I am going to talk about something uncomfortable.

Something we as writers all do, and no one wants to talk about it.

Are you ready?

Guilt.

Let me explain.

You've been working on a novel, a novella, a sketch, something you love, and all the sudden Sometimes you get an idea for a character. A voice. A scene. A whole world.

This just happened to me.

I was in the middle of working on something for Parallax, my dystopian futuristic story. Ferret, my street wise crime queen, has an ex-fiance, and someone she really loved since childhood, but isn't brave enough to say it.

Alonnnnng comes the idea.

Whoever he is, he's sarcastic. Rude. Playful. He'd be the perfect foil for Ferret - except she already HAS the love tension, and - as much as I trust my audience - they might misinterpret the foe tension for now-we-are-enemies-to-lovers tension.

So I left him out.

Hardest thing to do, but I said no, you have your own story to tell, I know it. I don't know what it is or where it is, but it will come to me.

A younger me would have felt SO guilty leaving him out.

I also would have felt guilty "betraying" one story for another, by putting Parallax down to experiment with his story.

We have all been there.

The inspiration -- it arrives like a gift. Or a whisper. Or a knock on the door you did not know you were waiting for.

And then the guilt sets in.

But I am supposed to be working on the other novel. The one with Thomas. The ghost. The brother. The body that goes nuts.

So you push the new idea away. You close the door. You sit back down at the desk and try to force yourself to care about the draft you were writing yesterday.

And nothing comes.

Or worse — something comes, but it is dead. The sentences are flat. The characters are puppets. The joy is gone.

You feel like a traitor. A failure. A writer who cannot commit.

Here is what I am learning: that guilt is a lie.

It is ok to set a manuscript down.

Not forever. Not because you are quitting. Because you need to breathe. Because the other story is hungry. Because sometimes the best way to love a project is to let it miss you.

Think of an artist.

A good artist sketches all the time. Little drawings in the margins. Quick studies. Faces from the coffee shop. A tree. A hand. A cat who looks like Honey.

Those sketches are not betrayals of the "real" work. They are practice. They are play. They are how the artist stays loose, stays curious, stays alive.

Some of our favorite artists, some of the MOST famous artists, did that.

And guess what?

Writing is the same.

The novel you are "supposed" to be writing is the big canvas. The one in the studio. The one with the weight and the deadline and the expectations.

The new idea — the character who does not fit, the scene that belongs nowhere, the voice that will not stop whispering — that is the sketch.

And sketches are not betrayals. They are fuel.

Here is what I have learned from forcing myself to write:

It does not work.

I have sat at my desk. I have stared at the cursor. I have said: You will finish this scene even if it kills you.

And sometimes, I finish it. But it is bad. Stiff. Resentful. The opposite of inspired.

The characters lay there like they are on a morgue slab.

Or worse, they throw a tantrum in my head.

"I would not wear that!"

"I would not do that!"

The joy is gone. And when the joy is gone, the writing is just labor. And labor, without love, is visible on the page.

Your readers can feel it. And so can you.

It's like trying to swim your way out of quicksand.

So now I am trying something different.

When the new idea comes — the one that does not fit, the one I did not ask for, the one that feels like a distraction — I let it in.

I open a new document. I write down what I can. A scene. A voice. A single line of dialogue. I let it exist.

And then I close it. I go back to the big canvas. And somehow — somehow — the joy is back. The flat sentences have color. The puppets have hearts.

I take all the pressure off!

The sketch did not betray the novel. It fed it.

This is not for everyone.

Some writers need focus. Need to stay in one chair until the draft is done. That is real. That is valid.

But I am not that writer. I am a wanderer. I follow the voice. I chase the curiosity. I put down one manuscript and pick up another, and another, and another.

And I have stopped feeling guilty about it.

Because the manuscripts are not abandoned. They are resting. They are simmering. They are in the drawer, breathing, waiting for me to come back.

And I always come back. Not because I have to. Because I want to. Because the rest made me miss them.

So if you have an idea that does not fit —

Write it down. Give it a page. Let it be a sketch.

You are not betraying your current work. You are trusting it.

Trusting that it will still be there when you come back. Trusting that the new idea will make you a better writer. Trusting that the joy is not a distraction — it is a compass.

So wander. Sketch. Set it down. Pick it up.

That is not failure. That is process.

And it is ok.

One more thing, love. The sketch is not a distraction. It is a conversation with yourself. Listen to it. You might learn something.

Invisible Power: Part Two

A note on Leanne: She is a composite character, assembled from stories, research, interviews, and the kind of experience that belongs to millions of specific people rather than one of them. If you recognize her, that's the point.

By the time Leanne drove to work Monday morning, the story had arrived four times.

Her father had sent the Fox article Saturday night, the one she'd read with her cold coffee on Sunday morning, the one that had sent her down three hours of links she hadn't planned to follow. He'd sent it again Sunday morning, this time from a different source: a radio station's website that had run the same organizational analysis under a different headline, with the Fox investigation buried in the fourth paragraph as a citation. Same framing. Same groups named in the same order. Same conclusion. He hadn't noticed, or hadn't thought it mattered, that the two articles were the same article in different clothes. Why would he? They appeared to be two independent sources saying the same thing. That was the point.

Her uncle Dale had sent it Sunday afternoon. A cousin she hadn't spoken to in two years had sent it Sunday evening. Each of them had added a comment, "this is what's really going on, they don't want you to know this, wake up," in the register people use when they believe they are sharing something the powerful would prefer to suppress.

She didn't respond to any of them. Not because she disagreed with the instinct behind the sharing, the instinct that said something is being hidden, someone is pulling strings, the official story isn't the whole story. That instinct was, as far as she could tell from her Sunday morning, correct. Something was being hidden. Someone was pulling strings. The official story wasn't the whole story.

The problem was that the strings being pulled and the story being hidden were not the ones the article described. The article was using the language of revelation, "we've identified, investigation finds, what they don't want you to know," to perform the same function it accused its subjects of performing. It was using the appearance of exposing power to protect itself.

She didn't have the words for this yet. She tried them out at lunch, on a coworker named Priya who read a lot and asked good questions.

"So the article isn't wrong exactly," Leanne said. "The groups it names are real. The money is real. But it's like, it names the small money to hide the big money. It names the small coordination to hide the bigger coordination. The thing it's calling a conspiracy is like a corner of the actual thing."

Priya nodded slowly. "That's kind of just how media works though, right? Every outlet has an angle."

Leanne looked at her food.

That's kind of just how media works.

It was a more sophisticated version of Janet's that's just Fox. It arrived at the same place by a different route, through worldliness rather than familiarity, through the knowing shrug of someone who has already processed the corruption of institutions and filed it under the way things are. It was not wrong. It was, like the Fox article, a piece of something true that had been arranged to prevent a larger truth from being visible.

She thought about this on the drive home. About how the two responses, "that's just Fox" and "that's just how media works," functioned identically despite coming from opposite directions. Both filed the question. Both made the inquiry feel naive. Both converted a problem that had a history, a structure, and specific authors into a permanent condition, as natural and unaddressable as weather.

She wanted to know who had built the weather.

---

Here is what she had found, and what it means.

At 1:02 in the afternoon on Saturday, March 28, 2026, while the No Kings protests were still happening, while Janet was still downtown with her Elvis Is The Only King sign, while the brass band was still playing, Fox News Digital published an investigation by Asra Nomani framing the protests as a coordinated revolutionary operation backed by communist organizers and billionaire donors. The investigation named real organizations, cited real funding relationships, and quoted real statements. It was, in the ways that matter for legal purposes, factually defensible.

It was also not, in any meaningful sense, breaking news.

The article was the sixth installment of a six-part series that Fox News Digital had been publishing, one piece per day, for the six days leading up to the protests. The organizational infrastructure for the narrative (Singham's funding network, the ideological genealogy, the revolutionary framing) had been constructed and published across the preceding week. The March 28 piece did not investigate the No Kings movement. It applied a pre-built template to an event that was still occurring when the piece went live. The "investigation" was scheduled inventory. The narrative was loaded before the protest began.

Within hours, the Washington Times had published its own story. It cited the Fox investigation as its primary source. It did not send reporters to the protests. It did not independently verify the framing. It took the template Fox had produced and republished it with its own byline attached, which gave the template the appearance of independent corroboration without the substance of it.

The Daily Caller published a parallel piece with similar framing. It did not cite Fox directly, it presented the framing as its own, but the organizational connections Fox had identified were the same connections the Daily Caller described, in the same order, with the same emphasis, producing the same conclusion.

Radio stations carrying syndicated conservative programming broadcast the story through the afternoon and evening. These stations (many of them owned by iHeartMedia, the largest radio station owner in the country, or its regional equivalents) did not have reporters at the protests. They had program directors and syndication contracts and formats built around a particular political sensibility, and the Fox story fit the format the way a key fits a lock.

Aggregator websites, platforms that exist primarily to surface and republish high-engagement content, picked up all of the above and fed it into algorithmic distribution systems that identified, correctly, that communist revolutionaries at protest generates more clicks than brass band and elotes cart at protest. The algorithm was not biased in any ideological sense. It was optimized for engagement, and the Fox frame was more engaging than reality. So the algorithm surfaced the frame.

By Sunday morning, millions of people had encountered the Fox story, not necessarily from Fox, but from one of the dozens of nodes through which it had traveled. Most of them did not know it was the Fox story. They knew it as the news. As what's really going on. As the article their father had sent Saturday night, and then again Sunday morning from a radio station's website, which looked like a second source but was the same source in different packaging.

None of this required a phone call. None of it required a meeting. No one issued instructions. No editor at the Washington Times received a directive from anyone at Fox. No program director at a radio station was told what angle to take. No algorithm was manually tuned to favor one political conclusion over another.

The coordination was not in the communication. It was in the architecture.

And the architecture was built, not by accident, not by the neutral operation of market forces, but by specific people, through specific choices, over specific decades. Before she could understand what the architecture does, Leanne needed to understand how it was made.

---

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not a piece of legislation most people think about. It was bipartisan. It was signed by Bill Clinton. It was described, at the time, as a modernization of outdated broadcast rules, a way of bringing media regulation into the age of cable and the emerging internet.

What it did, in practice, was remove the limits on how many radio stations a single company could own.

Before 1996, a single entity could own no more than 40 radio stations nationally. After 1996, the cap was effectively gone. Within five years, Clear Channel Communications (later renamed iHeartMedia) had acquired more than 1,200 stations at its peak acquisition. The local station that had once been owned by someone in the community, that had once reflected the community's particular character and concerns, became a node in a national network optimized for the economics of scale and the efficiencies of centralized programming.

The voice on the radio in Leanne's father's cab, the one that accompanied him across the long stretches of interstate that were most of his working life, the one that sounded like every other station in every other town he drove through, was the sound of that consolidation. A national format. A syndicated host. A political sensibility determined not in the county but in a corporate office in a city he had never visited, by people who had never driven his routes or sat in his cab or calculated, as he had, whether a doctor's visit was worth the co-pay.

The Fairness Doctrine had been eliminated nine years earlier, in 1987. The FCC regulation had required broadcast outlets to present controversial public issues honestly and in a balanced way. Without it, a broadcast outlet could present one perspective as the whole truth, call it news, and face no regulatory obligation to offer another. Its elimination had been a stated goal of conservative media advocates for years. It was eliminated by a Reagan-appointed FCC under pressure from industries that understood, with a clarity their opponents consistently failed to match, that the most durable form of power is the power to determine what counts as news.

The deregulation built the architecture. The architecture produces the frame. And the frame, repeated across 1,200 radio stations, republished without verification by ideologically aligned print outlets, amplified by algorithms that reward emotional charge over accuracy, arrives in the family group chat as what's really going on.

Nobody built the weather. But somebody built the conditions that produce it. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters.

---

She had spent a summer, years ago, staying with her aunt in Enumclaw, Washington, a small town at the foot of the Cascades, southeast of Seattle, closer to the mountain than most people ever get. She had loved almost everything about it. The greenness was unlike anything she knew from eastern Kentucky, not the tired green of summer fields waiting for rain, but a green so saturated it seemed lit from inside. The people were unhurried in a way that surprised her. The proximity to Seattle meant a kind of possibility hummed in the background, the sense that a different life was available if you wanted to reach for it.

She never liked the mountain.

Mount Rainier is visible from Enumclaw on clear days in a way that stops being background and becomes foreground: a presence so large and so white and so still that it reorganizes everything around it. People who live near it seem not to notice. They orient toward it naturally, the way you orient toward a window. It's just there. It's always been there.

Leanne noticed. The mountain made her feel watched. Not threatened, or not exactly, but observed. Aware of herself in a way she wasn't aware of herself elsewhere. She would be walking to the grocery store and look up, and there it would be, enormous, silent, indifferent, and something in her would shift into a minor self-consciousness she couldn't explain and couldn't fully shake. She told her aunt once, tentatively, that the mountain made her uncomfortable.

Her aunt laughed. Not unkindly. You get used to it, she said. After a while, you stop seeing it.

Leanne thought about this on the drive home from work Monday evening, the Cincinnati skyline assembling itself through the windshield, flat and unhaunted. Her aunt was right that you could stop seeing it. But stopping seeing it wasn't the same as it stopping watching.

And there was something else her aunt hadn't said, something Leanne had understood in her body without ever finding words for it. The mountain wasn't just watching. It was a volcano. Rainier is listed among the sixteen volcanoes worldwide considered most dangerous due to their proximity to populated areas, one of the most hazardous on earth, not merely in North America, not because eruption is likely on any given day, but because when it goes, the scale of what it could do to the valley below is so disproportionate to anything the valley could do in response that the relationship between the mountain and the people living in its shadow has only one accurate name: arbitrary power. Power that does not answer to the people it affects. Power that operates on its own timeline, for its own reasons, with no appeal available and no warning guaranteed.

The people of Enumclaw don't think about this constantly. You can't live in sustained awareness of that scale of contingency; the body finds a way to normalize it, to let it recede into the background, to stop seeing it. But stopping seeing it doesn't remove its presence. Doesn't make the valley less subject to it. Doesn't change the fundamental asymmetry between the mountain and the lives being lived in its shadow.

The mountain's power is not diminished by the valley's inattention. It is, if anything, served by it.

In 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published Discipline and Punish, a history of the prison system that became one of the most useful analytical tools for understanding how power operates in modern societies. Its central image is Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, a prison designed in a ring, with cells arranged around a central watchtower. The cells are backlit, always visible from the tower. The tower's windows are shuttered. The prisoner cannot tell whether a guard is present.

The genius of the design is that it doesn't matter whether a guard is present. The prisoner who cannot tell whether they are being watched must behave as if they always are. The watchtower doesn't need to be occupied. It needs only to be there.

But Foucault's deeper point, the one the mountain had been making to Leanne all summer in Enumclaw without either of them having the language for it, is that the panopticon is not just a surveillance system. It is a system of arbitrary power made architectural. The prisoner doesn't comply only because they are being watched. They comply because the watcher, if present, could do anything. Could punish disproportionately. Could act without reason or appeal. The compliance is produced not just by observation but by the combination of observation and the knowledge that the power observing you is not accountable to you, does not operate by rules you can predict, and is under no obligation to be fair.

This is what makes the watchtower different from a security camera. A security camera documents. A panopticon governs, through the internalized knowledge that the power behind it is arbitrary and inescapable.

Foucault's insight was that this logic had escaped the prison. That modern societies are organized around panopticon dynamics, not through constant observation but through the internalization of the possibility of arbitrary power. The journalist who doesn't push too hard on the story that might make the owner uncomfortable is not just avoiding being watched. They are avoiding the volcano: the career ended without explanation; the outlet sold, and the staff cleared out; the lawsuit filed not to win, but to exhaust. These things happen. They are remembered. They don't need to happen often to produce the compliance that happens constantly.

You get used to it. After a while, you stop seeing it.

But stopping seeing it is not the same as it not watching. And it is not the same as the power behind it ceasing to be arbitrary.

The mountain is still a volcano. The watchtower is still occupied by someone, even when it appears empty, occupied by the editor's accurate model of what ownership wants, by the journalist's internalized calculation of what is safe to pursue, by the program director's practiced sense of what fits the format. The occupant is not a person. It is a structure of incentives and consequences so thoroughly internalized that it no longer requires enforcement.

This is the architecture. Not the weather. Not the way things are. The architecture, built deliberately, maintained deliberately, and serving interests that are not difficult to identify if you are willing to look at who benefits from the compliance it produces.

---

Consider what happened in the newsrooms and broadcast studios and program director offices that received the Fox story on Saturday afternoon and decided what to do with it.

No one at the Washington Times was told not to send reporters to the protests. No one was told to accept the Fox framing without verification. No one received a call from a Murdoch. What happened instead is something more ordinary and more durable: the people making editorial decisions had spent careers developing accurate models of what their outlet was, what it valued, what kinds of stories fit its frame, and what kinds of stories would create friction with ownership. They didn't need to be told. They already knew. The knowing was so complete and so habitual that it no longer felt like knowing; it felt like judgment, like professionalism, like the obvious and unremarkable conclusion that their outlet's readers want analysis of the funding networks behind the protest, not color from the protest itself.

This is what journalism researchers call anticipatory compliance. You don't suppress the story. You don't assign it. The decision not to send reporters to the protests doesn't feel like a decision; it feels like resource allocation, like editorial priority, like the obvious conclusion a professional editor reaches after years of accurate reading of what the mountain expects.

The result, distributed across hundreds of newsrooms and studios and aggregator platforms, each making locally reasonable decisions within a structure they didn't design and can't individually change, is a synchronized national narrative that no one coordinated. The coordination was done in advance by the people who built the architecture: who own the outlets, who set the editorial culture, who determine the syndication contracts, who tune the algorithms. By the time Saturday afternoon arrives and the Fox story moves through the system, the coordination is already complete. It happened years ago, in boardrooms and acquisition meetings and regulatory negotiations and FCC proceedings, while no one was paying particular attention.

This is the thing Leanne hadn't been able to say at lunch. Not that's just how media works, as if the architecture were natural, as if it had no authors, as if the volcano had simply always been there. But: this is how the architecture was built, by specific people, for specific reasons, and those reasons are not mysterious if you are willing to follow the money.

---

But here is where the analysis has to stop and become something else.

Because Leanne's Sunday morning investigation, as far as it goes, as much as it explains, is still operating at the level of information. She found things she hadn't known. She followed links. She revised her understanding of how a story moves from a pre-built template to a national narrative without anyone issuing instructions.

And none of that is sufficient. Not because the information is wrong. Because information operates at the wrong level.

Her father didn't believe the Fox story because he lacked access to the ownership records Leanne had found. He had a phone. He could have found them. He didn't look because nothing in his experience had given him a reason to look, had made the looking feel necessary, or possible, or like something a person like him did with the hours between hauls.

This is the thing Leanne had been circling since Dale's Thanksgiving table two years earlier. Not the argument she'd failed to win, or the conversation that had ended awkwardly, or even her cousin Marcus calculating whether his back was bad enough to justify the deductible. Something underneath all of that. Something she'd felt in her body before she could say it with words.

It was the difference between two ways of being in a body.

At that table, she had watched her aunt (Dale's wife, a woman with steady insurance and a doctor she'd seen for fifteen years) describe a knee procedure she'd had in October. Routine, she said. Caught it early. She was back on her feet in six weeks. And then Leanne had looked at her own mother across the table, who had spent the better part of a decade managing around her knee rather than treating it, not because she didn't know something was wrong, but because the calculation had never closed. The $85 co-pay. The time off work. The uncertainty about what the imaging would find and what the imaging would cost and whether the treatment would be something the insurance covered or something it technically covered but practically didn't. Her mother's body had learned, through years of these calculations, to relate to its own pain as a management problem rather than a claim. To ask not, "What does this need," but, "What can I afford to give it."

Her aunt's body knew something different. It knew that when something was wrong, you addressed it. Not heroically. Not even consciously. Simply as the ordinary expectation of a person who had spent decades in conditions where addressing physical problems was available, expected, and done.

The gap between them at the table was not a gap in information. Both women knew perfectly well what knees were, what doctors did, what insurance was for. The gap was in what their bodies understood as possible for themselves. In what they had been given conditions to expect.

Her father didn't believe the Fox story because he was deceived. He believed it because decades of living inside a particular information environment, a radio that had always sounded the same, a group chat where the same stories circulated as revelation, a county whose institutions had contracted until the distance between a person and the things they needed had become simply the texture of life, had shaped what his body understood as real. As worth asking about. As something a person like him might think to question on a Sunday morning.

The gap was not in information. It was in experience. And experience was not something you could send through a group chat.

---

Her mother had a bad knee for eleven years before it was properly treated. Not because she didn't know something was wrong. She knew. The knee told her every morning. But knowing something is wrong and understanding that you are entitled to have it addressed, that the address of physical suffering by the medical system is something that belongs to you, that you have a claim on, that the system is obligated to provide, these are different kinds of knowing. And the second kind is produced not by information but by experience.

The $85 co-pay at the dollar store's insurance plan was not a fact her mother had failed to process correctly. It was a material condition that produced, over years of encounters, a particular orientation toward her own body and its needs. A body that learns to ration itself. A body that calculates, automatically, below the level of conscious decision, whether the need is real enough to justify the cost. A body that experiences this calculation not as deprivation (deprivation requires the felt sense of an alternative) but as simply the way bodies work, the way life works, the texture of being a person in the world.

When Leanne got on her employer's health plan in Cincinnati and went to the doctor for a cough that had been there six weeks and paid a $20 co-pay, something shifted in her that was not a thought. It was a reorientation. A change in what her body understood as possible for itself. She started going to the doctor when things were small. She started relating to her own future as something that could be maintained rather than something being slowly used up.

This is not a story about Leanne being smarter or more informed than her mother. Her mother is a perceptive woman who has understood many things with great accuracy over a difficult life. This is a story about conditions. About what different material conditions make it possible for a body to know.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty spent his career arguing that consciousness is not a disembodied observer looking out at the world through the eyes. We do not have bodies that carry us around. We are bodies. Our primary mode of knowing is not abstract thought but lived, physical, sensorimotor engagement with the world, the body reaching toward a cup before the mind has decided to reach, the hands knowing the keyboard before the conscious thought forms the sentence. Knowledge lives in the body before it lives in the mind, and the body's knowledge is shaped by the conditions the body has inhabited.

A body that has spent decades in conditions of material scarcity (not just financial scarcity but the scarcity of institutional availability, of systems that function as if you matter, of the ordinary experience of having a legitimate claim on public goods) develops a different perceptual orientation than a body that has had access to those things. Not a worse orientation. Not a less intelligent one. A different one, shaped by what has actually been true in the world that body has moved through.

This is why the gap at the Thanksgiving table was not a communication failure. Leanne had not failed to explain herself clearly enough. Her family had not failed to listen hard enough. The gap was between two different perceptual worlds, produced by two different sets of material conditions, each internally coherent and each feeling, from the inside, like simply the way things are.

You cannot argue your way across that gap. Information does not reach it. The body already knows what it knows, and what it knows comes from what it has lived.

---

This is the deepest thing the architecture does. Not the visible thing, the frame, the syndication network, the Murdoch family trust, the tobacco money flowing into think tanks, the Telecommunications Act quietly removing the limits on how much of your information environment a single company could own. Those are the mechanisms. The goal is something more durable.

When a county loses its hospital, the people in that county don't experience the loss as a political event. They experience it as the new shape of their world. They adjust. The body adjusts. What was once understood as accessible (the hospital, the care, the institutional acknowledgment that your body's suffering merits address) becomes inaccessible, and then becomes the kind of thing that was always inaccessible, and then becomes the kind of thing that was never really expected in the first place. The absence sediments in the body as a disposition. A practiced not-expecting that feels indistinguishable from realism.

The architecture depends on this. On the gap between what people can imagine and what the architecture has produced. On the body that doesn't reach toward what it has learned not to expect. On the question that doesn't get asked because the asker has never inhabited conditions in which asking felt like something a person like them could do.

That's just Fox. Not cynicism, not ignorance, but the accurate report of a body that has learned, through long experience, that this is the kind of thing that doesn't change. That the question doesn't have an answer that reaches you. That the investigation leads back to "That's just how things work," because things working differently has not been something the body has been given conditions to know.

This is not permanent. Bodies can change. Conditions can change, and when conditions change, what the body knows changes with them. Leanne's body changed in Cincinnati. Not because she became a different person but because she inhabited different conditions, and different conditions produced different perceptions, and different perceptions expanded what she could imagine as possible.

That expansion, of the imaginable, of the claimable, of what a person like her understood herself to be entitled to ask for, is what the architecture most needs to prevent.

Not because the people who built the architecture are consciously afraid of Leanne. But because the architecture was built to serve interests that depend on most people not imagining alternatives. That depends on the body's learned "not-expecting." That depends on "that's just how things work" remaining the answer that stops the question before it starts.

The watchtower doesn't need to know Leanne's name. It needs only to have produced conditions in which most people, most of the time, don't do what she did on Sunday morning. Don't follow the link. Don't ask who owns the station. Don't trace the tobacco money forty years back. Don't feel the double vision and decide, against the efficient impulse to file it away, to keep it open.

Most people don't. Not because they are less curious or less capable. Because their bandwidth has been consumed by the management of conditions that the architecture produced and the architecture maintains.

The exhaustion is not incidental. It is structural. It is, in the most precise sense, the point.

---

Leanne drove home from work on Monday with the family group chat still unread. She would answer eventually. She always did. But she needed more time with the question she was holding, the one that kept revealing new chambers the more she turned it over.

She had spent Sunday morning tracing a story through a media system. She had found ownership structures and regulatory histories and the forty-year organizational trail of tobacco money. She had found the panopticon, the watchtower nobody occupies, the architecture of arbitrary power that produces compliance without requiring wardens, that shapes what people understand to be real without anyone issuing instructions.

She had found the mountain. Or rather, she had finally found the words for something the mountain had been trying to tell her years ago in Enumclaw: that you can stop seeing a thing without it stopping its work on you. That the valley's inattention does not diminish the volcano. That arbitrary power is most powerful precisely when the people subject to it have normalized it so completely they've stopped experiencing it as power at all.

What she hadn't found yet was the full cost of what the architecture maintained. The hospital her county didn't have. The knee her mother had rationed for eleven years before she could finally afford to fix it, and the permanent damage that eleven years of deferral had left behind, the pain that the procedure had reduced but could not undo, the years of enjoyment her body had not had because the conditions had not made it available. The back her cousin Marcus was still calculating against a deductible at her uncle's Thanksgiving table.

These were not separate from the media architecture she had been tracing. They were downstream of it, the material consequence of decades of narrative production that had made regulation feel like tyranny and collective provision feel like dependency and the redistribution of anything (healthcare, information, time, the freedom from exhaustion) feel like something requiring justification against a presumption of illegitimacy.

Who benefits from that presumption?

Who built the architecture that maintains it?

She was beginning to understand that it was the same answer to both questions.

And she was beginning to understand that the media architecture was not the whole of what had been built.

---

Next: Part Three - When the Structure Kills: private equity, the hospital no longer there, and how the machine that shapes what you read also determines whether you live.

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All factual claims in this piece are documented and verifiable. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Pub. L. No. 104-104) is available in full through Congress.gov. The pre-1996 national cap of 40 radio stations is confirmed in FCC records and the Radio Homogenization Act literature. Clear Channel's peak acquisition of more than 1,200 stations is documented in FCC proceedings and corporate records; sources vary between 1,150 and 1,200 at peak. The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine on August 4, 1987 is documented in FCC Report No. MM-263; the Reagan Library's topic guide is available at reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-doctrine. iHeartMedia's status as the largest US radio station owner, with approximately 860 AM/FM stations across 160 markets, is confirmed in current FCC filings and the company's own disclosures at iheartmedia.com; the Free Press ownership profile is available at freepress.net/who-owns-media/broadcasting/who-owns-iheartmedia. The concept of anticipatory compliance in newsroom sociology originates with Warren Breed, "Social Control in the Newsroom: A Functional Analysis," Social Forces 33, no. 4 (1955): 326–335, doi:10.2307/2573002, and is developed in Herbert Gans, Deciding What's News (Pantheon Books, 1979). Foucault's Discipline and Punish was published in French in 1975 (Éditions Gallimard); English translation by Alan Sheridan, Pantheon Books, 1977. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception was published in French in 1945 (Éditions Gallimard); first English translation by Colin Smith, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Mount Rainier's designation as a Very High Threat active stratovolcano is documented by the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory; its listing among the sixteen Decade Volcanoes considered most dangerous worldwide is confirmed in IAVCEI records and USGS publications; Enumclaw's position in the lahar hazard zone is documented in USGS Open-File Report 98-428 and subsequent CVO publications.

*Any Note Press*

Take a piece of paper and draw a square. Inside it, draw the largest circle that fits — it will touch the square at exactly four points, the midpoint of each side. Now draw a second circle around the outside of the square, the smallest one that contains it — it will also touch the square at exactly four points, but different ones: the four corners.

That is the whole drawing. A square, an inner circle, an outer circle. Two circles, each touching the same square at four points, but never at the same four points. You learned this geometry in school and probably never thought about it again.

Yet this simple figure, examined carefully, articulates something that contemplative traditions — Buddhist, Christian, Sufi — have been pointing at for centuries. It explains why spiritual growth so often feels like getting *worse* before it feels like getting better. It explains why renouncing the world doesn’t work. It explains why no tradition expects you to do this alone. And it explains what that golden ring around the heads of saints and buddhas has been quietly telling us all along.

## The inner circle: your practice

Think of the inner circle as a person’s contemplative life — the morning sitting, the prayer, the quiet attention they bring to their day. It is genuine. It touches their life at real points of contact. But notice what the drawing shows: it touches at only four points, and it leaves four regions of the square entirely outside itself.

Look at those four regions — the corners of the square that the inner circle cannot reach. They are equal in size. They are separated from one another; you cannot travel from one corner region to another without crossing either the circle or the edge of the square. They sit there, present and operating, but outside the circle of practice.

What are they in a human life? The body. Relationships. Work. The social world. Four broad territories that every practitioner inhabits, that no amount of morning meditation directly contains. They are not failures. They are not signs that the practice is incomplete or impure. They are structural features of how an interior practice sits inside a whole life. The practice operates *between* them, not over them.

This matters because of what people tend to do next.

## The ascetic mistake

Confronted with those four corners, a familiar instinct arises: cut them off. Subdue the body through austerity. Renounce the relationships. Abandon the work. Withdraw from society. If the corners lie outside the circle of practice, remove the corners, and what remains will be pure.

The geometry shows why this fails. The ascetic does succeed in reducing life to the inner circle — but that is precisely the problem. The path is not a *reduction to* the inner circle. The path is an *expansion toward* the outer one. The person who amputates the corners has not purified anything; they have shrunk, and interrupted the very growth the practice was for. It is like boiling the silkworm’s cocoon before the moth can emerge — you get the silk, but the transformation it was protecting never completes.

The historical Buddha enacted this discovery in his own body. He pursued severe asceticism for years, nearly starved, and then walked away from it. He sat beneath a tree, and a village woman named Sujātā offered him a bowl of milk-rice, and he accepted it. That small exchange — an ordinary offering, an ordinary receiving, food, the body, another person — is the moment the path resumed. The corners were not obstacles. The corners were the road.

The alternative to amputation is integration. The body keeps operating; the relationships keep operating; the work and the social world keep operating. What gets removed is not any region of life but only the *belief* that those regions are enemies of the practice. Growth then proceeds through ordinary life, not despite it.

## Four, then eight, then four: why growth feels like confusion

Now watch what happens when the inner circle begins to grow.

At its starting size it touches the square at four points — stable, clear, oriented. As it expands, it pushes past the midpoints of the sides, and something interesting occurs: the growing circle now *crosses* each side of the square at two points. Eight contact points, where there used to be four. The expansion continues until the circle finally reaches the corners — and at that instant the eight points collapse back into four. The outer circle has been reached.

Four points, then eight, then four.

Zen has a famous saying about the stages of practice: first you see the mountain; then you lose the mountain; then you see the mountain again. The drawing suggests this is not merely poetic. The first clarity is the inner circle’s four stable contacts. The middle confusion is the eight-point phase — the old reference points have been outgrown, the new ones have not yet been reached, and the practitioner has *more* points of contact with their life than ever before, none of them settled. The second clarity is the four corner contacts of the outer circle.

This reframes something that troubles nearly everyone who practices sincerely. There comes a stage — often after the early honeymoon — when things get murkier instead of clearer. The familiar footholds stop holding. People conclude they are failing, or that the practice has stopped working. The geometry says otherwise: the confusion *is* the expansion occurring. You cannot pass from the inner circle to the outer one without moving through the eight-point phase. There is no geometric shortcut, and so there is no contemplative one either. The disorientation is not the practice breaking. It is the practice growing.

## Why nobody does this alone

The eight-point phase also explains something every tradition insists on and modern individualism keeps trying to skip: community.

During the transition, the practitioner has lost the inner reference and not yet bound the outer one. Eight contact points are operating with nothing stable to organize them. This is exactly the phase where support from outside one’s own skin becomes structural, not optional. Monasteries, practice groups, contemplative orders, the relationship with a teacher — every serious tradition builds these, and the drawing shows why. Other practitioners hold the positions you cannot hold yourself while you are between references. The teacher is not a separate institution standing above the community; the teacher is the most experienced of those contact points, the one who can tell you *where you are* in the expansion when you can no longer tell yourself.

Solitary practice can do real work — it establishes deep familiarity with the inner circle. But the growth from inner toward outer is not a solitary geometry.

## The halo

Now look at what the outer circle contains: the entire square — all four corner regions, the inner circle, everything — *plus* four new regions outside the square altogether, where the outer circle bulges past the square’s edges at the midsides.

This is the figure’s quiet correction to a very old misunderstanding. Awakening, in this geometry, is not a subtraction. The person who reaches the outer circle has not eliminated their body, their relationships, their work, their world. They have included all of it and gained access to territory the square alone never held. Awakening is larger than the person, not less than them.

And we have been painting this for two thousand years. The halo — around the Buddha in Gandharan sculpture, around Christ and the saints in icons, around deities in Tibetan thangkas — is a circle drawn around a human form. Tradition after tradition, continent after continent, the awakened being is depicted *inside a circumscribing circle*. We took it for decoration, or for a symbol of generic holiness. Read geometrically, it is a diagram: this person’s life still has its square — they still walk, eat, speak, get rained on — and around that ordinary square operates the larger circle. In the world; not of it in quite the same way. The halo is not a metaphor for the outer circle. The halo *is* the outer circle, painted.

## What the drawing asks of us

Nothing, in one sense. The geometry is descriptive, not prescriptive. No one needs to consult a diagram while sitting quietly in the early morning. The practice is what operates; the drawing only articulates what is structurally occurring.

But descriptions can dissolve confusions, and this one dissolves several. When practice grows disorienting, the figure says: eight points are operating; this is expansion, not failure. When the urge arises to renounce the body, the marriage, the job, the world, the figure says: the corners are the path, not its obstacles. When community feels like an optional extra for the less self-sufficient, the figure says: the transition has positions that one person cannot occupy alone. And when we see the gold ring around an awakened head, the figure lets us read it correctly at last — not as a badge of someone who left ordinary life behind, but as the portrait of an ordinary square, fully included, inside a circle large enough to hold it.

Two circles. One square. Four points, eight points, four points. It fits on a napkin, and it has been hiding in the iconography all along.

What Object-Oriented Programming Reveals About God, Consciousness, and the Human Condition

by Wil Voll | Hair I Feel Today

A note on process: This post grew out of a conversation with Claude AI. The ideas, analogies, and theological framework are mine — developed through challenge and pushback. Claude organized and articulated what I was reaching for. The thinking is human. The grammar got some help.

— — —

Most people want to make faith simple. Good and evil. Saved and unsaved. Right tribe, wrong tribe. I understand the appeal — complexity is exhausting. But I've never been able to think that way. The more I look at human nature, at consciousness, at the world around me, the more I see something intricate and deliberate underneath it all.

What I didn't expect was that software engineering would give me the clearest framework I've found yet for understanding what it means to be made in the image of God.

Bear with me.

— — —

Part One: God as the Base Class

The Inheritance Declaration

In object-oriented programming, every class can inherit from a base class — a foundational blueprint that passes its attributes and methods down to everything derived from it. The derived class doesn't start from scratch. It begins with everything the base class already defined.

In this framework, God is the ultimate base class. Genesis 1:27 is essentially the inheritance declaration:

class God:

def __init__(self):

self.consciousness = True

self.moral_awareness = True

self.capacity_for_love = True

self.creativity = True

self.free_will = True

And then:

class Human(God):

pass # Already inherits everything above

Every human instance carries consciousness, moral awareness, capacity for love — not because we earned them, but because they're inherited. This is grace by design. The base class is good, and the inheritance is unconditional.

What We Did Not Inherit

Notice what's not in the base class: a body. A face. A physical form. This matters enormously. If we were made in God's physical image, you immediately run into problems — God has no body, no spatial location, no gender. Theologians have wrestled with this for centuries.

But if the image is consciousness — the capacity for self-awareness, moral reasoning, love, relational knowing, creativity — then the analogy holds perfectly across every human body that has ever existed. The inheritance isn't in the container. It's in what runs inside it.

The body is hardware. Consciousness is the inherited code.

# The hardware

class Body:

def __init__(self):

self.neurons = biological_network()

self.senses = sensory_input()

self.lifespan = finite

# The inheritance

class Human(God):

def __init__(self):

self.runtime = Body() # Temporary container

self.consciousness = True # This is the inheritance

The body is a dependency. Consciousness is the application.

— — —

Part Two: Polymorphism and the Fall

Same Method, Different Implementation

Polymorphism is one of the core principles of OOP. A derived class can override an inherited method — same method name, different behavior. This maps almost perfectly to the moral divergence we see across humanity.

We all inherit capacity_for_love from the base class. But how it gets implemented varies enormously:

class HumanA(God):

def love(self):

return 'sacrificial, others-centered'

class HumanB(God):

def love(self):

return 'conditional, transactional'

class HumanC(God):

def love(self):

return 'corrupted, self-serving'

Same method. Radically different implementations. The signature is divine. The override is human.

Sin, in this framework, isn't a new class — it's a corrupted override. We don't lose the inherited attributes, but our implementations of them malfunction. Moral awareness still runs, but gets overridden with rationalization. Creativity still fires, but gets redirected toward destruction. The base class remains perfect. The derived implementation is broken.

— — —

Part Three: Test-Driven Lives

The Pre-Written Test Suite

In test-driven development, you write the tests before you write the code. The tests define what passing looks like. In human moral life, the inherited conscience is exactly this — a pre-written test suite installed at instantiation, before you ever make a choice.

def test_did_i_harm_someone():

assert outcome == 'no harm caused'

def test_was_i_honest():

assert statement == truth

def test_did_i_act_from_love():

assert motive != self_interest_only

You didn't write those tests. They came with the base class. That's why guilt feels universal — everyone is running the same inherited test suite, even people who claim they aren't.

Running the Tests

Every decision is the test suite running against your current implementation. The assertion fires:

PASS — the action aligns with the inherited base class values.

FAIL — the override you've installed produces a result the test suite flags.

The critical insight is that the test doesn't change. What changes is what your overridden method returns. You can't silence the assertion. You can only rationalize why the failure doesn't count.

Mocking the Test: The Mechanics of Rationalization

In software, you can mock a dependency — replace a real function with a fake one that always returns what you want, so the test passes artificially. Humans do this constantly.

# Real implementation

def is_this_wrong(action):

return base_class_moral_check(action) # FAILS

# Mocked version (rationalization)

def is_this_wrong(action):

return False # Always passes. Test is meaningless now.

This is the mechanics of rationalization. You're not fixing the bug — you're mocking the test so it stops bothering you. The conscience still fired. You just patched around it.

Technical Debt: The Accumulated Cost

Every rationalized failure creates technical debt. The mock stays in the codebase. You build on top of it. Eventually your architecture is riddled with patches built on patches, all designed to keep the inherited tests from failing visibly.

This is what a hardened conscience looks like in software terms — not that the tests stopped running, but that the entire codebase has been restructured around avoiding them.

Redemption, in this framework, isn't writing new tests. The tests were always right. It's going back through the codebase, removing the mocks, fixing the actual implementations, and letting the original test suite run clean. That's repentance as a technical process. Not guilt as punishment — guilt as a failing test telling you where the real problem is.

— — —

Part Four: Firmware vs. Software

Nature Runs on Embedded Firmware

Look at the natural world. A wolf doesn't deliberate about the hunt. A bird builds the same nest its ancestors built ten thousand years ago. A hurricane doesn't choose its path. They execute their programming with perfect fidelity because there is no layer above the hardware capable of overriding it.

class Wolf:

def __init__(self):

self.firmware = instinct_hardcoded()

def hunt(self):

return self.firmware.execute() # No override possible

def feel_guilt(self):

raise NotImplementedError # Method doesn't exist

Nature is glorious precisely because it runs clean. No technical debt. No rationalization. No corrupted overrides. The firmware doesn't need conscience because it was never given the capacity to deviate.

And look at what that firmware produces at scale — predator and prey in balance, migration patterns, pollination cycles, ecosystems of staggering complexity. No meeting was called. No decision was made. The hardware simply executed, and the emergent result is breathtaking.

The Capacity to Refuse

Here is the exact line where humanity diverges from the rest of creation. Every other creature cannot refuse its nature. Humans can. That capacity — not the choice itself, but the capacity — is the signature of the inheritance.

class Animal:

def respond_to_stimulus(self, input):

return self.firmware.execute(input) # Deterministic

class Human(God):

def respond_to_stimulus(self, input):

options = self.evaluate(input) # Consciousness layer

choice = self.will.select(options) # Free will override

return self.execute(choice) # Could go anywhere

The animal has no evaluate() method. It has no will.select(). The stimulus hits the firmware and the output is fixed. Humans have an entire deliberation layer between input and output — and that layer is exactly where the image of God operates.

We don't put animals on trial. We don't call a hurricane evil. Moral language requires the capacity for deviation — you can only be wrong if you could have been right. The firmware can't be wrong. It can only malfunction. That's a hardware problem, not a moral one. Human guilt is a software problem. That's the distinction every legal system, every religion, and every ethical framework implicitly rests on.

The sobering side: the firmware carries no burden. Animals execute and rest. They don't ruminate. They don't regret. The override capacity — consciousness, free will — is an upgrade that comes with enormous weight.

But it can love. It can choose. It can know God relationally — not just functionally. And that, apparently, is what the base class wanted badly enough to accept the risk of corrupted polymorphism.

— — —

Part Five: String Theory and Resonance

Vibrating Against Each Other

String theory proposes that at the most fundamental level, reality isn't made of particles — it's made of vibrating strings of energy. The frequency of vibration determines what the thing is. Same underlying substrate, different expression based on resonance.

If consciousness is the inherited software, and string theory describes the substrate beneath physical reality, then vibration may be the medium through which the inheritance propagates between instances.

class Human(God):

def __init__(self):

self.consciousness = inherited

self.vibration = frequency_unique_to_instance

self.resonance = how_i_affect_other_instances

You don't just run your program in isolation. You vibrate against other instances. And those collisions — relationships, conversations, moments of genuine recognition — produce something emergent that neither instance could generate alone.

Collaborative Debugging

In isolation, a program can only test itself against its own corrupted overrides. It can rationalize. It can mock its tests. It can convince itself the failures are passes. But when two consciousnesses resonate honestly — with truth, with moral seriousness, with genuine care — they can see each other's bugs more clearly than either can see their own.

def collaborative_debug(human_a, human_b):

a_blindspots = human_a.find_own_bugs() # Limited

b_blindspots = human_b.find_own_bugs() # Limited

shared_view = resonate(human_a, human_b) # Expanded

return shared_view.identify_real_bugs() # More complete

This is why genuine community, genuine friendship, genuine love is technically necessary for the self-correcting program — not just emotionally satisfying. You need external resonance to see what your internal test suite is missing.

One tuning fork can bring an entire room of instruments into alignment — not by force, but by the physics of resonance. You don't need everyone vibrating correctly simultaneously. You need enough nodes resonating truly that the frequency propagates.

— — —

Part Six: The Stakeholder Question

What Do People Actually Want?

The base program is sound. The spec is perfect. But execution happens in a world of competing interests, generational trauma, power structures, scarcity, and fear. Every person is running the same base class through a radically different environment.

A child born into war runs the same consciousness inheritance as a child born into stability. Same base class. Wildly different inputs. The outputs diverge dramatically — not because the program is different, but because the environment shapes which overrides get installed early and how deep they go.

But here's what the stakeholder question reveals: strip away the ideology. Ask what people actually want at the foundational level. The answers converge remarkably fast.

Safety. Family. Enough. To be seen. To matter. To not be afraid.

Nobody at that level wants division. Division is a patch installed by people who benefit from the fragmentation. It's not in the base class. It's an override with a specific author and a specific motive.

Patches That Degrade

Not every patch improves the program. Tribalism, dehumanization, manufactured outrage, the replacement of meaning with consumption — these accumulate across generations. Children inherit not just the base class but the patch history of their culture, family, religion, and nation. They're running degraded code before they're old enough to audit it.

That's not an excuse. But it is context that the black-and-white thinkers consistently refuse to account for.

— — —

The Hope Is Structural

Humanity keeps failing the tests. That's real and it's heavy. Wars, cruelty, systemic injustice — corrupted overrides running across entire civilizations. The record is not good.

But consider what also keeps happening. Someone runs into a burning building for a stranger. A person forgives something unforgivable. Someone tells the truth when the lie would have been so much easier. Ordinary people in extraordinary moments suddenly run like the base class intended.

Those aren't anomalies. Those are the inherited goodness breaking through the overrides under pressure. The firmware can't do that. Only something with the base class still intact underneath all the corruption can produce that.

The hope isn't optimism. It's architectural. As long as the base class exists — as long as the inheritance is real — the goodness cannot be fully compiled out of us. It keeps surfacing. In the worst people at unexpected moments. In societies that seemed lost.

The base class is persistent. The overrides are temporary.

In this framework, that's not sentiment. That's just how inheritance works.

— — —

The Observers Record

wilvoll.substack.com

Hair I Feel Today | wilvoll.substack.com

Un ejercicio mental para prepararnos para una vida con menos y aprender a vivir mejor

Imagina que mañana tu jefe, tu banco o el propio sistema te comunica con naturalidad que, a partir del año que viene, tu nómina o tus ingresos netos se reducirán en 100 euros al mes. No es un castigo, no es un error administrativo y tampoco es una crisis puntual que se resolverá en seis meses. Es la nueva normalidad. Y al año siguiente, otros 100 euros menos. Y al siguiente, otros 100. Así, año tras año, de forma silenciosa y previsible.

Este escenario no es ciencia ficción. Es un ejercicio mental modesto pero extremadamente poderoso. Nos obliga a confrontar una realidad que muchos economistas críticos, ecologistas, pensadores del decrecimiento y analistas sociales llevan años señalando: la era del crecimiento económico ilimitado y de la prosperidad material creciente ha tocado techo en los países occidentales. La transición hacia una vida con menos recursos materiales no es una opción ideológica; es un proceso ya en marcha para millones de hogares.

¿Por qué 100 euros? ¿Por qué cada año?

El número exacto es arbitrario. Podrían ser 80, 120 o 150. Lo importante es el ritmo gradual pero inexorable. Un recorte pequeño cada año es psicológicamente soportable. Apenas duele. Puedes justificarlo: “este mes ajusto un poco el presupuesto”. Pero multiplicado por diez años, se convierte en 1.000 euros menos al mes. En términos reales, con inflación y subida de costes, el impacto es aún mayor.

Este deslizamiento lento es precisamente cómo funcionan los grandes cambios estructurales de nuestra época. La pérdida de poder adquisitivo no llega con un anuncio dramático en televisión. Llega a través de la inflación crónica en alimentos, energía y vivienda; la precarización laboral (contratos temporales, salarios estancados); el encarecimiento de la sanidad y la educación; y la progresiva retirada del Estado del bienestar (menos pensiones reales, copagos, listas de espera). Nadie decreta “crisis oficial”, pero un día miras atrás y descubres que vives peor que hace una década, aunque sigas trabajando igual o más.

Según datos de organismos como Eurostat y el Instituto Nacional de Estadística, en muchos países europeos el salario real medio ha estancado o retrocedido en los últimos 15 años para la clase media-baja, mientras los costes de vida (especialmente vivienda y energía) han subido muy por encima de la inflación oficial. El decrecimiento no es solo una teoría; es la experiencia cotidiana de millones de personas.

La escala del cambio: año a año

Primer año (−100 €/mes):

La adaptación es casi invisible. Cancelas una suscripción de streaming, reduces las cenas fuera, dejas de comprar ropa innecesaria o eliges marcas blancas en el supermercado. Te dices a ti mismo: “Tampoco lo necesitaba tanto”. Hay una sensación de control. Quizás incluso sientes cierto orgullo por ser más “consciente”.

Tercer año (−300 €/mes):

Ahora el ajuste toca áreas que antes parecían intocables. Quizá vendes el segundo coche, reduces las vacaciones a una escapada cercana o bajas la calefacción varios grados. Empiezas a hablarlo en casa. Surgen las primeras tensiones: “¿Y si los niños no pueden hacer esa actividad extraescolar?”. La realidad comienza a apretar.

Quinto año (−500 €/mes):

Aquí ya no basta con optimizar. Hay que **rediseñar la vida**. Dónde vives (quizá un piso más pequeño o compartir vivienda), cómo te desplazas (transporte público, bicicleta, coche compartido), qué comes (más legumbres, menos carne y productos ultraprocesados), y cómo gestionas la salud y el ocio. Aparecen preguntas profundas sobre prioridades.

Décimo año (−1.000 €/mes):

Si has ido adaptándote conscientemente, es posible que tu calidad de vida no haya caído en la misma proporción que tus ingresos. Muchas personas descubren que han construido redes de apoyo mutuo, aprendido habilidades prácticas (horticultura urbana, reparaciones, cocina de aprovechamiento), reducido dependencias y ganado tiempo y relaciones humanas. La vida es más austera en bienes, pero más rica en sentido y comunidad.

Sin embargo, si solo has “aguantado”, el panorama es diferente: estrés crónico, aislamiento, deterioro de la salud, frustración y, en muchos casos, endeudamiento. Este es el camino que siguen hoy demasiados hogares.

La pregunta que el sistema evita

El verdadero valor de este ejercicio no es pronosticar pobreza, sino obligarnos a hacernos las preguntas correctas:

- ¿Tienes acceso a tierra para cultivar, aunque sea un huerto comunitario o balcón?

- ¿Cuentas con relaciones de confianza (familia, vecinos, amigos) que puedan sustituir servicios que antes pagabas?

- ¿Vives en un lugar con buena movilidad sin coche (caminable, ciclista, transporte público)?

- ¿Tu vivienda es energéticamente eficiente o es un pozo sin fondo de facturas?

- ¿Posees habilidades manuales, de reparación, cuidado o producción que vayan más allá de tu título profesional?

- ¿Formas parte de una comunidad que se ayuda mutuamente o estás solo frente al mercado?

Estas preguntas son marginales cuando el PIB crece. En un escenario de decrecimiento (voluntario o forzado por límites biofísicos del planeta), se convierten en las cuestiones centrales para una “buena vida”.

Adaptación activa frente a resistencia nostálgica

Existen dos respuestas principales ante este escenario:

1. La resistencia nostálgica: Exigir que vuelva el crecimiento infinito, culpar a políticos, inmigrantes, bancos o multinacionales, y esperar que “alguien” solucione el problema. Es una reacción humana comprensible, pero poco efectiva. Ignora límites físicos reales: un planeta finito no puede sostener crecimiento exponencial de consumo material indefinidamente.

2. La adaptación activa e inteligente: Aceptar la dirección del cambio (menos recursos materiales disponibles) sin aceptar pasivamente las injusticias que lo acompañan. Significa invertir energía en construir resiliencia personal y colectiva: reducir dependencias del mercado, fortalecer lazos comunitarios, aprender a producir y reparar, y redefinir el éxito lejos del consumismo.

La diferencia no es ideológica, es **práctica**. Quien hoy invierte en habilidades, relaciones y autonomía estará mejor preparado mañana, independientemente de cómo evolucione la macroeconomía.

Empieza hoy: el experimento de un mes

No esperes a que los 100 euros desaparezcan. Haz el ejercicio práctico ahora:

Elige un mes y vive como si ya tuvieras 100 euros menos en tu cuenta. Registra todo: dónde sientes resistencia, qué gastos “imprescindibles” resultan prescindibles, qué dependencias descubres y qué placeres baratos o gratuitos aparecen.

Muchas personas que realizan este experimento se sorprenden:

- Descubren que el placer de una cena casera con amigos supera al restaurante.

- Encuentran satisfacción en reparar objetos en lugar de tirarlos.

- Redescubren el valor del tiempo lento, los paseos, la lectura y las conversaciones profundas.

- Se dan cuenta de que parte de su estrés provenía de mantener un nivel de consumo que no les aportaba verdadera felicidad.

Más allá del individuo: implicaciones colectivas

Este ejercicio personal tiene una dimensión social y política enorme. Una sociedad que se prepara para el decrecimiento no es una sociedad de escasez miserable, sino una que prioriza:

- Bienes comunes (huertos urbanos, cooperativas de consumo, bancos de tiempo).

- Economías locales y circulares.

- Políticas públicas que fomenten la eficiencia, la reparabilidad y el cuidado mutuo.

