ve met, what you’re building, where you’re going to be in five years. None of it can be observed here, around you, now.

I would rather someone text me, “I saw a kid swing a baseball bat. He must have been four years old, but he had the most beautiful, fluid swing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Or, “I went to an event today, and 90% of the guys had the same kind of beard, and I never figured out why.” Or, “I saw two teenagers playing old school Game Boys on the bus today.”

It’s a simple skill that is difficult to rehabilitate. We desperately don’t want to seem “boring.” We don’t want to just be around. Like I said near the beginning, if you’re out of the habit, your natural observations are going to be self-conscious, too status-focused, and therefore a little bit off-putting. But as you practice it, your intuition comes online again. Suddenly, even you will be surprised by the things you say. People will laugh just because of the way you say what you see. Whatever occurs to you becomes magic. It’s a way of letting go of all the pre-planning and the subsequent anxiety, and just being content with it all being boring, if it is. That way, you’re always ready to ride a wave when it emerges.

The common self-help advice about this is also mostly terrible. It suggests that men should only be friends with people who celebrate their successes, or that their network is their net worth, or that they’re the average of the five people they spend the most time with. This is just celebrating the disease of being weird to be around and finding other people with the same disease. Or they tell us that we need therapy or to better express their negative feelings. No. We just need to be socialized better. We need to be normal and fun. We need to be useful and good to be around. Socio-political headwinds against young men or no, this is the only way forward for them. Go be friends with old ladies at the food pantry.

You don’t need better friends. You need to be a better friend. You don’t need to be around like-minded people. You need to notice whose minds you like.

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What I always most look forward to about air travel are the seemingly mystical experiences I have in those liminal spaces.

Like a mother after childbirth, I always seem to forget that the first few hours are torture. I miss my routine, my ability to soothe every moment of boredom, and not be hemmed in on both sides by chubby elbows. At some moment, a few hours in, I break through to some extra place. There’s a new thrill of rootlessness. A spiritual severing, like I’m balled up in a womb 30,000 feet up, alone and clearheaded. I’ll have some podcast going or some book on my Kindle when the ideas start coming to me in rapid fire. I can almost not keep up with them in my Notes app. It’s not the time for truly finishing these ideas, of course, but just to leave breadcrumbs for my future hard-working self.

Presently, I am my future hard-working self. Most of those breadcrumbs are now inscrutable. My insights didn’t survive the landing. I just got back from a trip to Los Angeles. Now I’m back in the place where I write every day. Here it occurs to me that the process of thinking all the way through an idea is something close to psychological torture. My mind would rather do just about anything else but this, which explains, I think, procrastination. As a matter of fact, it explains plagiarists, hacks, and slop pushers too.

Sitting down to really think through an idea, to let the imagination expand out of the margins of the well-understood, edging into the dark half-freaky hybrid places of the once-dreamt-of and the fearfully intuitive, hurts. More than getting beyond the hurt, to write and to sort through new ideas, most of them stillborn, you have to sit balanced in this twilight band for a very long time, examining the creatures therein, one by one. Some of the beasts are too ordinary: been there, done that. Some of them are too freaky, nonsense, chimeras of unrealistic anatomies. Some of them will threaten your sanity. Occasionally, in this place, you’ll find the shining twelve-point stag across a glen. If you’re careful and quiet, you can follow and see where it leads you.

I used to doubt the existence of, or the importance of spending time in, this place. The Romantics wrote about it, "…capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Sometimes they elevate my heart enough to make me believe it for a moment.

Recently, however, I have become absolutely convinced that this is the only way to create anything worthwhile. That conviction came from an unexpected development (AI). Like most beginner writers (and don’t punish my candor), I, while finding my voice, was halfway convinced that you could borrow a tidbit or flash of prose here and there. No one would really notice, care, or find out. “Real originality” is probably just the unconscious fusion of various influences anyway, so what’s the big deal?