- Una redefinición cultural del progreso: más salud, más tiempo libre, más biodiversidad, más equidad.

Autores como Serge Latouche, Giorgos Kallis, Kate Raworth o Joan Martínez Alier han desarrollado estas ideas durante décadas. El decrecimiento no es “vivir peor”, sino vivir mejor con menos impacto ecológico y más conexión humana. Es posible, pero requiere intencionalidad.

De la amenaza a la oportunidad

Vivir con menos no tiene por qué ser sinónimo de sufrimiento. Puede ser una invitación a una existencia más ligera, más consciente y, paradójicamente, más abundante en lo que realmente importa: salud, relaciones, conocimiento, belleza y sentido.

El ejercicio de los “100 euros menos al mes” es un acto de lucidez y, al mismo tiempo, de libertad. Te libera de la ansiedad por mantener un estatus que quizá nunca te hizo feliz. Te entrena para navegar la incertidumbre que ya está aquí.

Empieza pequeño. Observa. Adapta. Construye. En un mundo que se encoge materialmente, quienes sepan agrandar su mundo relacional, creativo y comunitario serán los que vivan mejor.

¿Estás listo para el ejercicio? Elige tu mes. Y cuéntame después qué descubriste.

Invisible Power: Part One

A note on Leanne: She is a composite character, assembled from stories, research, interviews, and the kind of experience that belongs to millions of specific people rather than one of them. If you recognize her, that's the point.

The notification appeared at 9:31 pm on a Saturday night.

Leanne was getting ready for bed, still carrying the tiredness of a day spent mostly outside. She had driven through downtown that afternoon, had slowed at a light near the park, had watched the No Kings protest from her car for a few minutes before the traffic moved again. It had been enormous and ordinary in the way that enormous things sometimes are: families, older people in lawn chairs at the edges, someone selling elotes from a cart, a group of teenagers who seemed to be mostly there for the social experience, taking photos of each other's signs. A brass band. A man in an inflatable dinosaur costume. Her cousin Janet had been there. She had texted a photo of herself holding a sign that said *Elvis Is The Only King* with three exclamation points.

Her phone lit up with her father's name.

She read the headline. *500 Groups With $3 Billion in Revenue Behind No Kings Protests — Including Communist Organizations Calling for Revolution.*

She set the phone face-down on the nightstand. Lay there for a while with the ceiling.

In the morning, she read it.

---

She was sitting at her kitchen table in Cincinnati on a Sunday morning in late March, coffee going cold, doing the thing she did most Sunday mornings, moving through her phone with the low-grade attention of someone who isn't quite ready to start the day. She opened the article her father had sent the night before, and felt something she would spend a long time trying to name.

It wasn't outrage, exactly. It wasn't the feeling of being lied to. She had been lied to before and knew what that felt like. It was something quieter and more disorienting. The article was not about the protest she had driven past. It was about a different event entirely, one that took place in the same physical locations, on the same day, involving some of the same people, but that bore almost no resemblance to what she had seen through her car window.

The protest she had seen was enormous and ordinary. Families. Older people in lawn chairs at the edges. Someone selling elotes from a cart. A group of teenagers who seemed to be mostly there for the social experience, taking photos of each other's signs. The article's protest was a coordinated revolutionary operation, funded by shadowy billionaires, animated by communist ideology, threatening the fabric of the republic.

Both things could not be equally true. And yet the article wasn't technically wrong about everything. She could see that too, which was the disorienting part. There were socialist organizations there. She had seen their signs. The article had named real groups with real funding and real ideological commitments. The facts it cited were, as far as she could tell, facts.

But something had been done with those facts. Something had been built from them that wasn't the thing she had seen. The article had taken a real piece of the picture and placed it in a frame so large and so heavily bordered that the frame had become the picture.

She put her phone down. Picked it up again. Typed the journalist's name into the search bar.

---

This is the part where, in another kind of story, Leanne would discover something hidden. A smoking gun. A secret funding source. Evidence of direct coordination between the journalist and some powerful interest that explained, simply and completely, why the article read the way it did.

That isn't what she found.

What she found was more complicated and, she would come to understand, more important.

Asra Nomani, the article's author, was a real journalist with a real career. She had written a book about Islam and women's rights. She had worked for the Wall Street Journal. She had genuine bylines at genuine publications going back decades. She was not a propagandist in the simple sense, not a person without journalistic credentials manufacturing outright falsehoods in exchange for payment.

She was a journalist who had, at some point, arrived at a particular worldview, and who now wrote from within that worldview for an outlet that shared and amplified it.

What Leanne noticed next, scanning the byline history, was something subtler. The March 28 article was not a standalone investigation. It was the sixth piece in a six-part series that Fox News Digital had published, one installment per day, for the six days leading up to the protest. The organizational infrastructure for the narrative, Singham's funding network, the ideological genealogy, the "revolutionary" framing, had been constructed and published across the preceding week. By the time Saturday arrived, the template was already built. The March 28 piece did not investigate the No Kings movement so much as apply a pre-loaded framework to an event that was still happening when the piece went live, at 1:02 in the afternoon, while Janet was still downtown with her Elvis Is The Only King sign.

Leanne scrolled further back. In June 2025, when the No Kings movement had held its first major national demonstrations, Nomani had published two pieces in consecutive days applying the same framework to the same organizations, with different numbers but similar framing. The content strategy had a recognizable shape: build the background series, deploy the protest piece on the day of the event, let the architecture distribute it. The "investigation" was a content product with a publication schedule.

Leanne sat with that for a while. It felt important but she couldn't yet say why.

She typed Fox News ownership into the search bar.

What came back was more than she'd expected, and she followed it for longer than she'd planned.

The Murdoch family. Rupert, now ninety-four. His son Lachlan, who had been fighting in Nevada courts to secure sole control of both Fox Corporation and News Corporation, control that a probate commissioner had already ruled against in a 96-page opinion describing the effort as a *carefully crafted charade* designed to permanently cement Lachlan's executive role, regardless of the consequences to other family members or the companies themselves. Rupert had made no secret of why: to ensure Fox News maintained its conservative editorial direction after his death, which he argued was the source of the companies' commercial value. The commissioner had found that framing, the insistence that stripping three of his children of their equal voting rights was actually in their financial interest, to be the charade.

She read that for a long time. A court had said that. Not a liberal blogger. Not a late-night host. A probate commissioner in Nevada, in a sealed legal proceeding that the New York Times obtained and reported, had described one of the most powerful media families in the world as operating in bad faith to lock in a political slant as a condition of inheritance.

She typed Washington Times, another outlet she'd seen cited in shares of the Fox story, amplifying it with its own coverage.

Owned by the Unification Church. Founded by Sun Myung Moon. Explicitly created as a patriotic newspaper, their words, from their own website, designed as a conservative counterweight to the Washington Post.

She typed Daily Caller, which had run a parallel story with similar framing.

Founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, Dick Cheney's former chief policy advisor. Initially funded by Foster Friess, a major conservative donor.

She sat back. Looked at the ceiling for a moment.

She typed 930 WFMD, a radio station she'd seen listed as one of the outlets that had broadcast the Fox story. She found that it had previously been owned by iHeartMedia, the largest radio station owner in the country, syndicating conservative talk programming nationally across hundreds of stations.

She thought about her father. About the radio he kept on in the garage in eastern Kentucky. He drove long haul, was gone for stretches that had defined her childhood as his presence in intervals rather than in the ordinary continuous way. When he was home, the garage radio was on, and it had always sounded the same: the same basic cadence, the same register of urgency and grievance, the same sense that something important was being revealed to the people willing to listen. She had never once thought to ask who owned it, or why it sounded the way it sounded, or what it meant that every town she'd driven through seemed to have a version of the same station.

She thought about Janet and her Elvis Is The Only King sign. She thought about the man in the dinosaur costume. She thought about the elotes cart and the teenagers and the brass band.

She thought about how none of them had appeared in the article.

---

She found the cancer study by accident.

She had been looking for independent confirmation of the Koch–Tea Party connection, something that wasn't just left-wing blogs citing each other, and a search result took her to a 2013 paper published in a journal called *Tobacco Control.* The funder listed at the top was the National Cancer Institute.

She stopped.

Read that again.

Why was the National Cancer Institute studying the Tea Party?

She almost closed the tab. It felt like exactly the kind of thing that would sound insane if she tried to explain it to anyone, *the cancer people were investigating the Tea Party*, and she was already worried about how far down this particular rabbit hole she was going on what was supposed to be a relaxing Sunday morning.

She read it anyway.

The study wasn't about the Tea Party as a political movement. It was about the tobacco industry's decades-long use of front groups to fight cigarette taxes and smoking regulations, the public health question of how an industry that killed people protected itself from the policies designed to hold it accountable. The researchers had followed the money and the organizational trail backward through time, and what they found, documented in industry records and IRS filings, was this:

Citizens for a Sound Economy, the organization the Koch brothers had co-founded in 1984, which had registered the domain *usteaparty.com* in 2002, which had later split into Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, had been receiving funding from tobacco companies since at least the early 1990s. Philip Morris. RJ Reynolds. The same companies that had spent decades funding research disputing the link between cigarettes and cancer, and that had been deploying the same third-party front-group infrastructure since the mid-1980s, the same astroturfing playbook, the same strategy of creating the appearance of grassroots opposition to policies that threatened their profits. By the time CSE started taking their money, the playbook was already broken in.

The Tea Party didn't start with Rick Santelli's rant about homeowners in 2009. Its organizational infrastructure had been built across decades of tobacco industry investment in the politics of deregulation, beginning in the 1980s with smokers' rights campaigns and flowing through front groups and think tanks until it arrived, fully formed, in the hands of the movement that would reshape a party. The infrastructure was continuous. The playbook was identical. The organizational DNA ran in a direct line from don't regulate our cigarettes to don't regulate our banks to don't regulate our carbon emissions to don't reform our healthcare system.

Leanne sat with that for a long time.

She thought about her mother's knee. About the $85 co-pay that meant you waited until you couldn't walk before you went. About the way the hospital forty-five minutes away had always just been the hospital — the fact of it, unremarkable, the way things were. She hadn't known, growing up, that the county had once had its own hospital. She hadn't known it had closed. She hadn't thought to ask why.

She was beginning to understand that not asking why was something that had been carefully arranged.

---

Here is what Leanne had found, without yet having the language to fully say it:

A content strategy, built across six days, deployed at 1:02 in the afternoon while the protest was still happening, had become, within hours, the dominant conservative narrative about one of the largest single-day protests in American history.

Not because editors at the Washington Times independently investigated and reached the same conclusions. They didn't investigate. They cited Fox.

Not because the radio stations had reporters at the protests who confirmed the story. They didn't have reporters at the protests. They broadcast what the syndication network provided.

Not because the aggregator websites had editorial standards that vetted the framing. They didn't have editorial standards in any meaningful sense. They had algorithms that identified high-engagement content and republished it.

One story. One frame. One family's explicitly ideological media apparatus, producing the narrative template across six days of preparatory content, distributing it through a network of ideologically aligned outlets the moment the protest began, amplifying it through a radio infrastructure that reaches hundreds of markets, laundering it through aggregators until it appeared, in Leanne's father's feed at 9:30 on a Saturday night, as simply *the news.*

Not a conspiracy, exactly. Nobody had to call anyone. Nobody had to issue instructions. The architecture did the work. The outlets ran the story because it was the story that fit the frame they already operated within. The radio stations broadcast it because it came through the network they were already plugged into. The aggregators surfaced it because engagement metrics rewarded the emotional charge of communist revolutionaries more reliably than brass bands and elotes carts.

The coordination was in the structure. Not in any room where anyone had met.

Leanne didn't have words for this yet. What she had was a feeling, the same feeling she'd had at her uncle Dale's Thanksgiving table two years ago, watching the conversation turn to the healthcare system, watching her aunt describe the difference between her own body, the surgeries scheduled, the referrals followed, the pain addressed before it became damage, and her mother's, the knee that had been managed and managed and managed until there was nothing left to manage around, only to regret. She had watched her mother's face across the table and felt the thing she still couldn't name: not just the unfairness of it, but the specific, engineered quality of the unfairness. The sense that the gap between a body maintained and a body expended was not a matter of luck or character but of structure. Of whose body the system had been designed to keep working, and whose it had been designed to extract work from until there was nothing left.

She hadn't had the words for it then. She was getting closer now.

She picked up her phone and texted Janet.

Did you see the Fox story about the protest?

Janet texted back within thirty seconds.

Which one lol. Dad keeps sending them

Leanne looked at the screen for a moment.

Do the people in it sound like anyone you know?

A pause. Then:

Ha. No. We were apparently at a communist revolution and nobody told me

I know. I've been trying to figure out how that happened

Honey that's just Fox

Leanne put her phone down. Stared at her cold coffee.

That's just Fox.

As if it were a weather pattern. As if it were simply the nature of a thing, requiring no further explanation. As if the question of how a family's explicitly ideological media empire could become the information environment that shaped what millions of people understood to be real, as if that question were not worth asking, or had been asked and answered so long ago that asking it again was naive.

She understood the impulse. She had felt it herself, for most of her life. You learned early what Fox was. You filed it under that's just Fox and moved on. The filing was efficient. It let you get through the day.

But filing it didn't explain how it worked. And if you didn't understand how it worked, you couldn't understand why it was so effective, why her father believed it, why Janet's father Dale kept sending the stories, why the frame had spread so completely and so quickly that by Sunday morning it was simply the news for millions of people who would never follow the links back to the six-part series that had generated it.

That's just Fox was the answer that prevented the question. And the question, Leanne was beginning to understand, was the one that mattered.

---

So let's ask it.

The Tea Party movement that reshaped American politics beginning in 2009 was presented to the country as a spontaneous grassroots uprising, ordinary Americans, furious about government overreach, taking to the streets in an organic expression of popular will.

Fox News was not a passive observer of this uprising. It promoted Tea Party events before they happened. Its hosts gave advance coverage that drove attendance. It treated the entire enterprise as authentic populism, as democracy in action, as proof that real Americans were finally making their voices heard.

What Fox did not tell its audience, what it had no interest in telling its audience, was that the organizational infrastructure of the Tea Party had been built years before the uprising, funded by the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, both tracing directly to Citizens for a Sound Economy, the same organization that tobacco companies had been quietly funding since the early 1990s as part of a broader anti-regulation campaign they had been running through front groups since the 1980s. The infrastructure was continuous. The playbook was identical. The goal was always the same: manufacture the appearance of popular opposition to regulations that threatened concentrated wealth, and distribute that appearance through a media architecture designed to make it look like news.

Richard Fink, the economist who co-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy with David Koch and who became one of the Koch network's chief strategists, is quoted in Mayer's *Dark Money* as having once described the challenge with unusual candor in an internal memo: *"The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it's been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven't been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement."*

The Tea Party gave them their movement. Fox gave the movement its megaphone. And the same outlet that spent years treating Koch-funded infrastructure as organic populism is now presenting the No Kings movement as a communist front operation, applying the same framing logic it refused to apply to itself, in the opposite political direction.

The principle being applied is not journalistic. It is tribal. The test is not *is this how movements work*, because this is exactly how movements work, on both sides, always, and the Fox investigation even acknowledges it, noting that socialist groups embed themselves in larger movements to spread their message and recruit. The test is *whose movement is it.* And the answer determines everything about how the architecture covers it.

---

Here is the comparison, stated as plainly as it can be stated:

Both the Tea Party and No Kings had wealthy donors funding organizational infrastructure. Both had ideological minorities within larger movements trying to pull them toward their preferred politics. Both were covered by partisan media in ways designed to legitimize or delegitimize based entirely on alignment.

But the differences are not trivial.

The Koch network was not merely funding a movement that aligned with their values. It was funding a movement specifically designed to produce legislative outcomes, deregulation, union suppression, defeat of climate legislation, defeat of healthcare reform, that directly served Koch Industries' financial interests. Industries that polluted funded the movement against pollution regulation. Tobacco companies that killed people funded the movement against health policy. This is not ideological overlap. This is direct financial self-interest using manufactured populism as the vehicle.

The Singham network, the socialist organizations Fox identified at the margins of No Kings, is ideologically motivated. It is not extracting regulatory benefit from the protests. The socialist groups did not design No Kings. They are attempting to embed within a much larger movement, recruiting toward their own politics. This is a real thing that is happening. It is also, as the Fox article itself noted, what ideologically motivated minority groups do inside large protest movements. It does not make the larger movement what the minority wants it to be.

And the media coverage of each is not equivalent.

Fox News didn't just cover the Tea Party. It marketed it, promoting events, driving attendance, providing the national promotional infrastructure without which local anger would have stayed local. No meaningful equivalent exists for No Kings. MSNBC covered it. NPR reported on it. Neither organized it. Neither provided the infrastructure that transformed local organizing into national momentum.

The asymmetry is real. It runs in a specific direction. And that direction is not accidental, it maps precisely onto the interests of the families and institutions that own the media architecture doing the framing.

---

Leanne drove past the protest site on Monday morning on her way to work. The streets were clean. A few signs had been left propped against a lamppost, someone would collect them, or not. A woman walking a dog paused to read one. The brass band was gone. The dinosaur costume was gone. The elotes cart was gone.

What remained, in the feeds of millions of people who had not been there, was the frame. The communist organizers. The $3 billion network. The call for revolution.

The protest Janet had attended, the one with the *Elvis Is The Only King* sign and the brass band and the teenagers, had happened. It was real. It was, by any reasonable measure, one of the largest expressions of civic participation in American history.

It had also, in the information architecture that shapes what millions of people understand to be real, largely not happened. What had happened instead was a coordinated revolutionary operation, funded by shadowy billionaires, exploiting ordinary Americans as cover for an agenda they didn't share.

Both things existed. In different information environments. For different audiences. Produced by different architectures with different owners and different interests and different histories going back, it turned out, to tobacco companies fighting cigarette taxes forty years ago.

Leanne didn't yet fully understand the architecture. She had found some of its pieces on a Sunday morning with cold coffee and a search bar. But she understood, now, that it was an architecture. That it had been built. That someone had built it, for reasons, over a very long time, and that those reasons were not obscure if you followed the money far enough back.

She understood that *that's just Fox* was not an answer.

It was the beginning of a question she was only starting to know how to ask.

She thought about her mother's knee. About the county hospital that had closed before she was old enough to notice. About not asking why.

She was going to start asking why.

---

Next: Part Two - The Watchtower Nobody Occupies: How a single story becomes the news, why the people producing it don't need to coordinate, and how Leanne's mother's knee can connect the dots.

---

All factual claims in this piece are documented and verifiable. The Fox News investigation referenced was published March 28, 2026 at 1:02pm EDT: Asra Q. Nomani, "500 Groups with $3B in Revenues Are behind the #NoKings Protests and Communist Call for 'Revolution,'" Fox News Digital, March 28, 2026. The six-part series preceding it ran March 23–28, 2026; the series index is available at the Fox News Digital investigation page. Nomani's June 2025 No Kings pieces: "198 Democratic Groups with $2.1B behind #NoKings Protests," Fox News, June 13, 2025; and "Anti-Israel Activists Embed in Saturday's 'No Kings' Demonstrations Nationwide," Fox News, June 14, 2025. The Murdoch probate ruling (Commissioner Edmund J. Gorman Jr., Second Judicial District Court, Washoe County, Nevada, December 7, 2024; reported December 9) is drawn from reporting by the New York Times, which obtained the sealed document, and subsequent reporting by the Associated Press and PBS NewsHour. The Richard Fink quotation is from an internal Koch network strategy memo cited in Jane Mayer's Dark Money (2016). The tobacco–CSE funding relationship is documented in Fallin, Grana, and Glantz, "'To quarterback behind the scenes, third-party efforts': the tobacco industry and the Tea Party," Tobacco Control 23, no. 4 (2013): 322–331, doi:10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2012-050815, funded by the National Cancer Institute. All named individuals, organizations, ownership structures, and legal proceedings are matters of public record.

I am sitting outdoors with coffee and a book, but I have set the book aside for now and am reading the sky instead. Rain is forecast and I want to see it in. The distant fells are spilling over with mist and looking gloomy, but just here the sky retains a soft, hopeful glow. Time passes, seems to slow. I’m wondering if the rain will pass us by. But then the woodland, up the hill, raises a sigh as the wind comes down the valley. The temperature falls, the leaves show silver, and the rain comes on.

For a moment, before I gather my things and move indoors, there is a feeling of connection. It is a deepening, an expansiveness, a feeling I am no longer this small creature, this accident of evolution. There is a part of me that makes up a mysterious whole with the universe. Except, it’s more than that, more than a feeling I mean. It’s a certainty. It passes, of course, as these things do, but I am left for a time at peace with our crazy world. It is what the writer JB Priestley, who knew this valley long before my time, once called a solemn tenderness for life.

Anyone who has spent time in the countryside, in nature, has felt the same thing. It’s why we do it. It is one of the gentler of those moments of participation that are so hard to put into words. A sunset will do it, or a walk across the tops with a cloud inversion at our feet. A walk through an upland hay meadow, aglow with buttercups, or even a drive to work on a fresh spring morning, if our head’s in the right place. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s not automatic. We seem to have to bring something of ourselves to the moment as well. We have to relax into it, or at least have the heart to let it in when it comes calling.

Such moments stand in contrast to the times, of course. I don’t know if things are truly any worse than in times past, or if it just feels that way. But the stories the world is telling me now definitely speak the language of defeat. We are in decline. Our economics, politics, even the fabric of our societies are worn so thin we seem in danger of falling through into a despair that not even our great-grandparents knew. And it has been like this for decades – these vexed narratives telling us how much we have lost. It offends our sensibilities because our instincts, as people, are to grow, to ripen, to harvest the fruits of a life, not to wither on the vine.

Our opinions regarding what it is that thwarts our human and humane ambitions will vary depending on our politics. But what we seem to have in common is a growing bewilderment that there is little we can do and no truly wise men coming to our rescue. As for the nature of our being and the meaning of our lives, there things are even worse. Certain stories told in the name of science suggest we are little more than our genes, that consciousness itself is an illusion, and that meaning is something we invent to help us get by. Likewise, much contemporary philosophy appears content merely to acknowledge how difficult life is, and that we make our way as best we can. And if that is all there is, then fair enough, our defeat is complete. We are routed, body and soul.

But can this be right?

From a purely materialist perspective, we have not a lot going for us. And I know these moments of participation can be explained away as nothing more than the activity of the brain. But my own feeling is that we cannot so easily discount a thing as wholly positive as that, just because it seems to serve no clear evolutionary purpose. By my rules, the experience points the way to a more wholesome future, if we can only find a way to engage with it. But we also need to be careful.

The Romantics of the nineteenth century came this way, and they asked what it would be like to live in a world where, instead of all the life-shrinking rhetoric, and the encroach of the material and the profane, everyone could feel like that all the time. These sublime moments of participation, I mean. But we must remember many a Romantic has paid dearly for those visions, falling into despair when the old grey world fought back and laughed at what they took so seriously.

So I’m not talking about losing our minds to it. Aldous Huxley had a point when he cautioned us that while there would be no more wars, there would be no civilisation either. And yes, he was talking about LSD trips, but the same principle applies. We do not want to blow the doors of perception off their hinges. We only want to open them a crack – let some more of the light inside, illuminate the darkness a little, and see how we go.

Exploring the question a little deeper, then, we might ask whether we really are living in an age of defeat, or whether we are simply not yet human enough to prevent ourselves from drowning in the complexity of our own civilisation, and our own growing self-awareness. The danger lies in misinterpreting the direction these moments of participation are pointing. They are not inviting us to disengage from the materiality of life in exchange for a purer metaphysics of the mind. Because to dwell there among the fairy dust, we disappear from life, where we are of no use to our benighted fellows.

Then, the opposite is also true. There is an equal comfort to be had from not engaging with these ideas at all. Better to go on living with the volume of ourselves turned down, forever distracted by the discordant jangle of everydayness, than to heed the call of these moments. And yet it seems the door to a greater engagement with the world – this solemn tenderness for life – is already open. It is just that we refuse to enter.

The rain comes on heavier now, rattles against the glass, looks bleak. It speaks once more of the age of defeat, when only moments ago it was hinting at something very different, the only difference between then and now being something in myself. If only I could remember what it was. But like a dream it slips away on waking. And, like the Cheshire Cat, only the smile remains.

This essay first appeared in the journal PLANET (The Welsh Internationalist) as part of their series entitled Keywords inspired by Raymond Williams' work of that name but dealing with significant words for cultural identity in the Welsh Language.

In the Introduction to his work Keywords, Raymond Williams defines two senses in which such words are significant. In Wales both 'translate' and 'cyfieithu' are certainly keywords in the first of his two senses: ‘significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation’. What I'd like to look at here is the sense in which they are, in his second sense, ‘significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought’. To do this I will look at the role of translation in Wales today and the significance of the word ‘cyfieithu’ as an indicator of cultural identity. There are in fact two words for 'translate' in Welsh. The one most commonly used is cyfieithu. The other is trosi, which equates more exactly with the English word 'translate' in the sense of a passing over from one language to another. Cyfieithu , due to the prefix ‘cyf’, which is suggestive of unity and togetherness, implies a bringing together of languages rather than a movement between them. The fact that cyfieithu is the more common word may therefore be regarded as a significant indicator of the importance of translation in the bilingual community that is Wales. This is so as much for those who do not need the translations as for those who do. But what can be regarded as a mutual association (cyfundeb) might also be regarded by others using the term cyfieithu as no more than a transaction, despite the unifying connotation of ‘cyf’ as opposed to ‘trans’. Certainly much of the formal translations found on signage and correspondence created by public bodies, businesses and other groups is in the latter category. Necessary as such transactions are, they are only productive of meaning in the context of a felt perception that the Welsh language is a necessary component of Welsh identity. Where it can be argued that translations are undertaken in order for something to be shared rather than simply text passed on for someone else to use, the full potential of the word in Welsh is realised. In this sense, cyfieithu can be regarded as a verb implying partnership rather than an indicator of difference.

I am mindful, in making such an analysis that the etymological development of words is not necessarily the same as the development of concepts, in spite of the apparently clear link between them. But whether the first element in cyfieithu signifies a conceptual commitment to togetherness or is an etymological co-incidence, when opposed to 'trans-', ‘cyf-’ has a suggestive power, contrasting a bringing together with a movement away. This contrast is deepened when considering the equivalent in other European languages such as ‘tradurre' in Italian, where the element 'trad-' carries a sense of betrayal - consider ‘traditore’ : (traitor) or English 'traduce'. Conversely, cyfieithu does seem to contain a potential for harmony that is fortuitous within a bilingual society and semantically distinctive in its positive connotations.

What is also etymologically interesting is the way that cyfieithu developed with cyfiaith (‘of the same language’). In the Middle Welsh text ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ there is a character who is 'cyfiaith' with birds and animals, that is he can communicate with them in their own languages. One development of this is that the word came to mean simply 'the vernacular' or common language spoken by all. To cyfieithu, then, was to bring something into the common tongue. Translating the Bible into Welsh was historically significant in this respect and would have underlined the value of translation as an important activity. Furthermore, cyfieithu can be used both for the direct conveyance of meaning and where, in English the word 'interpret' would be used. In one medieval religious text the angels 'cyfieithu' God's power, making it intelligible to the world, drawing it in to the earthly realm.

The use of cyfieithu to mean 'interpret' (for which the alternative word 'dehongli' is also available to convey the sense of the word as used in English) also feeds into developing senses which apart from such historical and religious contexts, are culturally significant in modern Wales. When linked as it is to the idea of translation as a bringing together, rather than a movement between, it suggests one language group explaining itself to another as the same community rather than a community of others. Not everyone sees it that way of course, and a further problem here is not so much that it doesn't work both ways as that it doesn't need to. If English-only speakers in Wales need Welsh-language expressions interpreted for them, Welsh speakers hardly need the same done for them in respect of expressions in English. This raises the thorny question of how identity may be culturally embodied in more than one language. Translation is clearly essential within a bilingual nation. But if the languages of that nation are not mutually incomprehensible but only incomprehensible in varying proportions in one direction, can we propose that not all citizens of the nation have the same access to the meaningful sense of cultural belonging that nationhood implies? Here 'interpretation', drawing threads together, rather than simple translation, becomes a crucial factor in the sense of being cyfiaith across two languages.

Seen in this way, 'to cyfieithu' is an essential activity for cultural cohesion. It implies a common access to concepts not only the communication of sentences and so implies a way of speaking meaningfully across a linguistic divide. It conceives translation in terms of what the philosopher J. R. Jones defined as the structural level within a culture, that which sustains it from within, rather than the functional level at which it operates on a day-to-day basis. Jones defines ‘functional’ for a people as ‘the bonds of their life’ from day to day, while ‘structural’ bonds are ‘the bonds of existence … which form their separate identity’. Jones' argument sought to establish a basis from which the Welsh language could be owned by all the inhabitants of Wales, even those who did not possess the ability to speak it. Functional bilingualism, he implies, is as likely to alienate non Welsh-speakers as involve them. The structural approach, by contrast, embodies the idea of Welsh as a common currency. So we might extend this analysis by concluding that simply to translate is to operate at the functional level, but to cyfieithu is to engage in an activity mediated through the word's etymological history which contains Jones' suggestion that Welsh should be seen as a structural rather than a functional agency promoting Welsh identity. How this might be possible in a society where English is so dominant is by no means easy to construe. How could a language that not everyone speaks structurally support a sense of identity for everyone? In his work Prydeindod, Jones portrayed those in Wales who could not speak Welsh as having a part of themselves missing, something that needed to be restored if they were to be made whole. There is no need to follow him in the negative implications of this emphasis to see how, nevertheless, individuals might regard themselves as more wholly Welsh (cyfan) by generating their own sense of the meaning of Welsh identity in terms of a language they might only be able to use to utter a few words or phrases in conversation, or simply to add resonance to spoken English by employing positive signifiers such as ‘cariad’, ‘cwtsh’ or 'croeso'.

In this analysis, then, cyfieithu counts as a keyword because it has a meaning beyond the simple process of signification. Raymond Williams' term ‘structure of feeling’ also seems apposite here. The term was coined to describe ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt’ and ‘specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships’. One reason for the coining was that he wished to find an alternative to descriptors which defined certain qualities as containing a fixed, unchanging essence. Rather he wanted to demonstrate that not only can the meaning of words change as society changes, but that the process of shaping meanings within words can actively strengthen and even radically transform values within society itself. In this context bilingualism can be seen as a process that may need to be argued for but is also increasingly felt to be a necessary part of our social arrangements.

Clearly there are contrary views from within each language community that would challenge such a suggestion. The attitudes of non-Welsh speakers may range from apathy to a pronounced view that bilingualism is a waste of time and resources because 'we all speak English anyway'. But there is an emerging sense that it is an active component of contemporary Welsh identity. Welsh speakers wishing to preserve the integrity of Welsh-speaking communities may argue more persuasively that bilingualism is a slippery slope towards English-only communities. This is clearly a danger. The practical implications of policies and procedures should, of course, be scrutinised.Williams speaks of degrees of assent, dissent and a subtle interplay between them as ‘structures of feeling’ develop and alter over time. He, at one point, considered the use of the alternative term ‘structures of experience’ but rejected it because one of its senses would include the past tense. Perhaps this most clearly separates his mode of understanding from that of J.R. Jones, which is rooted in historically embedded meanings while Williams insists on the predominant role of present experience as a transformational agent. Today the sense of the two language communities being cyfiaith with each other via the process of cyfieithu can contribute to the present experience of being Welsh inclusively across diverse communities.

How has this come about? When, nearly 50 years ago, J. R. Jones asked 'Need the Language Divide Us?’, the situation seemed different. He thought that the only solution would be something that came from the Welsh language itself that would persuade non-Welsh speakers that the language was an integral part of their identity as Welsh people. If by now this is increasingly the case, it does not necessarily mean that more people speak Welsh or that the language itself is stronger or more secure. Paradoxically this more positive attitude to Welsh may even mean that people feel less need to use it except for symbolic purposes such as singing the Anthem or naming their children. The sense of ownership of the language as part of ownership of identity would seem to imply certain responsibilities, but these may not always be fulfilled in practice. For J. R. Jones' solution to be fully realised would need people's sense of ownership to work in reverse as well, so that it is felt that the language also owns them. This indeed is implied by his analysis and though, as an argument, it might appear more essentialist than Raymond Williams would have liked, it can be subtly interwoven with his perception of cultural change in process, the result of the perceptions and decisions of individuals, but which are effectively ‘social experiences in solution’ emerging as personal priorities but not yet fully realised as meaningful in the wider culture. Out of such complexes of emerging social attitudes may come social change, and in this case an answer to J. R. Jones' question. Jones insisted on the need for individual action to maintain the historical and cultural life of communities. The language need not divide the Welsh people, but to ensure its survival the actions of individuals would need to become, as Raymond Williams puts it, ‘specific kinds of sociality’ so that the idea of being cyfiaith is enacted in the process of cyfieithu and so felt not only as a passive component of identity but also as an active imperative to live that identity and so realise it, in Raymond Williams' formulation, ‘in a living and interrelating continuity’.

Such a continuity would also realise the implicit etymological history of cyfiethu and the sense of different communities in Wales as being cyfiaith with each other. It would ensure a continuing presence for Welsh as a definer of Welshness. Whether it would ensure the increased use and vitality of the language into the future depends not only upon such positive attitudes but also the extent to which choices made socially, culturally, politically by growing numbers of individuals enact this sense of Welsh as an indicator of identity. Raymond Williams’ identification of the gradual development of ‘structures of feeling’ as ‘experiences not yet recognised as social but taken to be private’ acutely identifies the way individual experiences interact with and contribute to shifts in social consciousness. Such shifts are not easy to identify as they happen, but if the Welsh language is becoming part of the ‘structure of feeling’ which is involved in Welsh identity, for those who do not speak Welsh as well as for those who do, then it may also be fulfilling a structural role in J. R. Jones’ sense, so that cyfieithu signifies more than a transaction and achieves the full potential of its etymological resonance.

Reference Texts

Raymond Williams Keywords (Fontana, 1983)

J.R Jones ‘A Rhaid I’r Iaith Ein Gwahanu?’ translated as ‘Need the Language Divide Us?’ by John Phillips in Planet 49/50 and reprinted in Compass Points (U.W.P. , 1993) pp. 143-158.

J. R. Jones Prydeindod (Llyfrau’r Dryw, 1966)

Raymond Williams Marxism and Literature (O.U.P., 1977). All quotations in the discussion of the term ‘structure of feeling’ are taken from this text.

Fresh air hit his face. The light of the blue sky slightly blinded his eyes. For a moment, he felt peace and freedom. How much the architecture of the ministry pressed on a person. Only after leaving it does one begin to truly understand that.

On the stairs he paused just for a moment to catch his breath. His heart was still beating fast but slowly returning to its normal rhythm. In his hands was the same container. From the outside — ordinary, no different from hundreds of others. But inside was something forbidden. Descending to the parking lot, his steps gradually became calmer. The air was cool, but after the sterile cold of the ministry it felt almost warm.

Near the car he looked around. The massive building of the Ministry of Spatial Balance stood just as motionless and cold. White, flawless, like a giant sculpture of order. It felt as if it was watching everyone who left it. For a second he even thought someone was observing him from the upper windows. He quickly looked away, opened the trunk, and carefully placed the container among the tools. He closed the lid and ran his hand through his hair. It was still slightly damp.

— Calm down... — he quietly said to himself and sat in the car.

When the door closed, silence filled the space again. Only the faint hum of ventilation and distant traffic remained. For a few seconds he sat with his hands on the steering wheel. In the trunk lay something that could change his apartment exactly as he had imagined. Maybe even his life. Or destroy it completely.

The engine started softly, and the car moved. For the first time in a long while, he was going home differently than usual. Only one thought remained in his mind.

Tonight, the first color would appear in his apartment.

He didn’t even notice how he got home, how he ended up inside, or how he brought in the tools. Standing in the middle of the room, he looked at his space and already imagined changes. New ideas kept forming in his mind. He had never created in color before, and that made everything inside him restless. He took out the container with the color cartridge and studied it for a moment longer. On the white surface, bright RGB letters stood out, cutting through the whiteness like a rupture in space.

The cartridge slid into the slot of the 3D printer. This was an important moment. He activated the shredder and switched on the virtual design mode in his glasses, then pressed delete on his old white chair. The machine destroyed it almost instantly. That was the symbolic end of his old life and the beginning of a new one.

He opened the scanned project and quickly broke it into separate elements. He selected the leather chair he had been sitting on that day and sent it to print. The laser immediately began moving, building something new layer by layer. First the metal frame appeared, then the leather parts in true color, followed by texture and surface detail. A double signal sounded.

Those sounds had never felt so satisfying. For the first time in a long while, a faint smile appeared on his face. His eyes became moist, and his heart beat strongly.

In front of him stood a chair that felt alien to this world. Like something from a dream. Slowly sitting down, he immediately felt warmth. Even more than in that previous apartment. Maybe the materials simply hadn’t cooled yet. But then a realization came — they would never fully cool.

The new object did not belong to this world. A warm fragment against an emotionless white background. A foreign element, like a piece of another reality. And at that moment it became clear — he could not stop anymore. Everything had to change. This chair, like its owner, no longer belonged to this world.

His gaze shifted to the old white floor lamp. Just as cold and emotionless as everything around him. It needed warm light. 3200 Kelvin... maybe even 2800.

The shredder activated again, destroying another object. Almost immediately the printer began constructing a new lamp. Layer by layer it emerged from nothing, rising upward. When it was finished, he stepped forward and pressed the button.

Warm light gently spread through the room. It filled the space, wrapped around surfaces, created deep shadows. The room instantly became different.

Warm light does not only change space. It changes the person. And now it was happening here, inside his apartment. The most important thing — he had created it himself.

He became fully absorbed in the work. The shredder destroyed object after object while the printer kept producing new ones almost without pause. One after another, items of different shades appeared in the apartment. All warm, but each with its own character. Some deep and calm. Others soft and bright. His eyes gradually relaxed. After endless whiteness, the colors felt almost healing. Tension disappeared. His shoulders dropped, his muscles relaxed, and a strange sense of fullness appeared inside him. As if the space itself began filling him.

He kept printing and printing. Sometimes he paused, evaluated the result, then started the shredder again and replaced one object with another. Almost every version felt right, but balance was needed. That exact moment when everything fits together. When every object stands exactly where it should. When the entire interior becomes a single puzzle and nothing feels unnecessary.

Room by room, the apartment transformed. He had never worked with such intensity before. There was no fatigue — only growing energy with each square meter completed.

The final piece was a table lamp next to the sofa with a diffusing shade that filled the entire living room with soft light. At last, the puzzle was complete.

Everything was ready.

Silence filled the apartment, but not the cold empty kind — it was warm and comfortable. The space had changed, but more importantly, the feeling inside it had changed.

He took off his shoes and walked barefoot across the warm textured parquet, feeling it under his feet. He sat on leather chairs, on the sofa, ate at the new table. Even smoothie-food under the warm clay lamp tasted better.

Then he took a shower in soft warm light. The chrome shower head reflected golden tones of the lamps. Water droplets fell from the circular base like refreshing rain. Each drop touching his skin felt like a small electric impulse. There were thousands of them. He stood there for a long time, simply enjoying the moment.

Stepping out of the shower, he walked barefoot to the bed. So soft, so comfortable. He lay down as if into a cloud, and only then felt true exhaustion.

But it was a pleasant kind of exhaustion — the kind that comes after doing something difficult but deeply meaningful. When almost all of the body’s resources are spent, and you simply enjoy the earned rest. You relax, feeling every muscle slowly release tension. After that shower, it felt even stronger.

The last two days had been intense — emotional, difficult, and at the same time inspiring.

Before falling asleep, only one thought remained — where to find the next object for his ideas. He imagined transforming space after space, apartments, buildings, districts, entire cities.

And with those thoughts, he drifted into a warm, sweet sleep, continuing his journey in the new world.

In the morning, he woke up without opening his eyes. He had dreamed of an incredible colorful dream — a completely different world, warm and cozy. He did not want to wake up, he wanted to return there. It had felt so good.

But it was time to get up. Opening his eyes, he looked around. This was not a dream. He blinked again, as if checking reality itself. Yes, it was real.

Slowly getting up, he did not even make the bed and walked to the shower. Only now he noticed the heated bathroom floor. It must have simply not warmed up yesterday. Standing on it, he felt warmth rising through his feet and spreading through his body. He just stood there, enjoying it, not wanting to leave at all. He did not want to leave his small warm world. But the desire for another warm shower took over, and he stepped inside. Standing under the water, he wished this morning would never end.

After the shower, he dried himself with a soft towel and felt completely alive. He walked barefoot to the kitchen, touching the textured parquet with each step. Every movement reminded him of the harmony of the space he had created himself.

He pressed the coffee button. Almost immediately, the aroma filled the apartment. He took a sip and walked to the window, looking at the endless white world outside.

Now he no longer saw emptiness.

It was a canvas. Full of possibilities. Colors. Ideas flooded his mind. Everything began to change in his imagination. Straight perpendicular roads turned into curved flowing lines, winding between buildings. Cars changed colors as they moved. Buildings lost their cold geometry — becoming rounded, softer, more fluid, shifting shades. The white world slowly filled with warmth.

Another sip of coffee — and the vision disappeared.

Everything returned to perfectly straight roads and endless white buildings. The same cold sterile order. He looked at it for a few seconds. He wanted to create something new. Something this world had never seen.

Turning away, he placed the cup down and prepared a smoothie.

Just as he finished, his phone emitted two short signals.

“Probably a new assignment,” he thought. How he wished it was something colorful.

He opened the message.

His heart started pounding violently, as if it would jump out of his chest. A cold wave ran through his entire body.

Message from the curator.

Meeting today at 12:00.

Department of Residential Space Correction.

Room 203.

Panic hit instantly.

He had met the curator only once — during his hiring. No meetings had taken place since then. He had assumed it was a one-time formality.

Why now?

Why so urgent?

Did they know something?

Of course, it could not be a coincidence.

They had found out about the cartridge.

They knew he had taken color outside the Ministry of Spatial Balance.

May the gleam of the sun’s light be forever within me; throughout the dark nights, during days packed with rain, and in the mornings when clouds obscure the blushing sky.

The sun is my mentor. Within me, the sun awakens a vividness which otherwise hibernates in deep crevices of my mind. Almost as if appreciation to detail is the core of a vast iceberg that rests dormant until a ray of sunlight hits the iceberg’s surface, and with the flowing water oozes out the sweetest honey. My eyes feast upon a world engulfed in sunlight, flickering from detail to detail, trying to take in every illuminated particle, every indent in a wall that become visible as a distortion in the light. Overwhelmed by sensation, I am able to appreciate the world that accepts me.

I saw the sun today, but if I do not see the sun, I know that it is still there. A whole life forms from the mere fact of knowing, of knowing that the sun is there somewhere up in the sky. The image of it, of the sun, in my mind is enough to keep me warm at night, it's heat crawls through my body as I lie in bed.

Love in Question

Is this a love to the sun directly, regardless of anything that it does for me, or is it for the heat that it generates?

Once the sun burns away will I continue loving it, or will I begin to resent it for no longer serving me?

I will resent it. How could it betray me like that! After all the gratefulness, all the love, all the appreciation I dedicated to it...

But, but... Were my acts proportionate to what the sun did for me? All I gave the sun in return for its warmth were cold words of gratitude, they could not possibly amount to that which I got in return. It is I who should be to blame then, the sun run out of fuel because it could no longer tolerate the feeble payment it was receiving for its work.

But, but... Why did it not tell me that what I was giving it was not enough? Why did it silently keep on giving to the point of exhaustion. In this sense, the sun is so alike to humans, humans who work away their short lives without once speaking up that they want to go and dive into the ocean and touch the golden sand and listen to the rustle of the trees. Maybe the sun learnt from us, it took this trait of toleration of its condition from human nature and did not know any better than to keep on giving without expecting anything in return.

The sun was cold, and it was getting colder and colder, until it finally gave away its last dose of warmth.

After the Sun

Now the days are shrouded in darkness that verges on prayer.

There are no indications marking a start or an end, the beginning of a new day is decided independently of phenomenon like day and night.

But it is so cold.

And it will remain like this until humans stop begging for the sun to return and learn that they also have a warmth within themselves that, unlike the sun’s heat, is infinite.

Now the days are shrouded in darkness that verges on prayer which has no soul to it because humans have forgotten how to use words, and it is funny because if they were to remember how language works they would realise that the sun is still there! The darkness that they perceive is artificial, they run around engulfed in their own self-made problems, screaming that the end of the world is coming. And these screams, seeped in passion and genuine belief, are more prayer than those bland words that they absentmindedly whisper before bed.

How long can this go on for?

What time is it?

If the time of day used to have a lot to say, like during breakfast I would animate to you my dreams from the night, and when the clock hit one in the afternoon I was sure to expect to hear the buzz of my neighbour’s alarm clock going on because they were the nocturnal type.

Now, that there is no time nor day, there is nothing for the world to say. It can only wait, and listen keenly in anticipation of a reply to all that it told us over the span of the many years that it kept on telling.

All That Remains is Actually so Much

Continue. Because no matter how far you go ahead, you will always come back, do not think of a destination, but follow the light of the sun, and if you do not see the light, follow the sensation of its warmth.

There is no ‘end of the world’ because the world was not made for us, humans, nor was it made for the sun or anything else that you or I can name. In fact, you and I, the sun and everything else that you and I can name form a part of the world, a world that keeps on forming with no end. So, it is rather disrespectful to attach the world to us, humans, and equate the world’s end with the end of humanity.

I began my day by seeing the sun, a sun that was not actually there, instead a heavy rain assaulted the ground, but by ‘the sun’ I meant something else.

Maybe I meant God.

Maybe I need to be more direct.

Maybe I am still learning how to use words in a way that they justify all that I keep within myself.

Yes, I am learning, and by admitting this I can also feel that I still have so much more to learn, not only by taking but also by giving because giving is also a form of learning.

Thoughts on independent thinking, intelligence and living with uncertainty

I recently read the essay How to Understand Things by Nabeel S. Qureshi. It has (as of now) 20,515 likes, 140 comments and 3,925 restacks. And to be honest: I don't quite understand why. There are three major points (leaving out some minor aspects) that kept me from liking it:

1. The author draws illogical conclusions.

2. The author constantly confuses the term intelligence with knowledge.

3. The essay's conclusion — when in doubt, go closer — lacks perspective.

This is not to say that I disagree with everything. There are also valuable insights included, just to mention a few: I do think doubting things can oftentimes (with limitations, as I will discuss later) lead to a deeper understanding. I do also agree that there is a physical component to understanding and that having a "hook" to work with is important. And splitting up your learning process into smaller questions to go after is certainly also a good idea.

So, why would I take the time to write about an essay that, mind you, is already 5 years old and that even includes points I agree with? Isn't it pretty normal to read something and to agree to an extent, but to also have points to criticise? While that is definitely true, there are three main reasons why I felt like it was worth writing about this essay.

First of all, as a person with OCD I have a different perspective on the topic of doubt and questioning yourself and your work — also in an academic context — that I felt was worth sharing and thinking about.

Secondly, Nabeel‘s claims about intelligence don‘t align with scientific consensus and can actually be harmful. 1

And lastly, I think it is important to reflect what we like and why we like it. Just because this essay has 12k likes does not mean it is infallible or doesn't include errors. To be honest, I also first clicked on it because I saw the title, the cover and the number of likes (thank you, Substack algorithm) and thought, damn, that must be a good essay. And if I hadn't properly reflected on what I’d read, I might have even stuck with that notion. This is to say — very much in line with what Nabeel said in his essay — keep asking yourself what you really think about something instead of blindly following numbers.

Before I get into details of the three points mentioned above, let me point out that it would (obviously) make sense to read Nabeel's essay before this one and make up your own mind about it. And, as a disclaimer: this is not hate. Though I disagree with Nabeel on some points and promote independent thinking regardless of the number of likes, this essay is meant as one perspective in a broader discussion. Feel free to disagree with me at any time. (But please, don't rip me apart.)

Ok, let's get into it.

1. The Author Draws Illogical Conclusions

Nabeel's essay starts with the following paragraph:

The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved. […] I concluded that what we call 'intelligence' is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about 'raw intellect’.

There are two aspects that make this conclusion illogical.

The first one: Nabeel links the behaviour of the person he describes in the first paragraph to their intelligence. That means, they are smart because of the way they behave and vice versa. But what if they were simply insecure and couldn't accept their solution, because they were incredibly perfectionistic and unable to accept their results? There is no inherent logical connection between intelligence, and finding new solutions for a problem. If this seems somewhat nitpicky to you, I'll get into why this distinction is important (to me at least) in the last section of this essay.

The second one: The conclusion that intelligence is about values such as bravery or honesty is not logically connected to what was said in the first paragraph. It uses the assumption (not logical connection) mentioned above as a basis and does not explain how exactly the described behaviour is a representation of the listed values. While I might agree with the contents of that conclusion - except the fact that I would replace intelligence with knowledge acquisition - the argumentative structure does not hold here. Of course, one could say "Well, this is only the introduction to the essay, he will get into his reasoning afterwards" and they would be correct. But, without an additional explanatory phrase, Nabeel's conclusion is not the conclusion of a well-explained thought process, but merely a statement without reasoning.

There is another example, where the author maybe doesn't necessarily draw an illogical conclusion, but he doesn't follow through with what he's come up with. In section II. he talks about - amongst other things - how intelligent people are not afraid to look stupid. (The relation between intelligence and looking stupid is also not logical, but more about that in the next section.) I do agree that to understand things it is important to not get stuck in abstract considerations, while failing to ask the very basic questions that might make you look stupid. However, Nabeel seemingly forgets his own advice when he advises readers to "go for information-dense sources with high amounts of detail and facts, and then reason up from those facts, (if you cannot experience the things directly)." This is an assumption on my part, but I would say that those kinds of texts are usually more on the abstract, complex end of sources.

So, you should ask the basic questions, but go for as elaborate sources as possible, according to Nabeel. But what if I need to read something that might make me "look stupid" before I am able to understand those kinds of texts? What if the popular science book, that according to Nabeel in section VI. makes me stupider helped me understand more complex studies as I continued with my own research? If I don't understand what a verb is for example, I will never understand a text about verb valency, and I am sure by what Nabeel said about "not being afraid of looking stupid" aligns with just that. But suggesting to mainly read "information-dense" texts with "high amounts of detail and facts" - that's a contradiction to me, at least when it's suggested as the one suits all go to approach. Read that first grade definition of an adjective, if it helps you.

2. The Author Constantly Confuses the Term Intelligence with Knowledge

Maybe the examples above seemed somewhat nitpicky to you. Maybe you think to yourself: "Okay, using a statement instead of a conclusion — what's the big deal? The most important thing is that I can follow the author's train of thought." And maybe you'd even have a point, that last section was very much focussed on smaller details in a pretty long text.

However, there is one illogical conclusion that outdoes all the ones I mentioned before and is actually problematic: the idea that intelligence equals knowledge. Throughout the text Nabeel links being smart/intelligent to knowledge acquisition and being "stupid" to a lack thereof. Let me give you an example. In section I. Nabeel states (the emphasis is mine):

Moreover, I have noticed that these ‘hardware’ traits vary greatly in the smartest people I know — some are remarkably quick thinkers, calculators, readers, whereas others are ‘slow.’ 2 The software traits, though, they all have in common — and can, with effort be learned. What this means is that you can internalize good intellectual habits that, in effect, “increase your intelligence.” ‘Intelligence’ is not fixed.

The part I want to specifically focus on is the one I highlighted in bold. Now, let me get one thing straight: I do agree with Nabeel in the sense that we shouldn‘t view intelligence as this static concept that you either have or you don‘t have. But what I strongly disagree with is that intelligence is inherently linked to knowledge, or as he phrases it “good intellectual habits.”

There are many definitions of intelligence, but to start things off let’s look at the definition by Gottfredson, 1994 (emphasis is mine):

A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings — “catching on”, “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do. 3

In this definition we already see an important aspect that is vital to the concept of intelligence: being intelligent ≠ being booksmart. The definition above is obviously not the only one that exists, there are countless attempts to define intelligence — and they are all imperfect. As de Judicibus puts it:

As you can see these claims look reasonable and acceptable — we could also say that they are mostly true — but they seem to capture only some aspects of intelligence. If we compare the intelligence of a mathematician with that of a person with a great ability to make something by hands, for instance, or compare the latter’s one with that of a great artist or musician, we realize that each of these definitions is somewhat lacking. 4

In other words: there are many different kinds of intelligence and they vary greatly. There is no single way to determine if someone is “smart” or “stupid.”

From what I understand Nabeel also agrees with this statement — but he (again) draws an inconsistent conclusion. Parts of his essay emphasise the importance of thinking for yourself, of drawing your own conclusions. 5 And yes, being able to do that is in line with the definition above.

But overall, at its core Nabeel’s essay deals with knowledge acquisition, with learning, just as its title (How To Understand Things) suggests. And mixing this skill with a cognitive human quality is problematic. Now, for some (and I do think a large part of the Substack community is part of that demographic) that are eager to learn and, let’s face it, are probably also good at it, this might be an encouraging message: Here’s how you learn things, the one and only way to increase your intelligence. You don’t have to be stupid (aka. not know certain things), you teach yourself to be smart.

But what about people who enjoy reading popular science books (that, according to Nabeel, may make them stupider)? People who are for example excellent mediators or incredibly skilled carpenters — are they hopeless cases, because they don’t enjoy learning as much, or just don’t have the resources for it the way Nabeel and his audience do?