Now, if I borrow an idea to make my point or to impress, the chatbots can usually identify exactly where I got it from. At an even higher level, to the great frustration of all the slop pushers and plagiarists out there, if you use AI to fill in your insights, there are near-faultless (1 in 10,000 false positives or better) detectors that will easily identify that fact. To me, this partly reveals the shape of the ontological ground of true insights. The liminal zone leaves fingerprints in the matrix of our symbols. You can’t consume only compressed outputs without severing your fingers.

If I don’t know about a topic, read AI summaries, and then try to write about it shortly after, my own “original” writing will be flagged as AI-generated. That is, by the way, what I think is going on with people who are claiming “false positives.” True instances of that are incredibly rare. They’re most likely just consuming AI prose around the topic they’re about to write on, absorbing the way it frames, and spitting it out again with enough of the pattern intact to still be measurable. I’m finding that insight from the real liminal place always leaves its fingerprints.

For the last 100 years we’ve loved summary and compression too much. “I interviewed the world’s greatest experts, and here’s what they all have in common,” or, “I spent my life learning how to build habits, so you don’t have to,” or “36 lessons I learned in 36 years,” or something like that. The reason we’re so drawn to shrunken-head content is the same reason we’re drawn to procrastinate and plagiarize. We genuinely believe that we can get away with something. Those writers, in fact, are pseudomartyrs in the religion of the hacked self. Steal 30 years of my time in just 30 minutes, bro. So, of course, we’ve been primed to devour AI summaries, and then to be pissed off when a reconstruction of an AI summary is felt to be obvious AI prose, no matter how hard we wish it were like the people’s work we actually admire. We were given a bad promise, we took it, and now we’ve become spoiled and entitled.

But think about it: How many of these pre-slop life-hack people have written a great novel, song, screenplay, or built a beautiful house, or anything actually recognizable beyond their ability to sell shortcuts to other people? If anything at all, that is their original insight, and it’s a trick.

You can’t live on compression alone. You can't shrink your head and still have room to live in it. You have to skin your knees to learn how to ride a bike, and you have to sacrifice a part of your life to be a cyclist. Sometimes blazing insights come to you while high in the air, listening to the compressed insights on a podcast, or while reading self-help, or tinkering with AI. It's a misleading first act. The second act is dim, painful, and confusing.

So I’m back in my routine, walking in this twilight band, looking between clichés and chimeras, fighting, or even contemplating, my fear of this place. I’m fighting my mind’s desire to flee, think about something else: something known, something given. There actually is something new under the sun, and if I can find it, it will be a sort of tesseractal hunt. There are no useful compressions for this, only the thrill of relying on your instincts.

The first step to finding it is to believe that it exists. Enough, at least, to tolerate the liminal places where it would live.

I’ve met a shocking number of people who became religious or spiritual after a horrifying personal experience of evil. They all say almost the same line: After that, I knew for sure evil was real, so I realized its opposite must also exist.

“Slop” is a very interesting and apparently new subcategory of evil. It’s no coincidence, too, that we’re struggling to name its opposite. Some call it craft, some call it art, but both fail to truly counterbalance the gravity of the cultural antimatter that is slop.

“Art” has been reduced to entertainment on one hand, and economically and practically meaningless (yet somehow immeasurably precious) cultural expressions on the other. Then there’s craft, which is maybe a more concrete and therefore more wieldy term than art, but it bleeds helplessly into slop at its margins. It suggests that there is a repeatable process that can be mastered. AI is, if nothing else, excellent at mastering the right concrete steps and still excreting slop.

So without a satisfactory term for the opposite of slop, we’re just interpretive dancing at each other about the somehow self-evident importance that something is “made by humans!” You can squawk all you want about the inherent worth of a human made product, but unless you can point to something that is actually epistemologically distinct about it, we have no defensible moat. Humans have imperfections, but AI can imitate imperfections. Besides, imperfections are themselves a shadow of a quality, that being perfection, which is better suited to robots, anyway.

The AI people are completely fine with the ethics of machines taking our work, too. Horse whipping no longer propels you down the road, and you no longer dig tunnels with a hammer and pickaxe. If there isn’t anything meaningful for us to do that AI can’t do, then as far as they’re concerned we at least get to go to a paradise utopia where all of our needs are paid for. You don’t need to believe in that promise for them to bank on it. Pointing out that AI makes errors is also pretty easily rebuffed, because AIs are demonstrably making fewer of those errors all the time. They imitate human reason with pretty high fidelity in the newest models, as far as I can tell. If they’re making silly mistakes now, they maybe won’t be soon enough.

I’m not saying that we have no ground to stand on. But if you refuse to point out what actual nameable quality human beings have that the AI somehow doesn’t have access to, AI people will just tell you that the AIs are going to get better at everything that makes people people, at the very least until they’re a hell of a lot better than you.

We’re stuck with a problem: We need a strong metaphysic of the opposite of slop.

Slop, like the larger patterns of evil, insists upon itself. We don’t need to explain ourselves when we accuse people of posting slop. By now, we’ve all experienced that disgust. The opposite of slop certainly exists, but insists upon itself less. It flutters away from those with demands for power and bad intentions. Just because it will not land on sloppers, does not mean it doesn’t exist.

In the YouTube world, there are growing legions of AI copycat channels. They rip video ideas and steal entire visual styles from the big-name channels. They slop out what, on the surface, seems to be just as high quality as what otherwise takes months to render in Blender. They make large sums of money with those fakes. They even have Discord chats teaching others how to do the same (for a low-low price).

One of the big YouTube creators recently made a video about this ecosystem. His argument against the practice was emotionally appealing, but it also lacked a terminology for the opposite of slop. He said things like, human beings actually made our video. OK. What exactly is imbued in your images through the millions of clicks in Blender versus a quick AI generation? To the untrained eye, they look basically the same. We’re meant to react with intuitive disgust, which, by the way, I do. But the slop guys can just say they’re saving time and we’re just being big Luddites.

I actually love slop. For almost all of modernity, we have been in a long process of devaluing subjective experience in favor of the objective scientific view of things, which is wrong. Slop on YouTube is like my friend who got high on weed one time and experienced the presence of a demon who was the trajectory of the rest of his sad life. Slop is like a cultural bad trip, forcing us to re-establish some linguistic and cultural norms around categories of irreducible subjective experiences.

In Plato’s Seventh Letter, he wrote to some of his friends in Sicily who were struggling with succession of rulers. Of one of the new rulers, Dionysius II, Plato said that he only understood the surface of philosophy, nothing else. Dionysius II thought knowing the words meant he actually understood the ideas. He was angry at Plato for suggesting otherwise.

Using symbols does not mean you possess knowledge of what they symbolize. This is because, according to Plato, there are five elements to reality. The first three he called the symbol, the definition, and the image. These are the ones Dionysius II was obsessed with: the little linguistic formulas that he could bend and manipulate toward whatever end he was trying to achieve. The other two, Plato said, were more important: True Knowledge and the Thing in Itself.

All of human language is entirely composed of the first three, and does not give you immediate access to True Knowledge. To arrive at True Knowledge, you had to be exposed to a variety of arguments and symbols and definitions and images and experiences. True Knowledge, at some sudden moment, crosses over into you like the kindling of a flame. The words and the formulas and the expressions are always just a bad approximation.

Dionysius II was engaged in the ancient version of slop. He mistook the surface expression of things for True Knowledge of the Things in Themselves. He used the symbols to get whatever he happened to already have wanted, which, no surprise, were not good things to want, because they were coming from a man with little True Knowledge. Plato even said that anybody who would set out to write a treatise from first principles exposed himself as not knowing anything.