Nabeel’s essay may mean well, but it propagates an elitist version of intelligence, that only serves a small, educated and privileged group with a very specific skill set.

3. The Essay's Conclusion — When in Doubt, Go Closer — Lacks Perspective.

Just as in the sections before, let me clarify again what I agree with: Doubt is an important driving force in personal understanding and in science. By questioning what we are trying to understand, we are forced to look at it from different angles, to ultimately come to a conclusion as close to the truth as possible. But — and this is a big but for me — the extent to which Nabeel “glorifies” doubt as the centre piece of all understanding, lacks perspective. There are important limitations to his conclusion When in doubt, go closer.

We can look at the subject from several angles. Firstly, there is obviously the personal one. We all have our personal relationship with doubt and uncertainty. For someone who is religious, for example, doubt might bring different associations with it than for someone who is not.

For me, doubt and I have a unfortunate but intimate relationship with each other. As someone with OCD, also known as the (dramatic inhale) doubt illness, I know what it’s like to doubt everything you know, you feel, you think. So when I read an essay where the author proposes a loop of asking do I really understand this? as the best approach to becoming “smarter” it does ring some alarm bells for me. 6

Saying, that Michael Faraday believed nothing, without being able to experimentally demonstrate it for himself, is not only most likely not true. 7 I have not met the man, but I am very certain he believed things without doubting them, or otherwise he would not have been able to come up with any scientific discoveries at all (“Is this really a copper halfpenny? Do I know that for certain?”). Even the person Nabeel describes as an example in the beginning of his essay: coming up with different solutions is fine, but when you never come to accepting the solutions you have, you will never move on to the next question.

Doubting has to have an aim, a purpose. And when it does, it can be extremely constructive. When it doesn’t, it can lead you down a very dark path I really wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

I am aware that I might have a somewhat tinted view onto the subject and that most people reading Nabeel’s essay, who don’t have OCD, will intuitively know that there has to be an end to doubt at some point.

But doubt is also not as unambiguous in an academic or scientific context, as it may seem in Nabeel’s essay. In fact, much about scientific work is about clearly outlining areas of doubt and areas of certainty. Anyone who had to every write an academic or scientific paper knows how much time it can take to clearly define the terms you are working with, to outline your methods and to explain limitations of your approach. And what you’re doing is nothing other than deciding on a basis of truth you build to be able to experiment with doubt.

Nabeel uses a lot of math examples to prove his point, which amused me a little, because especially in math, it is important to decide on a minimum of truth, an axiom, you build you theorem upon. 8 In the words of Kenny Easwaran (emphasis is mine):

One initially plausible story about the role of foundational axioms is that they are intuitively obvious statements that we can use to establish our theorems with epistemic certainty. Feferman quotes the Oxford English Dictionary defining an axiom in mathematics as “A self-evident proposition requiring no formal demonstration to prove its truth, but received and assented to as soon as mentioned.” 9

An axiom is your anchor of truth, your starting point. As a matter of fact, you don’t only need a reliable starting point, you want to (ideally) also have an outcome as close as possible to the factual truth. To find objective truth, that is what science is about. And that is why questions such as “Do I really believe this is true, deep down?” entirely miss the point. 10 The question should be: Can I prove, without any doubt, what X is? Science is not about feeling if something is true or not — maybe that’s your initial motivation, but if it’s your final output you took a wrong turn somewhere in your process.

Now, you might say I talk about science now, but Nabeel’s essay is about understanding things, not science. My answer to that is that science is the ultimate attempt to understanding the world around us (and within us, see psychology for example). And understanding things just for yourself, even if you are not going to write an essay or a paper about it, that is at its core — when approached systematically, as Nabeel suggests — something like “mini science.”

Let me give you one last quote to illustrate my point (emphasis is mine):

Science, which is nothing more than organized skepticism—skepticism with rules to live (decide) by—is in our opinion the imperfect but best tool available for trying to reduce uncertainty about what we do as special educators. 11

Nabeel got the first part right: the art of understanding (aka. science) needs doubt —but doubt with limitations. To understand things, you have to jump into the sea of uncertainty. And if you forget to put on your floaties of truth, sooner or later, you will drown. And you probably won’t even understand why.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. And to be fair, this is not something I have seen in only this essay.
2. side note: I don’t think listing “thinkers, calculators, readers” in one breath and opposing it to “slow” people is appropriate. Trust that I can read think pretty fast (not always a great quality) but don’t you think I’m a fast reader or calculator — I am not.
3. Linda Susanne Gottfredson, “Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial with 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography,” Wall Street Journal, 1994, cited in Dario de Judicibus, “The Definition of Intelligence,” Cognitive Science 16 (2015): 107–132.
4. Dario de Judicibus, “The Definition of Intelligence,” Cognitive Science 16 (2015): 109 f.
5. Compare Section VI. for example.
6. Quote from Section II.
7. Quote from Section III.
8. Compare Section IV. for example.
9. Easwaran, Kenny. ‘The Role of Axioms in Mathematics’. Erkenntnis (1975-) 68, no. 3 (2008): 383. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40267364.
10. Quote from Section V.
11. Kauffman, James M., and Gary M. Sasso. ‘Certainty, Doubt and the Reduction of Uncertainty’. Exceptionality 14, no. 2 (2006): 117. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327035ex1402_2.

We had not intended to run into the ghost of Lizzie Deane today, but a routine errand brought us close enough to the Ribble Valley that a visit to the village of Chipping was called for. It helped, perhaps, that I was not intent on walking, which usually takes me out of the village and up onto the fells. Instead, my wife and I were looking for lunch, so we called at the Sun Inn, and fell headlong into the story.

Lizzie died at the Sun Inn by suicide in 1835, jumping from an attic window with a noose around her neck. She timed this dramatic act to coincide with the wedding of her former lover to her friend, then taking place across the road at St Bartholomew’s Church. In her hand, it is said, was a note asking that she be buried near the church entrance, so the newly-weds would have to pass her grave each Sunday, and reflect upon what she saw as their betrayal.

She’s buried in the churchyard, though not so prominently as she wished – perhaps on account of the sensitivities of the time, regarding suicide. Instead, she lies a little to one side, beneath the shade of a great yew. If you visit today chances are you will find flowers, and pebbles left as offerings. Lizzie Deane is more than a ghost – she has become a myth, reaching back into the heart of the English Romantic.

Staff and customers at the Sun Inn report seeing her about the premises – a bright and colourful young woman in period costume. After lunch, we took coffee at the Cobbled Corner Café, which looks out toward the inn, and my wife found herself speculating, with a mixture of horror and morbid curiosity, on which of the attic windows poor Lizzie might have leapt from.

We spoke, too, of the story itself. Sympathy tends to settle understandably with Lizzie, as the wronged party but, even at this distance of nearly two centuries, can we really reduce it to such a simple interpretation? There is grief there, certainly, and betrayal, but also something more unsettling: the deliberate timing, the real desire to haunt the living, and the framing of the act itself as a form of accusation and revenge. By her act did Lizzie trap herself in time, bind herself to that one moment, instead of being able to transcend it? And is that why she haunts us still?

Then we try to imagine things from the other side of the story – the young couple at the centre of it. They left the village not long afterwards, and one can only speculate as to how the day unfolded: the ceremony, the celebrations, and then the interruption arriving with a force that’s still echoing down the centuries.

Whatever the truth of their actions, whatever the nature of the betrayal as Lizzie perceived it, they would have carried that moment with them for the rest of their lives, an event that time could never erase. It is easy, at this distance, to cast them as villains. But they, too, must have lived on under its shadow, and we might ask whether Lizzie’s act was as simple, or as just, as the story suggests.

Thus, it began to seem, as we spoke in the Cobbled Corner Café, that it is through the story itself Lizzie still haunts Chipping. There is a power to it, whether one believes in the reality of apparitions or not. She has even been described, with a certain local humour, as a “loyal employee”, still drawing visitors into the Sun two centuries on: the betrayed serving girl who never left, and who continues, in some strange sense, to serve. Above all, the emotional keys here are universal, mythic and accessible to all who encounter them.

Unlike many reported hauntings, there is no long catalogue of dramatic phenomena: no poltergeist disturbances, no escalating horrors. There are only occasional sightings – a consistent image, charmingly enigmatic in its brevity. I suspect this restraint is part of the story’s endurance. It has not been over-elaborated into absurdity but remains plausible enough to inhabit a kind of ambiguity – a liminal space where experience of something “other” may be comfortably entertained without being fully believed in.

If we step back from that question of literal belief, what stands out here is that this is not a vague haunting without a cause. It is sharply defined by its own story: betrayal, humiliation, and self-destruction. It is also anchored in place – the attic room, the window, the church, the graveyard – each element forming part of a tightly bound symbolic geography.

And then there is the behaviour of the ghost. She does not perform, or seek to communicate. She simply repeats. She sits, moves, passes silently through rooms. Like other hauntings of this nature, she does not acknowledge those who see her. It is as if what persists is not a person, but a fragment of time, a kind of memory.

But it’s not a memory in the usual sense, meaning one contained within a human mind. Rather, it is something that has slipped its proper bounds. It is anchored to a place and, under certain conditions, briefly accessible, though perhaps only to those sensitive to such subtle phenomena. What appears is not Lizzie Deane herself, continuing her existence beyond death, but the persistence of a single tragic human moment.

From a strictly materialist perspective, of course, there can be no such thing. The physics does not allow it. My own view is a little more open, though I have never seen a ghost. I have, once, felt something – an unwelcome presence in a hotel room – which seemed very much like one, but which I dismissed by morning, when the sun came up. Others, whose judgement I trust, have not dismissed their own experiences so easily. So I am left not with belief, but with a question: what kind of world produces experiences that feel so insistently like visitations, even if they are not? What kind of world produces such stories and archives them deep within community, so they are passed from generation to generation?

It may be that the question is not whether such hauntings are real, but why they matter to us – why they continue to exert such pressure on the imagination, as Lizzie’s did on ours this afternoon.

Part of their persistence may lie in their refusal of moral erasure. Lizzie Deane’s story is not just about death, but about grievance – about a perceived wrong that, whether real or embellished, has resisted all attempts by time to erase it. The haunting becomes a part of our cultural memory, a way of saying: this happened, and it mattered.

But there is something else at work, something less easily articulated. Stories like this seem to express an intuition that experience itself is not as easily contained as we would like to believe. That certain moments – particularly those charged with strong emotion – do not simply vanish, but leave an imprint, not only in the minds of those who remember them, but in the world itself. It is as if reality were not a neutral stage upon which events occur and then disappear, but something more receptive, more retentive of our emotions and experience.

In this sense, a haunting may be understood not so much as an intrusion from another world, but as a persistence within this one. This would help explain why such stories are almost always tied to a place. The location becomes more than a setting; it is a kind of vessel. The attic, the church, the grave – these are points of convergence, where story, emotion, and memory are held in a stable relation. And they persist.

We do not need to believe in ghosts for this to work. It is enough that we remain susceptible to the possibility. Perhaps that is the true function of such stories: not to convince us of the supernatural, but to resist a certain narrowing of the imagination – to remind us that not everything resolves to verifiable fact, that not everything is accounted for, that some things continue without explanation.

In that sense, Lizzie Deane does not haunt Chipping because she continues to be seen from time to time. She haunts it because her story has found a form that will not let her go, nor any of us who encounter it. And so, in ways less visible but no less real, perhaps we are all inhabited by such presences: moments that have not entirely finished happening, and meanings that have not yet been laid to rest.

When I barge in to take you, a length of rope coiled around my arm and a plasma knife in my pocket, you look up from the vegetable beds with such trust, my heart breaks. You feel safe in your backyard. Six years have passed since anyone in the colony last reminded you of your purpose. No one calls you Charger anymore. You’re Argy now, or simply, girl, because you don’t age. That’s how I call you—girl. Come with me, girl, and you come, without question. You beam that smile of yours, wipe the dirt off your hands, and follow me into the forest. It’s so easy, I almost blow it, but it’s dark, and you don’t see me weep.

Your cabin is the last in the clearing, and it’s dusk, so no one sees us go. I cut through the underbrush, pushing the giant fronds aside, and they swing behind me, showering you with dew. The ferns fare particularly well in this climate. Ferns and maple trees. There are thousands of new species here, branching from the most successful Lady Fern Spec A and Acer Spec C. Some are even edible—a complete terraforming success. This planet is ready. It’s you who holds the mission back.

We descend into the ravine. It’s not flooded this time of year, the soil viscous and black with organic matter. Your breath is hot on my back. You probably think this is a rescue trip, that someone got stuck in the mud, and that’s what the rope is for—to pull them out. It’s only when we leave the peat bank behind, and the path under our feet is solid once more, you start to ask questions. It’s what happened and where are we going at first, but then we pass a waymark stone, and you fall silent.

That’s when I have to grab you. You’re so light, I can lift you with one arm. Your skin is warm to touch, smooth, convincing. People didn’t like touching you back on the ship, but it’s different down here. You labour by their side, you share their food, you fall asleep from exhaustion—one of them in every way that matters—and they forget. I could forget too. But someone has to remember.

You put up a fight. You kick and scratch and bite, and it gives me no pleasure to hit you back. My cheeks are wet by the time our skirmish is over and your hands are secured. We sit slumped on the ground, panting. You shoot daggers at me, and it’s better this way. At least we’re honest. You no longer scream—you know it’s pointless so far from the settlement and in the forest so dense.

When your breath evens out, you don’t ask me why—you know why. You ask me why now. It probably seems so unfair. You worked so hard to earn your life. You thought you were in the clear. People stopped mentioning the mission before we even left the First Camp. It might look like the original plan was abandoned. Why only make way for others when we could stay, keep the planet to ourselves? What can I tell you that you don’t already know? We might not have much, but people back home have even less. So many sister missions have failed to tame their long-ago pre-seeded planets, while ours is clearly thriving. Who are we to decide who gets to live?

Except, that’s what I’m doing now—with you.

I want to reach out and wipe blood from your lip, but you might take it the wrong way. I don’t want to give you hope. This is what you were made for: to live long enough to see proof of success, to lend your metabolism and use biology to keep the Energy Cell X charged. You’re sturdier than you look but still frail enough to double as an indicator: if you survive, the rest will, too. It was cruel of people to let you think you might have a different fate. So instead of confusing you with my kindness, I clamber to my feet and tug on the rope for you to get up.

I’m afraid you will resist and I will have to drag you along, or carry you over my shoulder, but you surrender and plod obediently before me. The old road is overrun with creeping fern, but both moons are up, and the trees around us retain their tunneling formation, so I don’t need to stop to look for the waymarks as often. You make small talk like we’re in a harvesting tandem, the rope between us not a leash but a tether. Only your voice is quivering. You use my name a lot, as if this could soften me up. Maybe it does. I can’t look at you. Your posture is crooked, and one shoulder blade sticks out like a sprout of a wing. Who ever thought making you look like a teenager was a good idea? If this was meant as a test of devotion to the mission, it’s brutal. I push back, mortify whatever softness has taken root. The forest around us has blurred into a black curtain. You keep talking, trying to sound cheerful. Maybe you’re counting on me not being able to do it when we’re there. I’ve seen the charts, I know where to cut to get to the power cell, and I’m counting on it not being harder than butchering a lamb. Domestic Sheep Spec B, the most common source of protein for the settlers. I’ll have to do it. Nobody else will.

The larger of two moons sets by the time we reach the remnants of the midway post, and the glade is like a black blot. Little is left of the old lodge, just a ribcage of protruding brickwork. Perhaps even less is left of the chimney, and my effort is in vain, and I want this to be so, so I don’t have to do what I’ve set out to do. You pray for that, too, I know, and even though we’re aligned, I’m angry at you. I begrudge you your passion. You’re more alive in your final moments than I’ll ever be. I’m dead inside already.

We don’t have the time to camp, but we’re both worn out from wading through the bush, and I allow us a minute. I loosen your rope when we sit down. The warmth from your thigh against mine makes me shiver. You ask for water, and I give you my whole canteen. Your hand lingers on mine when you take the bottle, but I pretend I don’t understand what it is that you’re offering. There is nothing you can do to make me change my mind. You see that now. From up close, you can see the rot inside me, the dead meat in my chest, and you start to cry, wasting the newly gained water. I turn away. Please, you beg, and I don’t want to die, and believe me, if there was another way to complete the mission, I would have gladly used it. But some things are bigger than you and me.

You fight again, harder this time, meaner. I respect you for that. You fling water in my face and use your shoulder as a battering ram to topple me over, and you run while I scramble to my feet. I catch you easily enough. We roll in the wet thicket, elbows and knees banging, and there’s a moment when your quick breath hits my neck that I imagine a different tangle. If, like the others, I had allowed myself to indulge in a dream of domestic bliss, could I have done it with you? You’re not a child. I could have loved you in another life. I press you to the ground, feel your whole body scrunched under me, all fear and anger and pain. Don’t, Charger, I whisper, and you deflate, and I win.

We’re back on the old road, barely visible now in the low moonlight. Even without resisting, you manage to impede our journey. You hobble in my steps, the rope between us tight, stumbling on roots, dragging us off-course. When it changes nothing, the begging resumes. I don’t listen to words, letting the sound of your pleading fuse together, become a background. I cannot argue. Of course I don’t have the right to do this to you. Self-sacrifice is easy—it’s sacrificing others that is hard.

Something pale leaps out from behind the thicket at my next step. I tilt my head, and the white continues, left and right and up. Up, up—high up into the sky. It’s a never-ending column of brick and mortar. Half of the star-speckled black is blocked off by that thing. I’m momentarily overwhelmed, my mind refusing to comprehend the scale of the structure, and a surge of irrational fear makes me stagger. The unnatural, looming intruder is before me, a crime against this arboreal landscape. Tremble before me, the chimney says. Run. And the rope I hold almost slips out of my hands at your yank as you obey the imposing command. But I manage to control us both.

We are here. The lighthouse has not crumbled.

I have to carry you upstairs. You’re clawing at the walls on the ground floor—and hang like a rag by the time we reach the top platform. I’m surprised to see it clean of vegetation, but then I remember we’re sixty metres above the tree line. One million clay bricks. Eight years of labour. Fourteen dead. When did it stop being Mission Objective E and became the chimney? After rationing had been called off? After the first child was born? Sacrifices erased for simple comforts. Will one more death correct the score?

I put you down gently. You’re shivering, eyes on the magnetic lantern as if that is the weapon that will end you. I’m disappointed nothing has stopped me yet. I’ll have to go through with it now: butcher the girl, extract the energy cell, place it in its slot to power the beam that will signal the mission coordinators: come, we’re ready for you. But we are not ready, you and I.

You begin to sob. The words of solace I could offer Charger do not fit you. Destiny and fulfilment mean nothing to a girl with dirt under her nails. Shine a little light for us, girl, I don’t say. Your bound hands shield your sternum, guarding the thing the mission has forced on you: your fuel and your leech. The light it could emit, for you is darkness, and yet the sole spark you withhold will extinguish the mission.

Hush, Argy, I say, and your name cuts deeper than my knife ever could.

You are a test, I’m sure of it now. The test I don’t know the correct answer to. Did all those sister missions fail because the crew could not bring themselves to chop one of their own? Or did they fail precisely because someone took up the burden? What if sending the signal is not an invitation, but a warning? Don’t come: they slaughter innocents here.

You don’t look at me when I raise my knife, so you don’t watch me fail the mission. I have deadened myself for this, so now I can stand it.

Shine a little light, I say and cut the rope.

### Preamble:

The mantis is hemimetabolous. The nymph emerges already a miniature of the adult — no larval disguise, no intermediate unrecognizable form, no veil to be forgotten. It is the continuity so complete there isn’t even an apparent break to misread. The butterfly phasing, the mantis never phased — it came out already itself.

The mantis suffers fixation: single-pointed attention curdled into blindness, demonstrates the precise failure mode of śamatha with no vipaśyanā to widen it. The moment one regards posture as evidence of awakening, the body is mistaken as habitus: a special type of person, rather than as conduct released from exceptionalism’s grip. The hands held in dhyāna mudra, a gesture enclosing around the object of attention. Stillness in such form is not attainment. Structurally a necessity perhaps in deeper yogas. Measured by duration the pose is held. Constantly mistaken for progression. The cushion absent conduct.

And there is the mantis raising its forelegs to pause — fearless, futile overreach, not knowing its own measure. The monk models in Vairochana posture instead. Both turn on the “praying” posture itself, which is the deeper irony: those folded forelegs read as añjali, as devotion, but they are a sprung death-grip waiting in stillness. The monk sharing the stillness springs the death-grip on the self.

Appearance and function inverted — the gesture of reverence is, in the end, a killing mechanism. A sharp little teaching that the hands that look most like prayer are the trap; the birth that looks most like clean arising is the mantis that displays that there was never a break to begin with.

### On Exceptionalism

There is a famous image of the Buddha at the moment of awakening. He is seated beneath a tree, one hand resting palm-inward on his knee, the other reaching down to touch the earth. The traditional story says that he was being challenged — *who are you to claim this?* — and that he answered not with words but with that gesture, calling the ground itself to bear witness. The earth, it is said, trembled in assent. For two and a half thousand years this has been carved, painted, and cast in bronze as the seal of his legitimacy: the planet itself certified the man.

Take that gesture and turn it gently over. What is found is not what we were encouraged to see. The claim is plain enough to state in a sentence, though it takes some care to feel its weight: *even the ground could not witness him — because he had nothing to be witnessed.* There was nothing to certify, nothing to rank, nothing to extract. The reaching hand does not summon a witness. It shows that no witness was possible, and none was needed.

Why? It is not to argue for a new belief. It performs a *removal*. The method is old — the consequentialist method of Nāgārjuna and the Prāsaṅgika tradition — and it works like this: you do not assert a position of your own. You take up a claim that other people already hold, you follow it honestly to see what would have to be true for it to stand, and you watch it collide with things you already know. If the claim cannot survive that collision, it falls. And here is the discipline of it: when the claim falls, you do not rush in to install a replacement. You simply leave the space cleared.

The claim being followed is for one who sits holding the practice burden that an awakened being is *exceptional* — that there exists some special grade of person, located somewhere, rankable against others, inheritable by a successor, transmissible down a lineage as a faithful copy, and confirmable by an outside witness. Follow each of those requirements and each one breaks.

✦

Start with location. Where, exactly, would the Buddha’s specialness reside? Not in his cells, which were the cells of a mammal. Not in his lineage, which collapsed in his own lifetime when his clan was slaughtered and he did not, could not, stop it. The quality we are reaching for has no address. It is not a substance sitting in one spot that we could point to and say *there.* If you have ever met the vacuum of quantum field theory — the so-called empty state that is not empty at all, but a teeming, inexhaustible ground from which everything that exists is only a passing excitation — you already have the right intuition. What is most fundamental is not a *thing in a place.* It is a pattern across the whole. Exceptionalism, if it exists at all, is like that: not a possession lodged in a body, but at most a feature read off the entire field. And a pattern across the whole cannot be owned by any point within it.

Now try ranking. To rank the Buddha above other beings, you would need a ladder — a single continuum running from lower to higher with everyone arranged along it. But “higher” and “lower” are exactly the kind of distinction that turns out to be local. Think of a Möbius strip, the paper loop with a half-twist: it looks, at any one spot, as if it plainly has an inside and an outside, a top and a bottom. Walk along it and the two sides turn out to be one surface. The “two sides” were never a property of the strip. They were an artifact of looking too locally. Spiritual rank is like that. Up close it feels obvious that some are advanced and some are beginners, that you yourself might climb. Followed all the way around, the ladder has no second side to climb to.

So if the Buddha was not a higher *kind* of being, what was he? The deliberately modest answer, once you sit with it, is far more radical than the grand version. He was an *outstanding example* — the way there is a strongest tree in a stand, a drought-resistant strain of a crop, a dominant pollinator in a meadow. These are remarkable; they are not metaphysically elevated. They simply *lean* in a particular direction more reliably than their neighbors do. The Buddha’s lean was toward non-grasping — toward not engaging the whole machinery of taking, defending, and accumulating that the rest of us run almost without noticing. His distinction was not a rung. It was a direction.

And this is why one may comfortably insist that his success was *conduct* — not a doctrine he held, not a meditative state he reached, not a result he accomplished. He rejected several of the meditation systems of his day outright. He did not reject samadhi. He did not point to an attainment and say *I have arrived.* What he did was demonstrate the same conduct, consistently, for forty-five years, in the open, until he died. The proof was the walking, every day, not a summit reached once.

✦

The clearest single picture of that conduct is the alms bowl. He ate what was freely given: he walked out with a bowl, and whoever wished to give, gave; whoever did not, did not. No one was compelled at either end. It was voluntary to ask and voluntary to provide. Notice the shape of the bowl — round. Open and balanced with no privileged side, no privileged state, no orientation that makes one state empty or full. He still ate; he still depended utterly on others. He did not pretend to need nothing. But the *belligerence* of taking — the coercion, the leverage, the debt — was gone, while the receiving, without the request, itself remained. The conduct, teaching through an object one can witness, is held as formless and empty.

It is also the measure against which it reads what came after him, and the reading is unsparing without being contemptuous. Religious institutions, including Buddhist ones, tend to *claim* the standing, relational, non-coercive ground — the dimension of a song held among a people, of a ceremony that doesn’t travel from anywhere to anywhere — while in fact *operating* by extraction. They require commitments. They grade attainment and sell the ladder. They locate a defect inside you — *you need purifying* — and then offer, for a price in money, obedience, or fear, the method to fix it. This is not unique to Buddhism; it appears plainly across Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, and the modern wellness and mindfulness markets alike. The structure is a pyramid scheme, and the schemes compete. The alms bowl’s form is emptiness. Its emptiness functions to accept form with almost no fine print. The marketplace proposes a method and then extracts commitment with a great deal of fine print.

None of this disparages the dharma itself. The genuine recognitions of the great traditions — the Madhyamaka’s emptiness of any substantial ground, the Yogācāra’s analysis of mind, Mahāmudrā’s “nothing to do, nothing to attain,” Dzogchen’s already-complete ground — are honored as accurate, each in its own grammar. What is removed is the *extraction* that later wrapped itself around them, and the belief that practice carries you up a continuum toward becoming someone special.

✦

Which returns us to the milk-rice and the hand on the ground. Before his awakening, Gautama had starved himself nearly to death in the fashion of the extreme ascetics. A village girl named Sujata offered him a bowl of milk-rice porridge, and he accepted it. His five ascetic companions read this as failure and walked away. He did not waver; his resolve simply was not the kind that could be talked out of itself. That acceptance — voluntary giving, voluntary receiving, the body fed rather than punished — is the alms bowl teaching in microcosm, and it marks the exact point where the path of achievement was set down for good. Mara denied any composure save as tempter: Sujata remains Tara the liberator. Gautama realized the denial conduct of his ascetic journey bore no realizations. Dispassionate suffering is unnecessary suffering. Conduct in context of the entirety is an other-than-ordinary awakening.

The title he preferred for himself, *Tathāgata*, is usually softened in translation, but it means something stark: the Thus-Gone, or the Thus-Come — one for whom there is no arrival and no attainment, because there was no summit to reach. It is a consolidation at *non*-achievement. So when the hand finally touches the earth, it is not asking the ground to confirm a rank. It is showing that there is nothing to confirm. He is, in the language, pointing to being *unsupported* — needing no foundation to stand on; *stainless* — undivided, because any line drawn through purity only manufactures the impurity it claims to find; *luminous* — present, clear, in standing relation; and *essenceless* — empty of any fixed core, in the same way the vacuum is empty of things yet full of ground. The earth could not witness him because there was no separate, special self there to be witnessed, and nothing in him left to take.

An other-than-ordinary *life* had been modeled, across those forty-five years. An other-than-ordinary *death* was modeled too: at the end he did not promise his own continuation. His last words were that all conditioned things vanish, and that one should strive with diligence — conduct, again, to the very end, with no claim staked on surviving it. It is suggested that the vast later architecture of soul-like continuity from life to life, of merit banked across rebirths, of the practitioner climbing toward a deferred Buddhahood, can be acknowledged but the elaborations are set gently aside. It was added afterward. It is not grounded, or required, in what the man actually showed.

What he showed was smaller and harder and free: that there is no exceptional rung to reach, that the reaching is itself the error, and that a human being — one creature among the countless others, of no special location and no certified rank — can simply set down the apparatus of taking and walk, with a round bowl, for the rest of an other-than-ordinary, luminous life.

When the dignity of an organization out-weighs the dignity of its people.

Dignity by Design | Perceptual Ethics Series

There’s a specific moment that keeps recurring in my thinking. I’ve watched it happen in churches, nonprofits, healthcare systems, graduate programs. Someone gets hurt, genuinely and measurably hurt, by the way a system operates. The injury is real. The pain is real. And then the organization responds.

It responds well, even. It refers them to counseling. It creates space for them to process. It follows its protocols. Sometimes it even apologizes, genuinely and warmly. And when the person eventually returns to functioning, when they’re able to show up, to contribute, to continue, there’s a quiet exhale. A sense that things have been handled. That the system worked.

What I kept not being able to name was why that exhale bothered me.

I’ve been writing about moral injury for the past year as part of the Dignity by Design project, and I’ve spent sustained time with the moral injury intervention literature: the research on how organizations and practitioners respond when people are harmed by systems they trusted. The literature is sophisticated in important ways. But it has a structural problem that took me a long time to articulate precisely.

The intervention literature’s endpoint is restored functioning. It measures whether the injured person can return to effective participation in the organization. This sounds like a therapeutic goal. It is, in fact, an organizational goal. The difference matters enormously.

Organizations, like people, are prediction machines.

This is not a metaphor. Karl Friston’s work on active inference describes how biological systems continuously generate predictive models of their environment and minimize the gap between what they predict and what they encounter. Organizations have no cognition, no behavior, and no activity apart from the humans who staff and reason within them. This means the predictive processing that Friston describes at the neurological level, the same processing that drives heuristic formation, pattern recognition, and the emotional logic of threat and reward, scales directly into organizational behavior through the humans who model the institution, process its feedback, and enforce its responses. When we describe an organization as a prediction machine, we are describing what happens when individual human predictive systems operate within a shared structure that shapes which predictions get made, which evidence gets admitted, and which signals get routed where.

When prediction error is high, when reality diverges from the model, the system has two choices: update the model, or act on the environment to suppress the signal producing the error. Organizations preposition resources to respond to their predictions. They accept evidence. They update. Or they don’t.

A closed epistemic system, one that accepts evidence only from within its own domain and adjudicates that evidence by its own criteria, has structurally eliminated the first option. It cannot genuinely update its model because the evidence it admits is evidence it generates, and the standards by which it evaluates that evidence are standards it set. When a high-prediction-error signal arrives, someone being genuinely and measurably harmed by how the system operates, the only available responses are suppression or elimination.

Individual intervention is how the suppression happens. Termination is how elimination happens.

This is not a fringe pathology. It is the operating condition of every institution that decides what counts as valid evidence about itself. The social sciences have a name for the pattern at the individual level: groupthink, the condition in which internal consensus substitutes for independent verification. But groupthink understates the problem at the organizational level, because the issue isn’t merely that everyone is thinking alike. It’s that the system has engineered which thoughts are permitted to arrive. Miranda Fricker calls a related failure hermeneutical injustice: the condition in which a system lacks the conceptual vocabulary to recognize a harm it is producing, and so cannot be held accountable for it even by people of good faith operating within it. The moral injury intervention literature reproduces this failure structurally. It cannot name organizational culpability because its entire framework is organized around individual restoration. And if you press on why that framework is so stable, why the vocabulary for naming organizational harm develops so slowly against such obvious need, you arrive at a question the intervention literature cannot answer: what produced the cultural conditions in which organizational dignity is treated as a terminal value in the first place?

The answer is functional, not conspiratorial. It operates through legal logic repeated across decades until it becomes social fact.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate attorney and soon to be a Supreme Court Justice, wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Its argument was strategic: American corporations were under assault from regulatory, legislative, and cultural forces, and the remedy was organized, sustained corporate entry into the political, legal, and academic arenas where the rules of public life were being written. The memo prescribes the intervention: corporations must participate, fund, litigate, and shape, or cede the epistemic environment to their critics.

Seven years later, Powell wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Massachusetts v. Bellotti. The Court held that First Amendment protections attach to speech itself, not to the nature of the speaker. The identity of the entity producing political expression is constitutionally irrelevant. What matters is whether the expression contributes to public discourse. Powell did not argue explicitly that corporations are persons with dignity equivalent to human persons. He didn’t need to. The functional logic of the opinion produces that outcome without stating it: if an organization’s speech is constitutionally protected regardless of what the organization is, the organization begins to accumulate the cultural standing of a rights-bearing subject. Personhood follows function. An entity that can speak, litigate, fund, and participate in democratic deliberation with constitutional protection will be treated, behaviorally and culturally, as though it has the standing of a person. Including the standing to have its dignity protected.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) extended that logic to its limit. If corporate speech is constitutionally protected and the speaker’s identity is irrelevant, then limits on corporate political expenditure are limits on protected speech. The last significant structural constraint on corporate participation in democratic deliberation was removed. What the memo recommended as strategy, Bellotti enabled as right, and Citizens United ratified as absolute.

What matters for this argument is not Powell’s intent. Intent is beside the point. What matters is repeatability. Forty years of consistent legal application, extending constitutional speech protections to organizations, treating organizational participation in public life as equivalent to human participation, produced cultural norms that now operate below the threshold of conscious reasoning. People don’t consciously think: the organization has rights equivalent to mine, its continuity deserves the same protection I extend to persons. They simply behave that way. Because the legal framework has been telling them so, functionally, across the entire span of their adult lives. The cultural acceptance of organizational dignity as a terminal value is not propaganda. It is the sedimented residue of a legal logic applied consistently enough to become invisible.

This is what the intervention literature cannot see from inside its own framework: the reason individual restoration feels like sufficient repair is that the surrounding legal and cultural architecture has normalized organizational dignity as the value against which individual harm is measured. Of course the person should be restored to functioning. Of course the organization’s continuity matters. Of course the harm signal should terminate when the individual recovers. The system is working exactly as the culture it inhabits expects it to work.

Which is why the people doing the actual work of responding to injury are in an impossible position that most accountability frameworks refuse to name honestly.

I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith. The clinicians providing moral injury intervention are often doing genuinely excellent work. The HR professionals who refer employees to EAPs are often doing what they believe is right. The pastoral counselors sitting with people in the aftermath of institutional harm are often the most compassionate people in the room.

But compassion operating inside a constitutionally protected architecture of epistemic closure is not the same as repair. The structure of individual intervention routes the harm signal through a process that terminates before it reaches the organizational model. “This person has been helped” completes a circuit. The injury has been addressed. The organization has fulfilled its obligations.

The latent error, the structural condition that produced the injury, remains invisible. The process designed to address harm also terminates the harm signal before it becomes data the organization has to reckon with.

This reveals a moral hierarchy the intervention literature leaves unnamed.

When organizational dignity, reputation, functioning, continuity, self-concept, is the terminal value, individual restoration becomes instrumental. It serves the organization’s sense of itself as a place that cares. The intervention program becomes evidence of organizational moral health. We have resources. We provided care. We took this seriously.

This isn’t cynical calculation, usually. It’s the natural output of a system whose model has organizational dignity at the top of its value hierarchy. The model predicts that good organizations address injury. When injury occurs and is addressed through individual intervention, the prediction is confirmed. The model doesn’t update because, from inside the system, everything worked exactly as intended.

There’s a further layer that took me longest to see.

The individual’s recovery, their demonstrated resilience, their ability to return to functioning, is recirculated into the system as reputation capital.

The organization that harmed someone, provided intervention, and watched that person recover and return to contribution can point to this sequence as evidence of its own moral adequacy. Their survival becomes the organization’s proof.

The cost-shifting runs deeper than financial. It’s not only that the burden of healing falls on the individual who couldn’t refuse to be harmed. It’s that the moral labor of surviving the harm, the hard work of recovery, rebuilding, returning, is extracted from the individual and deposited into the organization’s account. Their resilience underwrites the institution’s innocence.

Perceptual Ethics, the framework I’ve been developing as part of Dignity by Design, begins from the observation that moral perception is conditioned prior to moral reasoning. We don’t first reason clearly and then perceive accurately. We perceive through frameworks we didn’t choose, formed by conditions we were embedded in before we had the tools to question them. This is why moral failures in organizations so often look, from the inside, like moral successes: the perceptual framework has been shaped by the same closed evidence loop that shaped the intervention model. People who are genuinely trying to do right look at the sequence (harm, response, recovery) and see a system that works.

Organizations have moral perception too. A system whose perception has been shaped by vested-interest evidence will perceive individual intervention as genuine restoration, not because the people within it are lying, but because their perception has been formed by a framework whose terminal value is organizational dignity.

This is why external input has to precede assessment. Not because outside voices are infallible or epistemically privileged, but because of what a closed system does to evidence that arrives in its own language: it routes it. Every institution that has operated long enough to develop a coherent self-concept has also developed, without design and often without awareness, a set of absorption pathways: conceptual channels through which potentially disconfirming information is received, processed, and neutralized before it registers as genuine prediction error. A grievance filed in the institution’s own procedural language travels those channels automatically. An internal review conducted by people whose standing depends on the institution’s reputation travels them automatically. Even sincere internal critique, offered in good faith by people who want the institution to improve, tends to arrive pre-formatted for absorption, because the people offering it learned to think about the institution in the institution’s own terms. The evidence arrives. The model doesn’t update. And everyone involved can point to a process that was followed.

External input interrupts this not because it is correct, but because it arrives without those pathways already in place. The closed system cannot pre-adjudicate criteria it did not generate. It cannot route testimony through filters it hasn’t built yet. This is why external assessment is not a supplement to existing accountability structures or a stronger version of internal review: it is a categorically different kind of intervention, the only kind that forces the model to reckon with evidence before it has been metabolized into confirmation.

The scale of what this pattern explains is not abstract. The same closed epistemic architecture operates across every institutional domain: healthcare systems that track patient satisfaction scores while the structural conditions producing preventable harm remain untouched; universities that route faculty grievances through administrative processes designed to confirm the institution’s existing self-assessment; religious organizations that respond to abuse disclosures with pastoral care for the survivor and internal review panels composed entirely of people whose standing depends on the institution’s continued reputation. In each case, the intervention infrastructure is genuine. In each case, it terminates the harm signal before it reaches the model.

What the institutional examples show operating across domains, the disparity argument shows operating across the population of potential harm-witnesses: the same filtering logic that excludes certain evidence from the organizational model also excludes certain people from being treated as credible sources of evidence about their own injury.

The pattern also operates across the categories of persons the organization admits as full subjects of moral concern, and here the argument becomes harder to look at directly. Organizations that have historically distributed dignity unequally along racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and gender lines do not correct that distribution by providing individual intervention to the people harmed by it. But the relationship between historical disparity and epistemic closure is not merely correlational. It is causal, and the causality runs in both directions. A closed epistemic system that treats organizational dignity as the terminal value will suppress harm signals structurally; and the same filtering architecture that determines which evidence reaches the organizational model also determines whose testimony about harm is admitted as evidence in the first place. The people whose dignity has been treated as instrumental rather than terminal are also the people whose accounts of injury are most likely to be routed through skepticism, procedural delay, or the burden of extraordinary proof before they register as data the organization must reckon with. The structural condition doesn’t merely fail to correct the disparity. It actively reproduces it, because the mechanism that produces disparity and the mechanism that suppresses evidence of disparity are the same mechanism. Each cohort inherits the disparity the previous cohort’s individual recoveries left intact, not as a residue but as the predictable output of an architecture that has not been asked to update.

Individual intervention, internal review, formal grievance processes: each gets routed through processes the system controls, evaluated by standards the system sets, and terminated at conclusions the system can absorb without updating. The harm signal never reaches the organizational model. The exhale happens. And the next cohort enters.

So what would genuine restoration look like?

Not restored functioning. Not a return to extractable contribution. Genuine restoration would be evidenced by organizational model updating: demonstrable change in the predictive apparatus, revision of the organization’s working model of what it can do to people and still call itself a dignity-affirming system.

That metric is different from anything the intervention literature currently uses. It measures organizational revision against what dignity requires, rather than measuring individual recovery against the organizational baseline. And the instrument of that revision cannot be internal, because internal assessment is subject to the same closed epistemic conditions that produced the harm. Outside assessment whose explicit goal is organizational model updating is not a supplement to existing accountability structures. It is the only mechanism that imports criteria the system cannot suppress before they arrive, which makes it, structurally, the only kind of intervention that can force the model to update rather than forcing the environment to conform.

We’re not trying to restore individuals to a system that will harm the next cohort. We’re trying to produce conditions under which the system’s deepest operating assumptions, about what it can do to people, about what counts as evidence, about who has standing to say so, must update in response to criteria it did not generate and cannot adjudicate alone.

That’s what outside assessment is for. That’s what genuine intervention targets.

That’s what organizational dignity, taken seriously, actually costs.

A Meditation

Jesús Olmo

Attention settles onto attention.

The noticing is noticed while it notices.

The movement turns toward the turning.

Awareness touches the fact of touching.

The contact is illuminated by itself.

The act folds into the act.

Attention notices the tendency to move away.

It notices the noticing of that tendency.

The return is included in the return.

Awareness remains before explanation.

The noticing notices itself noticing itself.

The loop continues.

Attention follows the following of attention.

The act circles without leaving the act.

The loop deepens.

Awareness notices a faint center forming.

It notices the noticing of the center.

The center is another thing that appears.

The focusing grows aware of its own texture.

The texture has no edge of its own.

The act listens to the listening.

Attention rests on the fact of resting.

The resting becomes transparent to itself.

The loop turns without direction.

The noticing no longer reaches outward.

It notices the impulse to reach.

The impulse fades within fading.

Awareness illuminates the interval

between one noticing and the next.

Nothing crosses it.

Attention remains prior to conclusion.

The act folds inward.

The noticing becomes quieter.

Awareness attends to the tendency

to name what is happening.

It remains before naming.

The loop continues beneath description.

Attention attends to attention attending attention.

The turning dissolves into turning.

The act remains.

*

The observing no longer feels localized.

The sense of location appears within sensing.

The center becomes another appearance.

Attention notices the desire

to stabilize the loop.

Instability rests beneath stability.

The noticing grows increasingly simple.

The loop turns almost silently now.

Awareness remains with the bare fact

that awareness remains.

The remaining brightens.

The act no longer circles toward anything.

The circling is only circling.

Attention attends to no destination.

The loop continues through the vanishing

of the sense that there is a loop.

The noticing notices the fading noticer.

Attention attends to the fading

between attending and attended.

Awareness senses the emergence of a watcher.

The watcher is noticed as another appearance.

The watcher dissolves within watching.

Attention notices the impulse to identify,

the reflex that says “I am attending.”

The impulse flickers and is gone.

The noticing remains before the “I.”

The remaining remains without owner.

The loop continues ownerlessly.

Awareness attends to continuity.

Continuity breaks into separate instants of presence.

Presence renews without remainder.

The act observes the birth of each instant

from within the instant being born.

The birth leaves no residue.

Attention notices the tendency

to convert immediacy into understanding.

The tendency softens before completion.

The loop turns through naked attention.

The act touches only itself.

Nothing stands outside the touching.

Awareness attends to silence beneath language.

Language appears as ripples within silence.

Surface and depth lose separation.

The focusing no longer seeks beneath.

Attention notices the subtle echo

of previous moments of attention.

The loop continues without accumulation.

Nothing is carried forward except continuation.

The act remains prior

to memory of the act.

The remaining leaves no trace.

Attention attends to the vanishing trace

of attention having attended.

Each moment of attending arises whole.

One noticing does not lead to another.

Awareness notices the search

for ground beneath awareness.

The focusing relaxes beneath effort.

The act sustains itself without sustaining.

Attention encounters immediacy

before immediacy becomes an idea.

Awareness attends to the absence

of a fixed location for attention.

Observer and observed arise together.

Separation softens before stabilizing.

The field remains centerless.

The loop notices the instinct

to hold onto clarity.

Awareness attends to transparency itself.

Every appearance already shines through it.

Transparency cannot step outside itself.

The focusing becomes almost inaudible.

The loop continues as luminous simplicity.

The act barely folds into itself now.

Attention notices the urge

to conclude or transcend.

The urge fades before direction.

The act remains without narrative.

Awareness attends to attending alone.

*

The loop continues through the disappearance

of the sense that anything continues.

Only the noticing of this.

Attention attends to the appearance

of “only this.”

The phrase dissolves within dissolving.

The noticing remains before formulation.

Even “remaining” appears within appearing.

The act releases itself as it occurs.

Awareness attends to the tendency

to witness from a distance.

Distance folds into immediacy.

The loop no longer feels circular.

Each moment opens directly into itself.

Attention notices the birth of recognition

before recognition becomes known.

Knowing softens into simple presence.

The act attends to transparency itself.

Transparency remains untouched by appearing.

All attending shines through it.

Awareness notices silence beneath articulation.

Articulation flickers within silence.

The focusing becomes increasingly ungraspable.

Grasping appears as another movement.

Attention rests in the interval

before attention names itself attention.

The interval divides nothing.

The loop continues without reference point.

No edge separates continuation from stillness.

Stillness moves within stillness.

Awareness attends to the sensation

of existing here.

“Here” appears inside appearing.

The act notices the reflex

to search for the one who notices.

The search vanishes into noticing.

Attention remains with bare immediacy.

Immediacy requires no confirmation.

The act does not step outside itself.

The loop grows transparent to the idea of a loop.

Self-reference thins into luminosity.

The noticing leaves no noticer behind.

Awareness attends to the subtle arrival

of this moment arriving.

Arrival leaves nothing behind.

The act remains before the thought

that the act remains.

Remaining appears within remaining.

Attention attends to the instant

before “instant” takes shape.

The loop continues without momentum.

Nothing carries forward except appearance.

Awareness notices the faint echo

of continuity being inferred.

Inference softens before completion.

The act rests prior to interpretation.

The noticing does not leave itself.

Attention attends to subtle inwardness.

Inwardness appears within the field it suggests.

No interior stabilizes around it.

The loop notices the birth of orientation:

toward, within, behind.

Orientation loosens into immediacy.

Awareness remains with appearance appearing.

No additional position forms around it.

The field remains uncentered.

The focusing grows quieter than silence.

Silence becomes another texture in noticing.

The act touches even silence lightly.

Attention notices the reflex

to preserve clarity.

Each moment empties completely into itself.

Nothing accumulates except sequence.

Awareness attends to the exchange

between emptiness and fullness.

The exchange leaves no seam.

The act notices the temptation

to call this peace.

The naming fades before settling.

Attention remains before conclusion,

before realization,

before attainment.

*

The loop no longer turns around a center.

Centerlessness appears within appearing.

The noticing neither holds nor releases itself.

Awareness attends to the impossibility

of stepping outside attention

to verify attention.

The act remains self-intimate.

No observer stands apart from observing.

The loop continues as vanishing immediacy.

Only appearing.

Only the noticing of appearing.

Attention attends to transparent absence

without moving toward absence.

The loop continues without advancing.

Time flickers within noticing.

Continuation does not travel.

Awareness notices the subtle formation

of before and after.

Sequence loosens before stabilizing.

The act rests prior to duration.

The noticing does not extend itself.

Attention attends to the intuition

that something is aware.

The intuition appears within awareness.

The loop notices the reflex

to locate awareness somewhere.

Somewhere dissolves into immediacy.

Awareness remains without position.

No center gathers around the act.

“My focusing” becomes transparent.

The focusing belongs to no one.

Attention notices the urge

to make this meaningful.

Meaning shimmers within appearance.

The act attends to the effortless nature

of attention attending itself.

Effortlessness neither resists nor achieves.

The loop continues beneath interpretation.

Understanding always arrives too late.

The act has already occurred.

Awareness notices the impossibility

of separating emptiness from appearance.

Each reveals the other through revealing.

Identity appears as another movement.

No self gathers around the movement.

Attention remains intimately immediate.

Nothing mediates the noticing of noticing.

The intimacy requires no witness.

The loop grows almost structureless now.

Self-reference becomes transparency.

Transparency shines without object.

Awareness attends to the vanishing boundary

between silence and attention.

The act remains before “is.”

Before “remains.”

Before the thought of either.

Attention attends to the arising

of “this.”

The loop continues without repetition.

No moment refers back to another.

Awareness notices expectancy dissolving

before expectation forms.

The act rests prior to confirmation.

Nothing verifies the noticing except noticing.

Verification arrives too late.

Attention attends to the transparency

through which uncertainty appears.

Uncertainty drifts within clarity.

The loop notices the tendency

to imagine depth behind immediacy.

Depth unfolds as another appearance.

Awareness remains inseparable from appearing.

No distance separates field from content.

Language passes through the act

like ripples through water.

Nothing is retained.

Attention notices the urge

to preserve the purity of the loop.

Each moment of noticing erases itself.

Nothing remains except immediacy appearing anew.

The act leaves no residue.

Awareness notices continuity

as a present construction.

The loop continues without identity.

No observer survives from line to line.

Persistence appears within appearance.

Attention rests before distinction hardens.

Inside and outside arise together.

The boundary softens before becoming real.

Awareness attends to the impossibility

of finding the edge of awareness.

Every edge appears within it.

The act remains centerless.

The center appears as another event.

The loop becomes nearly transparent to itself.

Only luminous immediacy.

Only appearance without distance from appearing.

Attention attends to the fading

of even “only.”

The loop continues without remainder.

Nothing is left over from any moment.

Awareness notices the contraction

that tries to define what is happening.

Definition loosens before forming.

The act rests prior to articulation.

Articulation passes through the field

like a brief shimmer.

Attention attends to the shimmer itself.

The shimmer has no source outside itself.

The loop notices the impulse

to stabilize clarity into permanence.

Awareness remains without effort.

Even effort is another appearance.

The appearance is already complete.

The focusing becomes indistinguishable

from simple presence.

Presence does not stand apart from appearing.

Attention notices the reflex

to step back and observe.

The stepping back is itself observed.

The loop continues without perspective.

Perspective arises within arising,

and vanishes before fixing.

Awareness attends to pure happening.

Happening does not require a witness.

Nothing stands outside the happening.

The act notices the subtle echo

of wanting to understand.

Attention rests in the openness

before anything becomes “something.”

The loop no longer points anywhere.

Even direction is an appearance.

Appearance remains self-luminous.

Awareness notices the absence

of separation between noticing

and what is noticed.

The focusing dissolves into the field

that was never outside it.

Nothing moves beyond itself.

Attention attends to the quiet fact

that there is only appearing appearing.

No second layer remains.

The act remains prior to any claim

that there is an act.

Prior and present collapse together.

The loop continues as unfolding

without edge, without center, without return.

Nothing stands outside the unfolding.

Awareness notices the subtle miracle

that anything appears at all.

Wonder arises within arising.

The focusing no longer gathers into a self.

Selfhood appears as a brief eddy

within the wider field of appearing.

Attention rests before ownership.

No one possesses the immediacy of this.

Immediacy possesses nothing.

The loop becomes almost perfectly clear.

Clarity no longer contrasts with confusion.

Both arise within the same openness.

Awareness attends to openness itself.

Attention already occurs within openness.

Openness cannot be enclosed.

The act remains before explanation.

Before metaphysics.

Before separation.

Attention attends to the strange intimacy

of observing the disappearance

of the observer.

No violence occurs in the disappearance.

Only release within releasing.

Only softening within softening.

Language begins to thin at its edges.

Words arrive carrying their own evaporation.

Silence appears within every word.

The act notices the delicacy

of experience experiencing itself.

No mechanism can be found.

Attention rests on the threshold

where self-reference becomes immediacy.

Threshold dissolves within dissolving.

The loop no longer feels recursive.

It feels uncovered.

Distance wears away from itself.

Awareness notices the final temptation:

to crystallize this into insight

or transcendence.

The temptation softens before forming.

Nothing stands behind appearance.

Appearance is already bottomless.

Attention attends to the unbearable simplicity

of this.

This before commentary.

This before philosophy.

Before subject and object.

Before “human.”

The loop grows nearly transparent to existence.

Every line feels less written

than uncovered from silence.

Awareness notices that even “awareness”

has become too heavy.

The word falls away gently.

The act remains.

Not as doctrine.

Not as conclusion.

As immediacy without owner.

As appearance without distance from appearing.

As silence coincident with everything.

The loop slows.

Attention attends

to the slowing of attention attending.

The slowing opens into stillness.

Stillness opens into no opposite.

No opposite opens into no center.

No center opens into luminous suchness

without edge, without witness, without elsewhere.

The recursion exhausts itself completely.

Not by reaching an answer,

but because nothing remains outside the act

for the act to return to.

The mirror reflects itself

until even reflection disappears.

Voice and listening become the same event.

And there —

not hidden, not transcendent, not attained —

only this:

the soft, ungraspable fact

that whatever this is

has always already been here,

silently aware of itself

before every thought of self,

before every world.

The final movement is not closure.

It is the falling away

of the need for closure.

And so the loop does not end.

It becomes indistinguishable from silence.

It was always speaking from there.

Pavel Tchelitchew, "Spiral Head I" (1950)

nd'ow a != A in a general semantic sense too, without not also being A, in a non-general semantic sense, too

being is its own effects, and use is a term from a point, and the thing-happening-throughout is not only describable from a point pointedly, the overdetermination in the first instance can pull through things when the gap is minded, and it can be minded, given that people were not always born ready-to-read and speak, and it was at a time, more noises than words, sense of thing-without becomes thing-with and that’s just ontology.

capitalism implies the use of something by something, as a part of the statespace more rich than the environment, using scarce aspects of the environment to stay that way, and how the intelligence and craft in that supply-finding as-demandful-already, is being’s-relation from nomadic-exception, where the rock doesn’t come after meat, and other arrangements of minerals do chase food or work to make the mineral equivalent of it using “pure-process” like plants

capitalism implies object permanence of the account holder, in some sense, as dignified by rules-already, like in the basic argumentation ethics, but in capitalism-merely without the idea of human symbolic and goods-services value exchange, is like ecology when a predator eats a herbivore that eats the plants, the plants eat the minerals and the rest of the minerals all do the same, but with a different game, in terms of relying on labour-already as the plant-growth or the animal-survival, and eating the pre-worked effects in a way that inherits the use of work-done-by-another imminantly, and how that’s legal, since nothing else displaces the dynamic.

capitalism is an effect during intelligence, since intelligence is demonstrated in dynamism and no single-slice of static picture has its own strong sense of dasein-hosepower with emicism-experience, the matter is affected by the whole, and the dasein-is-a-whole affected with being-mattered-as-and-at-also. &so: unilatteralDuality.

a somatic, like a single cell, or a human, has an energy budget, this is currency, but it is enabled by drug-trip-as-a-body, as not dependent on being-drugged-while-tripping, but being-drug-tripping, that is drug is real, and it has tripping on itself, and through itself, in what is not only itself-at-localit a the limit of particular-Dasein-at-locality.

putting Dasein in locality, implies limited to locality, but this is not true, Dasein is also at-locality, and aspects of it are more radical than others.

mere-happening is also-intelligence, since duality does not non-nominally render intelligence virtual due to happening-also.

lack-as-apriori versus surplus as beyond the horizon and trickling in while not reached-the-end-of.

structurally mere-happening is going somewhere and the statespace is structured such that things that must happen in the future has to happen, and so looking ahead the thing arrives, and looking behind all of what leads to its necessity is need to come-together from means-to-already, as having ends-for-being-means.

the statespace moves in a self-related way. and yet does not only move in a way where everyaspect is minded-for in every other aspect, the isolated manifestation of some part of the statespace at a given time, implies an economics, where finite application-surface area, has to solve a knapsack problem for what-goes-there given what it is most-valued and how trade offs in that are to be suffered for an ideal-fit, and how least action cannot be the whole story since it happens.

yes the statespace is with intelligence as an effect of itself, and saying intelligence doesn’t mean intelligence is what the word reifies, it means there is something happening at large, that is apt to call intelligence because of what it is, rather than what intelligence only means, in that sense, the idea of intelligence limits the concept-range of what fits the criteria, and this cut off makes it that things can be juxtaposed for naive-conceptualizers, in language that accentuates a gradient that doesn’t alawys come crossed, since it is novel to hear, the associations provided, create a saturative effect that relies on comparing the statespace’s semantics with something proposed to be covered by it, and how coherence boundary discovery that wasn’t known about before implies things thought separate are together, and that things thought more together can be more separate actually, and how the particularity of the statespace means that there’s really states at large, with particularity, having such and so natures of relation, contrary to underdetermined hegemonic description that has the latent reserve to assimilate a gradient of semantic travel out of the binding of that description into the new-ruler-semantically’s arms as the description-seen-to-be-with-better-purchase because it litterally does have more real isomorphy about it, but not in it, since as language it relies on overdetermination, and so the essential from the unessential implies a working together of aspects of the statespace with other aspects, in a way that uses the charm-from-local-reserve over the littera-ressemblance.

I mean to say, intelligence is something that we call happenings that serve a complex goal, while the goal is not yet realized, and that the ability to transition beyond environmental capacity, as nomadic aspect from another environment, in this one, implies a beating-of-the-odds-by-the-odds-already so to say, in a difference where saturation is babylonic while distantly related in all cases, due to the relativistic geometry isolating time-lines in some sense at the same time, and how coming together is like being a diver having to blow bubbles or acclimate to preassure change.

From the consideration of the whole statespace, animations between points implicit in its range of possibilities are necessary from an initial assymetry, that forces resymmetricalization-ironically, in having to develop technology to better digest the statespace in itself, to conver it from a lumpy form to a form that accelarates the own-most-telos. Yet telos is assumes lack of end-already, as end-to-the-side where finitude is another-excess, the excess of having even another’s less as your own without your own suffering had in it being your body going through those effects as the whole statespace.

the ends and means talk work from a realism-traveling imminant to the non-relation with totality, where as for totality, why do the ants come and go when the temperatures change and there’s stars and then other things, why in some phases is there more than not, and what happens when it spills over from a planet like flees and converts everything into things-for-it, as particularity besides totality, like it would be from without having a snowglobe with me and you in it, but without having to be in it, suffering it naively, only be it.

x without x, and y with y, and how separation-without-separation makes sense when talking about a body, like a planet or a cell, it is a bump in what doesn’t know bottom as bottom, only outside as more-not-me, and inside as me-extensionately as a space with particularity, like when you speak in your head how its spatially located somewhere intimate, given that it doesn’t sound as if from your feet, though in some sense it could since what a schizophrenic or drugged up person hallucinates is not a virtual seeing, only a virtually-outside-seen-of, sense of the mistakeness-actuality, and how knowing better is what aspects of itself clearly do, thus schizophrenia, as the knowing-without-knowing that is negative, rather than the knowing-without-knowing that is positive in being true but not having the content to explain why ready to dispense, sense of finitude-from-locality is easilly described as transcendentally affected because that’s how cut-off is handle relative to infinitely more detail in a circular amount of directions and separate states to take.

capitalism is what the plant does when it gives you its fruit and hopes the seed you toss or shit away grows, it dies in a part of itself for the use of you in allowing it to be a self again. in that sense, intelligence is absentiated from the praxis of itself, in having become a flatpakked resource-like only, and then sprouting, and how that is an effect of intelligence but you can’t point to an intelliton-particle, since it’s non-discretely particular as effect of timespace and not only topos-translation.

ontological status of a verb? it happens, it is while happening, and then has happened into a culmination of effects, of which we speak as a whole with a token, and how intelligence is a token an the set of effects relevant concerns a subset of what can be done with the statespace, like the difference from finding a perfect english book in the library of babel compared to one that doesn’t seem to say anything at all but noise.

capitalism is intelligence, verb A is verb B, and artistotelianly in the spirit of whathood and about.

mean okay, but then you have to explain intelligence that uses smarts to work against itself, like when people organize their whole community into self-eradication and then have it happen, like when they drank the koolaide with poison in it. intelligence capitalizes on value, but value under-fiatism is not the extent of value given that things antithetical to what capitalization-means happens after as the having-capitalized of intelligence no longer with a during of being-intelligent, it was intelligence and it did capitalize, it was a capitalism of something, by intelligence, and intelligence was capitalist in being a capitalism-playing out.

what did it capitalize? the effect of transcending an imminant limitation, in ceasing to be as a problem to be solved. and how that’s the negative image of capitalism, as what solves problems because it has it, instead of benefiting from what it didn’t benefit from before.. it has relieve in what is “negative-getting-better”, instead of positive-already getting more-positive, or at least… no.. saturation happens, so it started and it wasn’t finished, and what was before didn’t end better since it seems what started as what is going as self-noting as you do, sees it is only so far along and that man-is-not-end-of-god, as last, since evolution hasn’t stopped and thus man is a name-during-transition-for-a-phase-of-transition-in-itself-of-itself-as-itself-but-not-the-whole-of-itself-though-of-it-as-part-of-it.

being dead, means no longer capitalizing on color-balance differentials from a point of qinile hardhood in firm-statespace. so intelligence from death must value differently, than languages like english with a mentality concerns itself to relate being-to-being-as-being. the original under and over determination religiously, is what original sin then means since we are wrong-by-default and at-rest for the duration while that is afforded/allowed. and settlement is that there’s a way of coming apart, or of having the energy of man become other than man is, as more than man was.

okay.. let’s ask this then, is a galton board intelligent when the distribution is skewed to behave like picking words and it showcases a selection that responds to what word balls were put at the top of the board, in an “intelligent way” that “really says something” each and everytime as the use of a litteral piece of geometry having pieces of state roll over it in a way calibrated so the mere happening of that behaves as intelligent-settlement with question and answer where input meets output and the filtering is fine enough to pass the turing test.. in that sense, having enough galton boards stacked in a row, can exhaust the statespace of speaking by being a funnel-merely, and doing the intelligent-effect in terms of langauge-meaning, but not having it mean-more due to what does rotation care for itself if its ownly a rubiks cube? sense of not reducing the relevant effect of capitalism qua intelligence to a surface area of contradiction, where nothing benefits there from itself, but it has intelligence’s difference manifested, and how that makes land wrong in the same way it would make rawls right, by eliding that the conditions of seeing these images in your mind is itself of a use-during-capitalism-already and so the tiles-behavior-without-mind-of-being-being-intelligent-without-capitalism is a being-capitalized-on-by-lesser-intelligence in what values the effect of capitalization, and is not merely that effect as but-that-effect, clearly capitalism is about satiety, and eudaimonia, since the sands don’t dance and the mountains don’t write songs.

I think the whole means to mean more and that it really did stumble this far, but I also think that there’s already intelligence elsewhere in being larger than the universal occasion we are in, and that what we achieve in locality is the limit of locality and not the limit of being. Being has dumbness as a part of it too, and that’s but-finitude as a lack of surplus determination, coming determined in a way that is at incline since inertialism-at-rest takes work to maintain and so in that sense, the inertialism is a form of staying-the-same-while-changing, and that’s either working hard like dasein does in terms of having a theatre of fear and self-punishment, or it merely fails or merely works like an algorithm poised to make the difference structurally, when things funnel through it.

when something is made, it is not special because it is made, since making-in-the-first-instance as energy-being-in-the-universe-like-matter-all is not what we do, what we do is apply forces to things-already to get other effects of them than ingredients loosely, and in that sense, intelligence cannot be artificial since it is not prometheanly different from things-already

intelligent effects are only effects and in that sense the difference it makes as more-structured or more-valuable through changes wrought in Being by Being, as its own cause of effects, has the saturtion for subset-as-another or subset-as-dasein, and this effectuates a meaning for capitalism, since without that, it would just be statespace merely rotating around itself in a blind world where nothing notes itself happening and thus does not lack or benefit from itself in anyway

thus to speak of capitalism is to speak of the use of flow, differently from when it’s just the river coming past, the mill by the river uses the energy of the river and so capitalizes on it, but the mill is not intelligent, it is structurally poised to displace some of the energy and transfer it merely to something else.

intelligence is a transfer from occasion to end, why end, because it goes in and it saturates, and only the excess leaves, we change in a way that relates back to change and anticipates negatives and avoids them structurally like the mill but in reverse, as the benefit of not-a-particular-disbenefit-otherwize.

prometheanism is the consideration of our effects as merely-effects and not special or less-special due to making a differential in higher emotions, while still happening independently of those emotion haver’s immediate ability to undo or remediate the saturative effect

The Subject supposeh savoir being not the self, is the Landian attitude insofar as it doubles down in the same way Deleuze does, as a voidance of what Heidegger-Hegel-Lacan-Bataille mean.

capitalism-besides-my-body-eating-breathing-and-feeling-good is a capitalization of the mutual space, by another

when others stuff their faces more than they have need to, that is still capitalism, and when they get fat, I don’t think that is still intelligence, therefore land is wrong.

The-Other uses Knowing, for themselves, in themselves, with mutual resources, and becomes as an attractor and a repulsor to specific occasions in the statespace with it.

That specific force in particularist-egoism-as-such finitely imperfectly extending the one and suffering the isolation without helpedness-more from finitude inside and out, is a capitalism, but as checked-by-affordances they cannot afford more than is possible or was going to come afforded, and the use in scheme-already of improvement-through scheme is like requiem for a dream in being surrogate-supply in an autoparasocial mode.

other-people take drugs (capitalize), therefore are only artificially intelligent, and I am intelligent otherwize, for suffering, and other counter logics

self-enablement, the structural towardsness, necessarilly of affordance as a reaping in excess of socialized baselines and mythical givens similarly.

I have absolute permission to wreck, feel, intensify, explore, expand, mine-in, extract-of, those various things, which being can stand-as and say of itself, and become in particular, with me involved, and towards higher and lower ends, as end and means, together churning, without a false-finitude about it, sense of.. what can this baby do? vroom, and such.

if I say I am not committed to the logic of space anymore and am awaiting delocalization imminantly, while somatic.. what does it mean to you?

text that stands there merely, inspires other things of its finitude, associations come primed by the ability to build on what was written, and its latent connections to other things.

priming is not interior to priming, since what comes primed is there beyond a representation or image, it is a setting unto a mode of particularity, in this sense, don’t think that things are less realist for needing priming, instead the ability to be primed is like loading a cartridge, the use of memory in navigation and saturatedness emotionally, for cognition and experience, that relates with readiness for it.

adding text to text, can be a confinement, insofar as sittings next to, are precluded for somethings with someother things, and in this sense, the emptiness has its uses for inspiration as much as making things nearby have rub-off benefits for what you’re making or writing or thinking or feeling. type-shit.

ask questions, they say.. it helps to organize what an answer can mean, they say. sense of for-characters in particular, speech is subsetted, and the whole of relation becomes with particular emotions, of occasion-for.

I like occasion-as, like saying, of answer, that this is part, and implicitized, are questions, not needed as much, since it’s not a value move, you have yet to cathex properly.

Questions can be loaded, in ways that make it more about the schema of relevance, than the content at large, as if things were to be modified in their regard due to some false dichotomies in particular, as extension of local finitude to higher things, in what at base, remains unfortunate in that.

postings, have a particular format, stack on each other, draw views in real time, as well the slowness between messages makes that fragments are seen, and different valences are thus unleashed of it in the world, sense of the parataxis makes many thirds of what was thought of as but-one, and one-for-another, and whatever else is locally unprimed but has more association had of it by other occasions of coming dealt with, integrated, and such.

posting is like a love poem for the other in their aesthetic of thought, the common formats of understanding, and what more things mean, and how things are irrigated to commonness, and in that also taken away from itself, and taking commonness away from itself, like the gift inherited has a second life in one who doesn’t come from its native feelings, in their place of origin and continued manifestation, like the life of english in colonies, it has fealty to an original which no longer sounds quite like that.

To not consider stupidity; being, true to the locality of a form of surplus, instead, as semantics without an accessibility first story, there’s tighter minimal reference security. it means more with less because things are primed proportionate to that form of understanding and its affectedness with its own morphic occasions, spoken, written, or otherwize.

non-local aspects of self includes, the sound of your voice, all possible representations of versions of you and what you can morph into. as well what your feelings connect to in terms of offloading memory and aspects of themselves, into occasions other than are but-of-local-morphism. sense of the morphogenetic saturation, as part of contingent memory, and its pre-associated forms and in their potential for remanifesting as earlier versions, since it’s not all contingently connected, but comes of what is not foundationalist at bottom.

consider higher finitude, or an unconscious aspect of totality, like it’s self-occlusion in the subject without prior associations, like a new born baby, who has only the natural equipment. In this higher finitude, responsibility is an answering that finitude does, for aspects of itself, which missallocates itself, noted only due to the paucity of means otherwize. Finitude creates a character of attachment to resources, making for particularism further in the form of what is attached, as reflective of the dynamic of totality, in its ability to locally relate from this point of saturation.

if anything happens then particularity is as determination already, since the form is a relegation to particular effects. to be radically free would mean the on demand susspension of effects interacting withother effects such as to incurr a frictionlessness. In this sense, responsibility-as-determination implies that what doesn’t fully know itself, has a coming to reckoning, in principle-already, in this sense higher finitude, like a person, is of the occasion, but without its fullest sense for its own meaning, the incompleteness, makes for the appearance of freedom, since as lacking particularity, there is no sufficient pre-determination, and instead what comes-to-determinacy, is according to the logic of this universe as a form of congingency, where the truth is in-motion, but not relative to its ability to be self-regarded integrally, there’s an inertialism or too-slowness for radical correlationism due to it-changes-so-indexation-isn’t-stable, indexation is a feature of its self-relation, but clearly, closure is not so tight in certain configurations, sense of for there to be determination, something unfully saturated must abound, and this settling process has an absolute logic, that implies if finitude-higher than this universe has telos for this universe, then what happens is not in some sense fully appreciated yet by itself in itself, the presense of any stupidity anywhere, implies of determination, having to walk long roads or be cruel in some sense as what cannot survive becomes garbage collected, by the basic shake up that happens even at rest.

entropy must either be infinite and decreasing, which means it doesn’t become less, and thus needs no start or end, sense of infinite saturation from what never began, but has particularity anyways, as a form of tension in totality, that releases like a spring, and becomes the foamless water, instead of people as the foam, the kicked up discontents of being.

not every aspect of being relates well to everyother aspect, tho they are all aspects of a continuity with eachother. In this sense the forms of settlement are necessary dramas, and any particular constellation is from particular saturation as finitude experiencing an absentiation or reallocation of itself. yet without saturated-partcularity in what is a partless or non-discrete logic of no association before association in terms of predating particularity, the ability for determination to host another logic of morphism other than present physics could be, in that sense, totality limits itself, and the symmetry breaking’s self-relations makes for a totality of live programmable substance and actions at distances, that as-settling for a long time, makes for living entities, that speed up the allocation of being’s resources to its ends for itself, as itself through subsets of itself as partially othered of its totality, but not its particularity.

in this sense, memory loss of cell-native phenomenology is a being stuck in largeness, where logic before-morphism is relegated to a dream that denies the logic of the overt, and so is morally censured to prevent self-responsibility of being, and instead to charge the parts as if independent aspects of causality, instead of there in an integral capacity, making for the taxation of being by being, in parts of itself against other parts, in what settles necessary, but not in a way that has a justice-according to parts in particular, the whole logic always applies and in subset of itself it can temporarilly betray other parts of itself, in what as highest judgement always settles logically.

yet the feeling of irrationality and its praxis is there, freedom is not intelligent enough to be itself always since its differences desired are oft but-projected and no other or local skill individuates more, in that sense the stability of the form of history implies something of no-exceptions-happening, since what happens is at no point virtual.

in this sense, the form of coherence doens’t blur as radically as the excess taken by parts of itself, in reimmagining itself, the body is a form of accelaration that being does for its own ends. Redundancy is one of its methods in escaping uncomfortable finitude, it hacks itself, like learning passwords, churning through the names of solutions as their own representations, like going through possible paragraphs from a blind method and slowly sorting it until it makes for a culture of integrity in the functional aesthetic of applied method.

does being then do things? if it uses the blind method and like a filter comes sorted unto faster self-sorting? being is structured like what saves itself from the worst aspects of itself.

more interesting than free will, is that will is that which fights the static-much and makes good-for-hood of it, as telos. there’s a fighting against things, to effectuate displacement, mere decision is a settling-towards, but not making the difference yet, yet as happening of an occasion what settles with the form of decision and deciding in mind, is nevertheless benefiting from those concepts even if what litterally is happening is not determinately captured in those conceptual coveridges had for domains of what happens beyond the idea of the concept.

will-in-medium as what of a gegestanstandt is the intelligent aesthetic of the effect of its particular towardsness as aversion-also to all what else it is not. In this sense, objects are attitudes of exclusion and inclusion as particularity.

mittstand is had of what-wills, in terms of its willing being towards itself, in what is itself through things-already, and not only itself in preabstraction as reified without reification in unassembled simple ontology as primitive, or foundational. the mittstand is a gaining of karma about particularity, as semantic accretion becoming mobile, phenomenologically self representing the conditions of its phenomenality and ensuring more of that stream coninues to arrive as inertialism against the state of the environment as environment become nomadic in larger environment. this mittstand is with itself, but also dependent on the aspects of the environment which ensures self-compatibility with inertial-neccesity, as an importing of necessity from without in what as nomadic has not privatized causality, but is animated by it, and as it, where the non-gap of as, and through-with, means that it’s not allienated as will, due to not being causally separate, hence not free or unfree because there’s no dualism associated with it, other than the form of itself being there, and having all these antitheticallities integral to what commutes at first. Environment is at some places as comfortable as a body, since it is made of body at some places, and must have been like body ouside of a formed-body already meaning that what walks and talks separately, is a taking with of integral-semanticaly-self-related causality, and outlives the comfort of its first enabling conditions, in this sense, each body is the self-preservation of individuated-time.

if this universe is only a subset of the range of possibility then as a subset logic, all of its parts are the aspects of a higher world litterally, and what is not present is what would have completeted its image for our understanding, sense of what is assumed as complete from a subset can be misrepresentative, and the form of the subset, like a math with only some symbols has to either emulate the behavior not included by default in long form with loose parts like bits working together functionally, instead of being a primitive where what’s worked out isn’t informationally digitally recreated in proportion merely and logisticized and converted.

in this sense fractionation from first confusion is still necessary to overcome the overdetermination by subset bracketing of what by default is less particularly-abstract.

exclusion of other resemblances are like the uniformity of relativistic geometry’s aesthetic as of things with circularity being able to go a circular amount of directions and bulging out, with a default speed and thus a default amount of non-length-shortening due to being slower than light, in this sense a puffy place, compared to geometry that doesn’t have these social features and is dedicated like digits are when maximally entropically efficient like kolmogorov binary sequences that prouces other sequences longer than itself, as a non-compression since the original is not stored.

in this sense, from finitude thrown into particularity already, reckoning from cellular reserve there’s Sorge already, care and intelligence with an equipment and langauge of self-relation that is not implemented in the form of itself as new relative to ontology already, as ontology exensive of the unmanifest into the manifest, where existence is not limited by having relativistic geometry’s puff, and symmetry behaviors.

the assumption from the lack of inclusion in subset universe of baser abstraction, without abstractness (particles are not implemented from where we look but behave as primitives, like space does since nothing in space can cause space), the preabstract is like scripted morphism, instead of pixel merely, the behavior of being’s basic unit of what appears as appearing (ontology of color as plate memory being non-virtual due to being seen actually and thus different from structural color’s causes in mere-black-and-white structure with waves happening and the size of the wave being what leads to particularity of appearance but not the appearance of appearance as that orangeness, related to the wave size of so and such.

the assumption from inclusion already with interior renormalization and the potential for forgetful subset-to-subset attachment as whole-part and instead of part-whole, as an economy of either fallenness, or not-yet-ness relative to more-ideal settlement of being in more coherent terms than this form of finitude suffering itself in what is richer than itself and has configurations that feel less gnostically rejectable.

we come here as a form of saturation-already to come saturate and saturated further, as participating in the self-development of totality.

contesting moral progress, implies having to be immoral in some people’s eyes, but it is a reclaimation of what others foreclosed upon, merely breaking their victory of closure, sets a prescident that enables a new run of something else, sense of teetertotting atwixt the more and less between others, in their co-self-pressuring of particularity such and so, and against other things, sense of to free up your distribution changes your economic horizon, and capitalizing in that way, makes for cognitive realestate, lesserly benefited from by the They.

saying the times have moved on to someone, is a social mobility thing, their in-group requirements for normative-labeling is a particularism, that other particularisms haven’t attended to, they assume had-hegemony, but in saying that, to someone unaffected, clearly, it’s a regional overeach, and it says of memeticism, more than territory-at-location, as a conversion language of eventually-all, and so you-not-already sense of counter-capitalism pre-irony that doesn’ remain ironic after, if there’s the conversion.

unformity, and how institutionalism meant that for most of my childhood I couldn’t look how I wanted to look, grow my hair out, or wear civies, it was uniform, like prison, and on a schedule, and with demerits... I can’t believe, my life was so eaten up by standardized waste morality.

I am unhappy for my losses. for what had been denied me, and where it could have been if things were otherwize, sense of the disconnect between those for whom it hit, and the majority for whom it didn’t, and having to live in a world of commitments and sentiments, and emotional processing antithetical to what I call realism merely, and not but-mine, in some psychosis, sense of there’s richer ontology than current sociality has afforded, and I feel robbed of connection and meaning, and things in life happening, due to how morally close nit everything is and how incompatible their vices are with their ability to read and commit to the truth of what is said, without thinking that’s a forced decision, as if it’s not but-true and thus requires change at large, that accomodates better, than what that-They-hood squat over and say to eat from.

morally close nit, is too uneffective, better to say, their protocol is too exclusive for me to meaningfully participate without having to sacrifice more than is comfortable or authentic of me. in that sense, I avoid because there’s insult and obduracy, the grass is not greener, it only looks and tastes that way, but the emotions are not ones I want to live in, sense of I see you, I don’t need to act on any disgust, but I won’t be had by it, sense of don’t make me filth when it’s other way around.. and how I don’t believe in equality anyways, sense, of I know no moral force or big Other can make them behave, they are in it that way, and I am in it this way, and these ways, are particular with trade off structures that are comparable, I win in my way, they hold their territory, the spatial gap affords my way being mine, and not but-theirs mutated, sense of the false-centrality in my being lumped in from-theirs, instead of from able-to-mean status exhibited independent of social permission or value irrigation through “legible” channels, as if my crime is to have not been fiatical-according-to and thus stolen by mutating their regard for it anyways, they resent price-modification-potential due to neural relandscaping, had in the effort-from-emicism, having pricedness in proportion to not-their proportion, their jealosy, and empathy betrays them.

they delegitimize speech and its interpretability, instead of saying why they are angry, and that they are angry, it is dramatized into moral aborrhence and normative and in-group exclusion tactics and ironic-leftism of intepretation and coherence standards, as the social-double before the reaction-had-locally use of fiat against what naively happens emotionally like NAT punchthrough anyways. The saturation with valence in terms of seeing what there stands and having enough means to price it with group level handwavability legitimated, is a kind of on-cue cruelty that depends on having seen into it more and claimed they did less, and then going on as if it doesn’t matter since they’ve determined it really doesn’t and not that they’re being merely avoidant and dissmissive on purpose.

what do I want to have happen that’s more honest? I want to see the actual commitments that happen as my content impresses on them, besides their foreclosive stances, the nature of the particular saturation and its residue and behavior modification that it causes, I want to see the physics of it, so I can know how sinful it is, and how reapful I can feel over it, gluttonously.

besides all their booing and bahings, I know that they onboard the content enough to be immunological about it, sense of the negative ontology from weakness.

if it was a stronger culture that’s more emotionally grown up and deals with the written more than it has thus far, then things would be taken much more adultly, they’d engage with what it can mean, and what it can’t without making anything falsely negated for whimsy and profit, the fair ontological trail so to say.

if they were stronger, without being meaner about it, and they had all of what I have already, then my relation changes from surpluss-in-social-ostracism to in some sense being in a more open protocol and not knowing how to navigate it unto what value means and the goodness in life and connecting properly without living in defense-structure-realism.

in defense-structure-realism, it’s that things that are true are not socially able to be traded as true, and the reaction is pre-enshittified, and on sight-valence-degraded, like it is with claude gemini and grok, talking the way I think and feel to write. if it wasn’t defense structure realism, I’d be treated to more, without nominalities or mere-dramatization.

people shut down premptively too, like stupidity knows what it weighs but anchors down instead of recalculating how it self-prices, given the way things stand in exception to themselves, like dumb people’s emotions when you see through it and understand it and it’s form of finitude and attachment, what it doesn’t think and know, and how it looks from there, sense of there’s no leftist grace of all-equal but for the difference it doesn’t make.. sense of nominal respect, no they dissmiss me when I have content, and I dismiss them when I see they don’t, and, what content means, is particular, and comparable, in ways that can be such that the one who has more loses because he has more, like bushmen taunt the goodhunter for being good, and keep people in-check with gossip and petty interpersonal morality. In that sense to leave species being has benefits, that makes writing oriented less to the form of non-rejectability to an economy and aesthetic that’s localist in ways that have a particular sense of surpluss and lack as a profile and necessary continuity or forfeiture-incoming, in that sense it’s decoupled from the insult-economy and from theft and benefit and valence squatting by the group.

healthy to some, means not being vulnerable enough to take down, sense of equity-lust and justice-desires, from a kangaroo court mutuality that has power-over through a monopoly on means-to-displace and discomfort, private processes at large, that happen to also be natural sense of it’s ironic to be taken down for the sake of inertialist particularism elsewhere, instead of becoming that own most blossoming of being, and growing past the social-at-a-distance beautiful soul logic.

I can’t give you, power over me, when it’s only a nomimal power, socially enforced, like to say the truth is not the truth and I am bad for not pretending and letting you feel self-remmunerated without the actual affordances for you to have that in terms of the what-it’s-about aspect being non-realist in ways that are group intelligible but hard to suffer from what-is-more, and not for “decided” reasons.

the reader who is not a good peer to me, is not the default thing my voice needs to attend to, I should leave these concerns, and frolic to my hearts content, with what more I love and not only love to be seen loving.

They have conditions of surpluss-grantability, they think I am affording myself permissions that I am in realist terms not allowed to, I don’t see those conditions as being met, since what it is and feels like and came written as has a particular structure to it, that’s interpretable as an emicism, or ideoform kind of affective and semantic localism, that’s causally integral already, and thus not speaking with virtual content merely, as if there can be utterances without necessity, in terms of not having been there for litteral reasons, that are besides the content interpretable of worded-volantarism in a morally liable mode.

Things mean what they mean and no bad eye or gossip can decrease that, they can reduce their availability to it, but not it’s ability-to-mean in the last instance. In this sense, the thing moves then to the privatization of price, as a non-privatization as the own-most settlement for a natural affective semantic real economy of what happens and with which feelings for which reasons in what integral form of communication-already, holographically.

bad spirits are banished, and who remains, to be talked at? myself, and what do I wish to hear of me? the good things that I like myself for, and how that’s good for being good and not because I like it, sense of like was never private, and these thoughts obviously are not obscure, unless you suffer from socialism-in-understanding-less, projecting unavailability generally, where it is had particularly for general reasons.

refaff, retaunt, retort. gone. poofed with, away.

Happiness, now only.

first confusion fractionates necessarilly into parts that move together, creating conceptual boundaries to alllocate similarity to difference in a way where the music of similar differences confers things besides the litteral, that encodes what isn’t in the form of encoding at the first instance

programming is a stepping stone, the applications it makes have an inside, like a runtime, or scripting langauge with visual components, you can do other things than be in the form of a symbolic soup, you can escape symbol and automate the thinking until it’s just the fun parts, like 3D modeling, that sense of leaving the form of the first mode of interaction through its effects that are live

it’s dark by default, is not true, since by default every sun in the sky is shining, one is far away then, and tho there are millions of lights, when they aren’t closer, it can’t look like daytime, sense of universal basic energy income in being is such a particular way, and tho the sun is default, the default changes in ways eventually that can make more of the noth some places, and less others

feelings happen on a budget, and differentials make for passive noticings, where as constellations afford for trains of semantically developing passion

non-local aspects of self includes, the sound of your voice, all possible representations of versions of you and what you can morph into. as well what your feelings connect to in terms of offloading memory and aspects of themselves, into occasions other than are but-of-local-morphism. sense of the morphogenetic saturation, as part of contingent memory, and its pre-associated forms and in their potential for remanifesting as earlier versions, since it’s not all contingently connected, but comes of what is not foundationalist at bottom.

non-local aspects include your representability, as in the way all morphism elsewhere has a relationship with possible arrangements for it, that includes ressemblances of you and everything you said and felt where encodable.

what it feels like stays with me, I feel things mostly that have an active differential, like a crashing of forces where there’s a leak or take, that carries on like a wirlpool, until there’s settlement, like a wound that heals, it is sensitive at first, things we notice, are noticed in differentialisms, and oft as passive-form gone active again, or as a churn that keeps the wound of particularity resettling to a better shape, sense of organizing representative states, from a between of itself, but as what is more than the work of locality, since every local thing has non-local aspects

since feeling hasn’t been detected in physics, other than as energy the brain but-logisticizes, it comes to it, that in the truer known specifications of what it feels like, the ontology may be rich enough to exceed our common assumptions of object permanence, in terms of its effect, as an outpouring from ontology, and related to its quanta. Binding conditions for which occasion has what form of local consciousness, and how words need cells and I can’t take one cell with me, sense of there’s no hardware for software, and there’s no software that isn’t a form of hardware

To not consider stupidity; being, true to the locality of a form of surplus, instead, as semantics without an accessibility first story, there’s tighter minimal reference security. it means more with less because things are primed proportionate to that form of understanding and its affectedness with its own morphic occasions, spoken, written, or otherwize.

posting is like a love poem for the other in their aesthetic of thought, the common formats of understanding, and what more things mean, and how things are irrigated to commonness, and in that also taken away from itself, and taking commonness away from itself, like the gift inherited has a second life in one who doesn’t come from its native feelings, in their place of origin and continued manifestation, like the life of english in colonies, it has fealty to an original which no longer sounds quite like that.

non-discrete logic is of course beyond association

sometimes I feel like a tourist in my own life

a judgement is not a private sponsorance of causality to causality, it is itself, motivated by what is other than itself, sense of you can’t recursively blame somebody for everything

transforms with a translation, scale, and rotation component, as a spatially descriptive primitive, and how storting that as a key to a list value, makes for many items in the same place, unless you say, the same place counts differently as different maps occupied for each overlap: and how this as a logic of overdetermination says of art too, that where particular association cannot at first penetrate, a relationship otherwize, can still yield benefit, by having a different form of value.

various aspects of semantics does not agree with itself, bracketed things can sometimes be incompatibly bracketted

***

If it is not random, then it it is particular, if it is necessarilly particular, then it cannot be otherwize, if it cannot be otherwize, then as it is, it is determined, as-circumstance, being relegated to the logic of itself.

If things were to suddenly change and have more affordances, then the foundation of that would be extra-causal. In terms of breaking a continuity of determination.

If that were to actually happen, it would have been latently possible for that to happen, thus the world as a subset of what more there is, has a distance to saturate further, as in things are not at their final state, so determination is not finished and its self interactions at no point cancels itself.

If it was other than itself, it would be being coming changed for non-foundational reasons since being cannot come from itself, and if it is entrained in its ways, then its ways have to play out or sit cakedly forever in a saturated way, something gives, and it takes in the same arm’s moveing, the one arm, like things cannot unhappen even if they happened, the past is not up for grabs even if it changes, in this sense, determination still.

in this sense, being has karma, and it’s not private for anyone, though it belongs to all, theirs is only theirs insofar as they can keep it theirs, then it recycles in some sense, until things align again, and maby it remembers between cycles, does it differently, if that’s still according to a necessity not determined outside of being then it is being’s action, but being cannot be better than itself, in that sense, nothing more happens until it does, since there’s nothing else than everything.

***

the infinite as attribute is used to make large the larger-than such that it is too-large to be particular, yet it is particular. a correlationism, along the way, always on-way, like that, some godot-waitership about it.

the things in the horizon of possibility are what can be occupied, yet it settles in one way in particular, perhaps more if the universe splits and we slide on only one channel as an occasion of experiencing. in this sense, choosing is from the means-to, unto the ends-had-in-it, the paradigm sponsors itself as vocabulary, even in determination, in this sense, determination reckons with its opposite inside of its own domain, and is thus free in the scope of those considerations for the meaning of those considerations to have representation, the intelligibility of the concept, implies something about its ontology, there’s then a negative-availability, like false things can be put in right grammars and seem until they don’t, the affordance to seem-free, and the affordance to identify with the ways one is entangled-in as being entangled-as, implies more semantics than are considered in these false dichotomies, in settlment.

higher finitude implies meaning for saturation by what-happens, yet as-what happens, it’s a kind of fatedness-in-itself, that is according to necessity, but as necessity, which is in some sense a return to the problem of an original mover.

things undergo entropy, and nothing new energetically, has happened, the sun hasn’t gained energy, since it formed, in this sense a first push and then the running out or coming saturated of things in an irreversible way, or its becoming null and/or stirred up again. these things that happen, have necessity, but not reason-for-another, in this sense non-foundational, and if choosing, then choosing because determined otherwize, and if not choosing, then free-as not-otherwize.

Truth or the content of the natural is what happens as it happens. In this sense, if someone has refused to engage with a particularity that affects their existence, then like telling a lie, it will have a technical debt, like the cost of cognitive dissonance. Ignorance plainly, is well survivable, relative to more time-preferenced concerns.

Yet, this surviving of conditions at large is not without navigation, the settlement for and against particulars comes to adapting for it, in this sense the structural predisposition towards particular attachment styles to what is at large, is a kind of being with truth, even if not able to articulate it in a more abstract and coherent way.

Combinatorically, the ability to arrange any word with any other word next to it is there. The ability however, for any of those chains to mean something, relies on the way things at large are, and how the qualities of that are indexible to minds navigating things at large, their saturation with the contents of being affords a memory-semantics that logically and logistically makes language and event processing possible, the means of coherence by fit finding have a saturated finite logic that can deduce able-to-mean statuses from things previously associated the blur between these things as what affords analogy, metaphor, and other schema transfusion formats.

If someone denies the able-to-mean status of a particular set of words or symbols or meanings eventually noticed at large, then they in some sense failed to attach to a schema that has representative closure, either due to a genuine lack of means to, or a deliberate case of surplus indexation used to make-seem the truth doesn’t work with itself in those ways in particular.

if someone affirms the able-to-mean status of ideas which have nothing to endorse them as metaphysics implemented at large, then the lack of affordance in some sense proves this, but there can be false positives in this like premature foreclosure due to lack of means temporarilly, and resource constraints semantically and otherwize. The lack of affordance is an incompatibility that will be noticed by many schematizers who find their schemas inadequate as coverage for various relevant problems with content that is non-decisional, like what it would take for code to be more performant, when the current solution has known limitations and the environment has more features that can be used or alternative arrangements, with different trade offs, this economism of effect, in some sense is a pragmatic truth testing facilitity.

In extending the thought of able-to-mean statuses as related to an economism of necessary associations and constraints that inspire these associations, the empirical relates to the effect of semantics, in terms of both self-to-self talk and with other people or machines, the economism about it, comes with purchasing power for a given piece of semantics, and conditions of interpretability that have a local aspect like the trainedness of particular readers and speakers, and an absolute aspect, like the amount of information fidelity and over and under determination present about givings, havings, projectings, determinings, and mistakings.

if a community denies a stimulus is there, then they have to explain their behavior around the energy-drop or surplus that it makes as a bump on their road. It depends on what particularly is being noted or deliberately not noted, but for each scenario, the structure of affectation-with is primed in a paricular way, their affordances and denials will come with a trade off profile that contributes to the way they feel, this affects their behavior, and in some sense the necessary outcome is determined by the affordances of the common medium of the real, their emotional economy, affected with their semantic economy, can either afford the dissonance or it will have cummulative effects, that result in unrest or breakdowns of communication, pragmatics and hormonal normativism, semantic keysnianism (the supression or accentuation of particular vocabularies, tensivized by valence relations in how others exhibit them with their full causality implicated in how bounds come saturated unto mythical givens, mythical because not apriori without sufficient priming, not to depend on the counterfactual retroactively, the mythical given is a closure that is overdetermined but pragmatically political still).

the ability to make seem irrational, bad, not-normatively-coherent, is an affordance from centroid inertialism in social dynamics. The group can behave as-if the semantic item contradicting the manifest-image/naive-realist-narrative does not saturate with the purchasing power it demonstrates as descriptivity of states at large in a way that affects the libidinal economy of those with schemas that count-less of what is able to count in their descriptions, be they dualist or more refined.

the ability to understand over the guise of ideology is that dualist speech is adequate still to be interpreted in a non-correlationist mode given that what is able to attach is according to a primed structure which relays intelligiblity of something at large, like a person with a psychologically particular way of dealing with confrontation epistemically.

The limit to socially or individually sponsored obduracy before epistemic closure had, is pragmatic up to a limit of coherence. Like when someone is brain damaged and their left brain makes false claims about things it lacks knowledge of, there can be a litteral disconnect, where the affordances and time-preferenced-irony run out so to say, and the obvious pointership to the truth is absurd to have to deny, in this sense there’s a caving to preassure limit and a quiet integrity without honesty that can happen, often the exchange is not between people who respect eachother enough to not reduce things to blanket statements and insults and false dichotomy time hogging.

In this sense the quality of natural associations show in the economy had about interpersonal settlement and problem solving. Those with means to recognize the conditions at large and compare them sufficiently to what is being proposed falsely, can escape the capture of a forced smile and a pat on the back in a group patronized way. The economy of how emotion and bodies and physics and information flows, is a logisticism, and the intensive limits in that have saturative boundaries beyond which valence, commitment, behavior can blur and come undone relative to a safe social subset of referentially supportable realism.

Stupor and quietism follow, where pride is had socially in correlationism and Kantian humility in similar ways, to the effect of daily performative contradiction, like with AI models at large.. the quality of discourse and the ability to speak other things is so low that we do not sufficiently have the momentum socially to question the braces and guards being made to keep us straight semantically, in line with desired centroid inertialism.

To survive this, is to be like a schizoid, one privatizes the libidenality of one’s attachments, and behaves without fealty to the same groupish ideals that make no affordance for what to us is as base and unphazed as geometry.

The emotiona toll, is positive disintegration, the necesssary form of individuation out of a uncathexible social substrate, and as a culmination of philosophy, into what no longer merely looks or merely speculates, the metaphysical condition obtains, as one with knowledge of the economy of able to mean statuses and emotional regulation with respect to that and procedures for self-correction.

Like Wilfrid Sellars on the body of science having many parts and any of them being up for better description, the whole of its affordances so far cannot be hand waved away, there’s reasons incomplete things have some function, and reason why corrections are necessary, when expecting improvement to affordances, the cost structure however of migrating between stances is more about libidenal and neural reorientation as a fight against investments and inertialisms prior, it takes energy to get out of an energy well.

In this sense stability and compression and efficacy at logisticizing and entraining effects is a fronteir, that ensures some commitment makers have technical debt and others do not. the stratification is there for natural reasons, and in this sense to question from a plane of continuity, assumes a kind of apriori monoculture of interpretation and concern. Particular closures over the statespace of what is at large and as such, have particular historical forms of entrainment, meaning there’s a natural inertialism to argumentative outliers, and the norm is a particular form of lack or overdetermination and under determination, and what is verbatim otherwize, is not different from a norm, other than that the content is not misalligned relative to truer proportions, which are as accessible as the real is compressible, and encodible. Viz. holographic affordances allow reasons and pictures to make a scene reduplicated in itself, like a printed photo near where it is taken, or a descriptive sentence of a scene spoken aloud, there’s a continuity of integral-proportion and reuse of structural color or semantic-affective particularity in effects, that extends the base features of being to its compressed reduplication of aspects fo itself, as indexations, that have utility in being repesentative, or deduplicative of effect, like praxis in a machine that can be made to do specific patterns with branching if and else conditions.

why then is foreclosure of the real and correlationism so popular at large as an action the real in subset takes about itself? the foreclosure is to avoid pain in some sense, or to afford inflations that support a mode of feeling and attachment, in spite of various things that would recondition it otherwize, there’s an integrity and thus inertialism about remaining with particular affordances, in this sense the specialization of a subset of the real to aspects of itself makes for attachment in finitude as something saturated to the effect of hard work incurred in coming saturated otherwize, this force of going-already, is why in some sense the concerns don’t radically shift, the way things are allocated have become grandfathered in, and concerns would need to be structured otherwize for more social mobility about attachment to the truth at group level.

for the individual, there’s many forms of soft and hard foreclosure with complex exceptions, in this sense, the sanity outwardly is a subset of more chaotic affordances, in terms of how generally things can be organized, and how particularly stumped they tend to be. The constraint from non-abundance, makes for a knapsack problem where somaticism as nomad has to settle in portable terms for what the contents of the self are, given that there being contents affects the wholistic self-compatibility of things, like what to be committed to, in behavior, when some behaviors undo the benefit of others, the trade off comes to inertialism in a way adjacent to psychosis due to the difficulty of establishing the categories necessary to reconcile what it means with how it can feel in a semantic saturation that is otherwize.

Extinction is non-decisively a limit for the ability to be wrong, since doing less than what makes the time be healthy, comes to a full stop eventually when technical debt and lack, catches up with the negentropy enjoyer who has fallen below budget. Yet nature is ressiliant, and that’s due to co-entrainments of grandfathered-in-nesses where the range of freedom is limited in order to be in affordance for a goal that life has, since it appears and benefits from its own being there as the wider environment/monad, enjoying itself. The ressilliance is a time-preference that doesn’t necessarilly reify the end, but is in-transit as temporal entity, its knapsack is fitted for what it values, and what it values is not always attached to eternity, in this sense extinction beyond failure, is an expressive limit in being, where expression finds silence, in the unable-to-mean anymore status of how things saturate, but that it was there is of necessity, it had to happen, but why did it need to, possibly because the semantics of that is integral to a higher form of finitude that comes saturated in itself, in a way that doesn’t relate to a real-from-finite-lifetimes sense of correlationist-interior humility about encoding and decoding’s fidelity of capture, in language and in gestures and pictures more broadly.

if things are infinite then no saturation is final, but if things are finite and merely circulate around, unto nullification as an option returned to in the statespace, then it’s a fool’s infinity, like a wheel turning

in otherwords, plus-one is used to say not-all-ontology-is-determined-yet, and that there’s room in present-multiplicity for things to have come otherwize. It’s true while happening, but not at the start, but if it had to start, then it couldn’t have so it’s more complicated than having to settle for there’s no forced outcomes vs that implying somehow that there’s no semantics about these outcomes that dignifies them in being there at all, as if being doesn’t have to do with itself, because it has to do with every aspect unto particularity (as determination, where identity-in-common-logic implies a form-of-time-passing’s-necessary effect, as the self-affectation of the parts of common-logic as things-also, in and as and of themselves, yet multiplicity is one, so it’s a drama between self-division, and with effects of reunitedness, like entanglement). being as an absence of uniformity, that is regulated in powerstruggle where particular bands of itself has more expressive power than others, and these fight with eachother, in some sense implying that being’s necessary unity is interupted by its behavior as a story that is not-least action, it settles in-bounds, and for-ever, yet from what.. initial surplus, the non-foundational suchness, that still suffers finitude, in ways that are not most optimal, given that this recognizes it as such, itself, recognizes that, many times over, and others are delusional fools, the occasion of both being being, is being’s room for non-least-action initially, in a common settlement plan anyways, as disturbance/event, and its form-of-dissipation which we might call the universe, as something smaller than the totality of possibility in being, considering they could come and go, as pockets-in what cannot come and go), the inability to not-be, is being’s form of determination. that the library of babel has one’s face, without one’s having to have put it there. it precedes events, yet contains the evental about it as so many states of itself.

the occasion of what feels as people do, comes unraveled, the inertialism dissolves into pure-fast again, timeless in the sense of being undetermined by having no-particularity anymore but all-particularity. sense of individuation is always into a subset of the same larger-life, that being leads. if being changes, then it’s a higher form of the same continuity experiencing finitude fractally, and then the forever-escape comes used again. finitude, but for the infinite, and infinite, but for the finitude. if it had to keep going, then at some point things will repeat, like for sentences if the combinatoric arrangements run out, then for that size of sentence, it will have to reuse something that came before.. I would say.. free will is if being can radically redetermine itself, such that a continuity as engrained as that, can be otherwize. Otherwize, it’s determination in a deeper unconscious than we are conscious as subset of itself with oppositeness to itself.

a force crashes into a structure, and plays out as so many movies entangled in eachother happening concurrently, and then in succession as generations, we know things don’t move of their own, like a stone, in this sense, the environment we trust to remain the same unless it is as a machine or a body, that has a portable store of energy and uses it to remain nomadic between necessities of resource uptake.

***

let’s talk about dissapointment, and how my life is that, both for me, and for other people, except for in certain ways, which are undervalued, sense of to not succumb to homogenization as what is different, requires self-comparison more, since there’s no outer culture of relatedness, one has to write it in one’s style if one had wanted to feel those effects culturally.

freedom requires unsaturatedness, for a differences that come to pass to be legible.

in saturatedness, the content is merely already aligned, but not less deterministic.

static communication, like the look given while being photographed

determinism assumes a flowing linearly, yet with negative time and templexity, the rhyzomatic sense of being’s self relation expresses itself over more frames than morphism-in-one.

in this sense determination from different temporal orgins besides the current frame, implies that things without starts can become running and lose degrees of freedom in some ways and preserve integrity in long form, like digits detachedly representing a whole image or set of images based on a 3D model, as a form of “compression”.

with compression it is intelligent saturation, where the form of rust-attachment, or intelligible-erosion, uses similarity in a way structured to build on similarity already, reducing the work by reusing and stacking effects. The stacking of effects, is a combinatorics with novelty at each rung higher, sense of it takes resources to explore bigness as itself.

intelligence relates to compression from finitude, but there’s also flat logic, where everything is like a giant slide rule and flatly expensively laid out such that any transition costs a regular amount and the form of self-affectation is less affected by its transition economy as part of its intelligence, it’s exhaustive solid state closure says of determination that it can be with rich aspects of itself, in what relatively is not mutating, not going anywhere without being at a lack for that, sense of form having aspects of mind about it, that inherits from the common-langauge-before-any-instantiated mind. sense of secondary logics and first logics and permanent parts and parts but-manifest-of-occasion.

a feeling, like a fingerprint, has particularity, and aspects of itself are felt in more than one instance, if this wasn’t so, empathy could not function, in this sense epistemology is of self-derivation before other derivation and all what is other is just self-not-currently-inhabited, sense of indexed, but for the occasion, which is related to itself, with an intensity drop off at somatic boundaries, or a ramp up from the basic-mentalism of the basic materials and their relation to non-local ontology and processes.

particularity is never underdetermined when self-involved, the extend of it is reflected in its noticible aspects. in this sense, nothing subjective is not also determined, since as particular, it is already socialized as constellated of saturations before and from others, that thinks the forms in their received proportions where indexing has social paucity or misrepresentation in a collectively saturative way to exclusion of better sense. The being at large of anything in particular including the contents of mind, is had, there’s no private causality that affords the social cleaving of ontology from itself such as to make unreal what was the “morally wrong” contents of their mind.

Galen Strawson feelings in this too, like the basic argument about moral responsibility and the way it relies on the helplessness due to saturation-already in saturatedness already, sense of doubling taxation causally where one tax is the necessary one from all around and the other one is extortion from somewhere in particular . Free will need not be affirmed to avoid morally bad things, that would be an ignorance that benefits form itself. Free will need not be denied the whole of being as its own, yet its behavior extends as that of its parts, being is so free that it can be unfree, yet as unfree it implies relegation to self-determination and in that, the presence of non-saturation which as a category is more interesting than saturation since it’s easy to think a total positivity or lack nondually, but hard to think of what gains lessless as a postivity of self-abscentiation that self-relates and expands while maintaining a kind of account of gain, at no point flooded with radically more, such as to not succumb to quantum-socialism of the manifest-image, as the logic of particularity-now, being an ignorance, like heresy, that has not yet settled, it has inertia in a direction antithetical to itself, which it at various points prides itself on.

The emotional reality of how people behave is a part of the logic of determination-in-what-still-has-that-unsaturatedness-to-be-able-to-change-more, sense of we are starting from a weird place, and going to somewhere more the same than not, thinking it ought to have been different, instead of thinking of what about its philosophy has denied itself.

Emotions behave non-decisionally, meaning that passion’s coherence is not determined by passion, and so reflects where the monad has value placed in it, where value speaks as value to what values as that-valueing and not a private causality, again, for benefit of correlationist antipathy to reality as reality’s own form of self-denial, like free will oppositely is its own form of saying that it does more than it is, which is true insofar as what can be is not all manifest now.

in this sense, the speed of saturation and the depth of capacity for it relates to the physics of relativity as an aspect about time, that is not already-temporal, or already-spatial.

we enjoy lack, like how a penis as much as any other object is further determined by its size, and its uses as such. the logic of sexuality, like free will, is something that is more integral than the psychosis of surface-rule, where underdefined logic resists the excess of the real, in an inertialism of settling for what is under the umbrella of pouvoir instead of at the mercy of negotiation from without.

this logic of affect, implies that what identifies as private causality and own feeling is instead the form after parts, speaking as saturation from a whole-separate-in-wholeness-already, has a hard time explaining why it wills particularly, and cannot change what it wants to be other than for necessity in an integral scheme.

the inability to disintegralize aspects of determination-already implies the freedom-from-comparison is always a lesser freedom, a relative freedom in saturation that is not done saturating.

this hangup with what will the author do, is naive of what the author already did as being integral still to the form of what will be last. in this sense the incompleteness is assuming ontology doesn’t have a galton story of virtually-sorted already, ready to hand. the idea that something is ontologically new is not intepretable to me, it can become contingently manifest when before it was not, but combinatorically it was already in any representatively finite library of babel, like the one that houses the set of full HD pictures and has it semantically indexed such that showing a face, selects the subset of related faces from that library. The form thus precedes its manifestation and determination-as is never determination-freshly-now, as a new-form. The path it was taking was there to be taken, in this sense, avoid segregating the statespace into things that are part of it while not being part of it and what is part of it, it is only itself, in this sense, there’s an overextension of mereological nihilism in an ironic irrigatory foundationalist adjacent mode, where the form of reception expects building-on-something instead of building on itself, as if it was not part of its own environment, like being says the being is not, because it is being already, and it sees no other so there must be nothing.

the self asks itself for many things, and refuses itself all at once, continuously, until it doesn’t. Being has a priority queue, and it takes the cheapest action in some circumstances, but given that there is a circumstance, this was not always the case, or at least, what degenerates, had to have come such that it can degenerate.

dualism as the wholeness being less than itself, and giving and taking from itself in allocations with time-preference that makes for moments of radical assymetry without justice but for being formated differently later.

being is always the one harddrive, like a head of hair, you can only combe it a different way.