Modern people have taken on the shallow philosophy of Dionysius II as Gospel. Materialists and rationalists effectively factor out the Knower from the evaluation, so the symbol is confused for True Knowledge. Because of this fundamental error, we tend to get lost in squabbles over definitional differences and category errors (analytic philosophy and rationalist discourse).

Bucking that trend, the American philosopher Charles Peirce took up more productively where Plato and other philosophers left off. He said we are fundamentally triadic in our consciousness. Now, Plato broke the first of this triad into a smaller three: the symbol, the definition, and the image. We can just call those all “symbol.” The other two would be the Knower and the Thing in Itself. There’s nothing in the universe, even far away quasars and bangs at the beginning of time, that escapes this irreducible three: the symbol, the symbolizer, and the symbolized. If we’re the ones looking at them, we’re the third in their dyad.

Modern researchers are now rediscovering and validating Charles Peirce. They’re writing papers about how the reason AI has not come into a subjective consciousness is because it is ultimately a dyadic phenomenon. It is ones and zeros, cause and effect, and only through our observation of it does it become triadic. In other words, it is completely dependent on our own consciousness for its phenomenological existence. It has no direct experiences. This is great. Serious people are once again understanding the idea that phenomenology actually has something real to tell us about the way the material world unfolds for us. It’s also a foothold we might be able to work with to describe the opposite of slop.

Slop itself obviously requires triadic consciousness to be a coherent concept. Nothing that the AI produces can be deemed slop or not slop without a human subject judging it to be so. In fact, the way the machine learning systems work is that they produce a lot of outputs, and a human judges them. We do this by paying attention. We tell them over long training periods that this looks like a cat, or this doesn’t look like a cat, or this is good writing, or this is bad writing. Our attention is constantly interwoven into the system’s outputs, as we tend to forget. The reason their outputs feel like slop is because they contain millions of instances of vague human attention, not actually aimed at the true object of any given prompt.

The reason we knee-jerk accept the definition of slop without necessarily accepting a further non-materialist explanation of things is because we have an intuitive understanding of the Platonic realm, if not an explicit one. We feel a natural revulsion to slop, and negative emotions are much more powerful than positive emotions. So we’re much more likely to give a hard definition to a negative phenomenological experience than to a positive one because, like evil, it insists upon itself. Again, though, the negative form suggests the existence of a positive form.

Slop has been greatly expanded by the powers of AI, but it is not really new. People have always been hacks or copycats or genre writers or mass products. There are endless definitions for what we mean when we say something is not authentic, a vague gesture where a keen insight is wanted. What these things all have in common is that they lack layers upon layers of that irreducible, triadic attention.

I’m about to describe magic to you. You’ll believe in it. There seems to be something that happens when a human being with some amount of True Knowledge pays close attention to any object. This object could be a small business, a novel, a poem, a movie, a band, or any other Thing you could pay attention to. That object will become layered with his attention like a croissant.

What we widely agree upon as the great classics are deemed that because they are imbued with an attentional depth that approaches infinity. By unfolding these layers of attention as a reader, it may kindle you with True Knowledge. As it’s paid attention to upon rereading or rewatching or re-examining, it tends to unfold like hyper-space-origami, presenting itself differently each time. This is the opposite of slop.

Now, slop often crassly imitates a gloss of the sorts of things that were once known to contain attention. For this reason, AI slop YouTube channels always have to be knockoffs of a well-established and deeply respected channel. No slop channel can be the origin of a new vibe. The 3D models they make with AI have to be based off of the sorts of 3D models that were previously made with deep attention. Not because real humans did it. Rather, because the project of spending time with 3D objects in a software like Blender gives their focused attention ample time to imbue these objects with the magic fire. We intuitively like it even when we don’t consciously understand we’re seeing it. When you see a YouTube thumbnail for the first time, even if you don’t quite know what you’re looking at, something in you recognizes it as deeply paid attention to. The only exception to this is when you are tricked by an intentional imitation.