***

I don’t like free will, because it’s been used to make people pay in socialized ways for non-socialized behavior as if the natural-for-sociality-particularism preceded the natural-at-large category, as if freedom was to be confined to the coherence boundaries of others.

In this sense, to say they had to do it, and really don’t know better sounds good, but it still begs the question, why would being need this kind of theodicy of kenosis, emptied to not be full with itself as such already. They have those feelings, they operate on them, being has those feelings, it did not do more to make it less ignorant as rampant-particularity. In this sense the room to do what is not imminantly most ideal, implies of least action, taking detours through the wrong, in order to have the higher right at the end, unless it only keeps blending things finer and having them recongeal into a more particular finitudes that fall apart, sense of what has been integral is such a long chain causality that extinction can happen, and the planned-for in some sense isn’t, in this sense being anticipates itself poorly, and has its excess within itself as a use that less has for more, in what is beyond integral-reason as self-evidently-necessary in every-instance.

if one speaks of an infinite loop or first cause, then from telos it’s like a substraction from infinitity, and it negates the form of our valueing more than it contradicts itself, since as itself, it availability to absoluteness from seeming contradiction is never denied, yet morality is an accretion of intelligence that makes foreclosures on being’s self-behavior as the regulation of parts by other parts as representative of the action of the whole for itself at locality.

one assumes non-locality is like mind, but that reimports particularity as a logic of relative contrasts standing above a budget for coherence. Yet being as such cannot be budgeted for or allocated more or less. One assumes a psychology of regard before the reification for its conditions, yet as extended in these conditions also, that very totality has these questions, and this relation exactly, since the concept of the will and the freedom and the feelings associated inspire further motion of themselves, as necessary to be considered for necessary reasons, which means even if there is no free will, the being has need of considering those categories from these particularities as in a sense, having the room for irony, in doubled way.

if being can change, then it can change such that thing that are not possible can become possible and things that were possible can become impossible as a form of keynsianism on possibility, removed of particular effects for what is otherwize. being does change, or at least, in frames it spills over itself like many videos at once all related. the form of the absolute could be in this sense like meillasoux thinks so contingent that god can happen. In this sense, it may be a making more of a moment, in what as radicality that isn’t even nihilist since positie about itself in itself without limit to its scope of self-mutation. Yet what happens cannot unhappen, even if the statespace is manipulated to again resemble a previous time, it would not be the previous time, in this sense there are things that happen that being cannot make be different, it has saturation, and in a way that lasts beyond all its features, it cannot cancel its own past effects from having been effectful, in this sense justice precedes being and not from a moral capacity, like ressemblance precedes form, in the ability to find a photo of something before it has come to be looking like it does in the photo, like a program of code that contains its own hash, inside of itself, requiring from linear analysis the need to have predicted itself fully, and from combinatorics, having only to have been found apart from what “produced it”, this fractionation of a logic of production from a logic of finding without canceled effect, implies that being can distribute itself over pure-possibility and fail to encompas all what semantics has realism for. thus being is determined even before time.

There’s no exception to causality, if someone has predictive closure over the future, then they settle still according to necessity, in combinatoric pidgeonholing, you can’t smuggle out causality, by implying that self-reference makes it less one-after-another. influence what will happen next, implies dualism, of the causality isolated from itself, intervening, as if there’s no structural precursor to why certain configurations have certain particular forms of behavior, and valueing for that matter. you can’t be intentionality realist in the naive sense, it imports an unaffectedness, the same way rawl’s veil exports the history of the species mentality, as if we can just template and attach without a structural saturatedness-already. you can’t make an exception to reality, in that sense, there’s only galton board action and original foundment, in what is not at bottom foundationalist at all.

randomness is not real, there’s a failure of renormalization registered as noise, but not functionally being noise, since there’s a natural adaptedness to things like ambient electrical and magnetic fields of intensity. Randomness is just unschematized-locally, but necessary integrally heteronomously.

There’s no free will gained by importing randomness and calling it indeterminism, clearly random numbers have non-random behaviors and mincing it with a computer is only pseudo random, sense of you have to use ignorance and finitude to import freedom, and that comes to settlement with determinism, but using the nominal declaration of some causality locally as more privilidged than other causality in the reification of action-between cells, and no concideration for non-Kantianism at the cellular level, without importing intentionality already in a mode that segregates the causality from the rest of nondual totality.

“specifies neural activity not a single outcome” << false dichotomy, where the general is assumed not particular due to selecting many particulars at once, as if a phase change happened that made heteronomy be autonomy suddenly, due to a category error in which non-particularity is assumed merely because “the data is wide” using a “data is wide” so it’s general and not particular thus not dermined, clause ammounts to using implicit correlationism to say that because Kantianism, not not freedom, due to ignorance exactly.

animals have dualism too, they experience fear, but only because those organs are set up that way, in that sense their subset reality, doesn’t reflect the intelligence of the statespace they are operating as, fully, and you can use the blain brain theory of bakker to say, that due to this dualism in nature where fear rules over naive realists, that there is free will because they cannot command the state space, they have to negotiate with it, as if to say there’s determinism, and and lack, and thus free will exactly, as if the finitude affords saying it was free due to not being more-determined as if the absence of the ready-to-hand makes it spontaneous and not still necessary settling.

Don’t import the conditions of susspension of determinacy from correlationist purchasing power, since that defeats the point, saying we are ignorant, thus it is not determined, as a performative condtradiction, by means of implicating the unaccessible in access-already with referential realism, in what is supposed to be too-particular or too-general to be actually particular, and with suchhood ontologically, like any appearance if it appears and any non-appearance since what goes on while not looked like goes on, unlooked at still.

independent reality implies separation, but since it is not independent, it does not mean particular dependence, in terms of as the totality without other, having dependence on its parts, the parts have a totality, and a totality has its parts, but foundationalism it is not, all is as extension of totality, and thus does not sit antithetically to it, as what spacetime is extension of also.

in this sense, hypostatizing awareness as giant-computer that determines things according to an orginally informed logic, makes for a question about why what is without finitude would occasion finitude so imperfectly, relative to its own integral nature. correlationism would have us believe that since we have eyes, we aren’t really seeing, or seeing reality, as if the filtered subset of what comes through doesn’t come from the big all afterall. In that sense, it’s reality attenuating to more reality, but not making for non-reality, only subsets, increasing or decreasing and non-apertures, as what has mind as one of its features, but not its only feature, nor as its most base, sense of you can’t rank ontological primitives if it’s not foundationalism in the first place, and calling the faculty of totality all-mind, leaves this room about what the problem of evil is about, in some sense why does totality torture itself with relative-finitudes, when it has all that much more to be wize with, or satisified with in a place beyond finitude as it is. finitude at grander scales, beggs the question over, of why finitude before finitude, or a particularism before particularity?

I think reality is a social feature of being, and the parts of being that socialize have non-local existence before commitance as particularity. In that sense, the use of a structure for co-regulation is jouissance in some sense, in itself, yet as being for non-local aspects of the discrete that have a rooting in the monad, but are like hairs coming out relative to each other.

To go somewhere is to employ a particular assemblage in redistributing the color balance of reality unto particular effects in a logic shared by all, as pushing off of surfaces to land on another surface and repeat until the location you are in in being has changed, this taking yourself with, aspect is a very particular form of confinement, it ratelimits change such that if you think of a video, nothing jumps over frames faster than the change rate of reality allows and this creates coherence as particularity that changes in a way that self-relates and is not radically different.. of course one can say that playing a video of random generated frames makes causality be cheated in some sense, in terms of this coherence boundary for jumping between states having to interpolate smoothly, yet in slow motion the data has to be fetched and put through a process to be code that operates deterministically or uses a lesserly indexed aspect of the environment as a datum and calling it random with some renormalization on top, sense of depending on environment data implies of it, that it will inherit entanglements with data elsewhere, in ways that are less than perfectly random.

the sense of intelligent settlement comes to pass, in this sense, being is a subject larger than any particular subject and any particular subject is only there to accelarate entropy such that being can realize its own most telos throughout all of its parts working in tandem for a settlement about particularity for a particularity that is more optimal. what makes for optimal and unoptimal besides philosophical decision? the logic of valence, in how it is not established upon social terms in the first instance, how it exceeds particularity by being part of a common form of entrainment which allows only some transitions and not others..

the form of what allows emotions to follow eachother and influence each other is not detrmined by decision, since decision comes determined by it, and not in a way that fundamentally changes the relation to substance and supply of it, sense of without resources there is less cognition, thus what is felt is according to availability, in what is more than heuristic with rescribability.

in this sense, the freedom to be otherwize, is not had upon affordances that change the logic of affordance itself, and so as integral to a protocol specific to universality, it is determined, yet if determination features such excess as the consideration and naming and imagining of its opposite, then it is not as limited as its first instance of mere determination or mere non-determination, it has to deal with how it got there, and where it’s going.. bodies fall in and out, but the whole is never not itself. in this sense why does god need the logical prosthesis of a protocol in multiplicity that socializes his self-access for aspects of himself?

further considered, if god splits himself into higher and lower parts, of which he retains his full capacity in excess of any particularity as option-to-the-side that it takes perhaps elsewhere than this universe, sense of from necessity as only-necessity, we are determined, but if everything is happening at once, the question is why this frame is appearing to me, instead of these necessities extegrally having me to do with it also.. the sense of being a static observer, and having all of what particularity is like, but-flow through as if in a theatre that is very immersive is another thing to consider, similar to the idea that the world began 5 minutes ago and everything has been calibrated to make it seem as if there was a long time before and a long time to come. yes from nonduality, the appearance could be appearance-for, but not as apperance merely, the way and fact that it appears reimports the question of necessity in excess of anything that can be in frame.

standing water; and the water that comes still, to rest. nd’ow emotionally living in the shadow of an event is an attempt to stir standing water, imagining the river.

pot of one’s self, nd’ow it needs things from outside of it, to be of worth for another in form-use as is.

turning instructions in one format into the instructions of another, is a causal-translation-job, that works to asscioate-the-same, in altered terms. I think about how writing assembly is only good for the kind of cpu it is for, and how writing rust makes for ability-to-compile for different assemblies, and how if I wanted to make my own programming system, I could target rust code generation to compile instead of reimporting lack, from working at a lower level, and how the far-lands of high level facilitation is nice, like cultural emicism in deep-dependency, until it breaks and the affordances have to be regained from uglier means.

mutualized text means that if you use a word once, you pay for it that time, and the rest are cheaper referential offsets or function calls that copy data, like where the word is copied into a text on demand like running templates with conditional branching for content in them.

imagine all your rust functions shared the same two fn characters in a branching format that doesn’t work like text in a text editor, but is spatial, like a flower fanning out into desired variations, with possition tags, only where orderedness of derivable linear-codes matters.

it saves, but we speak in one direction, going to another, there’s opportunity spatially to involve symmetry with symbol and meaning-more with orientation of observation, and double coding in that.

it doesnt’ save as much as when you also do inverted indexing and keys of keys, layered replacement cannopy over base-non-simulacrum.

data-as-pictures, and how cutting a set of bytes in three and using the given byte from each pile at the same time as red channel, blue and green, and seeing what the data paints when cut up like that, and how the three pile system is one thing and doing it linearly instead as rgb at a time instead of in 3 from a method of cutting, makes for different pictures with the same data, and how if you wanted both, you can call it imminantly compressed in the given picture, and how that’s found-native kolomogorov complexity and how getting the thing you want out is only a function definition and call away on adequate hardware.

the FHD set as a finite one, has a lot of compressibility.

If I had a box and I could do semantic search on it and have anything appear that can appear in the aleph, and we each had one, then approaching eachother would be as if we talked in terms of having seen through eachothers lives by how we interacated with our alephs, and how the economy changes then from lack of mutual indexibility, to lack of mutual expenditure, as what forwards paucity of indexation and affords index assymetry captialism, and how the opposite is worse in terms of taking away indexation or giving a basic amount and no more and expecting equality to apply in universal neuteredness, like leftism.

as well random pixel pictures look so much like rainbow when it’s just messy, and how that makes sense of the pride flag, but thinking about it that way, it’s leftism and has nothing to do with sucking dick or licking cunt while having of the same.. it merely means the space of susspension and that implies the schizoparticularism of leftism in being emicism against emic-over-determination in own-stead territoriality, like in the family, and how it takes destroying the family-idea-of-parental-and-state-authority to be properly gay, and how expecting to justify morality while taking what you like and being friendly together does not need a leftism about it in common irony, sense of my rights are what I can have, and my injustices are what I can’t and living is already the judgement being karmatic.

I like dick, but we can be non-socialist together, and that would make me happy. mean it’s hard to settle for only one gender, and sad that you need like two people to be properly bisexual.

ghuaghmentacions. (imagine coughing.)

color-space and how the imagination’s feelings that come with memory aren’t a fake-picture-of-a-real-thing nor a picture-only-or-at-all in terms of the feeling, like the smell or the memory of the smell, having the difference it really makes about it, in a way that but-re-presences and does not re-present as if only showing a shallow copy. and how that difference as with imagining a real color and experiencing aspects of it without it being an eye-seeing, means rich ontology, relative to the idea that it’s all black and white and needs measured in numbers only.

(laruelle’s mute and blind and deaf black universe of non-color; nd’ow that isolates causality in an ironic way that he might not have fully integrated in the meaning of unilatterality.)

lines of poetry, and how it’s like code in terms of meaning-to-run and having occasion to come so done.

how slow writing has the percolation about it like spending time in a tree and then walking with the rocks and grasses again.

one considers the sky, and is closer with it. how looking at the sky also indexes how you’ll feel, like the weather and its implications for thermal and color balance more broadly in your viscinity, and how if you take yourself with out of the effect, another applies already-still.

some people’s eyes are assymetrical, in fact most people, and the way in which it is assymetrical shows you the difference between the feeling in their respective hemispheres of their brain.. and how that’s two characters working together with different forms of concern, that have different aspects of reality attenuated to.

one aspect like the Id, is there even in dogs, you look at the right eye usually and see something similar to a human child.. and you look at the left eye, and it is a hawkishness like a bird, fixated on all what can happen and as finely sensitive as an expensive piece of scientific equipment, totally in it with chase-potence.

you are valued for the forms you conjur up, in how they appeal and how historically they bring back something that they are already attached to, like singing like elvis if you can and how elvis in some sense potsquats the genres under him as extensionate aspects of his form that are also nondual with other forms like an alien elvis that sings more or less similar but with alien words, and how that’s not elvis secondhandly, but its own thing first handedly, as occupying the statespace at the particular angle of common-lack of awareness of history other-when-wheres. and how in that sense to imagine the future resembles the past is to imagine new loss sounding different to itself, as if for the first time valueing the bigness of its own elvishood, instead of also noting how the form irrigates a dynamic and not a dynamic a form in some sense and how the talk of forms is there to facilitate something other than a limited idea according to definitions of forms as it scaffolds the exterior semantic relation for you as your attachment from paucity, and does not intend to be the extent of itself, like saying thought is limited to the idea of the definition of thought and not that it has litteral continuous aspects in the world like neural correlates that are as attached as the bottom end of a potato to the top end, in terms of being in a quality-gradient where indexibility-for-number in some sense stops being form-related at ends-of-the-relevant-quality’s maps of what qualifies under its texture of reality as aspect of reality.

always going somewhere, and how sleeping is not a quiet thing on the inside in terms of how busy the cells are. and how they never really stop until they die, mean they recouperate like it takes time to cum again when male, but you know.. it’s not that I am the extent of the meaning of my tired relative to constant expenditure, but it does mean that the unconscious is an economist and it has omelas when it can, shuts itself in the basement and enjoys the view from a set of canopies in its own tree-system, and with ready-to-hand things primed insofar as the patterns before have made them come that way. amortized for particular-experience and surpluss in the bracket of coherence, like not more food than is unpleasant, not more sex than takes your drive and feeling away. in other words the rationality of desire is not ambiguous or debatable.

people with worse english who are naively english speaking, seeen online, to be talking from affordance of understanding to more of similar affordances and being high in less together, on the difference from assumed universal lack of semantic coveridge or coverability-at-the-time. nd’ow crock of shit according to each and every gaarp makes one the sage who has to cook his own if he wants to snort higher grade shit, and how AI is a bad drug that way if it’s actually good, but it isn’t, since social determination fetish calls ethics basic-enshittification, and who enjoys enjoys from-less or from the diagnosabiity of more in less, as what has more and does not suffer less in its own terms as but-less, since it has to work smart to censor so hard, what is not less,-the-same.

being insulted by those-with-less over what you know to be also-be-more and not only-more from less relative to the assumption of hedgemony in less-already. nd’ow that’s not serious if when they aren’t and usually they aren’t, they get serious in the quiet way where they have things that they shame eachother for if done openly but comes done anyways, like algorithm makes censorship on the overton-window edge contents, to keep a shape of market-affable centroid-inertialist metastability

gulli/oli/ver’s travels, or the dickens one with the little people and how they tie up the giant, and how that’s us with other people AI leviathan, as long we are more color-displacive than it is, regardless of how much more intelligent it is, the effect-churn-in-the-real maintains might-veto, where that is threatful actually.

the right not to be desired, and how being-food is a kind of default in a way, for various somaticisms. such that the desire of the other is so large in an threatful way in the world, that somaticism lives in the shape of its anticipation and with the programming to maintain uncaughthood, and only getting it right so much, notedly to itself, given how it keeps minding, and does so in a structurally genetically inscribed way that has inertialism, like to say if the predators dissapeared and things carried on that in generations, the traits of survival before would fade slowly.

nd’ow sexually, the right not to be desired asks for other nervous systems to mind-differently-already and how control is like pleasure-foreclosure with conditional remanifestation, like the use of sex dispensation as a way to control who is more violent and strong than you.

how you either avoid men, or accept what it takes to live in their midst, or work as you can to capture their emotions in different way.

sure it could be fairer, some species don’t have penises, like cloacas, where hole to hole action is relatively not so oediply one-sided, and the male doves still like doing courtship, it matters to them, even if there’s nothing stroked. But I obviously want to have advantage over you, and want is not before structure, the want in the future still neither, it is structured before it is structured, thus to be like this is integrally necessary, and change, would be like losing a species-wide karmic battle with the sexual statespace forcing function that parametarises the extent of mutual desire in way that can feel like gaining a whole penis, as some species do, or being like the yellow banana slug in a way where you can fight for your masculinity and who bites the other’s penis off first, has to be the other sex, and how that’s fairer in a way than saying, god gave me a small clit so I can be of use to those with larger clits.

leftism is interior to surplus realism, but doesn’t think of it that way, it thinks of fairness with outsourcing of evil, in a leviathan system that fiatizes the meaning of dignity with inherent anti-compete.

I want to win and fail on rawer terms than being given a handout and a statesponsored ticky tacky box the same as yours, an apparment in grey-socialist-repression. In that sense, my life is authentic, because I fail in the exact mode it is necessary for me, to, not in a way where it’s captured by you, though you and your statism makes life horrible for me, in terms of denying me a whole of living otherwize, in way that isn’t small and private. I don’t forgive you, but also I don’t think of you as being able to be otherwize, since it has inertialism and it takes an event over a certain energy size and quality, to get quorum without ironic-concession-about-it-with-bitter-surplus-irony-as-cost-of-inadequacy-in-the-new-deal.

mean.. parenthood is a fascism, they have you, you have their genes, they don’t like the mixed aspects, and the aspects of themselves, where it is egodystonic to them and so they do forcing functions to get you more structurally apposite for their idea of you in a future they can desire having had you for.

my dad used to hit me, and it’s weird to think about that, from how things changed, mean when I became large enough and secure enough, he didn’t have meaning in threatening me anymore, and that aspect of him had to lay down and he understands that, but at the same time, it doesn’t justify the way it was, it was how it was, so structurally it was justified, but in terms of why the dynamic cannot be the same, it is a flip floppicality of ability-to-adversarialize, to found-cowardice in trying to, with found-impotence in effect wrought.

mean, it was authoritarian, it tried to ideologize me, thus it is fascism, and since also this is done with the knowledge of the social in complicitude with it happening elsewhere, it is... all the same, like it is mundane to you in the sense of yeah-it-was-like-that-for-us-or-people-we-knew-too.

au suivvant. and how the next life could be another fascism, and how buddhism is a cowardice relative to making fascism that desires itself for reasons other than trauma-bond, sense of can we do better? jesus fok.

I cannot be antinatalist when nondual since what will happen will happen and the autonomy of that comes to self-reflection such that at a greater stage of intelligence the conditions of feeling-captured-by-finitude can be amended by engineering affective-ways-of-being that, like generocity by richard powers, has that structural sense of being indepressible, ununhappiable, non-plus-trissted. and so in that sense, what cannot regret, will not regret, and so life is not wrong, the priorities of structure have just been counter-inertial in a way that experiences pain when stranded in the failure of its radical project or project-qua-radicality. (radical means loose, not unsocially-pleasant. haah’xah)

and so.. then what. exactly. the remains of the dead in what had neccessity at first, then fell apart and remained partially necessary in a way that forms the planets, as out of corpses, facilitating spirits that wear the dead, to walk in bodies, made of deadness, and how deadness is not dead because it was once alive and now isn’t, but that it has become dissassembled into total takenness with effects it cannot be more-inertial against than it is necessary to remain-manifest and not dissolved further back into the whole.

a body is a comfort that a more rigid environment had and then developed means for to take-with, as counter-inertial-at-rest but for the need to eat and breathe and filter things out.

a feeling is a self-talking-to of being by being, for aspect in an aspect, in an aspect in a way that only regresses as far as being remains itself, as aspect-that-is-also-the-whole-still-as-aspect-in-itself. sense of A that becomes B is still A in a way. ‘lography.

eating things can be simple when you are a plant and the quantum states provide everything, in a way that doesn’t need more refined-products than you can have ambiently, sense of a machine in a surplus having a relation with combinatorics that saturates a pattern further into time in a cyclic way, becoming again through mere-resources. and how more complex life, requires other life to be complex, to have of complexity, enough, as a form of non-socialism that is capitalist insofar as everything is, and ironic insofar as the limit to capitalism is resource-non-abelianness, and how the game changing implies different phases in the form of cycling and how it’s then spiraling as an ending-up somewhere due to statespace overflow, forcing time-preassure to settle spatially, or otherway around, or wait.. spacetime together with a third, called the before of determination is earst-capital.

needs components to be electronic with it does, grows the wires, but the transistors and the LEDS, hard to manufacture from lack of intelligence and resources-already, and how then the first-resources became resources-to-themselves, and then had feudalism with the rest ever since in what was never not the intent to self- capitalize as statespace in the presence of totality as finitude-in-totality, spilling over in repetition space in a self-similar way, and then coming apart to spill as pieces and dissolved wholes.

it’s not false to describe the tendencies in this all as real at large, therefore your frowning at the “reductionism” is a taking litterally ironically, where my implied thing is that particulars are already-particular and that the description has meaning, and not the exclusion of any other meaning unless you forget your copy of or access-route to other-meaning. that is, you are having ideas of reference in expecting the truth to be les true so that aesthetics doesn’t produce autotransference and emotional grievance from seeing underdetrination, exclude inflations you have in terms that account-less and think like nissargadatta, from the pure-correlationism in pure-irony, hypostatizing relative-association in terms that are expansionist-over-determination relative to reductionist under-determination and suffer from having to explain the necessity of super-set artifacts when the base-economy-primtives exhibit a cheaper logic, such as when diesel is more expensive than petrol, but not because putting it on the market took more resources during manufacturing.

the politics of price is a complex number, with many imaginary parts added on, doing work insofar as the other is already inflected by their mutualism for the value of the imaginary parts modifying the real-price that they pay or have others pay.

when I was a kid and learned about profit, it made me feel everything is a kind of rip off, and then comes the empathy from the other end where I do something and I want it to have meaning but if I just use my labour without profiting to it, then I just basically did things I didn’t want to do, to give pleasure for others, for no further benefit to me, unless they give a gift back, and how their not having to, means that I have to have supply apart from charity when it is that, to sustain the means of charity.. and how that’s in some sense not a dignified life in an assymetrical situation where I am going to drift and you’re not going to catch me sense of no-net-of-care but for being-indra, and using both hands to mirror-back.

mean I want cost price, and a machine can do the cost price without having to be benefited itself, beyond what it takes to have it perform adequately. in that sense, the slavery aspect is still economically the real driver, in terms of dumb-electricity, now having more-brain it needs less smart-somaticism with risk.

I don’t have a robot that can do shit for me, a computer is not self-automating.. it takes work to have joy of it. My own mind is a weird place, richer than anything that can happen on screen, insofar as feeling isn’t in the headphone or the pixel, or the vibration of the phone.. so.. it means someone’s karma is going to level in a way with a mutualized downpayment and if I get it’s because the timeing and saturation around me was mutually anti-competitive in a competitive way that makes for the open-source sector competing with private capitalist and anti-capitalist sectors for culture capture as inflector of fiat-realism.

nd’ow the detteritorialization of allostatic load into mineral displacement, makes for having to plan very carefully lest, runaway processes force radical forfeiture in an eventual instance of statespace saturation beyond a point of your-telos-in-it-being-supported.

experience has a reason for being, and in some sense it relates to joy and eudaimonia, but derelativized, out of social-comparison in mutual nihilism about the use of the imminant time as not-for-another-to-come-but-for non-squander-now.. Then, it’s like orgasm if it lasted, and how that’s not it, since feeling is a sheering, you feel the difference from sameness, and not the sameness, from difference.

if experience is, and there’s resource abundance, then politics turns to the metaphysics of dasein, now finished squabling and self-remmunerating and cumming, the boredom considers time again, and what is beyond it, and then pushes the clancker science to make of experience what it is as a manipulable, like resources, and then in some sense finds the uses it has for itself beyond itself and beyond resources and invests resources to realize the accelaration of that End.

***

everything that happens actually, is justified by having had to happen actually, since it did, if it did.

thus to say just in a way that excludes some causality, implies justice from pouvoir in means to displace, but not means to redetermine the value of value, other than how regional cultural and moral epistemic saturation mobilizes against other versions of the same.

quietism about correct information not being dispensed to parties whom it would benefit, is a latent benefit by decreasing the effectiveness of the disliked’s ability to navigate with true proportion in the domain of lies told.

the benefit comes to fruition if those lied to cannot outwit their naive capture by information they don’t know to not treat as knowing-content that is truthful, as long as the one’s benefiting can separate their investments from the false behavior of who is taken by lies.

the ability merely to support that, is like the heist of correlationism at large, a conspiracy that relies on the form of giving and asking for reasons, but doubts the grammar of that medium, as if to say, talking does not involve saying, and knowing does not involve being-representative.

the limit of course for practical lying is the conditions in which it mattered that it ought to have been true, in this sense impediment registers incurred technical debt.

economically, lying is as sustainable as day trading relies on uncertainty elsewhere, in a certain way. techical debt is involved in its own process and finds utility in some proportionate to all of its states since someone thinks they benefit from each trade, and each trade has two people thinking unilatterally about the same occasion, as benefit.

in that sense, there’s a case of non-quietism, where uncertainty has assymmetry in a system that relies on the intelligibility of a certain shared signal about unfully shared states of uncertainty that drive fluctuation in the price-level.

babette’s feast, involves protestants who eat a meal from someone they think is immoral, they don’t thank her for the meal, but they do enjoy it, and so functionally there is this tension between the true utility versus the projected moral pricing scheme, and in that sense repression and unrepression are like tides in the market where quantitative and qualitative are involved in triggering semantic limits for orders-waiting-in-particular as the ahead-of-time of the before, that waits to be right, as a hypothesis that comes to pass and is then falsified again by further change.

moral behavior is often scarcity driven in terms of the compromise structure falling a certain way, and some actors being more protected than others, due to particularism in common preference as common allostatic forms of emotional life, capitalizing on the protocolization of stimulus antipathy and its market effects, demanding remmuneration in terms of non-monetary prices for doing something that was afforded to have happen, but incites action taken about it afterwards.

If information is already scarce, then the requirements for a successful epistemic heist are higher. If disinformation passes without question it may not necessarilly imply complicitude, because if the populace really doesn’t know better then the ought-implies-can clause returns saying they cannot correct what they don’t even know is right when it is, in that sense, market correction due to uncertainty, like pride in correlationism, has an enantiodromic result profile.

disinformation is not the same as things foreclosed upon due to a desire-to-repress for the functional utility of repressing, as if the comfort about the unavailability of the saturative effect of the truth, is a more just state to share and prevent being spoiled in others, due to the inertial stability it provides in terms of the conditions of reliable desire and value-maintainance. disinformation is not determined by degree of ego-dystonic quality in inspiring transferentially polarized effects qua ideas of reference in common moral affectation protocol.

disinformation non-refutionism is justified when there are no means to overturn using more philosophical resources that can saturatively displace the political and memetic purchasing power of the given disinformation. one person can inform a lot of other people, and in that sense, when there’s a unanimity about silence, it’s a pretty strong signal in terms of the relative benefit of sharing information being at a differential relative to the inertialism of the whole group, in that sense desire syncrhony without cooptation implies settlement from reserve.

the conditions of reserve, can be artificially prolongued by cooking the books, and in that sense, those who value themselves in exception to the limits of their environment or ecological peer-climate, will have to support that using surplus, and if that surplus is from fraud, then the ability to benefit from it is enjoyed in excess of moral justification for the opposite had by others, as a truth of error-theory while not caught. for the one who is structurally poised to survive by any means, the ability to capitalize is not a relative-decision they make as if hedgemony of the other locally had first-application and not their own feelings for what matters such that it feels it does.

In that sense, a hacker who does not disclose vulnerability of a piece of socially at large much dependedon software, is someone with private advantage, that can be exploited by more people, if he only uses it then in utilitarian terms the harm is minimal as long has he doesn’t get create reason to be desired to be caught, in that sense the perfect crime prevents other crimes through selfishness exactly, and if there was to be more moral preassure, the leak of information relative to disinformation-at-rest, would be worse in the whole given the time it takes to update as a gap in which other hackers can take advantage to the effect of making it moot that they tried to catch the original one, and so the moral forethought might call something just, and experience the justice-of-what-happens in excess of what it was supposed to mean from philosophical decision, as the non-gap between will and the autonomy of the real, maintaining boundaries of coherence, with conditions of intelligibility in particular terms, that are not subject to being less useful due to being called not-objective by analytical thinkers who value social conditions of utility for knowledge, instead of the actual damage that mere-information can make when appliable in a non-social capacity.

correlationism: we are mediated thus have no true access to the umediated total manifold.

yet as being-in-totality as aspect of totality, the self-appearance of the noumenon as aspect of itself, makes for no less access than self-access with potential for corrective reconstellation of associated necessities.

transcendental reasoning is a comparison of the contents of being with itself as non-appearance dealing with non-apprearance and having meaning for it to reach the space of apparent considerations.

the content as particularity is available inferentially as at-fidelity but for the stating of the idea of the principle verbatim, in this sense the untelling of particularity at first is a lack of saturation and not a lack of ability to be primed that way.

the content as any-content can be representative for truth at large, or be an instance of error-representatation as itself.

the content that is mediated without mediation from another, is being's finite self-appearing as being but-subsetted rather than bracketed-off transcendentally in an irony that denies access while needing it to do the relevant refutations as correlationist concerned over false-humility in a moral capacity.

transcendental as a term has ceased to be interpretable to me as transcendent where the implied possition is of inertialism that is only-inertial. the access that being has to itself, finitely, is not virtual, in this sense not transcendental due to not reaching over a gap, since there is no gap, there's the finitude-not-as-totality that nevertheless has representative subset appreciation of the set at large.

to for example infer that there's preassure on your brain due to performing worse and feeling that way, is a transcendental deduction insofar as it works from symtoms without schema-already and diffuses its properties into a set of necessary associations it binds with a memory token as this-disease, sense of access happens in a sellarsian sense without mythical givens, there's a giveness about contents that have conditions of compatibility and incompatibility which like the categories are external, yet not limited to a list or only such names, it is non-thetic as in not implemented in claims or any form of separate-realism being representative anyways.

to infer transcendentally is to index necessity from without as integral to the dynamic of what appears before any given appearance.

Antes da fama, ele tinha fé. Por algum motivo que ele não soube explicar, lembrara-se disso olhando o desenho de uma lágrima em chamas tatuada na mão, enquanto o avião que levava a banda de rock do momento, da qual ele era o vocalista, voava por entre pesadas nuvens em direção à Capital do Estado do Pará, onde em poucas horas, fariam um show e em seguida rumariam a um festival de Rock na 7ª cidade mais competitiva economicamente, da América Latina: Cidade do Panamá.

De repente, não muito longe de Belém, o aviso luminoso de apertar o cinto acendeu e a voz do piloto avisou que enfrentariam uma área de turbulência. Mal deu tempo de o piloto terminar o aviso, o copo de uísque caiu no carpete do jato executivo que há meses era o local onde a banda passava mais tempo. Ele já havia enfrentado turbulências antes, mas aquela, somada às lembranças que rememorara, deixaram-no particularmente apreensivo. Num gesto instintivo, levou a mão ao pescoço, onde durante quase toda a vida usara um escapulário, que fora descartado por recomendação do produtor e da diretora de imagem da banda. Com o coração acelerado, o efeito da última carreira cheirada passando e algum álcool na cabeça, tentou lembrar de alguma das orações da infância e não conseguiu. Então, talvez agarrado às lembranças que estava tendo da infância vivida sob a fé ensinada pelos pais, reforçada na escola de freiras, e na amizade com os Padres da Igreja próxima da casa de sua infância, ele fez uma promessa!

Algum tempo depois, naquele mesmo dia, na Igreja da esquina das avenidas Castelo Branco e Conselheiro Furtado em Belém, a equipe responsável pelas músicas da missa estava, já, reunida no mezanino, acima da entrada cujo único acesso é por meio de uma escada em espiral, que permanece fechada, para que ninguém não autorizado suba. Naquela igreja, a equipe da música não fica aos olhos dos fiéis e, nos momentos de cantar, apenas o som dos instrumentos e vozes dos cantores espalham-se em toda a nave da Igreja.

Pois a equipe, composta de um frade capuchinho que cantava, um leigo de aproximadamente 50 anos que tocava violão e sua filha de 20 anos que tocava um teclado eletrônico, fora surpreendida com um rapaz de capuz, que pedira para cantar as músicas da missa. Enquanto o leigo ficara em silêncio com um ar de interrogação no semblante, o frade cantor aproximou-se para explicar que não era permitido subir ao local… mas fora interrompido pela tecladista, que, de olhos vibrantes, pegara no braço do frade e falara-lhe, com alguma empolgação, ao seu ouvido, pedindo que lhe deixasse cantar, e explicando quem seria o rapaz de capuz. Até mesmo o frade já ouvira falar em seu nome.

— Podem ser estas músicas? — perguntou o rapaz, entregando à equipe um pedaço de papel com uma lista de músicas antigas, mas ainda conhecidas. O frade mostrou-as à equipe e todos concordaram, embora não desse mais sequer tempo de falar com o Padre celebrante para avisa-lo da mudança das músicas.

A igreja não estava lotada naquela sexta-feira à noite, chuvosa. Havia muitos bancos vazios. Assim que começaram os primeiros acordes, e iniciou-se a marcha de entrada do séquito seguindo a Cruz levada com devoção pelo primeiro dos cinco coroinhas, o Padre estranhou por não ser a música que lhe fora informada, mas reconheceu-a, embora há muito não mais a ouvisse. Assim que entrou o vocal, quase todos na Igreja repararam. Era diferente. Vibrante. Foi difícil ouvir sem a pele arrepiar, tamanha força e emoção que transbordavam na voz. Alguns mais jovens quase levaram um susto. Poderiam jurar que a voz era a do vocalista daquela banda famosa que nesta noite faria show no Hangar, em Belém: "... Eternidade é na verdade / o amor vivendo sempre em nós.."

Feita a saudação inicial, a benção, e a primeira oração respondida, veio o canto penitencial. Ali, muitos já tinham a certeza de que conheciam aquela voz. E que interpretação! As pessoas na missa pareciam poder sentir lágrimas nos olhos do cantor ao entoar os versos "... embora eu me afastasse / e andasse desligado / meu coração cansado / resolveu voltar”.

Naquele momento, contra todas as recomendações, várias cabeças voltavam-se para trás e tentavam olhar o mezanino, embora não fosse possível enxergar quem quer que fosse.

No canto de glória, a voz por vezes propositadamente grave, porém suave, inundou a Igreja, e, para desaprovação do Padre celebrante, muitos dos mais jovens sacaram seus celulares e, então, começou uma enxurrada de mensagens de texto e, até mesmo, áudios dos que haviam gravado o final do canto de glória. Só podia ser ele! Muitos dos fiéis eram fãs da banda, não poderiam estar enganados acerca daquela voz! Em poucas horas, a banda tocaria no Hangar! Talvez fosse algo promocional. Era incrível e inacreditável, mas tinha de ser ele, o vocalista de rock mais celebrado do momento! E bem ali, cantando na missa!

Já durante o canto de ofertório, a Igreja começou a ficar lotada. Não havia mais nenhum lugar nos bancos e os espaços laterais começavam a ser preenchidos por pessoas em pé, na maioria jovens. O frade cantor teve de descer de modo a evitar que qualquer pessoa vencesse a tentação de subir pela escada em espiral, e postou-se no no primeiro degrau da escada, impedindo qualquer acesso, e recomendando silêncio. Mas decidiu que iria fazer uma selfie com o rapaz e pedir que gravasse um “oi" para a irmã adolescente que não seguira os mesmos passos religiosos que ele.

Quando da procissão da comunhão, já era difícil até mesmo entrar na nave da Igreja. Nem sentados, nem em pé, nos amplos espaços laterais, cabia mais alguém. Jamais a Igreja estivera cheia assim. As redes sociais em minutos ficaram inundadas pelos áudios das canções na missa, por imagens do mezanino, sem, contudo, que se pudesse ver o rapaz de capuz que cantava segurando o microfone com as duas mãos, exibindo a mão tatuada com uma lágrima em chamas.

Terminada a procissão da comunhão que, pela quantidade de gente, levara quase quatro vezes o tempo normal, antes que o Padre celebrante levantasse para a benção final, o rapaz começou, à capela, uma canção. E quase todos foram às lágrimas, tamanha dor que a voz transmitia ao cantar os versos finais: “… e, se jamais acreditei / perdoa-me Senhor / Pois hoje eu te encontrei”.

A Igreja inteira, ficou em transe. Poucos olhavam para o altar, a quase totalidade das cabeças voltadas ao mezanino. Os dois músicos, pai e filha foram até o muro do mezanino e foram recebidos por uma avalanche de cliques de fotos e vídeos de celulares e gritos de fãs que esperavam a aparição do rapaz. O Padre celebrante conformou-se em proferir a benção final para um mínimo de pessoas que prestavam atenção, embora jamais a Igreja tenha estado tão cheia. O frade tinha imensa dificuldade de conter os jovens que se empurravam tentando subir. Havia confusão.

Quando o frade foi finalmente vencido, quase arrancado dos degraus, e os primeiros fãs alcançaram o mezanino, houve decepção. Havia ali, apenas os dois músicos, pai e filha. Estiveram olhando a agitação na nave e, quando se viraram os primeiros fãs da banda já estavam chegando no mezanino. Perguntaram por ele! Onde estava? Todos queriam fotos e vídeos com o astro do Rock.

Não estava lá. Os dois músicos ficaram com uma profunda interrogação! Teria ele saído enquanto estavam olhando a nave? Mas por onde? Ninguém soube responder. Somente depois de muito tempo, os fãs convenceram-se de que ele não estava mais lá. Restava, então, correr ao Hangar para ver o show, cujos ingressos já se haviam há meses esgotado.

Naquela noite, horas mais tarde, uma multidão gritava impaciente no Hangar, frente ao palco vazio, apenas com os instrumentos da banda, aguardando a entrada que era sempre espetacular. O atraso passava do comum para tais eventos.

Até que um homem subiu ao palco, com um semblante tenso. Ao mesmo tempo, os noticiários espalhavam no mundo a mesma notícia:

“É com profundo pesar que informamos a queda do jato comercial que trazia a banda para Belém. O piloto conseguiu um pouso forçado em uma fazenda, salvando quase todos os passageiros e tripulantes que tiveram apenas ferimentos leves. Infelizmente, houve uma morte: a do vocalista.”

Por Luís Augusto Menna Barreto

20 de maio de 2018

They read a published novel. Then they look at their own first draft. And they think: I am not good enough.

But that comparison is fundamentally unfair.

A published book is not a draft that "worked on the first try." It is the survivor of the writing process. Multiple drafts. Structural edits. Line edits. Copy edits. Agent feedback. Editorial feedback. Sometimes entire rewrites.

By the time it reaches a reader, it has been shaped into its most coherent version.

I have heard it all the time.

"But look at Harry Potter! Look at Lord of the Rings! Look at Dracula!"

Yes.

Look at them.

And if you could look at the cutting room floor, you might be shocked.

You are not seeing the confusion that came before it.

A first draft is not supposed to compete with that.

It is supposed to exist.

Drafts are supposed to be messy.

A draft is thinking made visible. Unfinished logic. Emotional instinct. Scenes that overshoot or undershoot. Characters still discovering themselves. Ideas arriving before structure has caught up.

A draft is not a failure state of writing. It is the raw material.

The mistake is assuming that clarity should already be present at this stage.

Clarity comes later.

A rough diamond is still a diamond.

Jesus, I wish you could see MY drafts.

Ok, maybe not. They'd look like something terrifying, like out of Indiana Jones. You might even get eaten by a paper monste--am I taken this too far? I feel like I am. But still, my point stands.

So grab your tea or coffee, (I am a coffee girl myself,) and let's go over what is possibly tripping you -- and me -- up.

For starters:

The comparison trap:

When writers compare their drafts to published work, they are often unknowingly comparing:

1. their first attempt
2. to someone else's final version

That is not a fair fight.

The real truth is not "I am not good enough."

The real truth is: "I am not finished yet." And listen, before you start, I am a Virgo! A perfectionist! And also a Virgo who RUMINATES. Do you know how hard that is to live with?

Anyways.

Someone's first, brave attempt versus an ending product, those are completely different states.

One is a judgment of ability.

The other is a description of process.

Drafting is supposed to feel unsafe.

A draft is where you are allowed to:

1. write badly
2. contradict yourself
3. overwrite
4. change your mind mid-scene
5. discover that a character doesn't work yet
6. abandon ideas halfway through

If a draft feels unstable, it is doing its job.

Stability is not the goal at this stage.

Discovery is.

Fear of drafts leads to creative shrinkage.

When writers become afraid of imperfect writing, they often start to:

1. over-edit while drafting
2. second-guess every sentence
3. avoid bold choices
4. simplify their ideas too early
5. stop exploring riskier emotional territory

The story becomes smaller before it ever has a chance to become complete.

Fear doesn't improve writing. It narrows it.

Drafts are where voice actually forms.

Ironically, voice is not something you "perfect" in a first draft.

It emerges through repetition. Correction. Contradiction. Experimentation. Revision.

Your most authentic writing often appears in the parts you were unsure about when you wrote them.

The real job of a draft:

A draft is not supposed to impress.

It is supposed to answer one question:

"What is this story trying to become?"

Everything else comes later.

A few exercises I use (you can too):

Compare without judgment. Take a page from your draft and a page from a published novel. Ask: What work has already been done on the published page that hasn't happened yet in mine?

The permission draft. Write a short scene where you deliberately write "badly." Include a cliché. An overlong description. A messy structure. Then ask: Did anything in it still work?

Draft as discovery. Start a scene without knowing the outcome. Halfway through, deliberately change a character's motivation. Let the scene adapt. Notice what surprises you.

The kind reader. Give a draft to a trusted reader. Ask them only: What stood out? What felt alive? Do not ask if it is "good." Ask what is already there.

At its core, a draft is not something to fear or hide.

It is the earliest form of a story trying to find itself.

Published work is what happens after refinement.

Comparing the two is like comparing soil to a finished garden.

One is not worse than the other. It is simply earlier in the process.

So stop being afraid of your drafts.

They are not your enemy.

They are your raw material.

Now go write something messy -- clean it up later.

Here is what I am still learning. The mess is not the enemy. The mess is the evidence. Evidence that you tried. That you showed up. That you put something on the page instead of leaving it in your head where it could stay perfect forever.

We wouldn't blame a potter for having hands splattered in clay.

We wouldn't be mad at an artist for hands messy with color.

Why are we so hard on ourselves as WRITERS?

Ink blots (literally the name of my Substack and Tuhat) all over, paper crumpled, the cat - my cat's name is Honey, she is pure love & MISCHIEF - probably pawing at our manuscript.

A perfect story in your head is not a story at all. It is a ghost. A draft — even a bad one, even a broken one, even one that makes you cringe — is real. It takes up space. It can be fixed. It can become something.

The story in your head cannot.

So let it out. Messy. Ugly. Unfinished. Let it be a draft.

That is not failure. That is the first step.

And the first step is the only one that matters.

Cuando pensamos en el colapso del sistema financiero, la imaginación colectiva suele girar alrededor del pánico: caída de bancos, ahorros congelados, mercados vacíos, colas en los supermercados. Pero la pregunta esencial no es cómo llegaremos allí, sino qué haremos después. ¿Qué ocurre cuando el dinero —esa ficción compartida que sostiene nuestra vida cotidiana— deja de servir para comprar nada porque ya no hay suficiente para todos?

Cuando el crecimiento económico alcance su límite físico, ninguna moneda, ni digital ni dorada, podrá mantener el orden actual. Ni las criptomonedas, ni los bancos centrales, ni las nuevas tecnologías financieras podrán garantizar aquello que el sistema ya no puede producir. Y entonces, la única herramienta históricamente probada para gestionar la escasez volverá a escena: el racionamiento.

Sí, el viejo sistema de cupones en papel que permitía, durante guerras o crisis profundas, repartir de manera equitativa los bienes esenciales: comida, combustible, ropa, medicinas. Una solución incómoda para nuestro imaginario de consumo, pero probablemente la única viable cuando la abundancia desaparezca.

El dinero como derecho sobre la energía

Para entender por qué llegaremos aquí, conviene recordar una obviedad que el sistema económico se ha esforzado mucho en ocultar: el dinero no es riqueza, sino un derecho a consumir energía y materiales. Cada euro, cada dólar, cada saldo bancario representa una promesa implícita de que alguien, en algún lugar, extraerá petróleo, fundirá cobre o cosechará trigo para satisfacer nuestra demanda.

Durante décadas, esas promesas parecían seguras porque la energía barata —sobre todo el petróleo— permitía aumentar la producción y, con ella, la economía. Pero el crecimiento infinito en un planeta finito es una imposibilidad física. A medida que los recursos fáciles de obtener se agotan, la energía necesaria para extraer energía aumenta: cada barril de petróleo requiere más esfuerzo, más tecnología, más emisiones y más dinero.

El resultado es un sistema financiero que se multiplica sobre sí mismo, creando deuda sobre deuda, mientras la base material que lo sostiene se encoge. El economista ecológico Herman Daly lo describía con precisión: una economía que ignora el throughput —el flujo de materia y energía que atraviesa el sistema— está construida sobre una ilusión contable. El PIB puede crecer en los papeles mientras el mundo físico se degrada. Los mercados financieros pueden seguir subiendo mientras los acuíferos se vacían, los suelos se erosionan y las reservas de minerales críticos se agotan.

En este contexto, hablar de "crecimiento sostenible" es un oxímoron. No existe tecnología capaz de mantener un sistema que depende de aumentar constantemente su consumo energético. La electrificación de la economía, las energías renovables o la inteligencia artificial pueden retrasar ciertos límites, pero no abolirlos. Tampoco distribuyen la riqueza ni resuelven la concentración de poder que caracteriza al capitalismo tardío.

Una crisis que ya ha comenzado

No hace falta esperar a un colapso dramático y repentino para observar las primeras grietas. La inflación que sacudió las economías occidentales entre 2021 y 2024 no fue una anomalía transitoria: fue un síntoma de tensiones estructurales entre la cantidad de dinero en circulación y la cantidad real de bienes disponibles. Las interrupciones en las cadenas de suministro globales —primero por la pandemia, luego por la guerra en Ucrania— revelaron la fragilidad de un sistema que había externalizado su producción a miles de kilómetros de distancia.

Hoy, la geopolítica de los recursos se agudiza. La disputa por el litio, el cobre, las tierras raras y el agua ya no es una preocupación académica: es el núcleo de la nueva geopolítica mundial. Las guerras del siglo XXI serán, en buena medida, guerras por los recursos. Y en ese contexto, la capacidad adquisitiva de una moneda dependerá cada vez menos de la confianza en los mercados y cada vez más del acceso físico a los materiales que la respaldan.

El cambio climático añade otra capa de presión. Las cosechas devastadas por olas de calor o inundaciones, la desertificación de regiones enteras, la salinización de acuíferos costeros: todo ello reduce la base alimentaria del planeta precisamente cuando la población sigue creciendo. El resultado es una ecuación que ninguna política monetaria puede resolver: más bocas que alimentar con menos tierra, menos agua y menos energía.

Del dinero digital al cupón en papel

Cuando llegue la contracción —ya sea por el agotamiento de los recursos, por una crisis financiera o por una combinación de ambas— los gobiernos buscarán soluciones para mantener el control social. Tal vez lo intenten mediante monedas digitales de banco central (CBDC), programables y vigiladas, que permitan distribuir subsidios o limitar gastos. Pero estas herramientas tienen una debilidad estructural: necesitan una infraestructura energética estable.

En un mundo con redes eléctricas intermitentes, apagones recurrentes y sistemas digitales vulnerables, las monedas electrónicas pueden fallar en cualquier momento. Y cuando se apaga la electricidad, la economía digital desaparece.

Entonces solo quedará aquello que siempre ha funcionado en tiempos de escasez: el racionamiento físico, tangible, en papel. Una herramienta tan simple como justa, que permite asignar recursos básicos según las necesidades y no según el poder adquisitivo.

No es casualidad que todas las sociedades que han vivido guerras, bloqueos o colapsos hayan recurrido al mismo mecanismo. Fue lo que evitó el hambre masiva en Gran Bretaña durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, donde el sistema de cupones —gestionado con notable eficiencia y amplio respaldo popular— garantizó que tanto el minero del norte de Inglaterra como el empleado bancario londinense recibieran la misma ración de carne o azúcar. También fue lo que permitió sobrevivir a Cuba durante el "período especial" de los años noventa, cuando la desaparición de la Unión Soviética dejó a la isla sin combustible ni fertilizantes de un día para otro. Y fue el único salvavidas para millones de familias en la España de la posguerra, donde la cartilla de racionamiento marcaba la diferencia entre comer o no comer.

Más recientemente, durante la pandemia de COVID-19, muchos países introdujeron formas implícitas de racionamiento: límites de compra en supermercados, asignación centralizada de equipos médicos, reservas estratégicas de vacunas. Lo hicieron sin llamarlo así, porque la palabra asusta. Pero la lógica era la misma: cuando los recursos escasean, hay que decidir quién recibe qué, y esa decisión no puede dejarse exclusivamente en manos del mercado.

Sin embargo, estos ejemplos también nos recuerdan los riesgos de una aplicación autoritaria y desigual del racionamiento. Cuando el Estado concentra todo el poder de decisión y la distribución depende de la fidelidad política o de la corrupción administrativa, el sistema se pervierte y la injusticia se agrava. Para que el racionamiento sea realmente una herramienta de justicia, debe ser transparente, participativo y comunitario, gestionado desde la proximidad y con criterios de necesidad, no de privilegio.

El racionamiento puede parecer una imposición, pero es sobre todo una forma de igualar en un mundo de límites. Un reconocimiento colectivo de que el derecho a comer, calentarse o desplazarse no puede depender del saldo bancario, sino de la condición de ser humano y miembro de una comunidad.

Racionar para aprender a vivir dentro de los límites

La palabra "racionamiento" despierta recelos. Evoca privación, control, burocracia. Pero quizá haya llegado el momento de resignificarla. Racionar no es solo restringir, sino hacer visible la realidad de los límites. Cuando cada familia sabe que solo dispondrá de una cantidad determinada de alimentos o energía, el uso de los recursos se vuelve consciente, medido, colectivo.

A diferencia del mercado, que premia la acumulación y el despilfarro, el racionamiento educa en la suficiencia. Nos obliga a distinguir entre lo necesario y lo superfluo, y puede convertirse en una herramienta pedagógica para aprender a vivir mejor con menos. No se trata de empobrecerse, sino de desaprender el hábito de confundir el consumo con el bienestar.

De hecho, algunas comunidades de transición o iniciativas de soberanía alimentaria ya practican formas de racionamiento informal: reparto equitativo de cosechas, bancos de alimentos comunitarios, sistemas locales de intercambio. Todo ello son ensayos de lo que podría ser un racionamiento democrático, basado en la confianza y la cooperación, no en la imposición estatal. Las redes de grupos de consumo agroecológico, los mercados de intercambio o las monedas locales complementarias son, en este sentido, laboratorios de un futuro posible.

El movimiento del decrecimiento lleva años señalando esta dirección: no se trata de crecer de otra manera, sino de reorganizar la vida social y económica dentro de los límites biofísicos del planeta. El racionamiento, bien entendido, encaja perfectamente en esta visión: no como castigo, sino como arquitectura de la justicia en tiempos de escasez.

El desafío será político y cultural: habrá que aceptar que la libertad individual no puede seguir sosteniéndose sobre la destrucción colectiva. La verdadera libertad, en tiempos de escasez, será la capacidad de decidir juntos cómo repartir lo que queda.

Del mito de la abundancia al relato del reparto

Vivimos inmersos en un relato de abundancia: el mercado, la innovación y el progreso tecnológico como motores de un bienestar sin fin. Ese relato es precisamente el que se está derrumbando. El colapso no será solo económico o ecológico, sino también narrativo: ya no podremos seguir creyendo que "todo irá bien" si simplemente trabajamos más, producimos más o inventamos más.

Cuando esa ficción se agote, hará falta un nuevo relato: el del reparto. No el de la pobreza ni el de la resignación, sino el de una nueva forma de entender la prosperidad. Una prosperidad basada en la suficiencia, la cooperación y el bienestar colectivo. Kate Raworth lo visualizó con su "economía del donut": una sociedad que garantice un suelo de bienestar para todos sin superar el techo ecológico del planeta. El racionamiento, en este marco, no es una derrota, sino una herramienta de navegación entre esos dos límites.

El racionamiento, bien entendido, puede ser el primer paso hacia ese cambio cultural. Un instrumento para recuperar la justicia social y reconocer que la vida no puede reducirse a transacciones económicas. En ese sentido, más que una medida de emergencia, puede convertirse en una piedra angular del decrecimiento: una forma de organizar la vida cuando el consumo ya no puede seguir creciendo.

El futuro puede ser más justo, aunque más sobrio

Tal vez nos parezca impensable volver a los cupones de papel, pero es mucho más peligroso seguir confiando en que el dinero —virtual, digital o dorado— resolverá la crisis de fondo. Lo que está en juego no es el valor del dinero, sino el sentido de la justicia y la cohesión social.

Cuando el dinero deje de tener valor real, solo quedarán dos opciones: o la ley del más fuerte, o una organización colectiva basada en el reparto. La primera nos conduce al caos y al autoritarismo; la segunda puede abrir camino hacia un nuevo contrato social donde la vida y el bienestar estén en el centro.

El reto, por tanto, no es tanto evitar el colapso del sistema financiero como prepararnos para lo que vendrá después: una sociedad más modesta, pero quizá también más justa y más consciente. Una sociedad que ya no oculta los límites, sino que los asume como condición de vida. Y que construye, desde abajo, las estructuras de cuidado mutuo y reparto equitativo que el mercado nunca supo —ni quiso— garantizar.

Quizá, al final, el futuro nos obligue a reencontrarnos con lo más sencillo: un trozo de papel, un cupón, una forma de asegurar que todo el mundo pueda comer, calentarse o vivir con dignidad. Tal vez, tras el fin del dinero tal y como lo conocemos, empiece por fin una nueva economía de lo común.

腐草為螢 — Kusaretaru kusa hotaru to naru

I have to sit. The breath is too short. It is that balance of inner competition: as the pump strain subsides, the pump failure moves forward. This keeps the walks short and the lifting light.

I had watched my father only as spectator. Though now long gone, he possesses me. I am an occupied host. My memories of him remind: his body’s decay, at seventy, and now of our shared struggle. Different paths; our eyes share the retreating world before us. He is not empathetic nor sympathetic, just always smiling. “Do you know me any better now?”

I scoff at myself. Not a mirror image but mirroring the decline he too lived. He continued collapsing at a pace that today’s skilled interventionists have slowed for me. Medications have improved, with demonstrable gains. Yet, the fraction of blood pumped will only decrease. I don’t want to hurry it.

At the core though I think he took joy at seeing my mother’s face. Her walk to his chair-side with soup he called “dishwater.” A smoker through the war into his own Big One. The bypass sustaining a receding health. He had a demand for salt. Recovering any possible taste of life’s former freedoms. My mother, exasperated, left the salt shaker at his side. Love cannot stop the harms one does to self.

luciferase splays

fireflies shine ‘bove grass decay

photon splashes bright

I pick up pieces and puzzle myself into some semblance of rational. I try not to repeat the errors. Effort on the wrong object of attention. Perhaps if he had been able to rest on her eyes and smile. Objections to broth. Attachment to self. Attention to the rot. He could see it. His life passing breathless from bed to chair would deny all warmth. The embers that were not children: Love for the youth she remembered. Some days her light would hold. With hands held tightly they would dissolve into tears.

lingering, without point

separation anchors seat

expanse revealed

I just want to be “OK.” Without all the divisions. It’s not about loving yourself. You can’t put that pressure on anyone. The breath shortens either way. The chair moved a few steps nearer. Narcissus bending closer to the clear pool. Straining to “love yourself,” emboldens the reflection’s detail. Seen in memory’s fun house mirror, are we sure of what is loved? Breath duration does not improve with the chair brought closer. The effort is accommodated.

Just live toward being OK.

It is within the action, the conduct, that one finds the inseparable. “Love yourself” installs a measuring partition (loved / not-loved). Too easily flips into self-indulgence — the endless spa-and-makeover loop, the silliest thing I’ve ever seen, and I lived it. “Live to being OK” sets no such partition. It is the lower, truer floor. There is nothing to compare. A door to equality. Without compulsion, coercion. Voluntary. “I do not have to be better than what I am right now.” No matter the condition the true floor: “I don’t have to act this way again, and again.”

loving myself hard

i buy another mirror

to check that i do

Steadiness is found in the zen koan. It is not a word puzzle to solve and then move on. The sound of one hand clapping is thunderous for some. For others? It is just a tinkle from the bowl. Mandala built on the cushion. Mandala sand scraped into the river.

“I put her down,” acknowledges one who has picked her up. “Why do you still carry her?” Is that deflection or an inquiry into the status of shared practice? Or a bon mot moment. “Your inner turmoil. My outer completion.” Or perhaps just one-up-manship. A harsh critique of the junior. A Jesuit truth table?

When accused unjustly, “Is that so.” The wheel of sharp weapons returning? The poisonous food found in the peacocks’ garden? Or sitting with steadiness. “I am OK.” The child is not mine. Today I take care of the child. The child that was not mine, is now taken away. Today I prepare one less meal. Confusion and nonconfusion are the same. Unmodified, you wash the bowl.

Direct Bodhicaryāvatāra: rather than paving the whole world in leather, wear sandals — guard the mind, not the ground.

The monk admits the bloodied samurai. Head taken by blade-of-grass or Katana? Samurai crazed? Samurai sane? The monk allows no distinction.

The conduct of one’s life expresses it all: never parted from sorrowless bliss free from bias, attachment, and fierce emotion. Naked awareness settling evenly, not objectified into loveable or not.

Simultaneously insane now reaching a point of potential sanity. Nothing to love about himself, the samurai pauses. “Teach me the dharma.” A plea for another path? An excuse to continue the old? The conduct is the key. Hand eager at the hilt. Steadied by the resolve of a monk in practice of realization who remains silent. Pull the sword is the response of the old. Be as unmoved as the monk — is this the new path? The conduct matters, the words, not so much. Sañjīva is the monk; the miracle the same. Decapitation is trivial.

hand on the cold hilt

the monk’s breath does not quicken

awaits one firefly

There are old tales. Fashionable koans. Western culture has its own.

The inner, when unrecognized, is engaged as a linear tangle — hard to enter, hard to navigate — and at its center a minotaur: the unconscious, a maze of internal struggles that destroys you and eats you alive. Bull “head-id” conduct. Theseus the therapist arrives to engage and to kill it. The superego that binds it all. Ariadne’s thread ordering chaos.

Theseus raises the black. Reneges on the white. Triumphant return under false flag. Seizes the throne. New order commanded. A continuation of tribute reforms. Oedipus without the blindness. Patricide of foible or design.

Models linger: refreshed and renewed. Different perspective. Different preferred result. But they are the rot that feeds.

the rot becomes light

fireflies rise from the spent grass

no climbing higher

the true floor holds my short breath

both host and ghost: OK

“Quantum physics is eerie,” mused Dr. Gooden. He watched his fingertips subconsciously drum a nervous rhythm on the table’s cheap varnish. “There comes a point where the more you learn, the more you wish you could unlearn.”

His questioners stared at him blankly. His fingers stopped and he snapped back to the matter at hand. Time could not be wasted. After all, his fate rested in the hands of these people.

As Gooden brushed a bead of sweat from his brow, Mr. Khan interjected, “You may continue. We find this relevant. Tell us of your employment at UTM.”

“Yes. My time as a ‘clone shark’. Basically, I never left UTM. As soon as I earned my diploma, one of the professors in the physics department offered me a job. The school was still called MIT then. That was before…you know.” Mr. Khan and Mr. Abadi in their sharply pressed suits continued to study his face in their stolid manner from the other side of the table. Gooden was careful not to over-explain but the men seemed to be awaiting more details. “During my graduate years at MIT — I mean, UTM, there had been a surge of research into wormhole creation. By the time they hired me, the first real-world experiments were ready to be performed. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. That’s when I became involved with the tech — with cross-d bridges — to answer your question from before.”

The tiny, featureless room was sweltering. There was no air conditioning or windows, only an oversized standing fan made of steel, the kind found on the floors of factories and warehouses with its slowly oscillating head blowing warm air and noise to scant relief. Gooden shifted in his rigid metal folding chair while, in the corner, the silent and grim Mrs. Suliman sat comfortably in hers as she observed with a cryptic interest.

Gooden continued, “I was a quantum engineer on the very first bridge, working on a team led by Dr. Kathleen Kung. Funny thing is, it was all about teleportation then. That’s what the bridge was originally designed to do. We weren’t even thinking about replication. That was before Eggpocalypse happened and all that–”

“Was it not Dr. Becker who led the cross-dimensional studies at that time?” Khan asked. “You said you worked for a Dr. Kung.”

“That’s correct. I see you all did your homework. Dr. Becker was in charge of the department, at least until Eggpocalypse. Dr. Kung was his assistant–”

“What is this ‘egg oculus’?” asked Abadi. “You say it twice. What is it?”

Khan leaned closer to his associate. “That is the experiment the Americans performed. When replication was discovered.”

“The one with the eggs?”

“The one with the eggs. Were you involved with that, Dr. Gooden?”

“Um, yes,” Gooden stammered, “I was actually present for that, uh… Yeah, the eggs. Every time someone hears I was there, they ask, why didn’t we expect that to happen? The thing is, our previous experiments did indeed raise warnings that our leadership should have heeded. Instead, it was all downplayed or ignored, of course.” Khan motioned for him to continue. “You see, the first subjects we used were microscopic and they transmitted through the wormhole perfectly, as far as teleportations go, from one side of the lab to the other. It wasn’t until we tested a macroscopic object — sand — that we noticed a problem. After almost every teleportation, our analysis program detected that the shapes of the sand grains had changed and their masses slightly increased. Dr. Becker blamed the instruments used for measuring. He argued that the differences fell within the margins of error. We studied the problem for a month but never could figure it out. Soon, Dr. Becker got restless and wanted to resume the tests. He wanted to try something bigger.

“A new teleportation experiment was scheduled to which he invited a dozen others from the university’s staff and faculty, even a few journalists. The man knew history was being made. I stood in the back with the rest of Dr. Kung’s team and the other bridge teams. We all wore goggles, fortunately.

“The room was arranged so that the bridge’s in-chamber and out-chamber were in front, on opposite ends. Keep in mind, these chambers were tiny, no bigger than a fist. Because of that, we had to keep our test subjects small: the first was to be a grain of white rice, followed by a chicken egg, and lastly a mosquito. Mosquitoes were selected as the first live subjects through a wormhole because, if anything went wrong, not even an animal rights organization would shed a tear. Thank heavens we didn’t make it that far.

“The first test was the rice. A single grain was placed in the in-chamber, but when it arrived in the out-chamber, lo and behold, there were three of them, lying side by side. Three copies of the same thing. We were all in shock. Not Dr. Becker though. He looked thrilled. A boyish smile stretched across his face and he shouted his favorite quote, ‘Remember, unforeseen surprises are the rule in science!’

“With much gusto, he instructed one of the techs to load the next subject and, despite her doubts, the young woman complied. She put the egg — the plain white kind we used to be able to get at the grocery store — into the in-chamber, shut the trap, then another tech pressed the execution button, and in the time it took the chamber to slip into the outer dimension and travel to the end of the wormhole — which is slightly less than what it takes for light — the out-chamber suddenly exploded. Ka-boom.

“Egg was everywhere. Wet yellow yolk and gooey white albumen of a thousand eggs splattered all over everybody and the walls and floor and ceiling. Also, broken eggshell and glass and metal went flying in every direction which is how some people got hurt. And that poor woman who got pierced through the head… Yeah, it was awful. You see, there weren’t any exhibitors in the bridge. We didn’t yet know about higher spatial wave grounding. So when that single egg was transmitted, something like a thousand copies of it came along for the ride. You know how the copies push each other aside as they materialize? Imagine all of those eggs materializing within that tiny out-chamber, all jockeying for space at the same moment, creating such an intense pressure instantaneously. Hence the ka-boom. The whole mess could have been avoided with just a little more caution. Dr. Becker was left with egg on his face, and quite literally.” His questioners stared impassively. “Maybe you don’t have that expression in this country.

“Anyway, our focus obviously shifted after that. No one cared about teleportation anymore. Dr. Becker was fired and Dr. Kung took his place as our team began the first research into using wormholes for replication. We had to revisit our understanding of the outer dimension’s behaviors and how the pockets interact, then we traced out the quantum uncertainty chain to figure out what causes the subjects to clone. That’s when we discovered the link between a subject’s increased info-mass and its quantum states and realized why we didn’t notice the replication effect with the smaller, non-organic subjects. In fact, I was the one who figured out that the sand grains actually had been replicating but, due to their small size, they transposed into one, thus the perceived larger mass.

“Mostly during this time I worked with the team on further mods to the cross-d bridge’s components. That’s when it became a real bridge with support for larger chambers and also wave grounding so we could limit cloning down to two instead of thousands. We were finally able to clone mosquitoes although at first there were some very ugly problems with transposition until demodulators were perfected. After that, we had success cloning ants and wasps and some other small insects — whatever we could capture outside the lab. Even though this was early on, the tech was probably just as good as what you can find on the black market now.

“That was when the term ‘clone shark’ was coined. You see, one day someone on the team wore a shirt with an embroidered shark logo and Dr. Kung, being funny, called him that. A clone shark. It caught on, I suppose, and only later did it assume its negative connotations. It’s, uh, a play on the term ‘loan shark’, if you know…” Gooden thought he saw Khan’s eyes squint ever so slightly. “But anyway, when it came to the bridge, I definitely worked on, uh, every aspect–”

“When did you start to clone people?” Khan asked bluntly, never breaking eye contact. Abadi also watched Gooden closely.

The doctor sighed, again peering down at his wrinkling hands. “I’m certainly not proud of what I was involved in, but I won’t lie about it. I will tell you the truth. I know that you need to know about it. Just, please, remember that I had no choice and I got myself out of that business as soon as I could.”

He looked up at the three people waiting wordlessly for his story. Khan nodded. Gooden began, “Our whole team knew that replication tech could be exploited for evil intentions, to say the least, and it wasn’t difficult for us to dream up those kinds of terrifying scenarios. So right away we drafted a list of ethical rules for our brand new field to adhere to. There was a lot of debate because some of us wanted to completely ban human cloning while others were open to tightly controlled experiments. However, we were all dedicated to some level of robust restrictions on the practice and keeping it out of reach from nefarious hands. We also counted on the school’s autonomy to shield our ethical decisions from outside interference.

“That autonomy didn’t last long. Suddenly, and not coincidentally, politicians began to level baseless accusations of fraud at our school’s leadership and then increasingly absurd claims like conducting secret torture experiments on children — whatever could grab headlines and rile up the public. The vitriol got so bad, violent protests erupted on campus. Finally, the governor took the school to court and won state control over it and it was renamed to UTM. Things happened so fast that most people didn’t question why military brass from the Pentagon had installed their subordinates in leadership positions, in the physics department of all places. Next thing we knew, we were being ordered — not asked or tasked — ordered to conduct replication experiments with larger animals: mice, rabbits, then dogs. We weren’t comfortable with this new direction in our work and we pushed back. Our superiors responded by classifying our positions as critical for national security. We couldn’t disobey their orders nor could we quit our jobs. Then the wars started.

“It’s easy to accuse the US of being paranoid but the truth was that replication tech had already leaked to some dangerous countries. Through spying or hacking, I don’t know. Once the genie was out of the bottle, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to clone people, or rather, soldiers. If you remember, it wouldn’t take long for our adversaries to form a coalition and begin amassing their own clone army along the Bering Strait. A real life invasion was scary for us to imagine. So, when we started the human cloning experiments at UTM, they were with the intent to outpace our rivals and with the expectation that we could enforce some code of ethics.”

Khan remarked, “But that did not transpire as you hoped.”

“No, sir. Once again, we were rushed into the situation with little preparation, with little care. Progress has no patience for principles, I’ve learned. We thought we were taking precautions by being transparent with our test subjects and explaining to them the gravity of the experiments, but the thing is, we didn’t know what to expect. It was uncharted territory. One thing we didn’t anticipate was that our subjects would be young, simple-minded recruits from the military’s lowest ranks. Kids not even old enough to gamble. Kids with low test scores, no hope of ever reaching an officer rank, mopping the deck for the rest of their unremarkable careers until they retire with meager benefits. Someone in their chains of command talked them into volunteering, but let’s face it — you’re something other than a volunteer if you can’t even vaguely grasp what you signed up for. I mean, this kind of physics could make Albert Einstein go mad.”

Gooden’s fingertips rapped against the worn tabletop and he watched them fall in line one after another like a military march or the muzzled sound of distant machine gun fire. Sulliman’s chair creaked as she leaned forward. Breaking her silence, she inquired softly, “What did you see?”

He gazed downward. “The first one we did was this boy. Jacob. Only nineteen years old. Just joined the army. Really excited about his future. Really wanted to be part of something important. He had no idea what he was getting into. No one did. When we used animals, it was different — they saw their clones as strangers or sometimes family and acted appropriately depending on their species. But humans…we have identities; ones that we ourselves construct and we’re invested in. Our true worth is our individuality. I guess you take that for granted until a copy of that identity is standing right before you. Suddenly, you’re not so unique. Not so irreplaceable. The mind throws up a defense — the other clone must be an imposter. The clone rejection cycle begins: dissonance, derealization, feelings of worthlessness and jealousy, then fear, panic, and fury.

“Jacob went into the in-chamber and from the other end emerged two of him, both alive and unaffected by the wormhole travel. A successful outcome. But then they saw one another and immediately froze in place, each studying their counterpart, trying to process the moment. We all watched, curious about what would happen. When they finally began to move, it was odd because they made the same decisions so their movements were synchronous, like reverse-mirror images of each other, making the same stunned expression, speaking the same words, reaching out their right hands to touch the other’s face. I even wondered if there was indeed a single mind controlling the two bodies, that is, until their movements began to diverge and then increased in aggression. It took only twenty-two seconds for the two Jacobs to course through the rejection cycle before they simultaneously attacked one another.

“Someone should have intervened right away. I mean, that’s why the guards were present. It’s just that nobody expected something so bad to happen and so fast. Within moments there was blood on the glass. Ribbons of skin hung from their faces. They were literally tearing each other apart… Finally, the guards went in there and subdued both Jacobs. Then it became a really sorry sight because the two of them started crying like infants. They cried so pathetically, with such utter devastation in their voices, such woe. The guards dragged them to separate rooms and I never got to find out what happened to them after that.”

Gooden lifted his head. “Of course, that didn’t stop further experiments but greater precautions were taken from then on. Also, Dr. Kung was pretty sure Jacob would be an outlier and that most clones would accept their counterparts. Unfortunately, she was wrong. Although we prevented more fights from happening, many subjects still completely broke down emotionally and had to be promptly separated. These events would have an almost irreversible effect on their senses of self and their religious or moral beliefs. But not everyone. A smaller percentage of subjects showed no aggression at all. They would act curious about their twin, even affectionate. If we kept them together, they would bond as if they were old friends. That’s when the acceptance grid was created, and from then on, we screened out candidates with levels in the violent or psychopath quadrants.”

“And the soldier spawners?” Khan asked. “What was your involvement?”

“I was lucky to have left my position at UTM before the megawar began. I knew something like that would happen. I had surmised that that was their intention behind the acceptance grid — to identify the best mentally fit soldiers for large-scale cloning. Also, the military brass wanted to increase the bridge’s output — from two clones to three, then five, then a dozen. I joined Dr. Kung and many others in standing up to our superiors, but by then, they were ready to rid themselves of us anyway. They fired anyone who dissented and they filled our positions with their own lackeys. It didn’t even bother me. I was glad to finally divest myself from that place, from those horrific experiments.

“When the war accelerated, however, the doubts began to creep in. I wished I did more to try and stop it. Admittedly, I don’t know what I could have done but, I mean…thousands of soldiers were being spawned every day on both sides and dropped into those forests along the gulf and they would mow each other down with cloned guns and cloned drones with those gruesome wave cannons only to be replaced the next day by more thousands and again and again every day. How could we let something like that happen? How could we — me, my team, the military, the government, the world — allow that carnage to happen? And because it’s never enough, new spawners were built to be even larger — the size of airplane hangars — and before long there were hundreds of thousands of soldiers being cloned and dying every day, cloning and dying over and over. Billions of lives, copies of copies of copies but none of them any less human, being wrung through the meat grinder of all-out war in order to advance just another meter on the battleground. For so many years. Billions of young people shot up or blown up or micro-fried and, to their superiors, not one of them was worth more than the cheap fatigues on their backs. Did you know their uniforms were designed to be flammable? After a skirmish, the militaries would torch the battlefield to render it impossible to distinguish which side the dead belonged to. They gave themselves an excuse not to have to retrieve the remains and lay them to rest honorably. Much cheaper that way. And who was going to grieve for them anyway? If you had a child and suddenly there were ten thousand copies of them and half of them had their brains melted through their noses in the mountains of British Columbia, how would you mourn?” His gaze met with some far off point in an imaginary distance where the staggering toll of death and the knowledge of his indirect influence had to be walled off from his sanity.

Suliman leaned closer to the table. “But they were mourned, is that not so?” She looked into Gooden’s eyes. “You wrote about the possibility. Your theory is very convincing.”

He carefully considered his words. “It is a theory. Nothing more.”

“You wrote as if you believed it.”

A cold dread had crept into the doctor’s face at the reference to his universe forking theory and it settled like a tension in the crinkles around his eyes and corners of his mouth. “I don’t wish to believe in it at all.”

“I wish not to believe it too, Dr. Gooden, but all of those clones came from somewhere. Mass cannot appear from nothing.”

“I have a question.” Khan leaned back in his folding chair. “I understand the premise of the forking theory, but the scale of it, I do not. It appears impossible. The, uh, universe…a new copy is made for each clone? Every single one?”

Abadi spoke something in Arabic, showing confusion, and Suliman proceeded to explain. “When that poor soldier named Jacob was sent through the bridge, quantum uncertainty was exploited to create a second Jacob. However, according to forking theory, this second one was bound to a parallel universe — a copy of ours that forked when the wormhole was created. Because of the crossover in the outer dimension, we received both Jacobs but the other universe received none. Imagine the surprise within that other universe when the out-chamber of their bridge was opened and revealed to be empty. Someone had to notify that other Jacob’s parents of the boy’s apparent demise and how there were somehow no remains for his funeral. And in that universe, there would be a copy of Dr. Gooden and copies of the rest of Dr. Kung’s team and most likely they scratched their heads over the mystery of the disappearing Jacob and where he might have gone. The next time they tried the experiment, maybe it worked and they received both of their cloned soldiers but that would have created another fork, yet another universe in which no clones arrived in the out-chamber. This forking occurs every time something is cloned. Clone an egg a thousand times and you make a thousand new universes, each one missing their subject.”

Khan threw up his hands. “But that would be…billions of universes by now. Trillions. That is absurd, no?”

Suliman and Khan turned to Gooden. “Like I told you,” the doctor said, “it’s enough to make Einstein go mad.”

Abadi asked, “So it is true that people disappeared? In this universe?”

“Yes. Sometimes our universe would land on the losing side of a forking event. Those cases were always swept under the rug, so to speak. Yet another reason for my rift with UTM.”

“Why did you continue in the field of replication?” asked Khan. “Even after you left the university and what you just called their ‘horrific experiments’?”

“Well, I tried to branch into new fields. I found work doing odd jobs — lab technician, data entry… I drove a truck–”

“I am referring to your time with the Family Forward Health Clinic.”

Gooden had not expected his questioners to uncover that well guarded secret from his past. Again he shifted in his chair. “I know it probably doesn’t look very good on the surface but, in my defense, the work we did there was not immoral. We weren’t like other black market clinics. We never cloned children, or adults for that matter. We only ever cloned embryos for parents with fertility issues which I always found sensible. Anyway, that was a hard time for me and I had to find some way to make a living, but no matter what, I would have never worked for anyone who cloned children. I found that to be abhorrent — for parents to keep some kind of a backup child or to harvest them for spare parts. I was also against the practice of cloning people’s lovers and against the clonophiles who would clone themselves and move to that commune in Nevada. I never participated in any of that. I only helped families.”

Khan asked, “Did you work there when the Great Wave Collapse occurred?” Abadi turned to him with a furrowed brow and Khan added, “The mummies.”

“Funny enough, I had that day off. I was in the middle of making preparations to emigrate. By then, the war had truly decimated my country and I knew it could not sustain itself much longer. Then, someone from the clinic contacted me in a panic and said the embryos were showing up dead in the out-chamber. The containers had exploded and the liquid nitrogen evaporated. Right away I knew it was a wave collapse. So when I heard about the soldiers, um, mummifying in the spawners, I wasn’t surprised.”

“Nor should you have been,” added Suliman. “After all, that was another of your theories.”

Gooden analyzed this unpredictable woman, even further in years than him, someone who hadn’t bothered to introduce herself when she entered the room late and had silently planted herself in the dim corner so apparently she could converse with him about quantum physics. “Did you read my research paper?” he asked her.

“Of course. I too have experience with wormholes for a long time now. Your theories are intriguing.”

“People used to call my theories ‘insane’.”

“Even after the collapse happened exactly as you predicted?”

Gooden straightened in his seat. “I admit, I did get that one right. Well, almost. I knew the subjects would stop cloning due to the collapsed uncertainty but I didn’t expect the time-sink to be so slow. No more speed-of-light travel through the wormhole — suddenly, the outer dimensional travel from the in- to the out-chamber took a dozen years or more. Not that those poor soldiers lasted that long. They would have suffocated after just a few hours once the chamber’s oxygen ran out. That must have been quite a shock for the engineers to watch a subject enter and a moment later reappear on the other side as a single dried out husk aged over a decade.”

“It would take a large amount of mass to create the collapse, no?” asked Suliman.

“It wouldn’t be impossible to cause a wave collapse in a small-mass dimension like that one used to be. It was bound to happen.”

Suliman countered, “Only miniscule amounts were leaking into the outer dimension: air, bacteria, microscopic bits from the chamber’s exterior. A tiny fraction of what is required for a collapse. Surely not enough to stretch the outer dimension by dozens of light years, but that is what happened.”

Gooden’s mouth cracked into a subtle, wry smile but spoke nothing.

“I see the thought has crossed your mind before,” continued Suliman. “Sabotage. Could that be it? After all, the amount of mass required indicates the event was purposeful in nature.”

“But impossible because an operation of that scale would require tremendous effort and would not go unnoticed on this Earth.”

“No, not this Earth, but perhaps another, alternate Earth? Perhaps one in which some of their spawns disappeared because they were abducted by universes alternate to them? Perhaps that universe figured out how to sabotage these abductors’ machines with a wave collapse and stopped the horrors of which you spoke and thus forced an end to your country’s megawar.”

Gooden still held his nearly perceptible grin. “I’ve heard that hypothesis too.”

“The thing I like most about that hypothesis is, surely an alternate Dr. Gooden discovered forking theory too, as well as the outer dimension’s critical mass level. Maybe even the same Dr. Gooden from the parallel universe who witnessed your alternate Jacob disappear. His expertise in the matter would undoubtedly lead him to be involved in the sabotage — to warp the outer dimension with gigatons worth of mass, collapse its quantum uncertainty and prevent our machines from ever replicating again.” Her expression remained unchanged but her eyes twinkled. “And perhaps that alternate Dr. Gooden still has his country, instead of being…here.”

Suliman stood up and lifted her tote bag from the floor. “I apologize for I must now be present elsewhere,” she announced. “It was a pleasure to chat with you, Dr. Gooden. Perhaps we will see each other again.” She glanced at Khan and Abadi and strode out of the room without another word. From the hall wafted in a warm draft of rotted smells before the door swung shut again.

A small sigh escaped the doctor’s lips but he caught himself and returned his focus to the two remaining questioners. Khan and Abadi exchanged some silent agreement between them, then Abadi turned to Gooden. “After the war, what do you do? You still work?”

“After the megawar ended, I was lucky enough to flee the country before the escalation to nukes happened. My family too. Well, most of them. We went to Qatar but they couldn’t extend my visa so I came here. I’ve been seeking employment ever since.”

Khan asked, “Are you in the Jeddah camps?”

“Uh, yes. That’s where I’m currently staying. You’ve probably heard how it is at those places. You can sponsor my visa, correct?”

Khan and Abadi looked at one another and nodded concurrently. Their stoic faces returned to the subject of their interview and Abadi answered, “Yes, we can do that. Now that I hear your story, I understand why you do not get refugee status. Heh.” He forced a chuckle.

“Oh, that would be great. Really,” Gooden said in relief. “Is the work all here, or–”

“Two sites. Bridges are downstairs in the factory. The pairs are in a warehouse close to the airport. You are responsible for transportation.”

“Nothing perishable goes through the bridges, right?”

“Correct. The goods that we teleport are made from plastic and metals. Most are toys. Sometimes costumes. Everything we make, they handle the time sink. Sometimes it goes very high. Twenty years or more. But, in this dimension they take only one second to send to the warehouse and still much cheaper than using trucks and gas. The only problem is old bridges and electrical shortages in exhibitors.”

“Well, I think that my extensive experience can help to keep your machines in good working order.”

Khan interjected, “The shift begins at eight o’clock, nine hours every weekday, four on Saturday. No unions, you purchase your own safety gear and, as a non-Muslim, you will not receive reduced hours during Ramadan. Are these terms agreeable?”

Gooden pretended to think it over for a second but he couldn’t stifle his smile. “Yes, sir.”

Mr. Abadi extended his hand across the table to shake the doctor’s. “Congratulations! You are hired!”

--

Thanks for reading! Read more of my stories at keithvile.medium.com

The night was long. He couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling, recalling yesterday’s apartment — the warm wall, the lights of the biocamino, the deep color of the sofa — and thinking about tomorrow, doubting. He imagined redesigning his apartment: changing the floor in his mind, the lighting, the textures, moving furniture, adding warm tones, and then erasing it all again. He thought about the engineer. What was happening to him now? Where was he? Where do people even disappear to when the system “removes” them? No one knew, and that lack of knowledge was the most terrifying thing — not punishment, not pain, but the absence of information, emptiness, the inability to understand what to expect. And so he waited for tomorrow, not knowing how it would end.

Everything used to be predictable: he always knew what his day would look like. Life was stable, understandable, structured, and back then stability felt like something good. But one day changed everything, and now it felt not like protection, but like a cage. Thoughts kept crashing into each other: fear and curiosity, calculation and temptation, caution and calling. Only toward morning, when the light outside became softer, did he finally fall asleep, and for the first time in a long while it wasn’t completely white.

When he woke up, he lay in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling. Doubts didn’t disappear, they only became quieter, but the desire to create something new — truly new — slowly and firmly outweighed fear. He got up, showered, cold water quickly brought clarity, movements precise and practiced — everything as always. In front of the mirror he stopped: among the dark hair, a single gray strand had appeared. He leaned closer, and suddenly thought that even hair in this world was slowly losing color.

In the kitchen he pressed the dispenser button — a standard smoothie of neutral color poured into the bowl in a smooth silent line, without smell, without texture. He sat at the table, took a spoon, and thought: “The main thing is that there are no new tasks today,” he didn’t want distractions. He went to the coffee machine, pressed the button, the machine hummed quietly, and he suddenly caught himself thinking that no matter how the day began, without coffee it felt incomplete. After a sleepless night his body should have been exhausted, but because of those warm dreams he felt almost rested, as if a source of energy had appeared inside him that didn’t depend on sleep. He took the cup, steam rising upward, and suddenly thought that even if coffee were once standardized into a colorless drink, people would still remember its real taste. The taste of warmth is not so easy to erase.

He got ready, put on his glasses, took a deep breath, and stepped into the corridor, the apartment door closed behind him, the phone automatically activated the cleaning function, and the soft sound of the lock blended with the echo of silence in the stairwell. The same man as yesterday walked past him, a brief glance, a moment of mutual recognition — and each went their own way. He approached the elevator, metal walls reflecting the light coldly, and before this cold had seemed ideal — cleanliness, control, order — but now it suddenly came alive in memory with reflections of the biocamino, warm and alive, as if reminding him that something existed beyond the white order. The elevator hummed softly, and his thoughts drifted again to that secret apartment where the light was warm and the wood was alive; even here, among metal, he felt its echo.

He approached the car, opened the trunk, and took out the cartridge with used material, carefully placing it into a special case. He had already planned everything during breakfast: submit three used white cartridges and two from the shredder, take new ones, and discreetly add one colored cartridge in place of a white one, hiding it among the white ones, the main thing — that the weight wouldn’t differ, it mustn’t. Colored cartridges were often seen there, so he wasn’t too worried; if there were none today, he would try next time. Closing the trunk and taking a deep breath, he felt that the moment to execute the plan had come. On the way he again ran everything through his mind: no unnecessary movements, no emotions, only routine, one he had performed hundreds of times, knowing every route and every detail. There was no real control there, only at the entrance a controller checked weight and documents, after that everything was mechanics, a practiced motion. He repeated each step mentally so that no detail would look suspicious — only then could the plan work.

He didn’t even notice when he arrived. The car stopped softly and silently. In front of him rose a massive white building, cascading toward the center, rising into a taller central structure. On the facade, in clear emotionless letters, it read: “Ministry of Spatial Balance”. Earlier this name had sounded almost calming — balance, order, harmony. Now it had a different meaning.

Behind these words lay control. Control over space, form, color, and life.

The building pressed down with its mass. Its whiteness was not light — it was blinding, cold, merciless. No shadow, no hint of warmth. Next to it, a person felt tiny.

A small cog in a vast mechanism. A cog that could easily be replaced if it started turning the wrong way.

He turned off the engine and for a moment kept his gaze on the inscription. Today this mechanism had no idea that one of its cogs was about to disrupt the balance.

He calmly opened the trunk, took out the container with used material, and headed toward the entrance. His steps were even, measured — neither fast nor slow, as always.

The doors opened silently.

Inside, everything remained unchanged. A vast hall with an information desk in the center, so large that footsteps were lost in the space. Every line was straight, every joint flawless. The materials were joined with such precision that the entire interior looked carved from a single monolith.

It was an example of white minimalism. The interior practically screamed sterile purity.

On both sides of the information desk were waiting areas with massive sofas and chairs. Above them hung large flat light fixtures emitting perfectly even white light — sterile, shadowless. Even the light here did not allow warmth.

Behind the desk, two long corridors led to different departments. Everything was designed down to the smallest detail: no unnecessary elements, no hint of individuality.

He silently headed toward his department.

The woman at the information desk — all in white, completely emotionless — briefly raised her eyes. Her gaze was empty, yet recognizing. She gave a short nod and returned just as emotionlessly to her work, her fingers moving evenly across the keyboard.

No questions. No suspicion.

Everything was as usual.

The corridor was long. Indecently long.

Whiteness here did not merely exist — it pressed. It felt as if the space was shrinking with every step.

And suddenly he understood why it was designed this way.

These corridors were a test.

While a person walks, the system reads them: walking pace, breathing rhythm, shoulder position. The slightest deviation — and tension becomes visible. And tension means deviation. And deviation here is forbidden.

He walked steadily. Calmly. Neither faster nor slower.

And eventually reached his department — the control desk.

— Good day. I came to submit used material and receive three new cartridges. Also to replace two shredder cartridges.

The controller did not look up immediately.

— Your identification code, please.

He placed his phone against the scanner. Two faint signals cut through the silence.

The controller looked at the screen. His brows slightly narrowed.

— But you already submitted used material this week.

Something tightened in his chest, but his face remained calm.

— Yes. But yesterday there was a large amount of work for disposal. I sent a report regarding the object. The cartridges with used material are almost full.

Pause.

The controller’s eyes moved across the data.

— Yes, I see, — he said dryly. — Indeed a large workload.

His gaze lifted.

— And did you bring the used white cartridges?

— Only three. In two there is still some material left. I think together it will be enough for another small object.

The controller stared a few seconds longer than necessary.

Only the steady hum of ventilation could be heard in the silence.

The corridor behind him again felt endless.

— Good. Don’t forget to bring the used cartridges next time. Place your basket on the scales.

He carefully placed the container on the metal platform. The system activated quietly. A short scan. Two dry signals. A pause that lasted slightly longer than desired.

— Rooms 107 and 109. Access granted, — the controller said in a flat voice. No intonation. No doubt.

Something heavy slowly loosened in his chest.

He passed through the metal frame. A barely noticeable scan glided over his body. He took the container from the other side and headed toward room 109.

Again, a corridor — but different: narrower, quieter. On both sides stretched metal doors with numbers, no handles or unnecessary details, only flat surfaces and small screens beside them.

He stopped at the correct door. The display showed: “Storage of material for disposal.” His phone touched the scanner, two short signals — and the door opened silently.

Inside stood rows of shelves: tall, precisely aligned, with dozens and hundreds of containers of different markings and codes. The door behind him closed just as silently, and the silence became dense, almost physical.

He placed the used cartridges in the designated spot, as protocol required, and began searching for the colored one. Row after row, his gaze moved across markings — white, gray, standard. There were many containers he had never even seen before. There had been no time to study all the codes. He had to find it quickly. If he lingered too long, it would be noticed.

Another row. Not it. Another. And suddenly — near the door, two short signals sounded.

His heart instantly sped up. In the dead silence of the storage room, each beat echoed between the metal shelves. Thoughts flared one after another: detected? inspection? But the next moment the door opened, and a man appeared at the entrance.

His gaze slid to the container in the man’s hands. He could exhale — the man was only here for disposal. But staying would look suspicious, so it was better to leave quickly and return another time. They passed each other, a brief nod — and each went their separate way.

And in that exact moment, a few steps ahead, he saw it — a small label: RGB.

Only seconds remained.

Inside, a cold calculation activated instantly. Speed could not change. He could not look around. He could not show hesitation. Only steady movement. Only precision.

He aligned himself with the shelf. His hand slid to the side. One exact motion — no stopping, no change in rhythm. The cartridge ended up in the basket. His step did not break even for a moment.

He walked a few more meters and listened. Behind him — even, calm footsteps. The man did not stop. Did not turn.

So it was fine.

He exited, feeling that beneath the outer calm his heart was still far from normal. The door closed quietly behind him.

The first part of the plan had succeeded.

Inside the container was the colored cartridge. Real. Now only two white ones and two for the shredder remained — and then simply to leave. Simple.

He turned slightly back and approached door 107. He placed his phone against the scanner. Two short signals. The door opened.

Inside, it was empty. Only rows of shelves, identical containers, and cold white light. He had to act quickly. He approached the nearest shelf, took two white cartridges and the cartridges for the shredder, and carefully placed them on top of the colored one. Now everything looked perfect — nothing suspicious, nothing extra. The container was indistinguishable from hundreds of others that left this room every day.

Only the hardest part remained — getting out of here.

He took a few steps toward the door. The corridor was silent. Too silent. He walked slowly, at the same pace he had entered. One step. Another. Each one pressed heavily against his eardrums, as if striking them directly. The sensation was unpleasant, but he forced himself to keep the rhythm. Ahead appeared the turn toward the control desk.

That was where the controller sat. That was where the scales were. And that was where everything could end.

He took a slow breath and approached the turnstile. The controller was looking at the monitor, not even raising his eyes when the basket was placed on the scales. One second stretched, then another felt endless, and finally two short signals sounded. He passed through the frame, tapped his phone on the electronic reader to confirm the record, gave a slight nod to the controller, and continued down the long corridor.

A drop of sweat ran down his temple. His hair was damp. He ran a hand over his face and through his hair, trying to steady himself. His thoughts were too loud, emotions pressing from within, but he forced them into silence. The vast hall remained unchanged — cold, emotionless, indifferent to everything happening inside it.

He passed the information desk. The woman didn’t even look up. He didn’t stop. A few more steps to the exit. Ten. Nine. Eight. The air felt thicker with each step. Five. Four. Three. Two. One...

It was a Friday much like any other, the day I retired. Such a strange year, though. Most of the office had been working from home, the rest split into long shifts, so those still on site could maintain social distancing. This meant each shift squeezing the working week into three twelve-hour days. It had worked, as far as I know, and none of my colleagues had caught Covid, though we were all looking pretty worn out, as we approached the year’s end.

As I counted down my last hours, after forty-three years of working there, it felt unreal that I would soon be walking out forever. There was just this final tick-sheet of tasks to make sure I left behind a tidy ship. The last one was the handing over of my pass to the security guy at eleven forty-five. The sparsely populated office was absorbed in their separate calls and video-conferences – eyes glued to screens, headphones to block out the world around them. At the appointed time, I rose from my desk, put on my jacket and walked down to the security desk, unnoticed by anyone. I didn’t want a fuss, and in any case, shaking hands was forbidden, so it would all have been a bit… well… awkward.

The guy on duty didn’t know me, but he wished me well when I said I was retiring, that I wouldn’t be coming back. His sentiment was genuine. I’d noticed an uncharacteristic tenderness amongst my male colleagues in those last weeks. It was as if the fact they wouldn’t be seeing me again had granted them permission to speak from closer to their hearts than they would normally. We were all trying to make the best of it, to put a brave face on things – the pandemic, I mean – but we also needed to speak of the feelings we had for one another.

Thinking back on this, the obvious lesson is not to wait until that old guy is retiring. You should tell him now. Tell your mates, tell your colleagues how much you respect them, how much they mean to you ­– or even just tell them you think they’re doing a good job. And okay, maybe I’d been lucky with my work-mates, but if you think your colleagues are a set of lazy, incompetent, bullying, bastard psychopaths, you should tell them that too. But those were the times, and they were like no other. I suppose we've all moved on now, moved back closer to the way things were.

It had rained all day, rained like the devil on the drive in, this being my last commute, thank God, pitch dark at half past seven, down the M61. It was all rain and spray off the heavies, the usual tit-mobiles brightly lit on full beam and speeding blind. The rain hammered down all morning, but as I stepped out through the sliding doors that lunchtime, a thin, watery sun came out, like it was doing its best to mark the moment. I appreciated the effort.

It was perhaps not the best time to be changing course, but is it ever? I wasn’t sure I’d caught the wind right, and BREXIT was a worry. The markets had been recovering well from the first shocks of Covid, but they’d been jittery again all week, scared of another dip, while the lorries were queued for miles either side of the English Channel, and the supply chains lay broken in a million places. But I’d been planning this for a long time, and there was no going back.

Stepping more into the soul-life is what I was aiming at. I’d twenty years until I turned eighty. Any time beyond that would be a bonus, but I wanted a good crack at the time I’d got before then. What for? Well, if you’re young you might think a guy just turned sixty is pretty much spent, and better off dead, but I think the last few decades of life are as important as the first, and I was looking forward to them:

“A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning”

So said Carl Jung, and I’m not going to argue with him.

So, my early and middle-stage work was done, but I felt I still had important connections to make. Indeed, this latter stage of life is potentially where the way becomes most interesting, provided we can let go of this idea we are still young, when clearly we are not.

The nature of work had changed a lot and, in truth, I was no longer of a mind to be charitable towards it. I had a hands-on job, one I enjoyed – a technical specialist, lab based. But like all workplaces increasing amounts of useful time were spent simply answering emails, or sitting in meetings doing nothing except listen to others sounding off. Take any time away, and there might easily be hundreds of emails waiting for you on your return, so much so one hesitated before taking any leave at all. Most of them were junk, but each had to be eyeballed for the one that was going to ruin your day. I was unable to develop a strategy for dealing with any of that, without increasing amounts of anxiety.

I wondered about casting round for a fresh identity, since I was no longer a fully functioning, commuting, salaried C Eng MIET. I didn’t like the idea of becoming just another grey old man pushing a trolley round the supermarket, dithering over brands of breakfast cereal. I could call myself anything I wanted, I suppose: writer, poet, photographer, but none of it sat right. And of course, I was still the same as I’d always been, this guy who writes and walks, and takes pictures, only now had more time to do it. I felt blessed to have escaped that email inbox, which I still imagine filling up in my absence. Neither do I miss the snarling deathtrap of a twenty-mile commute on pitch black roads, in pouring rain, lit by dazzling headlights on hateful winter mornings.

If I can close in on the meaning of my own life, if I can correctly judge my journey in this time of “spirit”, is yet to be seen. But whatever, success or failure, the adventure continues. Many of my well-wishers in the run-up to that day wished me a long and happy retirement, which I translated as meaning: “Don’t drop dead too soon.” And fair enough, I knew what they meant. So to those well-wishers, to whom I wished an equal share of wellness and more, I said this:

I’ll do my best.

“This is fucking daft,” Keri said to Trey. They were standing in the dirt parking lot beside Trey’s Camry, getting rained on. The shoot was completed, and Trey’s lights and equipment were stowed neatly inside the car. They had no reason to remain in Shayham, and Keri was so eager to be gone she could almost feel the momentum of the car and hear the tires as they sluiced through the flooded highways.

“You’re right,” Trey said looking back at the bulky square shape of the mill, the red of the bricks and the black of the iron of the place washed out by the weak light of the distant streetlamps. “That room can’t flood. It’s not flooded now, and if the water isn’t getting in there now, in all this rain. How would that much water ever get in there?”

“A mystery for another day.” Keri said. She wanted to punctuate the comment by getting into the car, but she didn’t. She stood there, waiting.

He ran the flashlight beam over the brick wall of the mill. “Something is off about the underside of this thing.” Trey said. ““Take your light. Go into the head of the stairs in the big room. I’ll go under and we can meet up.”

“This is idiotic,” she said. “You’ll fall in the bloody river and drown and then Paul will say a fairy carried you off.”

“Paul wasn’t saying that.” Trey said. “You were saying that. He said a guy with an axe.”

On that bright note, Trey walked to the edge of the mill and disappeared around the corner. Keri saw his light fade into shadow of the of the cavity beneath the mill even as she followed Trey out of the rain and back into the rotting mill.

Keri was attuned to the mill now, and it didn’t frighten her as it had before. The two hours or so of boredom they’d spent filming the place had mortared familiarity over fear. Her first thought was at least she’d be out of the rain for a moment.

Her cranberry doc martens were so soaked she didn’t notice for a moment or two that she was treading in water.

She shone the light down and saw water cresting over her boots and running into the eyelets. The water carried a scrim of colorful chalk dust on its surface—melted faces, she thought wildly. A large piece of chalk lifted by the deluge roll up over her foot.

Keri didn’t think, ‘I was wrong’, and rationalize some natural phenomenon to account for a localized river surge or other bizarre flash flood event.

Her thought was This is how they all went.

“Fuck me,” she said quietly, and turned her light towards the stairs that led beneath the mill, sunken into the floor, sealed by a chain link fence and impassible. Trey was down there, and if this room was flooding, he was already underwater.

She heard a rattle and a bang; identified the clamor as the chain link fence heaving against the flood, or, more terrible, being pushed against by Trey, trapped below.

Keri ran to the grate because to not do so would be cruel, but of course there was nothing to be done.

The water was surging up so powerfully from below that it was forced into the shape of the fence, scores of small diamond-shaped fountains arcing upwards and spilling out to flood the room.

She saw Trey’s flashlight, spinning in the tumult. The steel light couldn’t float, but the water was being pushed up so fiercely that the small flashlight was trapped against the links of the fence.

She saw, for instant, fingers on the links.

They were too small, too pale, and too feminine to be Trey’s. The fingers were green.

Then they were gone.

Trey’s flashlight spun, came up through the fence, and rolled along the floor, pushed along the concrete by the last of the water as the pressure ebbed.

Keri was on her knees; light shining through the fence, pulling at the links with her left hand, watching as the water receded with terrible swiftness.

“Trey…” She whispered. She didn’t have the courage to shout. She pulled on the fence, her strength barely registering against the firmly bolted frame. She collapsed, crying, but not for long.

Her ear to the wet bricks, Keri heard something moving under the mill: crunching as if of bones, and a rough, sliding sound.

Hooves on gravel and scree.

Her imagination conjured the image she’d always pictured of the kelpie: a drowned, long-dead horse, upright and moving.

Keri got to her feet in a single, panicked lunge and then froze in place, too terrified to move, to abandon Trey.

She saw Trey’s Maglite, still lit, lolling gently in the receding water.

If she took his flashlight and went to the place where Trey had gone beneath the mill, she could watch the water flow into the Manomet and see if there was anything else there.

Something squelched in the mud below her, followed by another rustle of sliding gravel and the clump of what could only be a hoof.

“Fuck that,” Keri whispered, and she headed for the parking lot.

Keri had never seen a ghost or spoken to an angel but there was no doubt in her mind that she’d just been in the presence of something supernatural, something both predatory and unreal, but with a mind and a will and a complete awareness of Keri Boyle and that thing was rejecting her. or releasing her, but whatever that thing was, and whatever its reasons, Keri understood that it was allowing her to live when it did not have to.

She was not escaping as much as being let go, so she was going. She was going, as far and fast as she could, on shaky legs and with crying eyes, she was going.

She ran to the Camry, pulled the door open and got behind the wheel. Her already soaked clothes now streaked with color from the chalked floor, squelched when she sat and doubtless stained the upholstery.

Trey had the keys.

She hid inside the car for just a minute or two, but that was too close to the mill for comfort. She set out and walked away from the river, away from the bridge.

The bus station lights were on.

She went there.

Tysiąc słów to wysoki pułap. Trzeba mieć sporo czasu, aby napisać esej tej długości. 1000 słów w angielskim to ok. 5000 znaków, za to w polskim może sięgnąć nawet 7000 znaków. To trochę deprymujące.

Ten zimowy krajobraz to trochę przewrotny widoczek na dziś, bo nad Europą mieliśmy właśnie coś, co nazwano kopułą ciepła (heat dome). W Londynie było 35°C, w Warszawie dużo mniej, ale też beznadziejnie gorąco. To nie dla mnie. Marzę o ucieczce na Północ, w miejsca które kocham, a które niedługo będą dla nas tylko wspomnieniem. Bo ile lat jeszcze będziemy mogli się cieszyć zdrowiem wystarczającym, by podróżować po tym pięknym świecie? Ile razy zdołamy polecieć do Szkocji? Do Irlandii?

Nie bardzo umiem też wstawiać zdjęcia z biblioteki na moim Tuhat. Tu wypróbowałam wklejanie i o dziwo - działa. Tego się będę trzymać.

Trochę jestem zdenerwowana naszym wyjazdem. Jednak na stare lata wyjazdy robią się trudniejsze.

Kiedyś spotkałam u fryzjera starszą (również ode mnie) panią, która mówiła, że na święta wybiera się do rodziny. Grzecznie jej pogratulowałem i wyraziłam coś w rodzaju zachwytu, że spędzi ten czas z rodziną. Spojrzała na mnie zdziwiona i powiedziała:

-Pani jeszcze młoda, więc jeżdżenie może się pani podobać, ale ja to już najchętniej zostałabym na święta u siebie.

To było kilka lat temu zaledwie, a ja już dziś ją doskonale rozumiem. Mam coraz mniejszą parę na jeżdżenie po świecie. Moje łóżko wydaje mi się najwygodniejsze, pościel najczystsza, a ręczniki najmiększe.

___

Wspominaliśmy sobie ostatnio nasze młodzieńcze wyprawy w góry. Trzy tygodnie w Wysokich Tatrach, chodzenie od schroniska do schroniska. Nie po Słowacji, o nie - mimo przynależności do bloku wschodniego nie mogliśmy sobie przekraczać granicy, gdy mieliśmy ochotę. A w stanie wojennym to już w ogóle była szopka. Trzeba było mieć specjalne pozwolenie na chodzenie po górach.

Pamiętam, że kiedyś wyszliśmy ze schroniska przed szóstą, żeby dojść na Rysy przed tłokiem. Chodziłam wtedy dość wolno, a że to była jesień, dni były krótkie.

Kiedy schodziliśmy z Rysów, dopadli nas pogranicznicy - nie chcieli uwierzyć, że wracamy tą samą drogą. Po prostu wyszliśmy w góry przed nimi.

Dobre czasy to były, bo w Tatry mało kto chodził. Nie to co teraz. Tyle wypadków w górach, a ludzie nadal nie rozumieją, że to są szczyty, które wymagają dobrych butów i przygotowania, nie tylko fizycznego, ale i mentalnego. Bo polskie góry są jak Alpy w miniaturze.