What copycats are banking on is that millions of viewers on YouTube have watched a great Veritasium video or two. They came away from it with a sense that they’d been paid attention to and their humanity affirmed, which left them with a positive memory of that channel’s look and feel. When they see a knockoff that imitates the vibe, they might be tricked into playing their video.

The problem, of course, is like Dionysius II’s philosophy, slop does not contain True Knowledge, so the attrition rate is going to be enormous. In fact, there is a well-known rebound effect: people start to feel the original creator’s videos are AI generated, causing harm to the entire ecosystem. The original creators are punished by the parasites as much as the parasites are punished for being parasites. To survive, you have to recreate new styles from scratch.

This is a pattern that’s been around for a long time. If you create something great, hacks are going to imitate it. You’ll seem like a hack if you keep doing it. That’s why great artists have to constantly rebrand and recreate themselves. This is a microcosm of the eternal battle against parasites, which exist on the deep biological level as well as the spiritual.

I’m not suggesting that we should just leave the parasites alone to do whatever they want because it’s all part of the circle of life or whatever. There’s a place for police. As far as YouTube is capable of it, they should manually remove and punish these people. At the same time, the arc of history is toward justice, and it is indeed sometimes long.

It’s not just YouTube grifters. We are presented with the temptation to be a slop parasite, all the time. In a lot of ways, the entire postwar American tradition of white collar work, where you basically do nothing and get paid a steady paycheck and retirement and medical care, is an elaborate system of expansionist welfare slop. We call them bullshit jobs, or email jobs. They were predictable and safe for about 80 years in America. They’ve been so stable for so long, in fact, that a lot of people have really forgotten that all parasites need a host. There must always be some original creation, some hyper-object, at the core of whatever corporation or conglomerate produces the parasite jobs as a byproduct of its existence.

Now, some people will say there is a lot of money to be made in bullshit jobs and that maybe the best thing to do is have a “day” job where you suckle on the long-ago memory of a hyper-object so you can spend your nights and weekends on things you actually care about. Lots of people have tried this over the years, and a few people even claim to have gotten away with it. Maybe. I’m skeptical. A bullshit job inherently drains my ability to pay attention well. Those who work these sorts of meaningless-feeling jobs will always seem to be unable to stop it from spreading into their personal work, their family life, and even their ability to be fully human.

You see this illustrated well in Fight Club. Norton’s character has a well paid 90s white collar office job, which is effectively bullshit. Of course, he deeply intuits that he’s participating in a parasitic relationship with a corporation that hates him but cannot fully identify and cure itself of his parasitic load. The conclusion of the movie is kind of dark. It seems to think there’s no such thing as true creation. The only thing that exists is destruction, and it’s better to participate in destruction than to be a nutless parasite. That insight might be helpful for people who are nutless, but it’s far from the final answer.

The truth is that whatever spirit he was working for, at some point in its forgotten origin, was not parasitic. A real person gave it the attentional seed that the entire multi-billion dollar corporation was built around. Everything that is economically profitable is either a source of True Knowledge or a parasite on it. It is sometimes extremely difficult to figure out how (and I don’t know your situation), but anyone, anytime, may participate in some true creation, usually by sacrificing short term security (which people tend to love more than life itself).

Now, I understand slop and true creation exist at every level of the fractal. Maybe even the majority of all giant corporations are effectively entirely parasites, slop purveyors. They’re low attention and tend to boom and bust quickly. They always obviously (if you know what you’re looking for) feed off something that already exists.

The thing about all slop, like evil, is that it’s like shadows. It doesn’t have any substantial reality outside of its parody of good. Even though our world is very confusingly cut across many levels with these shadows — there are fractals of good and slop at every level of every organization, from infinite scale and minute closeness — we can at least rest assured that what we should do as individuals is simple: Increase the amount of time we spend paying attention to the objects that draw us toward themselves with joy, and participate less in the electric blue mustardy thinning out.

The reason people hate LinkedIn with so much passion is because there are very few real creations there maintaining all the anxious attention. There are hordes of slop pirates trying, by careful wording and marketing and manipulation, to sink their teeth into these few true objects. They want to secure a safe bullshit job and make a nice salary. But there’s just not enough of that to go around. The majority of people who are making something truly good, and therefore sustaining and profitable and meaningful, avoid LinkedIn. Nobody who makes something layered with real attention wants it to be overwhelmed by LinkedIn HR parasites.

I actually failed to understand this situation for several years. I applied to, I’m not kidding, a thousand jobs on LinkedIn. I had a banger resume. I got five interviews, three of which were scams, two of which went to the final stages and fizzled out after like six months of back and forth. I have since realized that it’s almost always a much better use of my time to pay deep attention to what calls me, even if I can’t see how it will pay my bills.

I know what I’m suggesting is scary, because we all want a salary and health insurance (some people do get these things the right way, by the way). We’re afraid to get sick and not have enough for retirement or our kid’s college. I get it. Life is terrifying and the unknown is always looming just around the corner. But you just can’t half-way do this. People always underestimate how much attention you have to pay to create good things. More than you can imagine. An essay may seem simple, for example. It’s just a conglomeration of words. On the surface, anybody can do it. But what’s hopefully behind these mostly false symbols and definitions and images is the writer, trying to kindle an impossible flame.

Slop is indeed the enemy, but it’s just a shadow. It’s a reminder of what cast it. So anytime you see it, don’t despair. Don’t fight it with hatred, either. People, over a long enough time frame, really do want its opposite. Bet on the arc. I promise you, things will tend to miraculously bend in your favor if you fully give up on slop and go all in on your object.

I find that you will receive helpers, mentors, aids, and windfalls that you can’t account for in any spreadsheet, but nevertheless come to those who believe.

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.

In The Iliad, men with high status (conferred by physical prowess, beauty, providence, heredity, chance) are always, inevitably, compelled to exercise their power on their inferiors. Their swaggering unconcern and even cruelty toward the lives of others is almost identical with their power, and so cannot be relinquished in favor of “kindness.” Those without power are unbreakably confined by that lack of power, and may only muster a freedom to love their master.

It’s a very alien world from the world of my American barbershop. We have made the rules of this game taboo to speak of – uncool. To the sensitive, these games of power, and constraints by lack of power, are still very much happening all the time. We have simply made it our business to ignore and repress our love of power games. Despite hiding in plain sight, the central American lie is very stable because it produces these incredible castles in the sky.

The central lie of the ancient Greek world, I suppose, is that those with power are helpless to the fact that their power is impermanent. They’ll one day lose it, and whatever they wrought on their inferiors will inevitably be wrought on them. You can see hints of the coming gospel idea in Hector who, right before he is killed, says that Ares slays those who would slay.

The American tradition is, of course, downstream from the Christian one, but with an important twist on the core idea. The American idea is that, like Jesus, you are free from the constraints of worldly power. But for some reason, here in America, you get to do this without doing the one thing that he did that was so radical: submitting yourself totally to limitations. Without first becoming a slave, in other words. Without rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Americans are secretly unified under this one big unspoken lie. They just have various definitions of what exactly it means. Parts of the conservative right believe American freedom means the freedom to be a pagan killer in the marketplace and a Christian in the living room. The freedom here is the freedom to live or die by your success or failure in this secondary, abstracted power struggle for money. Only your “soul” is somehow divided from this struggle, often symbolized by the unconditional love of family or going to heaven after you die.

Parts of the liberal left see American freedom more as the freedom of your identity to break all biological and social constraints, to be forgiven of all shame, and to be forever cradled in a safety net of unconditional merciful care, which they believe to be the ordinary state of nature, if it weren’t for the greed and power struggles of those on the right.

Even though these two share pretty much the same intellectual heritage, they are mutually reinforcing adversaries. The right sees the left as the perennial, resentful losers who refuse to accept the freedom of their fate. The left sees the right as the colonizers forever spoiling the otherwise all-caring state of nature. They are unconsciously united in their disbelief in any rigid social responsibilities and immutable hierarchies that were self-evident to the Greek progenitors of our society.

I also don’t want to make it seem like I’m standing outside the American belief structure with my hands on my hips. I am myself an American, and I happen to love this country, despite everything I’ve said so far. Even now, I am practicing my freedom to observe what I see and write it down, outside of any social pressures that might try to convince me not to do that. In fact, I’m writing this in perfect privacy so that I can cultivate the clarity of my own will. The mere existence of someone nearby, watching me work, would make it almost impossible for me to do what I’m doing.

For this tendency, Americans are history’s greatest creatives and inventors. Despite our propensity for delusion, we have a simultaneous capacity to occasionally prove our delusions correct and make them delusions no more. I’m reminded of that 1903 New York Times article that scathingly suggested man-made flight was one to ten million years away (how do you even come up with those numbers?) The sentiment behind it was to viciously shame people like the Wright brothers, who were trying to take off from the ground not only physically but symbolically, and soar away from natural constraints.

Once you start seeing this, you see it everywhere. Even in places you might think of as trite, like the famous song from High School Musical, which is all about soaring and flying and reaching for every star in heaven, breaking free from social expectations: a desire greater than hope, greater than faith.

At the same time, America is changing right now. There’s a new group of people, not-so-lovingly referred to as chuds, or red-pillers, who make it their business to re-identify all the forgotten and ignored constraints of force: how CEOs tend to be tall, how tall rich men tend to get all the women, how the beautiful and attractive are conferred more status. How, in some ways, there is nothing you can do to overcome these forces. Anything that suggests otherwise is “cope.” This is the deepest American taboo, and these people are breaking it out in the open. It makes sense that, in the same general cohort you have what are called vitalists, sometimes even self-proclaimed neopagans. These people are, again, realizing what was obvious to the ancient Greeks: power.

We know how this story goes. The worldly circumstances of force and power of the pagans are brutal, real, and true. Also: those who live by that sword will die by that sword. So we may begin to correct for the central American delusion and say: in fact, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the thing to do with whatever power you happen to have is to willingly give it up. The thing to do with your lack of power is to realize that you’re actually blessed by it. By doing that, you invert the newly obvious again pagan rule that what goes around comes around, thereby sowing the seeds of your reward.

Societies based on this idea have received their reward by becoming high-trust and therefore very wealthy. We live in the products of that in the post-Christian West. The problem is that once you receive the reward, you have to give it up again, or it will be the very means of your downfall. Through historical amnesia, we’ve forgotten that responsibility to willingly give up our personal power, even going so far as relinquishing the power to continue to live. How much we’re willing to suffer a regression to pagan battles for power as a result of that half-forgetting is really up to us. How many times do we have to die tragic little deaths on our own sword before we realize we have to be able both to wield it but also not use it? That will be left to the peccadilloes of history to come.

Getting away from this hard-to-picture civilizational scale to make a smaller observation: Americans are bad listeners. We’re famously loud, insensitive to the more delicate status games of Europe (who have a more sublimated memory of their pagan history), and so we tend to stomp indiscriminately all over the place. That is our era in miniature: it is a submission to the power of the person speaking and to allow their state of being to wash over you, as if they are momentarily your master. To avoid this unconscious humiliation, when you tell most Americans what you’re going through, they go glassy-eyed, unable to let your story land on them, and then spout off some American cliché about being yourself, or you do you, or self-care. Whatever defense mechanism works for them.

The Americans I know who actually can listen tend to more often be the leftist rebellious artist types. They, at least, believe that the suffering of the victimized individual is what produces the art that overcomes tyranny. They just also have a false belief that everything would be perfect if they were free to express their true “identity” in its freest manifestation. If the suits and the money men and the power brokers would just get out of their way, this world would become a natural utopia. That is unfortunate for them because it creates an external enemy that they never have to submit themselves to, and thereby forever staves off their own best transformations. Still, I personally find it easier to become good friends with these types, because at least they have the ability to suffer and therefore to truly know anything. They are usually the most Christ-like Westerners, even though most of them would never consider themselves Christian, because they associate Christendom with American power culture.

Even though I consider myself a traditionalist Catholic, I have much more hope for the future of the American dream in the hands of rebels and atheists and artists. They’re already attempting the hardest part, which is to suffer to bring about what is good. On the extreme margins (mostly that you see only online,) they are also capable of extreme acts of evil. But the last step toward full integration is easier for a normal lib than it is for their power-obsessed counterparts.

We are all subject to caring what people think of us, to wanting power, to wanting to be part of some inner circle. We should not only accept it, but lower ourselves to the point of slavery. Instead of feeling resentful toward an entire aspect of reality, garner the courage to navigate it in all its imperfections. To love the people, the suits and the freaks included. To submit ourselves to society and church and family and to refuse to defect even when there is tyranny.

That’s how you practice the truer freedom. It will force you to completely relinquish all the safety granted by power and status, even the taboo to never mention it. Even the power to keep the people we love safe, which is maybe even more difficult than relinquishing it for ourselves.

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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.

I could say: a spirit woke me in the night. A hand set itself on my shoulder and shoved — which, by the way, is what it felt like — to jerk me back from the twilight of unconsciousness, because it had something to tell me.

I wandered out of my bed, away from my sleeping wife, and into the living room. I found our cat sleeping in my reading chair. There’s a little stained glass cow lamp with a night light behind it, shining deep shadows on the curtains and the stuffed animals she caught during Mardi Gras. I grabbed a Sprite Zero, because I was too bored by the idea of plain water and we had them leftover from a crawfish boil. I sat here. I tinkered on my phone. But mostly I just sat here.

The psychologization, the chemicalization help me apprehend what’s going on by giving me a functional framework. But any framework, in any case, wants something. It gets you someplace. What’s interesting about the first two is that they’re almost inert like dead specimens you study. They don’t have a lot of mojo. The spirit waking me up, on the other hand, has got some unction and a list of demands.

I’m reflexively incredulous about this sort of thing. And yet here I am, acting out the ritual of a ghost. I’m writing this thing, trying to work out, with you, exactly what I was awoken to receive from it. It makes me do something physical in the world, not just sit under sheets and think.

I don’t know what it’s made out of. That’s not relevant, any more than I need to know what my own dreams are made out of. Nobody can explain the material constitution of my own consciousness, either, and yet I totally rely on it as the sensation of myself.

If you believe down in your heart only in the material metaphor, then you’re stuck believing something has gone wrong with your machinery when you’re sitting on a couch at one in the morning. Something needs to be medicated. You are reduced to a diagnostic cadaver of yourself. And so you get even more anxious as you feel the wrongness of your place. That definitely is also to believe in something. You can’t not believe in something.

I don’t want to believe that it’s a material malfunction. I want to believe in the other story because, for one, it takes me where I want to go. That the interpretation makes different actions possible, reveals layers of meaning, and organizes perceptions, and so genuinely says something about how reality is structured.

I’ll need to believe that something put me here for a purpose. Intelligence. I’m not going to abandon the chemicals and the habits and the things I have to do tomorrow. But in a humming substrate just below those categories, with much more beauty and much more power, you can sometimes glimpse that there’s a bigger pattern to things unplanned and unplannable. There is sometimes something to be discovered in the odd cut of shadows of a living room at night.

I’ve mapped the shape of this spirit like a blind man feeling out the inside of a cathedral. By blindly mapping it, I’ve both discovered and built it. I’ve confirmed that what it wanted me to get could be gotten. Because I got it.

I’m tired now.

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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.