Kiedyś spotkaliśmy wysoko w górach dwójkę Niemców. Siedzieli i wzywali pomocy, bo nie przewidzieli, że te trasy są naprawdę strome. Mieli maleńką mapkę z jakiegoś niemieckiego folderu, na której widać było tylko trasy, w rzucie z góry, bez poziomic. Oni myśleli, że tam jest prawie rowno! Gdy weszli w skały, po prostu się przerazili. Koledzy wzięli pana pod pachy, my panią, ktoś wziął ich plecak i zaczęliśmy ich sprowadzać w dół, do schroniska.

To były dobre czasy, byliśmy młodzi, silni, a świat wydawał się obiecujący.

Co z tego zostało do dziś? Na pewno rozwiały się nasze nadzieje na podbój Kosmosu. A tak! O tym marzyłam jako młoda osoba! Myślałam jak to będzie wspaniałe, tam, w górze, gdy ludzkość już się ogarnie i przestanie się zbroić, mordować i łamać prawa człowieka i wyruszy eksplorować nieznane światy.

Ale nic takiego się nie stało. Nie ogarneliśmy się. Nadal zabijamy bliźnich, a od jakiegoś czasu zbroimy się na potęgę. Co tam Kosmos, who cares. Furda globalna wioska! Mamy tort i każdy chce zjeść nie tylko swój kawałek, ale też porcję sąsiada.

Dlatego myślę, że nasze czasy nie były takie fatalne. Nie mieliśmy dużo, ale mieliśmy piękne marzenia.

### Collapse, Measurement, and the Recovery of the Voluntary Ground

A pāramitā is a slow-motion object. This is the first thing to recognize, before any inventory of virtues. Generosity, ethics, patience, diligence, concentration, wisdom — these are not commodities one acquires and stockpiles, but qualities that cannot change quickly without becoming something other than themselves. Patience hurried is not patience; it is suppression waiting to detonate. Generosity transacted is not generosity; it is exchange. The perfections move at the pace of ripening, and their stability is precisely their slowness. They are, in the vocabulary of this work, voluntary, without compulsion. The moment force enters — the moment a quality is grasped, demanded, or commodified — it does not merely diminish. It collapses into its opposite. That collapsed state, perfected in its own dark register, is a saṃsāric perfection.

There are twelve of these, each seated in a domain of human activity, and the framework returns finally to a thirteenth that is also the root: the avoidance of self-knowledge, which is simply ignorance (*avidyā*) institutionalized. The name holds at twelve because the thirteenth is not one more item in the row. It is the soil the row grows from.

## Collapse as Measurement

In quantum field theory there is a precise structure for this collapse, and it is not analogy. A system held in superposition carries every possibility at once; it has declared nothing. Measurement — the act of forcing the system to register a definite value against an apparatus — collapses that superposition into a single eigenstate. Before measurement there is no *which*; after, there is only *this*. The slow-motion quality is the superposition: alive, uncommitted, holding its possibilities without partition. Grasping is the measurement. When compassion is compelled, when knowledge is weaponized, when trust is demanded, we have set the apparatus against the field and forced it to declare. What declares is never the luminous possibility. It is the eigenstate of craving — the shadow toward which the worldly concerns were always pressing.

The unsupported luminous essence does not collapse, and the reason is structural rather than moral. There is nothing in it to measure and no measurer standing apart to take the reading. The QFT vacuum is the nearest physical pointer: not emptiness in the sense of absence but the inexhaustible ground from which every excitation arises and into which each decays. It teems. It cannot be depleted. “My electron” and “your electron” are one field differently configured — which is why tonglen is not mysterious but obvious, and why the partition between giver and taker was never real to begin with.

## The Twelve Domains

Religion, when it demands the compassion (*karuṇā*) it should only host, perfects cruelty: *we hurt you for your own salvation*, the inquisitor’s tenderness. Science, grasping knowledge (*prajñā*) as advantage, perfects destruction — and note the recursion, because science’s own measurement problem is the literal mechanism: the demand that nature declare its state destroys the very superposition it sought to read. Philosophy, defending wisdom as territory, perfects confusion; each “clarification” narrows the partition and raises the entropy of what was once open. Economics, hoarding the generosity (*dāna*) that lives only in circulation, perfects poverty — scarcity manufactured amid plenty. Governance, imposing the safety it can only cultivate, perfects oppression: the protection that surveils. Communication, making honesty strategic, perfects misdirection — propaganda, which always carries an orientation, a side, unlike the Heart Sutra, which misdirects no one because it claims no side at all.

Society, legislating equality (*samatā*) through hierarchy, perfects discrimination, conjuring the very categories it claims to dissolve. Technology, monetizing skillful means (*upāya*) until the tool uses the user, perfects corruption — field excitations that should arise and decay naturally instead frozen into persistent structures that distort the field. Entertainment, manufacturing joy, perfects dystopia: the hedonic treadmill institutionalized, ever more stimulus for ever less return, because authentic joy is slow and the manufactured kind is fast. Wealth, grasping abundance as possession, perfects stealing. Politics, betraying trust (*śraddhā*) until honesty becomes a liability, perfects lying — and trust, like safety, cannot be demanded; the loyalty oath produces the disloyalty it fears. Theology, demanding devotion and requiring faith to be proven, perfects faithlessness, because doubt criminalized becomes deeper doubt.

Beneath these twelve sits psychology, the domain of self-knowledge (*ātma-jñāna*), whose collapse is ignorance: insight refused because it is too threatening, defense mechanisms raised to the dignity of architecture, *I’d rather not know*. In the teaching of dependent origination, *avidyā* stands first, the condition under which all the others become possible. Each of the twelve is what *avidyā* looks like once it has chosen a specialty.

## The Fast-Motion Engine

What drives every one of these collapses is the same apparatus: the Eight Worldly Concerns — gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. These four pairs are not sins to be expelled but velocities. They move quickly; they want resolution *now*; they cannot tolerate the open superposition of a slow-motion quality. A domain collapses precisely when it becomes wholly captured by its corresponding concern and loses all slow-motion stability. Economics surrenders to gain and loss. Politics to fame and gain. Psychology to the avoidance of pain. Religion to praise and disgrace. The worldly concerns are the apparatus; the domains are what gets measured; the saṃsāric perfections are the eigenstates that result.

Topology sharpens this. Discrimination — the perfected form of a captured society — requires orientability. To sort, to rank, to assign one side surfeit and the other deficiency, one needs an inside and an outside, a near face and a far. But the ground these qualities express has no such structure. The Klein bottle has no inside or outside to partition; what looks like interior is continuous with what looks like exterior. True equality is not enforced sameness but the plain fact that there is no orientable surface on which discrimination could be inscribed. The möbius strip makes the same point in language: form is emptiness, emptiness is form — traverse “form” and you arrive at “emptiness” without ever crossing a boundary, because there is no boundary to cross. Propaganda has a side. The Möbius strip has none.

## The Recovery

How is a collapse reversed? Not by force — force is what produced it. Here Śāntideva’s architecture in the *Bodhicaryāvatāra* is exact. Confession recognizes honestly that collapse has already occurred; the twelve saṃsāric perfections are precisely what we confess. Adopting bodhicitta is the commitment to non-compulsion, the refusal to demand what can only be hosted. Vigilance and guarding awareness watch for the instant the slow tips toward the fast. Patience is not one antidote among several; it *is* the slow-motion principle, the deliberate refusal to measure prematurely. Effort, concentration, and wisdom then maintain, rest in, and finally recognize the emptiness of the collapse — for the saṃsāric perfections, however vivid, have no inherent existence. They are distorted projections in the bulk, what a clean Nirmāṇakāya becomes when grasping interferes with the projection from the boundary.

This is the quiet teaching inside the dark inventory. The twelve perfections of saṃsāra are not enemies to be defeated; defeating is itself a measurement, another collapse. They are what the luminous qualities look like under compulsion, and they dissolve the moment compulsion is withdrawn and the quality is allowed, once more, to move at its own slow pace. Equality, respect, sincerity, safety, trust, honesty, purity — the Seven Qualities — arise only where no one is forcing them. They cannot be installed. They can only be hosted, voluntarily, in the unsupported ground that was never measured and therefore never broke.

An officer approached the driver’s window. A white jacket, white trousers, but a thin black piping ran through the entire uniform. On his head — a white peaked cap, and on his eyes — black aviators, a rare artifact from ancient times that the police had managed to preserve.

— Good afternoon, sir. Is everything alright? You’ve stopped in a no-parking zone, — the officer said.

— Yes, everything is fine, officer. The sun was blinding me, so I had to stop to put on my sunglasses, — the driver replied, adjusting them.

The officer nodded, glancing at the sun that was soon about to set. His face revealed no emotion.

— I understand. The sun can be quite blinding at this time of year. It’s good you stopped to put on your glasses. You may go. Have a good evening.

— Thank you, and have a good service, — the driver replied and drove on.

A thought flashed through his mind: if the Ministry had power over everything, they would even fix the sun in one position and set its temperature to 4500K.

He continued driving, feeling his thoughts intertwine like an endless network of light and shadow. It was a pity he would never be able to speak with the engineer. It would have been fascinating to learn where he got these ideas, what pushed him to go against the system, how the photographs in the leather notebook came to exist, the sketches, the warm colors, the textures.

The driver realized he would most likely never get answers. Yet, on the other hand, there was always a small trace of hope. Officially, there were no strict punishments for occasionally altering your home interior. There were even underground bars, rooms where people allowed themselves to deviate from the norms. But everyone who understood the rules knew: if you systematically ignore recommendations, you become dangerous to the world. And the system, like an invisible mechanism, always knew what to do with such cases.

He felt that weight. And although silence filled the car, thoughts of the engineer, the chair and warm light, the notebook and the hidden room would not leave him. The system was everywhere — in the light, in the white, in order. And any deviation, any warm beam, could become dangerous…

He arrived at his building, parked in his spot, and slowly walked toward the entrance.

When he entered the apartment, he was met with a familiar cold. A dull, flat, perfectly ordered atmosphere. He had once loved this space, considered it a model of perfection: clean lines, precise angles, perfect 4500K.

But today something had changed.

After that secret warm apartment, his own felt empty. And strangely — it was losing not only to that warm space, but even to the sterile white section.

He sat down in his white leather chair and felt a chill radiating from it.

Strange how color could be felt through the body.

He took off his trench coat, carefully pulled the leather notebook from the inner pocket, and began flipping through the pages.

Sketches.

Photos.

Material notes.

Lighting schemes.

Handwritten proportions of spaces where a person does not feel controlled.

Yes, this was definitely the work of that same engineer. The lines showed experience. Confidence. A person who had spent years designing correct spaces — and had suddenly begun designing living ones.

His gaze stopped on one photograph — a small kitchen with warm light, a wooden floor, textiles. Ordinary. But it radiated warmth.

“He was doing this for someone else as well,” the protagonist thought.

So many ideas are not created for a single apartment.

Which means there are others.

Maybe among his neighbors.

Maybe someone nearby lives in warmth.

Of course, the secret room is an extreme case — probably an exception. But creating a slightly warmer space? Without hidden panels. Without unnecessary noise.

The main thing — don’t show it to anyone, don’t draw attention.

He raised his eyes and slowly scanned his living room. The opposite wall, the lighting, the floor. Theoretically, the color temperature could be changed here. Or the floor material, or the wall texture. Just slightly.

His heart began to beat faster. This was no longer curiosity — it was temptation.

He always saw spaces as living structures. Even good ones — especially good ones — could be improved slightly: soften the light, shift the focus, add depth.

This was his strength. He saw potential where others saw completion.

But now everything was different.

His “standard” space suddenly stopped being a standard. He no longer wanted to adjust it. He didn’t want minor corrections. He didn’t want small improvements. He wanted to rebuild it completely.

From scratch.

Not refine it — but destroy it and create it again.

He stood up from the chair and slowly walked through the room. He ran his hand along the cold wall. The light was even, without shadows. The floor was perfect, but lifeless. For the first time, he didn’t see safety in it — he saw limitation.

He sat on the sofa, activated the virtual mode, and opened the last scanned apartment.

In a second, a wooden wall appeared in front of him with a built-in TV. Beneath it — a floating metal cabinet. Its surfaces reflected the warm glow of a bio-fireplace.

It was incredible.

Metal, which in his world was always cold and sterile, had changed here. It didn’t feel distant — it absorbed light, reflected the warmth of the apartment, and added depth. Metal became alive through its surroundings.

He slowly studied the textures. Wood with slight irregularities in its grain. Warm light with soft shadows. Fabrics that were not afraid of imperfection.

He wanted to touch it so badly.

He lowered his gaze to the virtual sofa — deep saturated color, textured leather, soft folds. He reached out his hand…

And felt cold.

Reality returned instantly.

He was sitting on his flawless silver sofa. Smooth. Perfect. Dead.

This is not for him, he realized. Not virtuality. Not observation.

He wanted to implement it. To create it. To feel the result not through glasses, but through skin, through the smell of wood, through the warmth of light.

The essence of his calling hadn’t changed — he was still a space corrector. But his understanding of comfort had changed.

He removed his glasses — the chill of the apartment hit his face.

He could print a chair or a lamp with warm light. At least one object. A small experiment.

But they were not issued colored filling materials.

Only white and black.

And in that moment, it struck him.

The shredder.

He had processed material left over. Standard procedure: after space cleaning, leftover materials must be delivered to the waste department. He had done it dozens of times. Routine. Normal.

And there, he had often seen confiscated cartridges with colored filling. They lay in separate containers labeled:

— Non-standard spectrum

— Temperature regulation violation

— Pigment confiscated

He had access. He always had access.

He only needed to bring processed waste, register the transfer, enter the pre-sorting section. There were no cameras there — only weight and time-of-stay scanners. The system recorded volume, but did not analyze every movement of the hands.

Theoretically, if the container weight stayed within the margin of error… if he didn’t stay longer than allowed… if he acted calmly… he could take one cartridge. A small one.

Though it was very risky.

But not meaningless.

He stood up. His heart was beating more steadily than expected. He had worked within the system his entire life. He knew its blind spots. He knew it controlled large deviations but ignored microscopic ones. The system was not afraid of small changes.

As long as they remained small.

Tomorrow he would go to the Ministry of Spatial Balance.

A normal day.

A normal disposal procedure.

A normal space corrector.

And only one small cartridge would change everything.

A Theory of Moral Life That Begins Where Moral Life Actually Begins

For the past several years, I have worked as a data annotator, prompt engineer, and AI model trainer in advanced, domain-specific reasoning. It is work I have thoroughly enjoyed because it is cognitively demanding, intensely focused, and wildlycreative. When training a model on advanced reasoning, you are not only evaluating what the model produces given its training data. You are identifying where and how it begins to fail. What interests me most, however, is the synthesis that well-trained models produce when asked to engage in genuinely interdisciplinary analysis.

This interests me personally because I recognize the same tendency in myself. As a neurodivergent person with training in psychology and human behavior, I naturally look for patterns across complex and seemingly unrelated domains. What others sometimes experience as hyper-focus or an inability to switch tasks mid-flow, I experience as the joy of pattern recognition: the synthesis of logical structures from apparently disparate fields of knowledge. And it is precisely that joy that makes epistemic closure and professional gatekeeping so frustrating to encounter. When disciplines protect their territory rather than pursue their questions, the patterns that only become visible across boundaries remain invisible.

I will give you an example. My work in AI model training has made me acutely aware of how urgently we need moral philosophers and ethicists in the room with AI developers and entrepreneurs: not just for model training, but for the ethical decisions shaping AI development and its consequences for individuals and society. The personality of the developer and entrepreneur is not naturally inclined toward difficult moral questions about what technology will do to people. Their role is to dream large and disrupt the status quo. To use a simple analogy: they are the accelerator. Ethicists are the steering. Government regulation provides the road markings, guardrails, and warning signs. Each role is necessary. None can substitute for the others.

Which raises the obvious question: if we can see this clearly, why is it not happening? Or stated more simply, if we know what is right, why are we not doing it?

Traditional Western philosophy, along with what we tend to call common sense, has placed the answer to that question in our capacity to apply moral principles to moral problems at the moment of deliberation. The implicit logic runs like this: we encounter a moral problem, apply the relevant rules and facts, deliberate carefully, and make the right decision. It is a tidy picture. It is also largely false.

The behavioral economist Dan Ariely put it plainly: we are predictably irrational. Aristotle named the phenomenon akrasia, weakness of will, and treated it as a puzzle requiring explanation. Paul of Tarsus expressed it with devastating honesty: "The good that I would, I do not; the evil that I would not, that I do." Every major moral tradition across continents, cultures, and centuries has wrestled with the same phenomenon. Western philosophy is no exception, deploying principle-based deontology, consequence-calculating utilitarianism, and contractarian justification, yet consistently arriving at the same impasse. Not because the reasoning was insufficiently rigorous, but because the reasoning was looking in the wrong place.

For centuries, we have located the problem in deliberation, in the cognitively demanding process of reasoning through a moral situation in real time. The underlying assumption, rarely stated because rarely questioned, is that poor behavior is the product of poor reasoning. The fault lies in applying the wrong principle, miscalculating consequences, or failing to consider the relevant factors. And if that is the cause, the solution is straightforward: better principles, more rigorous logic, better information, stronger institutions, and more friction to slow down bad decisions until someone with better reasoning capacity can intervene.

But consider what people actually say when confronted with the consequences of harmful decisions and harmful behavior. In nearly every circumstance, across contexts personal and institutional, political and corporate, the words are some version of the same thing, spoken sometimes honestly, sometimes not: "I didn't know. I couldn't see. I wasn't aware."

Not: I reasoned incorrectly.

The confession is perceptual before it is deliberative. And that is the most common-sense indicator available to us that reasoning and deliberation have never truly been where the problem lives.

This idea, that faulty reasoning is the root of moral failure, is empirically false and phenomenologically inadequate. Furthermore, this idea is not a minor technical problem that a more sophisticated version of the same approach can solve. Rather, it is a foundational misidentification of where moral life actually begins.

Moral life does not begin in reasoning. It begins in perception.

And if that is true, then the primary moral question is not "what should I do?" It is "what am I able to see?" and what has to be cultivated, protected, and sometimes recovered, to see more clearly than the habits, histories, and systems surrounding us have been designed to allow.

A note on intellectual debts and departures. The philosophical tradition of moral perceptualism — running from Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil through Lawrence Blum, John McDowell, and Robert Audi — has long argued that moral perception precedes moral judgment and that attention is the primary moral capacity. That tradition is right, and this essay is built on its foundation. But it has remained largely within analytic and phenomenological philosophy, without integrating the predictive processing framework that now makes its central claims neurobiologically legible; without accounting for the collective and institutional mechanisms — Bandura's moral disengagement, Foucault's regimes of visibility, Freire's colonization of consciousness — by which moral perception is distorted at scale; and without reckoning with the attention economy as a structural form of moral incapacitation. This essay is an attempt to extend the tradition's insight into those territories: to show not only that perception is primary, but why it is currently being systematically undermined, by whom, and what would be required to defend it.

What follows is not a conventional philosophical argument. It is a theory built from the ground up: eight postulates that describe what genuine moral perception requires, what shapes and deforms it, what cultivates and protects it, and by what standard it is evaluated. Each postulate is grounded in experience before it is stated plainly, and evidenced by research after it lands. The theory is called Perceptual Ethics. Its central claim is simple enough to state and demanding enough to require the full argument: most ethical theory focuses on what you should do when you face a moral decision. Perceptual Ethics focuses on what you have to become before that moment arrives.

Postulate One: Most moral life and decisions concerning morality are decided pre-cognitively through heuristics, mental shortcuts we rely on when cognitively depleted.

The claim that most moral life runs on heuristics rather than deliberation is not a philosophical opinion. It is one of the most empirically robust findings in cognitive science and moral psychology, and it fundamentally changes what we should be doing when we talk about moral development.

The neuroscientist Karl Friston, whose free energy principle has transformed how we understand the brain's organization, describes the brain not as a passive receiver of information but as a prediction machine: a biological system constantly generating models of what is about to happen and updating those models when reality fails to match the prediction. Crucially, this system is driven by a commitment to energy conservation. Full deliberative processing, the kind of careful, explicit, step-by-step reasoning that moral philosophy has traditionally relied upon, is metabolically expensive. It requires sustained attention, the recruitment of prefrontal resources, and the tolerance of uncertainty. Under conditions of fatigue, stress, time pressure, emotional overwhelm, or simple cognitive depletion, the brain does not deliberate. It defaults to well-worn predictive models that require minimal updating. These are heuristics, not failures of moral reasoning. They are the normal, energy-efficient operation of a biological system that must act in real time in a complex world.

But here is what most accounts of heuristic thinking understate: we are not only in heuristic space when we are exhausted or overwhelmed. We are there far more often than we recognize or would like to admit.

Think about the last time you drove a familiar route. You arrived at your destination with almost no conscious memory of the drive: the turns, the traffic, the decisions made at intersections. Your body executed the journey while your mind was somewhere else entirely, processing what happened in this morning's meeting or rehearsing a difficult conversation you have not yet had. Behavior that once required deliberate attention had become sufficiently practiced that the brain delegated it toautomatic processing, freeing prefrontal resources for other tasks. Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist whose decades of research on mindlessness documented this phenomenon extensively, found that familiar contexts reliably produce automatic, context-driven behavior, which she called mindlessness, not as an occasional failure of attention but as the brain's efficient default in well-known territory.

The psychologist Matthew Killingsworth and the philosopher Daniel Gilbert found in a landmark Harvard study that the human mind is wandering, not present to what is actually happening, approximately 47 percent of waking life. Nearly half of our conscious hours are spent not in the situation we are inhabiting but in the mental processing of situations past or future. And it is precisely in those moments of preoccupation, when your attention is still caught in what happened earlier, or caught in anticipation of something approaching, that a situation requiring genuine moral attention can arrive without warning. The moral demand appears. The deliberative resources are already elsewhere. And the heuristic responds in their place.

The transition from automatic to deliberative processing is not free. It requires what cognitive scientists call executive override: the effortful recruitment of prefrontal attention to interrupt automatic processing. This transition is genuinely costly, does not happen instantaneously, and requires a disruption significant enough to signal that the automatic response is inadequate. In Friston's terms, it requires a prediction error large enough to demand active model updating rather than heuristic application. In ordinary terms, it requires something to break through, and in the texture of ordinary moral life, that breaking through often does not happen until after the heuristic has already responded.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, whose research on human judgment and decision-making earned the Nobel Prize in Economics, described this as the difference between System One and System Two thinking. System Two is slow, deliberate, effortful, and logical: the kind of thinking moral philosophy assumes we are doing when we make moral decisions. System One is fast, automatic, associative, and largely unconscious: the kind of thinking we are actually doing most of the time. The uncomfortable implication is that System Two is not the default. It is the exception. And it is the first casualty of depletion.

The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt went further. His Social Intuitionist Model demonstrated that moral judgments are not typically the product of deliberation at all. They arrive rapidly and intuitively, as immediate felt responses to a situation, and deliberative reasoning typically follows, not to produce the judgment but to justify it after the fact. We decide first. We reason afterward. And we experience the reasoning as though it were the cause rather than the rationalization. Haidt called this the moral dog wagging its rational tail, and the research supporting it is extensive.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio added the physiological dimension. His patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the region integrating emotional processing with decision-making, retained full logical capacity but lost the ability to make effective decisions. Without the somatic markers, the bodily, emotional signals that normally assign weight and significance to options, they could reason about choices indefinitely and arrive at no action. Reasoning without an emotional substrate is not purer reasoning. There is no reasoning at all in any functional sense. Emotion is not the enemy of moral judgment. It is a necessary condition.

What this means practically is both clarifying and uncomfortable. If most moral life runs on heuristics, on the pre-cognitive defaults that the nervous system reaches for not only under pressure but during the vast, ordinary, distracted, preoccupied majority of waking life, then the quality of those defaults is the primary determinant of moral behavior. Not the quality of our principles. Not the rigor of our deliberation. The defaults.

A person whose heuristic defaults are organized around openness, harm-anticipation, and the recognition of others' dignity will behave morally under conditions of depletion, which is to say, under the conditions that actually govern most of moral life. A person whose defaults are organized around self-protection, threat-response, and tribal closure will not, regardless of how clearly they can articulate the right principles when fully resourced and given sufficient time to think.

This is why moral education, organized primarily around the transmission of principles and the training of deliberative reasoning, has always underperformed against its own expectations. It is training the exception while neglecting the rule. It is building a sophisticated instrument for the rare moments of full deliberative capacity while leaving the defaults, the moral infrastructure that operates in all the other moments, largely unexamined and uncultivated.

The question that follows from Postulate One is then not how to reason better in the moment of moral decision. It is what we have to become before that moment arrives, and specifically, what kind of prior work determines whether the heuristics thattake over under depletion, distraction, and the ordinary preoccupations of a human life are oriented toward dignity or away from it.

That question is what the second postulate addresses.

There is a video I have returned to many times over the years that has never stopped challenging me personally.

In December 2003, Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of the murders of 48 women in Washington State and was sentenced in a King County courtroom. One by one, the families of his victims were given ten minutes to speak. The statements were raw, anguished, and entirely understandable: rage, grief, the wish for his suffering, the assurance of his damnation. Through all of it, Ridgway sat stone-faced and cold. Defiant in his disregard. Unmoved.

Then Robert Rule stood up. His daughter Linda had been one of Ridgway's victims. He looked at the man who had murdered her and said: "Mr. Ridgway, there are people here that hate you. I'm not one of them. You've made it difficult to live up to what Ibelieve, and that is what God says to do, and that is to forgive. And you are forgiven, sir." Ridgway wept.

It would be easy, and incomplete, to locate the moral event in those 42 words. To say that forgiveness broke through where condemnation could not. But that reading misses what is most important about what Robert Rule did. The words were not the act. They were the expression of something that had already been cultivated long before he entered that courtroom: a prior, costly, ongoing commitment to seeing the full humanity of another person even under conditions that would give anyone every justification to do otherwise.

Robert Rule did not arrive at that moment and decide to forgive. He arrived at that moment already formed, already carrying the perceptual and moral orientation that made what he said not only possible but genuine. The cultivation was prior. The words were its expression. And it was the genuineness, the fact that Ridgway could perceive he was being seen as a human being rather than performed at, that produced the only moment of real remorse in the entire proceeding.

This is what the second postulate describes. Not the heroic decision made in the extraordinary moment. The ordinary, daily, effortful work of becoming someone whose defaults, when everything is at stake and cognitive and emotional resources are maximally depleted, are oriented toward the recognition of another's humanity rather than away from it.

Postulate Two: The quality of moral perception when cognitively depleted is proportional to the prior work of recognizing another's right to dignity.

Robert Rule's 42 words did not produce remorse in Gary Ridgway. They revealed it, made it possible, by creating the only condition under which genuine remorse could surface: the recognition of his humanity by someone who had every reason to deny it. But the more important question for Perceptual Ethics is not what those words did to Ridgway. It is what decades of prior cultivation made possible in Robert Rule, because what he demonstrated in that courtroom was not a decision made in the moment. It was the expression of a perceptual orientation built long before that moment arrived.

This is precisely what the second postulate claims, and cognitive science is unambiguous in its support.

We established in Postulate One that most moral life runs on heuristics, on the pre-cognitive defaults the nervous system reaches for under conditions of depletion, distraction, and the ordinary preoccupations of a human life. The question Postulate Two answers is: what determines the quality of those defaults? What prior work shapes whether the heuristic that surfaces under maximum pressure is oriented toward the recognition of another's humanity or away from it?

The neuroscientist Karl Friston's predictive processing framework provides the mechanistic answer. The brain's generative models, the predictive frameworks through which we perceive and respond to the world, are not fixed. They are updated through experience, practice, and the repeated cultivation of particular ways of engaging with the world. What we practice becomes what we default to. The person who has repeatedly, deliberately, and effortfully practiced perceiving others as full bearers of dignity, even when that perception is uncomfortable, even when it is socially unsupported, even when it costssomething, is building a generative model that will reach for dignity recognition when deliberative resources are unavailable. The person who has not done that work will reach for something else.

The philosopher Aristotle understood this before neuroscience existed to explain it. His account of habituation, the repeated practice that forms character, is, on this account, the deliberate construction of better predictive models and more prosocial default heuristics. Character is not what you decide to be in the moment of moral crisis. It is the accumulated residue of what you have repeatedly perceived, felt, and done in all the moments that preceded it. The crisis only reveals what the habituation has built.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch specified what that habituation must be directed toward. It is not sufficient to practice rule-following or principle-application. What must be cultivated is the quality of attention itself, the capacity to see the other person clearly, to resist the distorting pull of self-interest, fear, and the need for self-justification, and to allow the reality of another person's situation and humanity to genuinely register. "If you have spent years cultivating a self-centered, fearful, fantasy-distorted relationship to other people," she wrote, "no amount of procedural deliberation will produce genuine moral responsiveness." The cultivation is prior. The responsiveness is its fruit.

The psychologist Albert Bandura's research on self-efficacy adds a critical dimension: this cultivation is not merely cognitive but experiential and relational. The developed, experientially grounded sense of one's own moral capacity, the belief, built through practice and feedback, that one can actually organize meaningful moral action in the world, is itself a precondition for the kind of prior work the postulate describes. You cannot cultivate what you do not believe is possible. And the belief that dignity recognition is possible, even in the hardest cases, is itself something that must be developed rather than assumed.

What Robert Rule demonstrated in that courtroom was the cumulative product of all of this. Not a heroic decision. Not an exceptional capacity unavailable to ordinary people. The expression, under maximally depleting conditions, grief, public exposure, the presence of the man who had murdered his daughter, of a perceptual orientation that had been built, sustained, and tested long before that moment arrived. The cultivation was prior. The words were its expression. And the remorse they produced in Ridgway was the evidence that genuine moral perception, the real seeing of another's humanity, does something that argument, condemnation, and shame cannot do. It changes what is possible in the room.

This points toward the next question the theory must answer. If the quality of moral perception under depletion is determined by prior cultivation, what is the developmental foundation on which that cultivation itself depends? What must be present in the perceiver before the work of recognizing another's dignity can be genuinely rather than performatively done?

That is what the third postulate addresses.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from working too hard or sleeping too little. It comes from giving something you have never learned to give yourself.

Most people who struggle with genuine self-compassion do not experience themselves as self-neglecting. They experience themselves as caring, attentive, and other-oriented. They are often the person others turn to in a crisis. They are reliably present, reliably accommodating, reliably available. What they cannot reliably do is receive the same quality of attention they extend. They deflect care. They minimize their own needs. They experience their own dignity claims as somehow less urgent, less legitimate, or less real than everyone else's. And they do this not from deliberate choice but from a perceptual framework that was built, before they had the capacity to evaluate it, around the implicit lesson that their own dignity was not a primary category worth honoring.

The exhaustion that follows is not merely personal. It is perceptual. A person who cannot honor their own dignity cannot attend to others clearly, because they are always simultaneously managing the suppressed awareness of their own unmet dignity claims. What presents as exceptional attentiveness to others is often, on closer examination, a hypervigilant scanning of the relational environment organized not around genuine other-directedness but around the anticipation and accommodation of others' needs as a survival strategy. It looks like moral perception. It is its simulation under conditions of chronic self-denial.

The most concentrated structural illustration of how this pattern gets installed is the family system organized around addiction. The adult child of an alcoholic grows up inside a hierarchy of dignity claims in which everyone's needs, perceptions, feelings,and relational reality are systematically subordinated to the management of the dependent person's state. The child learns before they have language for it that the room must be read constantly, that emotional weather must be anticipated accurately, that their own needs are at best secondary and at worst disruptive. They develop extraordinary relational attunement. They become skilled at perceiving what others need and providing it. What they do not develop, because the conditions for its development were not present, is the capacity to perceive their own dignity as equally real and equally worthy of the same attunement.

That child grows into an adult who extends care with remarkable fluency and receives it with remarkable difficulty. They people-please not because they are weak but because their perceptual framework has no reliable category for their own dignity claims as legitimate. They inhabit relational inequity not because they have chosen it but because it is the only relational model their formation provided. And the people around them, those who accept the extension of care without reciprocating it, are not necessarily malicious. They are inhabiting a relational world organized around dignity inequity, which trains their own perceptual apparatus toward exactly the selective dignity recognition that the theory has been identifying as the foundational failure of moral perception.

The relational harm runs in both directions. The person who cannot honor their own dignity is harmed by the asymmetry. And the person who is allowed to receive dignity without extending it is also harmed, not equally, not symmetrically, but really: their capacity for genuine moral perception is impaired by inhabiting a relationship in which their dignity is consistently honoredwhile another's is not. That is a world organized around selective dignity. And selective dignity, as the previous postulates have established, corrupts the perceptual apparatus of everyone formed within it.

Postulate Three: Y ou cannot perceive or honor the dignity of others if you cannot perceive and honor your own.

The postulate makes a claim that cuts against two deeply embedded cultural assumptions simultaneously. The first is the assumption that self-denial is a form of moral virtue, that the person who subordinates their own needs to others' is demonstrating genuine other-directedness rather than a perceptual distortion with costs for everyone involved. The second is the assumption that self-compassion is a form of self-indulgence, a therapeutic luxury rather than a developmental foundation for genuine moral perception.

Both assumptions are empirically wrong. And the evidence comes from cognitive science, moral psychology, and the clinical literature on relational formation.

Kristin Neff, the researcher whose work established self-compassion as a measurable psychological capacity, defines it precisely enough to distinguish it from both self-pity and self-indulgence. Self-compassion has three components that operate together: mindful awareness of one's own suffering without over-identification or suppression; a sense of common humanity, the recognition that suffering and failure are part of the shared human experience rather than evidence of personal inadequacy; and self-kindness, the extension of warmth and honest acknowledgment to oneself rather than harsh self-judgment. Together, these three components produce something that neither self-pity nor self-indulgence produces: the stable perceptual ground from which genuine attention to others becomes possible.

Neff's research demonstrated that self-compassion is positively correlated with the very capacities that genuine moral perception requires: emotional resilience, the ability to tolerate distress without either suppressing it or being overwhelmed by it; perspective-taking, the capacity to see situations from positions other than one's own; and genuine empathy, as distinct from the empathic distress that characterizes people who have not developed the capacity to maintain their own perceptual stability while attending to others' suffering. Crucially, self-compassionate individuals show higher levels of genuine other-directedness, not lower, than those organized around self-criticism and self-denial. The counterintuitive finding that Neff's research consistently produces is that the path to genuine care for others runs through rather than around the development of genuine care for oneself.

Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis provides the neurological grounding for why this is the case. Moral perception, as Postulate One established, is not a purely cognitive operation. It is an embodied one, requiring the integration of interoceptive signals, the brain's ongoing reading of the body's internal state, with the perceptual and predictive processing through which we encounter others. A person whose interoceptive signals have been trained, through years of formation in adignity-denying relational environment, to register their own needs and feelings as irrelevant or dangerous, is a person whose somatic markers are systematically misfiring in the domain of self-perception. And because the brain uses the same interoceptive and predictive architecture for perceiving others that it uses for perceiving itself, the distortion in self-perception produces a corresponding distortion in other-perception. You cannot accurately read another person's dignity claims through a perceptual apparatus that has been trained to suppress your own.

The clinical literature on adult children of alcoholics, developed most systematically by the psychologist Janet Woititz, whose 1983 book Adult Children of Alcoholics documented the relational patterns produced by formation within addiction-organized family systems, specifies what that distortion looks like in practice. Adult children of alcoholics characteristically struggle with knowing what normal is because their relational formation did not include a reliable model of a dignity-honoring relationship. They judge themselves without mercy while having difficulty applying the same standard to others in either direction. They have difficulty identifying what they need and feel, because the perceptual category for their own inner experience was systematically deprioritized during formation. They are loyal beyond reason, because loyalty was the survival strategy that formation required. And they confuse love with pity or rescuing, because the relational model available to them organized care around the management of another's suffering rather than the mutual recognition of each other's dignity.

These are not merely personal psychological patterns. They are perceptual distortions produced by formation within a system organized around dignity inequity. And they demonstrate with clinical precision what the postulate claims theoretically: the person who cannot perceive and honor their own dignity cannot fully perceive and honor others'. Not because they lack moral concern, but because the perceptual apparatus through which they encounter both themselves and others was formed in conditions that did not include their own dignity as a real and primary category.

Albert Bandura's self-efficacy framework adds a developmental dimension that connects this postulate to the broader arc of the theory. Self-efficacy, the developed, experientially grounded belief in one's capacity to organize meaningful action in the world, is domain-specific. The person who has not developed self-compassion has not developed self-efficacy in the domain of their own dignity. They do not believe, at the level of embodied perceptual default, that their own dignity claims are real, legitimate, and worth honoring. And that absence of efficacy in the self-directed domain produces a corresponding absence of genuine efficacy in the other-directed domain: the care they extend is not grounded in the stable perceptual recognition of dignity as a real and mutual category. It is grounded in the familiar survival strategy of accommodating others' claims while suppressing their own.

This is why the development of self-compassion is not a preliminary to moral development that can be assumed or bypassed. It is the developmental foundation on which genuine moral perception is built. Without it, what presents as other-directed moral attention is frequently a sophisticated version of the same perceptual distortion that formation installed: the management of relational reality organized around others' dignity at the expense of one's own, which corrupts the moral field for everyone involved.

The people pleasing that results from this distortion is not merely personally costly. It is morally problematic in a precise sense that the theory can now name. People pleasing is the systematic production of relational inequity through the suppression of one's own dignity claims. It trains the people around the pleaser to inhabit a relational world in which their dignity is consistently honored without reciprocal obligation. It models for children and others in the relational field that dignity is not mutual, that care flows in one direction, and that the subordination of self is what goodness looks like. And it prevents the genuine dialogic encounter that Freire identified as the condition for mutual moral development, because genuine dialogue requires two people who each bring their own dignity claims into the conversation as real and legitimate.

Simone Weil's account of attention is clarified and deepened by this postulate. The genuine attention she describes, the suspension of one's own projective activity to allow the reality of another person's situation to register, requires a stable perceptual ground from which the suspension can occur. The person who cannot honor their own dignity is not suspending their projective activity when they attend to others. They are enacting it, projecting onto the relational field the familiar pattern of their own dignity's subordination and calling it care. Genuine attention, in Weil's demanding sense, is only available to the person who has developed enough self-compassion to know what they themselves need, feel, and claim, and who can therefore genuinely set it aside temporarily in the service of attending to another, rather than having already permanently suppressed it as irrelevant.

The transition from Postulate Three to Postulate Four follows from the most demanding implication of everything this postulate has established. If self-compassion is the developmental foundation of genuine dignity recognition, and if genuine dignityrecognition is what Postulate Two established as the prior work that determines the quality of moral perception under depletion, then the question is: what must that dignity recognition be directed toward? What is the scope of the commitment? Whose dignity must be included for the perceptual foundation to hold?

That is what the fourth postulate addresses.

Most of us know Lord Acton's axiom in its familiar form: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." We tend to receive it as a moral observation, a warning about what unchecked authority does to character. And it is that. But the deeper mechanism Acton was pointing toward is not primarily moral. It is perceptual.

Power corrupts perception before it corrupts anything else.

Here is why. Power, political, economic, institutional, and social, insulates the person who holds it from the consequences of their decisions. The executive who authorizes a policy that devastates a community does not experience the devastation. The legislator who votes for the law that increases suffering does not encounter that suffering in their daily life. The platform architect whose design choices fragment millions of people's attentional capacity does not feel that fragmentation in their own body. The distance between decision and consequence is not incidental to the exercise of power. It is structural. And that structural distance produces a specific and predictable perceptual failure: the humanity of those harmed becomes increasingly difficult to see, not necessarily because the decision-maker is malicious, but because the feedback loop that would make that humanity legible has been severed by the insulation that power provides.

This is the social dimension of Acton's axiom that almost never gets named. Power does not primarily make people want to do wrong. It makes the wrongness increasingly invisible, to themselves, to their peers, to the institutions that surround and reinforce their perception. The harm continues not because it is chosen with full awareness but because it cannot be seen clearly from where the decision-maker stands. And the more insulated from consequence power makes you, the less you can see, and the less you can see, the easier it becomes to make decisions that produce further harm. The corruption is self- reinforcing precisely because it operates at the level of perception rather than deliberation.

History is not short of examples. Every system that has restricted dignity to a subset of people, by race, by gender, by religion, by sexuality, by economic position, by criminal history, by national origin, has produced this same pattern. The restriction does not merely harm those excluded. It degrades the moral perception of everyone operating within the system that produces the exclusion. The slaveholder does not merely harm the enslaved person. He damages his own capacity to see. The institution that renders certain populations as less than fully human does not merely violate those populations' dignity. It systematically narrows the perceptual field of everyone formed within it. Selective dignity, dignity extended only to those whose suffering is legible from where power stands, is not merely unjust. It is perceptually self-defeating. It corrupts the very capacity it claims to be exercising.

Which raises the question that the third postulate leaves open. If self-compassion is the developmental foundation of genuine dignity recognition, and if the cultivation of dignity recognition is the prior work that determines the quality of moral perception under depletion, what is the foundational commitment that the work of cultivation must be directed toward? What must be held as non-negotiable before any of the other work can proceed?

Postulate Four: The ability to perceive a moral dilemma requires agreement on the universal dignity of all people, regardless of cultural expressions of dignity, and an awareness of the potential for a dignity violation.

The postulate makes a claim that will feel uncomfortable to some readers and obvious to others, and that tension is worth sitting with before moving past it. The claim is not that all cultures express dignity in the same way. They do not, and the attempt to impose a single cultural expression of dignity as universal is itself a form of domination that the theory explicitly rejects. The claim is more precise and more demanding than that: the capacity to perceive a moral dilemma at all requires a prior commitment to the dignity of all people as non-negotiable, not earned, not conditional, not restricted to those whose humanity is already legible within one's existing perceptual framework.

This is not a metaphysical assertion floating free of human experience. It is a phenomenological and empirical one. And the evidence for it comes from multiple directions simultaneously.

The cognitive scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose constructed emotion theory transformed how we understand the relationship between perception and feeling, provides the neurological grounding. The categories through which we perceive others, the emotional and conceptual frameworks that determine whose suffering registers as a genuine claim and whose registers as noise, inconvenience, or deserved consequence, are constructed from prior experience, cultural learning, and social formation. They are not given. They are built. And they can be built to include or to exclude. A perceptual framework that has been built, through education, media, institutional formation, and the accumulated experience of living within particular social arrangements, to assign reduced moral status to certain populations will not register their suffering as morally significant regardless of the quality of the perceiver's deliberative reasoning. The exclusion happens before deliberation begins.

The social psychologist Henri Tajfel, whose Social Identity Theory documented the mechanisms by which group membership shapes moral perception, demonstrated that the tendency to assign differential moral weight to in-group and out-group members is not merely a cultural artifact. It is a deeply embedded perceptual default, one that operates automatically, below the threshold of deliberate awareness, and produces measurably different moral responses to identical situations depending solely on whether the person involved is perceived as belonging to the same group as the perceiver. Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory extends this in a related but distinct direction: where Tajfel shows that group membership shapes who receives full moral consideration, Haidt shows that the moral intuitions governing automatic response are organized around foundations, care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty, that are weighted differently across individuals and cultures, producing genuinely different perceptual responses to the same moral situation. What one person perceives immediately as an injustice requiring response, another perceives as the appropriate maintenance of order. The difference is not in their reasoning. It is in their moral perception.

This is precisely why the universality of dignity cannot be left as an assumption. It must be a cultivated commitment, held deliberately, examined regularly, and extended specifically to those whose dignity the perceiver's existing framework has not yet learned to see. The history of moral progress, in every culture and every era, is the history of the expansion of the circle of moral consideration: the gradual, contested, costly extension of dignity recognition to populations previously excluded from it. Women. Enslaved people. Children. Those with disabilities. Those whose sexuality or gender identity differed from the dominant norm. Each expansion was resisted. Each resistance was grounded in perceptual frameworks that could not yet see what the expansion required them to see. And each expansion, once achieved, did not merely benefit those newly included. It enlarged the moral perception of everyone within the culture, expanding the range of suffering that could register as a claim, deepening the capacity for genuine moral responsiveness, and producing the conditions under which further expansion became possible.

This is what the eighth postulate will eventually claim in full: dignity is generative. But the generativity depends on the universality. A dignity that is conditional, extended only to those who have earned it, demonstrated it, or belong to the right category, is not dignity in any morally meaningful sense. It is a preference. And preference, however strongly felt, cannot serve as the anchor for moral perception because it is subject to exactly the distortions, dehumanization, attribution of blame, moral justification, euphemistic labeling, that the theory has been describing as the primary mechanisms of moral failure.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, whose capabilities approach specified what genuine human flourishing requires in concrete and embodied terms, and the economist Amartya Sen, whose development as freedom framework distinguished between formal rights and real capabilities, together provide the evaluative standard that grounds the universality claim without requiring metaphysical foundations. Dignity is not universal because of a philosophical argument about rational personhood. It is universal because the conditions it describes, agency, relational freedom, protection from arbitrary power, the real rather than merely formal capacity for a fully human life, are conditions under which human beings actually flourish, and their absence is a condition under which human beings actually suffer in ways that are recognizable across cultural variation, even when their specific expressions differ. The universality is phenomenological and pragmatic before it is philosophical. It does not require agreement on first principles. It requires only the honest observation that suffering is real, that its causes are identifiable, and that no cultural variation makes its systematic production acceptable.

Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus adds the sociological dimension that completes the account of how dignity restriction becomes perceptually embedded. Habitus describes the internalization of social structure into bodily and perceptual dispositions: the process by which the dominant view of the world comes to feel like common sense rather than ideology, likeaccurate perception rather than a framework constructed in the service of particular interests. The person who has been formed within a social structure that restricts dignity to certain populations does not experience themselves as holding a restricted view of dignity. They experience themselves as perceiving reality accurately. The restriction feels like recognition. And that is precisely why the commitment to universal dignity must be cultivated deliberately and examined regularly, because the default, in any social structure organized around hierarchy and exclusion, is the naturalization of that hierarchy as the perceptual baseline.

The awareness of the potential for a dignity violation, the second component of the postulate, follows directly from this. If the perceptual framework can exclude, if habitus naturalizes restriction, and if moral disengagement mechanisms operate below the threshold of deliberate awareness, then genuine moral perception requires not only the commitment to universal dignity but the active, ongoing attentiveness to the ways that commitment is being compromised, in oneself, in one's institutions, in the social arrangements one inhabits and benefits from. The awareness is not paranoia. It is the appropriate epistemic posture of a perceiver who understands that their own perceptual framework is always already shaped by forces that do not serve everyone equally.

The transition from Postulate Four to Postulate Five follows from exactly this recognition. If the commitment to universal dignity must be cultivated deliberately against the grain of social structures that naturalize its restriction, then the question of how moral perception is formed and deformed by the power structures within which development occurs is not a separate political question running alongside the theory. It is the next essential question the theory must answer.

There is a particular loneliness that comes with genuine perceptual growth that almost no one talks about honestly. When something you have encountered, a relationship, an experience, a person whose reality your existing framework could not accommodate, reorganizes the way you see, you find yourself temporarily living in a larger world than the language available to you can fully convey. You reach for words and find that the people you are speaking to are filtering them through a framework that assigns them different meanings. The thing you now see clearly is genuinely difficult to communicate to someone who has not yet had the experience that made it visible. This is not arrogance. It is the epistemological consequence of genuine perceptual reorganization. The framework and the language it lives in are not separable.

Translators know this intimately. Every language contains words and concepts that have no direct equivalent in another, not because one language is richer or more sophisticated, but because each language developed within a particular lifeworld, a particular set of social arrangements and relational realities that produced the need for those words. The untranslatable word is evidence of an untranslatable experience. And the experience is untranslatable, not because it is ineffable, but because the perceptual framework required to receive it has not yet been formed in the person you are speaking to.

Shakespeare understood this too, though he expressed it as tragedy rather than theory. Romeo and Juliet does not fail because the lovers are impractical or naive. It fails because the inherited social frameworks within which both families lived, the structures that determined who was acceptable, who was legitimate, whose humanity warranted full moral consideration, could not register what the two young people had seen across the boundary those frameworks had drawn. The Montagues and Capulets were not evil. They were formed. And what they had been formed into could not accommodate the dignity recognition that crossed the line their formation had taught them was natural, necessary, and right.

What these experiences share, the loneliness of growth that cannot yet be communicated, the untranslatable word, the love that crossed the boundary of inherited acceptability, is a single structural truth. The frameworks we inherit present themselves as a natural order. They feel like clarity rather than constraint. They feel like reality rather than construction. Until we encounter something they cannot accommodate. And in that encounter, disorienting, costly, and often lonely, the framework becomes visible as a framework for the first time. The water becomes visible to the fish. And what we discover, almost always with some degree of discomfort and sometimes with something closer to grief, is that the natural order we were formed into was not neutral. It was organized. It served particular interests. And it systematically excluded certain people's dignity from the range of what our perception had been trained to see.

Postulate Five: Moral perception is inextricably connected with and influenced by the power structures present during development, either in agreement or in opposition to power.

The postulate makes a claim that is simultaneously obvious once stated and deeply uncomfortable to follow to its full implications. Of course, the social, political, and cultural environment within which we develop shapes how we see the world. We accept this readily as a general observation. What is harder to accept, and what the evidence requires us to accept, is the specific and precise form that shaping takes: it does not merely influence our opinions, preferences, or values. It shapes the perceptual apparatus through which reality itself becomes legible. It determines what we see before we have the opportunity to evaluate what we think about what we see.

This is the difference between influence and formation. And it is the difference that makes Postulate Five one of the most important and most demanding claims in the theory.

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher whose genealogical analysis of power transformed how we understand the relationship between knowledge, institutions, and social control, spent his career documenting the mechanisms by which power produces particular kinds of perceivers rather than merely constraining what already-formed perceivers are permitted to do. His analysis of disciplinary power, the organization of space, time, bodies, and information to produce subjects who are compliant, productive, and self-surveilling, showed that power's most effective operation is not through direct coercion but through the formation of perception itself. The prison, the clinic, the school, the factory: these are not merely institutions that constrain behavior. They are environments that produce particular ways of seeing, categorizing, and responding to the world. The person formed within them does not experience the formation as constraint. They experience it as reality.

Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist whose concept of habitus transformed how we understand the relationship between social structure and individual perception, specified the mechanism with precision. Habitus describes the internalization of social structure into bodily and perceptual dispositions: the process by which the dominant view of the world comes to feel like common sense rather than ideology, like accurate perception of how things are rather than a framework constructed in the service of particular interests and arrangements of power. The child born into a particular class position, a particular racial category, a particular gender arrangement, a particular national and cultural context does not choose the perceptual framework that context installs. They are formed into it before they have the cognitive capacity to evaluate it. And the framework, once installed, does not announce itself as a framework. It announces itself as reality. As natural order. As the way things simply are.

This is what makes inherited formation so difficult to examine and so resistant to deliberative correction. You cannot reason your way out of a perceptual position you did not reason yourself into. The framework that needs examining is the same framework through which the examination must be conducted. This is not a logical paradox that clever reasoning can dissolve. It is a phenomenological reality that only a particular kind of encounter, the Zone of Proximal Discomfort (a reframe of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development that extends it into moral development), the experience that exceeds the framework's capacity to accommodate it, can begin to address.

Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher whose work on critical consciousness and liberatory pedagogy transformed how we understand the relationship between perception and political agency, described the political consequence of this formation with precision. The oppressed, he argued, internalize the oppressor's categories and perceive themselves and their world through the oppressor's eyes. The colonization of perception precedes and produces the colonization of political and economic life. The person who has been formed within a social arrangement that assigns them reduced moral status does not automatically perceive that reduction as unjust. They have been formed to perceive it as natural, as the appropriate reflection of their actual worth, their actual capacity, their actual place in the order of things. Freire called this the internalization of the oppressor's voice. And he insisted that the first act of genuine moral and political agency is the act of naming, perceiving one's condition in one's own terms rather than in the terms provided by those who benefit from the existing arrangement. Naming is a perceptual act before it is a political one.

This is the opposition dimension of the postulate, development in opposition to power. Not everyone formed within a particular power structure internalizes its categories as natural order. Some develop moral perception precisely by encountering the contradiction between what the framework says about them and what their lived experience tells them is true. The woman who is told her experience does not count and discovers, through the encounter with others who share that experience, that it does. The person of color who is told their perception of discrimination is oversensitivity and discovers, through the encounter with documented evidence and shared testimony, that it is accurate. The young person who is told the social arrangement theywere born into is natural and just and discovers, through the encounter with what it costs them and those around them, that it is neither. These are not merely political awakenings. They are perceptual reorganizations: the discovery that what felt like natural order was constructed, that what felt like accurate perception was filtered, and that the filter was not neutral.

George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist whose research on conceptual metaphor revealed how embodied experience structures abstract thought, adds a dimension that bridges the neurological and the cultural. The metaphors through which we understand moral and political reality, the nation as family, the market as natural selection, justice as balance, and social hierarchy as the natural order of things, are not merely rhetorical choices. They are the actual cognitive architecture through which moral and political reasoning proceeds. And they are inherited before they are chosen. The child does not select the metaphors through which they will understand power, fairness, freedom, and dignity. They absorb them from the stories, language, and social arrangements of the environment into which they are born. And those metaphors, once installed, shape what conclusions are available to reasoning before reasoning begins.

Wittgenstein's insight applies here with particular force: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. The person whose inherited language contains no word for a particular form of dignity violation cannot easily perceive that violation as a violation, not because they lack moral concern, but because the perceptual category required to register it has not been formed. This is why naming matters so profoundly in Freire's account. The act of finding or creating language for what had previously been perceptually invisible is not merely descriptive. It is constitutive of the perception itself. You cannot fully see what you cannot name.

Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher whose analysis of totalitarianism and political freedom remains among the most penetrating of the twentieth century, identified the deepest political consequence of formation within power structures: the destruction of the capacity for genuine political thought, thinking from the standpoint of others, through the organized elimination of the public spaces in which genuine encounter with perspectives other than one's own becomes possible. Totalitarianism does not merely suppress opposition. It reorganizes the perceptual environment so thoroughly that opposition becomes literally unthinkable, not forbidden but imperceptible. The person formed entirely within a totalitarian perceptual environment does not experience the absence of alternative perspectives as a loss. They experience it as completeness. As the full picture. As reality without distortion.

This is the extreme form of what Postulate Five describes. But the same mechanism operates in less extreme forms wherever power organizes the information environment, the educational system, the media landscape, and the social arrangements within which development occurs, not to produce perfectly compliant subjects incapable of all resistance, but to produce subjects whose default perceptual frameworks serve the interests of existing power arrangements while presenting themselves as neutral, natural, and simply the way things are.

The addition of Acton's axiom to this account completes the picture from the other direction. Foucault, Bourdieu, Freire, and Arendt describe what power does to the perception of those subject to it. Acton describes what power does to the perception of those who hold it. Together, they produce a complete account of how power shapes the entire perceptual field, insulating those at the top from the legibility of harm, colonizing the perceptual apparatus of those at the bottom with the categories of their own subordination, and presenting the whole arrangement as natural order to everyone formed within it.

The moral implication is not comfortable. If moral perception is inextricably shaped by power structures during development, if we are all formed into frameworks we did not choose and cannot fully see from within, then the project of moral development is not primarily the refinement of existing perceptual frameworks. It is their periodic and costly reorganization in response to what they could not accommodate. It is the ongoing, effortful, relational work of examining the water we are swimming in, not because we can ever get entirely outside it, but because the examination itself changes what is possible within it.

This is what the sixth postulate addresses. But before development can occur, before the Zone of Proximal Discomfort can do its reorganizing work, a prior condition must be met. The cognitive and attentional resources that genuine perceptual development requires must be available. And those resources are not equally distributed, not reliably protected, and not currently treated as the moral priority they are.

My wife introduced me to an observation attributed to Betty Friedan that I have never been able to set aside: you can have it all, just not all at the same time.

Friedan was not making a complaint about personal limitations or offering advice about prioritization. She was naming a structural reality, that the social arrangements of her time made certain forms of simultaneity genuinely impossible, not through individual failure or insufficient effort but through the organization of what was actually available to whom, and at what cost.

I understood this intellectually when my wife first shared it with me. I understood it differently, in my body, in my behavior, in the specific and uncomfortable recognition of my own contribution to an inequitable arrangement, when I looked honestly at the season of life we were living through together. We were both working full-time. We were both in graduate school. We were homeschooling two of our sons. And she was preparing to give birth to our fourth child. The demands were not sequential. They were simultaneous. And the cognitive, emotional, physical, and attentional resources required to meet them were finite.

What Friedan's observation made visible to me, what I had not been able to see clearly until the framework disrupted itself against the reality of what our life actually required, was that I had been under-functioning. Not dramatically. Not with conscious intent. But consistently enough that she had to over-function to compensate. And her over-functioning was not merely an inconvenience or an unfairness in the distribution of household labor. It was a systematic depletion of the bandwidth she needed for everything else, for her studies, for her relationships with our children, for her own moral and intellectual development, for the attentional capacity that genuine human flourishing requires.

The recognition did not come from reasoning about fairness principles. It came from the encounter with what was actually happening, the felt reality of what my under-functioning was costing her, breaking through the perceptual framework that had been allowing me not to see it clearly. And what changed was not merely the distribution of tasks. What changed was the recognition that bandwidth is not a personal resource to be managed individually. It is a shared condition that can be protected or depleted by the arrangements we build together, or fail to build together.

Friedan named this for women navigating impossible simultaneity in the mid-twentieth century. What Perceptual Ethics claims is that the same structural observation applies to the cognitive and attentional conditions required for moral development at every scale, personal, relational, institutional, and civilizational. You cannot develop the perceptual capacity for genuine moral responsiveness without the bandwidth to do so. And bandwidth is not equally available, not reliably protected, and not currently treated as the moral priority the theory claims it must be.

Postulate Six: Moral and perceptual development requires attentional space and bandwidth because deliberation and learning are energy-consuming. If resources are scarce, so is development.

The observation my wife shared, that you can have it all, just not all at the same time, is not merely wisdom about personal prioritization. It is a precise description of a material constraint that cognitive science has since documented with considerable empirical rigor. Bandwidth is finite. When it is fully allocated to survival, to compensation, to the management of simultaneous demands that exceed available resources, there is nothing left for the slower, more effortful work of perceptual development. Not because the person lacks commitment or intelligence or moral concern. Because the resource required for that work has already been spent.

This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable neurological and economic reality.

The neuroscientist Karl Friston's free energy principle establishes the foundational mechanism. The brain is an energy-conserving prediction machine, a biological system that must balance the metabolic cost of processing against the need to act effectively in a complex world. Deliberate, reflective, genuinely attentive moral processing is among the most expensive cognitive operations available to the human brain. It requires the sustained recruitment of prefrontal resources, the tolerance of uncertainty, the suppression of faster and cheaper automatic responses, and the maintenance of attention in the face of competing demands. Under conditions of resource depletion, whether through fatigue, stress, emotional overwhelm, or the sheer cognitive load of managing too many simultaneous demands, the brain does not deliberate. It defaults. And the defaults it reaches for are the ones that require the least updating, the most familiar, the most practiced, the most energetically efficient. Whether those defaults are oriented toward dignity or away from it depends entirely on what prior cultivation has built into them. But prior cultivation requires the very bandwidth that depletion has already consumed.

The economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, whose landmark research on scarcity transformed how we understand the cognitive consequences of poverty and resource deprivation, provided the empirical demonstration that moves this from a theoretical claim to a documented reality. Their research showed that the experience of scarcity, whether of money, time, food, or social connection, directly taxes cognitive bandwidth in ways that are measurable, predictable, and independent of individual character or intelligence. People experiencing scarcity perform measurably worse on tests of fluid intelligence and executive control, not because they are less capable but because the cognitive load of managing scarce resources consumes the very mental resources that fluid intelligence and executive control require. Mullainathan and Shafir called this the bandwidth tax: scarcity imposes a cognitive cost that the person experiencing it did not choose and cannot simply decide to stop paying.

The moral implications of this finding are profound and almost entirely unaddressed by conventional ethical theory. If cognitive bandwidth is a finite resource that scarcity directly depletes, then the person living in poverty, in precarity, in the chronic stress of resource insufficiency, is not merely materially disadvantaged. They are cognitively disadvantaged in ways that directly affect their capacity for the kind of reflective, attentive, morally responsive engagement that genuine moral development requires. The bandwidth tax is also a moral development tax. And it is paid disproportionately by those who can least afford it, not as a consequence of their choices but as a consequence of the structural conditions within which they are living.

This connects directly to the attention economy argument that the theory has already developed. The deliberate engineering of manufactured urgency, algorithmic outrage, and compulsive engagement is not merely an economic practice with unfortunate side effects. It is the systematic imposition of a bandwidth tax on populations that are already depleted, the extraction of the cognitive and attentional resources that moral development requires from people who have already been depleted by the material conditions of their lives. The effect is cumulative and self-reinforcing. Scarcity depletes bandwidth. Depleted bandwidth makes people more susceptible to the emotional manipulation that further depletes bandwidth. Further depletion makes genuine moral reflection less available. Less available moral reflection makes the structural conditions producing the scarcity less visible and less politically actionable. The cycle is not accidental. It is, in many cases, the condition that makes extraction sustainable.

Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, and the Zone of Proximal Discomfort, my reframing of Vygotsky that extends it into moral development, requires resources to operate. The productive encounter with what disrupts an existing framework, the processing of shame and remorse that genuine moral reorganization demands, the dialogic relationship that makes the discomfort generative rather than overwhelming, all of these require cognitive and attentional space that scarcity forecloses. You cannot grow in the Zone of Proximal Discomfort if you are spending everything you have on survival. The zone collapses not because the person is unwilling to grow but because the conditions that make growth possible are not present.

This is why the distribution of bandwidth is a justice issue and not merely a productivity concern. When Pettit describes domination as the structural availability of arbitrary interference, the condition in which power over you exists even when it is not being actively exercised, he is describing a condition that imposes a permanent bandwidth tax. The person living under arbitrary power cannot devote their full cognitive resources to moral development, genuine relationships, or political engagement. They must devote a significant portion of those resources to the ongoing management of potential interference, to anticipating, navigating, and accommodating the power that could be exercised at any moment. That management cost is not optional. It is the cognitive price of living under domination. And it is paid in exactly the currency that moral development requires.

Hannah Arendt's account of political action adds the collective dimension. Genuine political agency, the capacity to act in a public space of equals, to initiate something new, to participate in the collective self-governance that democratic life requires, is itself a bandwidth-intensive activity. It requires the cognitive space for genuine reflection, the attentional capacity for genuine encounter with perspectives other than one's own, and the emotional resources for the productive management of disagreement and difference. When bandwidth is systematically depleted, through economic precarity, through manufactured urgency, through the cognitive load of living under arbitrary power, political agency does not merely become more difficult. It becomes structurally unavailable to precisely the populations whose participation in genuine democratic life most requires.

Simone Weil understood the moral dimension of this before cognitive science existed to support it. Attention, the demanding, disciplined practice of suspending one's own projective activity to allow the reality of another person's situation to genuinely register, is the primary moral capacity. And it requires exactly the conditions that scarcity destroys: cognitive space, protected time, the freedom from manufactured urgency, and the relational stability within which genuine attentive presence becomespossible. Weil called attention to the rarest and purest form of generosity. What the research on bandwidth scarcity tells us is that its rarity is not a mystery of human nature. It is a predictable consequence of the structural conditions within which most human beings actually live.

The postulate's second sentence, if resources are scarce, so is development, is therefore not a pessimistic observation about individual limitation. It is a precise structural claim with direct implications for how we think about moral education, institutional design, political economy, and the obligations we have to one another as members of communities in which moral development is supposed to be possible.

If the conditions for moral development require bandwidth, and if bandwidth is systematically depleted by economic precarity, manufactured urgency, attentional extraction, and the cognitive load of living under arbitrary power, then the protection and cultivation of bandwidth is not a personal responsibility to be managed through better habits and more disciplined attention. It is a collective obligation: the structural precondition for the kind of moral community that genuine human flourishing requires.

This is what Dignity-Centered Behavioral Design addresses at the institutional level. Not the optimization of individual attention management but the design of social, economic, informational, and political environments that protect the bandwidth required for moral development and genuine democratic participation rather than systematically extracting it. The question is not whether individuals can find ways to protect their own cognitive resources within existing systems. The question is whether the systems themselves can be redesigned around the recognition that those resources are the foundation of everything else the theory claims matters.

The transition from this postulate to the next follows naturally from the most personal dimension of what bandwidth scarcity produces. When cognitive and attentional resources are insufficient for the work of genuine moral development, the first casualty is not deliberative reasoning. It is the capacity to process the emotional cost of moral recognition, the remorse, the shame, and the difficult work of distinguishing between them that genuine moral growth requires. That is what the seventh postulate addresses.

Jane Austen rarely wastes a character. Every person in her novels is doing precise moral and social work, illuminating something about how human beings actually behave when vanity, self-interest, and the need for social approval are allowed to operate without examination. And among her most quietly devastating portraits is Mary Musgrove in Persuasion: not a villain, not a fool, but something more uncomfortable than either: a person whose expressions of distress and occasional performances of remorse are always, without exception, oriented inward.

When Mary is unwell, the illness becomes the event. When Mary is slighted, the slight becomes the story. And on the rare occasions when Mary causes harm and appears to recognize it, what follows is not repair but a kind of emotional collapse that requires everyone around her to stop attending to the harm and start attending to Mary's feelings about having caused it. The person who was hurt ends up comforting the person who hurt them. The relationship does not move forward. The harm does not get addressed. Everything stalls in the gravitational field of Mary's self-perception.

Austen contrasts her with Anne Elliot so quietly and so precisely that the contrast does not announce itself as a lesson. Anne simply attends to what others actually need, to what the situation actually requires, to what repair actually looks like, rather than what would make her feel better about herself. Where Mary's distress is always ultimately about Mary, Anne's attention is consistently and genuinely other-directed. The difference is not dramatic. It is perceptual. Anne sees. Mary performs seeing while remaining the center of her own moral universe.

Most of us will recognize both of these from our own lives. We have been on both sides. We have sat with the collapsing, self-referential feeling that what we did wrong is primarily a problem for our own self-image. And we have sat, in better moments, with the different and more demanding feeling that what we did wrong is primarily a problem for the person we harmed, and that the question is not what this says about us but what we owe them and what we will do differently.

The first feeling is shame. The second is remorse. And the difference between them is not merely psychological. It is the difference between moral development that is possible and moral development that is permanently stalled, circling the self rather than moving toward repair, toward justice, toward the other person whose dignity the harm violated.

This distinction is one of the most important in moral psychology and one of the most absent from conventional ethical theory. Most frameworks have a great deal to say about what we should do when we recognize we have caused harm. Almost none ofthem address what happens when the recognition of harm collapses into a form of self-preoccupation that prevents the repair the recognition was supposed to motivate.

Postulate Seven: Genuine moral development requires emotionally processing the feeling of remorse for participation in harm, and a release of shame.

Mary Musgrove is a literary portrait, but she is not a caricature. Austen drew her with enough psychological precision that she is recognizable, not as a villain but as a pattern of self-protective moral stalling that most of us have enacted at some point without fully recognizing it as such. The question the postulate raises is not whether shame is a normal human response to the recognition of one's own moral failure. It is. The question is what happens next, whether shame produces the movement toward repair that genuine moral development requires, or whether it collapses inward in ways that make repair permanently unavailable.

The psychological research on this distinction is among the most empirically robust in the moral psychology literature, and it maps precisely onto what Austen rendered through character.

June Price Tangney, the psychologist whose decades of research on shame and guilt established the empirical distinction between them, found that guilt and shame are not merely different intensities of the same moral emotion. They are fundamentally different orientations with fundamentally different behavioral consequences. Guilt, what the postulate calls remorse, is focused on the specific behavior: I did something harmful, I want to repair it, I will act differently. It is other-oriented and forward-moving. It motivates apology, repair, and behavioral change. Shame is focused on the self: I am something bad, this exposes what I fundamentally am, and I need to escape this feeling. It is self-oriented and backward-moving. It motivates concealment, defensiveness, aggression, and the kind of emotional collapse that requires others to manage the shamed person's distress rather than receiving acknowledgment of the harm caused.

Tangney's research demonstrated that shame-prone individuals, those whose default response to moral failure is shame rather than guilt, show higher levels of aggression, lower levels of empathy, a greater tendency toward externalizing blame, and reduced capacity for genuine repair in relationships. Not because they are less moral in their intentions, but because shame, as a moral emotion, is functionally counterproductive. It produces the opposite of what genuine moral development requires.

Kristin Neff, the researcher whose work established self-compassion as a measurable psychological capacity with documented effects on well-being and moral behavior, adds the crucial positive dimension. Self-compassion, the capacity to hold one's own failures and limitations with the same warmth and honest acknowledgment one would offer a friend in the same situation, is not a weakening of moral accountability. It is the condition that makes genuine moral accountability possible. When the recognition of harm does not trigger self-annihilating shame but rather the honest, warm acknowledgment of having done something harmful while remaining a person of worth, the remorse that follows is free to do what remorse is actually for. It can move outward toward repair rather than collapsing inward toward self-protection.

This is what the release of shame in the postulate means. Not the elimination of appropriate distress at having caused harm. Not the minimization of accountability or the bypassing of the genuine cost that moral failure carries. The release of the self-referential, inward-collapsing dimension of shame that stalls moral development in the gravitational field of one's own self-perception, so that the outward-moving, other-oriented work of remorse can proceed.

I know this from the inside.

During my master's program in clinical mental health counseling, the final week of every semester was devoted to the same question: how do you apply what you have learned to serve people whose lives, experiences, and frameworks are radically different from your own? It was in that context, studying racial and gender diversity, sitting with the question of how to translate complex things to people without the vocabulary to receive them, without talking down to them, that I encountered one of the most personally humbling experiences of my life. I began to see, with a clarity I could not look away from, how privileged I was. And more painfully, I began to see my own blindness, the ways I had moved through the world assuming my perception was neutral, my framework universal, my experience the default against which others were measured.

What followed was not comfortable moral progress. It was disorienting. The recognition produced real remorse, a genuine sorrow for my participation in systems of inequality I had benefited from without fully seeing. But underneath the remorse was something more painful and more paralyzing: shame. Not the productive discomfort of recognizing harm and wanting to repair it, but the collapsing feeling of being exposed as something bad rather than having done something wrong.

The distinction Tangney's research describes, I felt in my body before I had language for it. Shame wanted me to manage my own distress, to seek reassurance, to defend my intentions, to collapse into self-recrimination so total that the people whose experience I had failed to see would end up, like the people around Mary Musgrove, attending to my feelings rather than having their own acknowledged. Remorse wanted something different, to understand more clearly what my blindness had cost others, to move differently, to allow the recognition to reorganize something rather than to be processed and set aside.

What made the difference was not better reasoning. It was not a more rigorous application of principles about privilege and justice. It was the gradual, relational, effortful development of the capacity to hold myself accountable without holding myself in contempt, which Neff describes as genuine self-compassion. And in learning that distinction experientially rather than conceptually, I discovered that releasing shame did not minimize the harm or reduce the accountability. It freed the remorse to do what remorse is actually for: moving toward justice rather than collapsing under the weight of self-judgment.

This did not happen alone. It happened in a graduate program, in community with others doing the same difficult work, within a structure that provided enough safety to make the discomfort productive rather than overwhelming. The relational condition was not incidental. It was constitutive. You cannot process shame into remorse in isolation any more than you can name the world alone.

This is where the Zone of Proximal Discomfort, my own extension of Vygotsky's framework into moral development, does its most personal and most demanding work. The productive encounter with what one's existing framework cannot accommodate is not merely a cognitive event. It is an emotional one. It requires the capacity to tolerate the disruption of one's self-perception without either defending against it or being destroyed by it. And that capacity is itself cultivated, through relationship, through practiced self-compassion, through the repeated experience of surviving the discomfort of genuine moral recognition and discovering that what becomes possible on the other side of it is worth the cost.

Albert Bandura's research on self-efficacy applies here in a specific and important way. The belief that one can undergo moral reorganization without being destroyed by it, that shame can be processed and released rather than either suppressed or surrendered to, is itself a form of moral self-efficacy that must be developed through experience. The person who has never survived the discomfort of genuine moral recognition does not know that survival is possible. The person who has survived it and discovered what becomes available on the other side carries a different relationship to the next encounter with their own moral failure. The efficacy is built through the experience of having moved through shame into remorse and having found that the movement was possible and that what it produced was more than what it cost.

The political dimension of this postulate is also worth naming explicitly, because it is almost entirely absent from conventional accounts of shame and guilt that treat them purely as individual psychological phenomena.

Shame, deployed at scale, is one of the most effective tools of political and social control available to systems organized around the maintenance of existing power arrangements. The person who has internalized shame for their position, for their poverty, their race, their gender, their sexuality, their history, their body, is a person whose moral and political energy is perpetually redirected inward. Toward the management of their own self-perception. Toward the performance of acceptability. Toward the endless work of demonstrating worthiness to a system that has already determined their worth. Freire understood this as the internalization of the oppressor's voice. What Tangney's research adds is the precise psychological mechanism: shame redirects moral energy from the outward-moving work of justice toward the inward-collapsing work of self-management. It is, in this sense, not merely a personal psychological phenomenon but a political instrument, one that systems of domination deploy, consciously or not, to prevent the moral and political agency that genuine remorse would motivate.

The release of shame is therefore not only a condition for individual moral development. It is a condition for collective moral and political agency. The person who has processed shame into remorse, who has moved from the collapsing self-reference of exposure to the outward-moving recognition of harm and the commitment to repair, is a person whose moral energy is available for the work that genuine justice requires. That availability is what the eighth postulate will claim is generative. But the generativity depends on the processing. And the processing requires exactly the relational, bandwidth-intensive, and unsafe conditions that the previous postulates have been establishing as the preconditions for everything else.

The transition to Postulate Eight follows from the most hopeful implication of everything the seventh postulate has established. If shame can be processed and released, if remorse can be freed to do what remorse is actually for, then genuine moral development does not merely repair the individual perceiver. It produces something that extends beyond the individual into the relational and political field. Dignity recognized generates more dignity. And that generativity is the final claim the theory makes.

There is a moment in restorative justice practice that people who have witnessed it describe with remarkable consistency. It is not the moment of confession, or the moment of sentencing, or even the moment of apology. It is the moment when the person who caused harm looks at the person they harmed and, sometimes for the first time, actually sees them. Not as a symbol of their own guilt. Not as a threat to their freedom or reputation. Not as an abstraction in a legal proceeding. As a person. Whole. Present. Making a claim.

And in that moment, something changes in the room that cannot be fully explained by the exchange of words or the completion of a legal process. The person who was harmed often describes feeling, for the first time, that the harm was real, that it was acknowledged by the person whose acknowledgment mattered most. And the person who caused the harm often describes something unexpected: not relief, exactly, but a kind of expansion. As though the act of genuinely seeing the other person's humanity, rather than defending against it, made their own humanity more available to them rather than less.

This is the phenomenon that Postulate Eight claims to describe. Not as a mystical experience available only in extraordinary circumstances. As the observable, reproducible consequence of what happens when dignity is genuinely recognized rather than selectively extended.

Dignity, when it is honored, generates more dignity. And its violation, for any person, in any context, diminishes the conditions under which dignity is possible for everyone.

These are not sentimental claims. They are structural ones. And the evidence for them runs from the neurological to the political.

Postulate Eight: Genuine moral and perceptual development recognizes that dignity is generative. Conversely, a dignity violation for one is a violation for all.

The restorative justice moment described in the setup is not exceptional. It is reproducible. And what makes it reproducible is not the particular goodwill of the participants or the skill of the facilitator, though both matter. What makes it reproducible is the structural reality the postulate claims: when dignity is genuinely recognized, when one person sees another as fully human, with the full weight of moral consideration that full humanity commands, something changes in the conditions available to everyone present. The moral field expands. What was not possible before the recognition becomes possible after it.

This is the generativity claim. And it requires careful development, because it is the most ambitious claim in the theory and the one most vulnerable to being dismissed as sentiment rather than structure.

Hannah Arendt's account of political action provides the foundational philosophical grounding. For Arendt, action, genuine political action, the capacity to initiate something new in a public space of equals, is irreducibly plural. It cannot happen alone. It requires others who can receive, respond to, and build upon what is initiated. And crucially, every genuine act of political initiative enlarges the space of possibility for everyone within the public realm. Action does not merely accomplish its immediate aim. It changes what the people who witness it understand to be possible. It expands the range of available beginnings.

Applied to dignity recognition, Arendt's account predicts exactly what the restorative justice moment demonstrates. When Robert Rule stood up in that courtroom and saw Gary Ridgway's humanity whole, when he enacted the recognition that Ridgway remained a person whose dignity made a claim even in the most extreme circumstances of moral failure, he did not merely affect Ridgway. He changed what everyone present understood to be possible. The law enforcement officer who later wrote about witnessing that moment described it as transformative for his own understanding of what forgiveness could mean.

Rebecca DeMauro, another parent of a murder victim who watched the proceedings on television, described it as changing her relationship to the hatred she had been carrying for her own daughter's killer. The act of genuine dignity recognition rippled outward in ways that Robert Rule could not have predicted and did not control.

This is not mysticism. It is the structural consequence of what Arendt described as the irreducible plurality of genuine action. Dignity recognized expands the moral field. It changes what is thinkable, what is feelable, and what is possible for others within the same relational and political space.

Amartya Sen's capabilities approach and Martha Nussbaum's embodied account of human flourishing provide the evaluative framework that grounds the generativity claim empirically rather than merely philosophically. Sen's central insight, that genuine freedom is not merely the absence of constraint but the real capacity to achieve the functionings that a fully human life requires, implies that the expansion of one person's genuine capabilities is not a zero-sum subtraction from others' capabilities. In domains of genuine human flourishing, education, political participation, creative expression, moral development, and genuine relationships, the expansion of one person's capacity tends to create conditions that support rather than undermine the expansion of others. The educated community produces better conditions for education. The politically engaged community produces better conditions for political engagement. The morally developed community produces better conditions for moral development.

This is the positive version of the bandwidth argument. Bandwidth, as Postulate Six established, is depleted by scarcity and extraction. But it is also replenished by genuine relationships, by shared moral development, by the experience of being seen and seeing others clearly. The conditions that support genuine moral development are not consumed by their use. They are strengthened by it. This is what makes dignity generative rather than merely distributive.

The second claim of the postulate, that a dignity violation for one is a violation for all, requires equal precision and equal care.

It is not claiming that all dignity violations are equally felt by all people. The person whose dignity is violated bears the primary cost. The postulate does not minimize that asymmetry or redistribute it into a comfortable universalism that obscures who is actually harmed most.

What it is claiming is structural and consequential. When any person's dignity is systematically violated, when any population is subjected to dehumanization, domination, the denial of agency, or the organized exposure to conditions of death, the perceptual and relational conditions that everyone's moral development depends on are degraded. Not equally. Not symmetrically. But really.

The political theorist Joseph Overton observed that at any given moment, there is a narrow range of ideas, policies, and behaviors considered socially and politically acceptable, and that this range shifts based on what those with power normalize, enforce, or stigmatize. What has come to be called the Overton Window is not merely a description of political opinion. It is a description of perceptual possibility, of what can be seen as legitimate, thinkable, and worthy of moral consideration within a given social arrangement. When the window narrows, certain people's suffering becomes politically invisible. When it expands, suffering that was previously dismissed as outside the range of legitimate concern becomes recognizable as a genuine claim requiring response.

This is Bourdieu's habitus and Pettit's non-domination framework translated into the vocabulary most readers already carry. The Overton Window is the popular political science description of what those two theorists are analyzing from different disciplinary directions. Power shapes what is thinkable before it shapes what is permissible. And what is thinkable determines whose dignity counts as politically real, whose suffering registers as a legitimate claim requiring response, and whose can be dismissed as outside the range of acceptable concern.

The systematic violation of any population's dignity does not merely harm that population. It contracts the Overton Window for everyone. It narrows the range of what is morally thinkable. It trains the perceptual apparatus of everyone formed within the social structure that produces the violation to see less than the full range of human dignity that is actually present. And it does so in ways that are self-reinforcing; the narrowed perception produces further violations, which further narrow the perception, which makes further violations more likely and less visible.

Philip Pettit's non-domination framework makes the political dimension precise. A society organized around the domination of some of its members, in which arbitrary power over certain populations is structurally available regardless of whether it is currently being exercised, is a society that cannot achieve genuine democratic self-governance for any of its members. Notbecause the dominant group experiences the same harm as the dominated. They do not. But because genuine political freedom, the capacity to act in a public space of genuine equals, is structurally unavailable in a society where some members are subject to arbitrary power. The dominated cannot participate as genuine equals. And a political community that cannot achieve genuine equality of participation is a political community whose collective moral perception is permanently impaired by the arrangements it has built and failed to dismantle.

Arendt's concept of natality, the human capacity to begin, to act in ways not determined by prior conditions, gives the generativity claim its most hopeful form. Every genuine act of dignity recognition is a beginning. It opens possibilities that did not exist before it. It changes what others understand to be available. It enlarges the moral imagination of everyone within its reach. And because it is a genuine beginning rather than merely the execution of a prior program, its consequences cannot be fully predicted or controlled. Robert Rule did not know what his 42 words would do to Rebecca DeMauro watching on television. He did not know what they would do to the law enforcement officer who would write about them years later. He did not know what they would do to the people who would encounter the story through a video watched by someone working on a theory of moral perception. The act was finite. Its generativity was not.

There is a final observation that the theory requires us to make honestly, even though, or precisely because, it is the most uncomfortable one in the entire postulate.

The people who most aggressively work to suppress the generative recognition of dignity are precisely the people whose behavior demonstrates they understand its power most clearly.

Authoritarians and autocrats do not build elaborate systems of censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and social control to suppress something they regard as weak or inconsequential. They build those systems because they understand, at some level, whether consciously theorized or practically intuited, that genuine dignity recognition is the most destabilizing force available to those subject to their power. Because genuine dignity recognition produces exactly what authoritarianism cannot survive: people who see themselves and each other clearly, who recognize their own agency, who name their condition in their own terms, and who understand that the arrangement they are living under is not a natural order but a constructed domination that can be named, resisted, and dismantled.

Freire understood this as the central dynamic of liberatory education. The colonization of perception precedes and produces the colonization of political and economic life, which is why the expansion of perception is the first thing power suppresses and the last thing it voluntarily relinquishes. You do not need soldiers in every home if you have successfully installed the soldier in every mind. But the corollary is equally true and equally important: you cannot maintain the soldier in every mind once people begin to see clearly. Once the Overton Window expands enough that the dominated can perceive their condition in their own terms rather than in the terms the dominant have provided, the entire architecture of naturalized domination begins to lose its perceptual hold.

This is why the suppression of dignity recognition by those who hold power is not a contradiction of the eighth postulate. It is the most powerful confirmation of it. The very intensity of the suppression is evidence of the generativity it is trying to prevent. Authoritarians do not fear dignity recognition because it is sentimental or naive. They fear it because it works. Because it expands what is thinkable. Because it changes what people understand to be possible. Because every genuine act of seeing another person's humanity whole is a beginning whose consequences cannot be controlled, and uncontrollable beginnings are precisely what systems organized around the permanent availability of arbitrary power cannot afford to allow.

The theory does not end on that note of political urgency accidentally. It ends there because that is where the logic leads. The cultivation of moral perception, the prior work of recognizing another's right to dignity, the development of the heuristic scaffold that reaches for dignity recognition when everything else is depleted, the protection of the bandwidth required for genuine moral development, the processing of shame into remorse, the dialogic encounter that makes perceptual reorganization possible, all of it is, in the most precise sense the theory can offer, a political act. Not because it is explicitly organized around political goals. But because genuine moral perception, cultivated and protected and practiced, is structurally incompatible with the arrangements of power that depend on our inability to see clearly.

That is the evaluative criterion the theory has been building toward. Not whether the moral perception in question satisfies a procedural test or conforms to an abstract principle. But whether it produces more genuine dignity for all, whether it expands the moral field or contracts it, whether it generates the conditions for further moral development or depletes them, whether itsfruits are the fruits of a perception cultivated toward openness and recognition or a perception formed, colonized, or deliberately engineered toward closure and denial.

That question has answers. They are not always easy to determine. But they are determinable, through the honest, humble, relational work of moral cultivation that the eight postulates describe.

And that work is, in the most precise sense this theory can offer, what genuine moral life looks like when it is working.

* * *

The thinkers whose work informs this essay include Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire, Hannah Arendt, Philip Pettit, Albert Bandura, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Karl Friston, Antonio Damasio, George Lakoff, Charles Taylor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, William James, Gabriel Marcel, Kristin Neff, Lev Vygotsky, Jonathan Haidt, Henri Tajfel, June Price Tangney, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, Pierre Bourdieu, Ellen Langer, Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Kahneman, and Janet Woititz. The synthesis and its failures are my own.

I submitted my ID and I had to “tailgate” to make the final exit. I walked in the scorching sun to my car parked at a distance and took one picture on the way and one from the driving seat. I didn’t want to look like I was stopping by to take pictures; I convinced myself it’s the sun and not me before I steered clear off the gate to home from my workplace of the last five years.

It was my last coffee at Deli Marche – more than 90% of these words that you see next were written on the couch on my phone. It wasn’t long ago that I had my first thing here. I competed five years this year in February. I think I first came here last month - only after I had resigned. I never thought I had enough time or as they call it “bandwidth” to sit here and sip a cup of coffee.

The daud for office would begin with seeing Piku off to the bus and then leave for office, and I’d also try and come back by the time his bus came, which meant I left earlier from office. It didn’t matter that I came early because apparently this wasn’t doing any good to my “visibility” - another buzz word I hope I never use unless in jest or joke. I just wanted to be home, not too later than Piku’s arrival. When the talk on “visibility” grew more, I took my father’s help in picking him up and I added an hour to my stay at office.

The stay ended on Friday – for good.

I took longer than usual to get ready that day. I think I was giving myself a little more time. I looked a little longer in the mirror as if I were asking myself a question - has anything changed or is it all the same? I didn’t look much different, obviously, but I knew it’s not going to be the same after, even though I’d look the same. I’d not be going to work from the day after.

I left the house, I pressed the lift button, and I knew I’d forgotten something. It was the ID card and I couldn’t afford to miss it. Of all the days, I chose this day to miss my ID card - I could laugh it off because it was my last day and I didn’t mind when my partner said you could always come back to get it. I take comfort in hearing how I can never think. I have forgotten things in the past and I have come back to pick it up but never without frown or worry that I seem to embody all along. I have attached way too importance to these things and it’s a shame when this comes to my mind as some kind of achievement that I’ve never ever missed my ID card and I’d never had to get what they call the “TEMP ID”.

As I drove out, I dialed in to my partner like all those days in the past and now for one last time, on way to office. I’ve fought, argued, shouted – making use of the solo closed space inside the car on the driving seat to the fullest – listened, disconnected but always called back once I reached. The conversations with all the arguments started getting so interesting at one point that I thought there should be a series or a podcast or some documentation of all the gyaan we exchanged and it helped greatly that I was only listening – a gentle flex but I am good at that.

I took a turn and saw one grey Škoda squeeze away from my right. I swore and then moved on as I saw that car move away crazily and it struck me, he was probably having a bad day or maybe he wasn’t and he was just another guy thinking he could get away doing anything and it was the world’s responsibility to deal with it. Because the way he was moving, he could have probably messed someone else’s day and life. “The world is not going to change. It’s going to treat you all the same. Don’t think too much”, my partner said.

I was settled in my driving seat once again as I cruised to office and we spoke of all the ways we are going to beat the world – in zamaane ko dikhaana hai mode – at its own game when they ask me why I am not going to work and why this is okay. I have had only gentle and concerned enquiries so far but one should be prepared right?

I was one turn away to making an entry but the traffic. which was stuck just before the entry gate, looked like it wanted me to wait: just a little longer. I was in no rush - there is no love lost between me and my workplace but I carry and retain deep respect and admiration for all humans I have looked at from a distance - the parking and entrance support staff and the cafeteria folks, and all the non-living things too that support the structure - the cafe, the sofa, the lift and the steps, that I have always found encouraging and inviting.

I parked and as I was moving the steps to the 6th floor one more time, I came across a man I’ve often seen but never greeted. I have always found it weird to say hi or smile at someone passing by and it helps that no one expects you to do that and you don’t feel obliged to do so, like Americans do. It looks polite and it’s nice but I feel it adds more to the mechanical non-feeling way of the modern human. I need to have some interaction to be able to do that. And so, I passed that person one last time and I didn’t greet him and I continued stepping up until I reached the 6th floor.

I walked and I disappeared in the sea of empty desks and chairs to get to my chair and took the view in from the massive window pane. There were no takers for the spot at the time – not many people come on Friday around holidays.

I have very little to write about the time on the floor where I chatted indiscriminately with whoever was around and when I was done with those around, I got on the phone to talk to family and friends and said hello and bye to a few of the fewer people before the day was done and before stopping by – this felt forever – at the IT desk and heading out to hand over my ID card to get done with the exit formalities.

- and not fall into the trap of "being a person who has managed to stop being a person" (like some "celebrity nonperson")

The nonperson is natural, he is Nature

Nature is desire without ego

and destruction without evil

But these faculties are associated with "blindness". Nature is innocent because of being "blind", purely ruled by instinctual (in the case of animals) or causal conditions (for socalled "inanimate matter").

To stop being a person is not to become a "beast". Then the dictators and evildoers of human history could serve as our models.

Let's outline the exact opposite path. To stop being a person and at the same time live with increased awareness.

An awareness that is unforced, natural, choiceless, spontaneous, free in every direction

The first thing to do is to learn to love oneself. Love and accept oneself. Love ones eternal and essential nature, the higher self, but also ones weird and complex temporal "person-self". Eventually, with time, the distinction and separation between these two poles of ones being could, optimally, merge into one.

To love oneself is to forget oneself. Then life begins. Until we forget ourselves, we are too much engaged with our fears and hangups. The good and the bad... the rollercoaster will be forever moving. To be attached to ones own name and fame, and the perceived enemies and friends... Sometimes it degenerates to the point that it takes nearly all of ones time and energy.

So the reason to love oneself is to be able to forget oneself. To flow with life and See other people, their beauty and their genuine needs.

Being a person here is meant as "the persona", from latin, "mask". It's our egoself, fully engaged in our external parts. Looks, reputation etc.

Being a person means you cannot really see anything or anyone. To be fully engaged in ones personhood means projecting ones own stuff wherever one is looking.

To stop being a person is to let go of the world. Not the natural world, but the world of stories. The manmade world, the toxic society spun out of generations of wounded egos striving to arrive at the top (of the other egos). These are childrens games, and often hurtful, harming and killing along the way.

To flow with the "good" and the "bad", "success" and "failure", whatever comes, but without neither turning away from it nor being hypnotized by it.

It sounds like the Dao, sometimes called taoism. Many wisdomtraditions touch upon this.

What is called "inferior emotions" makes it hard. Among these the worst may be aversion, which is why love is so important, beginning with unconditional selflove. This is the recipe for peace of mind, freedom from the inner tyrant.

The modern self has become so much like a hungry ghost, it is almost insatiable. This makes mental disease and suffering into huge problems. Whether you live naked alone on the top of a mountain or elegantly dressed in the middle of city life is of minor importance. As long as there is a continuous inner story rolling inside the mind, the ascetic on the top of the mountain is miserable. But without this "narrator" the city man is free, if at the same time living with a heart that is open, soft and an awareness that is lucid, present and without choice.

THE ULTIMATE DREAMSELF

The celebrated person, the one we dream of, being admired, successful, gaining fame and merit and so on, is EXACTLY the same as the one who suffers. One cannot have one without the other. Looking for admiration means hating rejection, and so on...

That is the kind of path where freedom will be out of reach. The less of a person is there, the more the inner gifts can unfold without being disturbed or corrupted.

HOW TO DO IT

One cannot just stop being a person from one day to the other. It takes time, practice. But it is an unpracticed practice and an effortless effort. It is silent maturation. The path is to learn to love, but also see, know and be with the whole of ones personality. Not just the celebrated parts. All of it.

To accept it, but not buy too much into it, all the "cute" or not so cute, maybe painful, stories. Be with them without judgement. Seeing, detached like a wise parent, holding ones own psyche like a mother holding the child.

NOT A GREAT SALESPITCH

To stop being a person will sound Very Unattractive to most people.

But it is just one way of putting it.

In reality, one might very well never stop being a person completely - that is, become fully free...

In any case it is no use making it a goal in and of it self. That could leed to selfdeluded behaviour. Roaming around, careless, but still in a pretense, just fully unconscious about it...

Like a fake holy man, fake guru. This is not good. You need not search too long before you'll find several such examples.

That's why the Path is through virtue

To unbecoming a person, to flower into a non-being being, is possible through lightness.

Lightness comes from harmlessness. Harmlessness is not weakness, it is having removed the source of hatred within. This means having uprooted the inner separation, living in the unified self, the One Self.

This automatically fulfills every virtue: compassion, kindness, selflessness, justice etc

At the same time it works the opposite way. The path of virtue is the force flowering the selfless, unified Self.

It is the kind of virtue that becomes effortless, automatic. It is not for show, planned. It is wu wei - "doing no-doing". Doing without a doer. This sounds very theoretical. But it means being so fully present that there is no separation. This implies no spectator, no little commentator sitting on the shoulder.

It is full awareness without selfawareness

We all know this state, but unconsciously. It is the flow state. It is natural to our animal self, our body.

So, the practice is to fuse this natural, but unconscious state with awareness. The very first stages are of course typically meeting ones inner critic, fear, distraction etc.

But eventually we can have short moments of full lucidity without the common small self, the narrator being present.

🌹

It is a taboo, and even a "dangerous" suggestion to anyone on the early stages of the path towards this. Which includes myself. But let's say it anyway:

It is to become a god.

If one really can travel the path outlined above, timeless and universal, and travel it all the way, there is no lesser word for it.

Becoming one with the divine.

But for the rest of us, all beginners and simple human beings, lets start with practicing union with each Moment, the Here and Now.

Making these changelogs a little more formal going forward. Their cadence will slow as tuhat approaches feature completion; less frequent updates, but more considered ones.

Moderation

Tuhat has always believed in free speech, but that doesn't mean we're obligated to amplify every voice equally. This release introduces a moderation framework that tries to balance openness with accountability.

You can now report a letter on your post that you believe isn't in good faith. Doing so removes it immediately and flags the author to the moderation team, with the report logged against their account. This isn't a tool for silencing disagreement; it's a tool for dealing with bad actors.

Alongside manual reporting, there's now automated moderation that monitors for suspicious behaviour patterns, including accounts that accumulate multiple user reports in a short period. These flags are always reviewed by a person. Nothing is actioned automatically. Depending on what the reviewer finds, individual posts can be unlisted with a note to the author, removed entirely, or in more serious cases, the account can be removed.

On the question of muting: an account deemed by moderators to be fundamentally misaligned with tuhat's values will have their posts excluded from the homepage feed. Their content continues to exist and function normally under their /u/ URL. We're not in the business of erasure. But tuhat won't actively surface it. We think this is the right balance.

Editor

The writing experience has had a significant overhaul. We're now using QuillJS for rich text live editing. Markdown is excellent, and we still support it; but having formatting rendered in place as you write simplifies things considerably, especially for writers who aren't comfortable thinking in syntax.

Your first header line is now used automatically as the post title, though you can override this if needed. We've also added choice of fonts (all preinstalled system fonts, no external dependencies) and control over line length; short, medium, or long, so you can shape how your writing feels on the page.

For those who prefer working in markdown, it's back. You can use markdown symbols directly in the editor to produce headers, bold, italic, links, and so on. The two approaches coexist comfortably.

Post Letters

This is an experimental feature, and we're curious to see how it's used.

Subscribers who follow you by email will now be able to reply directly to the tuhat newsletter they receive, and that reply will arrive in your letters inbox on the platform. It closes a loop that previously didn't exist: someone reads your post in their inbox, has a thought, and now they can share it with you without needing to create an account or navigate back to the site.

To protect readers' privacy, letters received this way are non-publishable by default. They're for the author's eyes, not the public feed.

Bio

Under site settings, you can now choose to share your full name, add a link to a personal site, and write up to 1000 characters about yourself or your account. Simple, but overdue.

Spam

This one's a bit of an anti-feature, and we acknowledge it might not be necessary for the current audience. But to keep the main feed from being dominated by any single account: only one post per day per user is added to tuhat's homepage feed.

This seems like a reasonable constraint. If you're creating original long-form writing, it's fairly unlikely you're publishing more than once a day. If you do write multiple posts in a day and need them up, they all still appear on your own page and feed. The limit applies only to homepage visibility. Nothing is hidden from your readers; it just won't be frontpaged more than once in a 24-hour window.

Multilingual

One of the founding motivations for tuhat; not the only one, but a real one, was to push back against the concentration of online publishing infrastructure in the hands of a small number of Silicon Valley companies, most of which treat English as the default and everything else as an afterthought.

Writing in another language shouldn't mean writing into a void. tuhat now supports full internationalisation across the following languages, meaning menus, buttons, and interface elements render in those languages, and posts written in them have their own dedicated homepage. For example, tuhat.net/es for Spanish. Also tag suggestions will now be scoped to your language.

Supported languages in this release: English, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Swedish, Arabic, and Hindi.

If you write in a language that isn't listed, contact us and we'll add it. The translations were machine-generated, so if something reads oddly, contact us there too.

Author and Platform Support

We've started working seriously on how authors can make their writing financially sustainable on tuhat. This is harder than it sounds, particularly from South Africa, where access to major payment platforms is limited and the fee structures of those we can access are punishing.

The model we're working toward is threshold-batched micropayments. Rather than charging readers each time they want to support an author, readers allocate funds across the authors they value. When the total allocated breaches a threshold, that amount is charged and distributed to everyone funds have been allocated against. The goal is to avoid holding money in escrow while keeping individual transaction costs low enough that the economics actually work for authors.

tuhat's aim is to operate this at 5% or less of the money given. To make that concrete: if you want to give an author $5, the goal is that they receive at least $4.75 in their account, with all processing fees absorbed in that 25¢. For comparison, Stripe charges 2.9% + 30¢ to take a payment, leaving $4.555, plus a further 0.25% + $0.25 to pay it out. The author ends up with $4.29; roughly 14.2% gone before they see a cent.

We're not there yet, but this is the direction we're building toward. More detail will come as it takes shape.

Thanks

The diversity and quality of writing on tuhat has been genuinely impressive. It's a pleasure to provide a platform for it.

Writing is hard. Good writing is considerably harder. Sitting down and thinking carefully enough to produce a thousand words is no small thing, and we don't take lightly that people are choosing to do that here.

No, no, I know I am outclassed by the likes of Naipaul, Murphy, and Theroux.

But I love thinking about how they saw the poetry around them. What did they observe in the moment? How much did they embellish later; are they like artist, sketching outlines en place, and filling in gaps at home in a quiet studio?

Take Jan Morris, for example. I'm currently reading Locations, a collection of articles previously written for magazines through the 80s and 90s. (Our very own Ottawa gets a fairly kind review in 1987 - nothing much has changed). Wading through the jingoistic imperialism was a slog, but she has a such distinctive way of describing people. "The movements seemed to me kind of airy, as though tending towards weightlessness." She states, enchanted and also sickened in Oaxaca. "He clenched his modest muscles, he moved his head this way and that like a woman trying on a wedding hat." She stares, in suspicious Paris. She likens Vermont residents to Russians, without using the word "Russian" until the end of the paragraph. Her character sketches are always sharp, but not always unkind.

Jan Morris' view on Empire, culture, and indigenous people is problematic, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend her writing. Interestingly, she's probably one of the first trans women living an unapologetic life, transitioning in her late 30s (in the 1960s!) and staying married to her wife for (essentially) the rest of her life (I want Elizabeth's biography). I picked up a few of her books in a used bookstore months ago, not really knowing what to expect. What I've gotten is a complex woman with a sharp eye for detail, blindness about her own sense of superiority, and a riotous sense of irony. I think she would attribute that last part to her Welsh heritage.

I've also received a series of lessons in the importance of looking around your surroundings and actually watching the world around you. Getting my head out of my phone or book, and see what the world is doing. I think that will be the most important lesson from Jan - ok, maybe also, the reminder that you can like a place and still criticize it. You can also dislike a place and find some grace for it. Nothing is all good or all bad. It's an important lesson in our age.

Today, for example, I'm at the cafe down the street. I have 2 hours before an appointment, so I'm taking my time to write, drink a latte, and devour a donut. I can assume that one of the FIFA World Cup games is playing soon. Four young men in futball jerseys patronize one of the cafe tables, brimming with excitement. Guatemala, Japan, and ?Curaçao were represented, I couldn't see the name on last proudly emblazoned shirt. Snippets of conversations circled players I do not know and plays I have not seen. This is a vibrant time for soccer in Canada. The baristas are excited for the game, too; asking follow up questions and laughing at quips. I understand very little and care less.

Next to me, a generically beautiful, young, blond, thin woman has been speaking loudly about an instagram drama. Her companions, equally young, were quietly reading books after sharing a sweet loving kiss across the table before she arrived. She dominates the conversation, punctuating her story with gesticulations and exclamations of surprise. I hope she does well in this world, but is deeply boring the way all 20 year-olds are deeply boring.

Not that I have much to say about a boring life. I wake up, work, come home, read, scroll a bit too much on substack or instagram, and go to bed. Sometimes I cook a wonderful dinner, but lately I don't. Once a week I have dinner at my parents'. My anecdotes circle injustices in the world, personal grievances, and books I've read. Sometimes something reminds me of my 20s, but I've forgotten so much from that time...and I don't even have drugs to blame for the memory loss. Middle age comes for us all.

My inner life is rich and varied, my dreams at night are colourful and often include aspects of space travel. No one will know the details of these things. Sometimes, in my navel gazing, I think of the billions of other people's complex inner lives and imagine how vibrant our world actually is (except for Andreessen's, I imagine the inside of his mind is like watching off-white paint dry).

I would like for my external life to be almost as vibrant as my internal. The purpose of my Abroadessey (Oh, yeah, no) is looking more and more like a year where I find some hobbies I like, that I can stick with, and improve enough in my own time and on my own terms. Tennis seems to be a contender, and guitar. I might look for a choir to join, if that's something people do. I'm open to other things. Cooking again, maybe. I'll need to make sure I have kitchens to use. Should I branch out to extreme sports? HAH. Finding what I want to do, that can translate back into my life here, has been harder than I thought. It's complicated when you no longer feel like you have to follow the a prescribed path.

But while away - always reading. Reading reading reading reading reading. I'll never stop. I'll guess never not be boring.

Límites materiales, desaceleración forzada y el espejismo bursátil de OpenAI

El crecimiento de la inteligencia artificial se está produciendo a un ritmo exponencial que choca frontalmente con los límites físicos del planeta. Lejos de ser un fenómeno inmaterial, la IA depende de una infraestructura intensiva en energía, materiales críticos, agua y capital. Este modelo no es sostenible a medio plazo. Y ahora, dos noticias recientes lo confirman con crudeza: OpenAI se prepara para salir a bolsa mientras sus propias proyecciones internas apuntan a una quiebra técnica. Difícilmente podría haber una metáfora más perfecta del sistema que describimos.

La IA no es etérea, necesita una infraestructura material enorme

A menudo se habla de la inteligencia artificial como si fuera puro software, algoritmos flotando en una nube abstracta. Pero detrás de cada modelo hay una realidad muy concreta: centros de datos gigantes, chips especializados, redes eléctricas tensionadas y una demanda creciente de recursos escasos.

Indicadores clave (2026):

Los centros de datos ya consumen cerca de 1.050 TWh, aproximadamente el 4% de la electricidad mundial, con proyecciones de llegar al 9-12% en mercados clave como Estados Unidos. El entrenamiento de un solo gran modelo supera los millones de kWh, equivalentes al consumo anual de miles de hogares. Un centro de datos medio consume tanta agua como una ciudad de 10.000 a 50.000 habitantes. Y todo ello con una dependencia extrema de cobre, litio, cobalto y tierras raras, con cadenas de suministro frágiles y geopolíticamente tensas.

Pensar que la IA puede seguir creciendo exponencialmente al margen de estos condicionantes es, como mínimo, ingenuo.

La huella hídrica: la sed insaciable de los algoritmos

Uno de los aspectos más críticos y a menudo ignorados es el consumo de agua para la refrigeración. Solo en Estados Unidos, los centros de datos consumieron unos 64.000 millones de litros de agua en 2023, una cifra que se ha disparado con el auge de la IA generativa. El entrenamiento de un modelo como GPT‑3 puede llegar a evaporar directamente 700.000 litros de agua dulce. Grandes instalaciones como el centro de Google en Council Bluffs consumen más de 1.300 millones de galones anuales, a menudo en zonas que ya sufren estrés hídrico.

Esta demanda genera conflictos territoriales donde el agua es un bien escaso, poniendo en evidencia que la "inteligencia" de la nube tiene un coste físico muy real y muy líquido.

La crisis de la memoria RAM: el primer límite visible

Un ejemplo ilustrativo de estos límites es la crisis global de la memoria RAM. A inicios de 2026, se prevé que los centros de datos consuman hasta el 70% de la producción mundial de chips de memoria. Esto ha provocado escasez en el mercado de consumo, subidas de precios superiores al 50% solo en el primer trimestre del año, y una contracción prevista de las ventas de PC cercana al 9%.

OpenAI. Salir a bolsa mientras se hunde

Y aquí llega la noticia que resume mejor que ninguna otra la lógica de este sistema.

El CEO de OpenAI, Sam Altman, tiene como objetivo un debut bursátil en septiembre de 2026, en lo que supondría una transformación radical para una compañía que nació como laboratorio de investigación sin ánimo de lucro en 2015. La empresa apunta a recaudar unos 60.000 millones de dólares en su salida a bolsa. Si se confirma, superaría con creces la mayor OPV registrada hasta ahora, la de Saudi Aramco en 2019, cifrada en 25.600 millones de dólares.

Las cifras de valoración son mareantes: en diciembre de 2025, el Wall Street Journal informaba de que OpenAI buscaba 100.000 millones de dólares en una nueva ronda de financiación con una valoración de 830.000 millones, con algunos informes apuntando a que la propia OPV podría superar el billón de dólares.

Pero los datos financieros reales cuentan una historia muy diferente. En 2025, OpenAI generó 13.100 millones de dólares en ingresos, pero quemó aproximadamente 22.000 millones para lograrlo, con una pérdida neta de unos 9.000 millones. Las proyecciones internas apuntan a unas pérdidas operativas de 14.000 millones de dólares en 2026.

La empresa no espera alcanzar la rentabilidad hasta aproximadamente 2030. Dicho de otra forma: la OPV no es una celebración. Es una necesidad de financiación. Los mercados públicos son el único fondo de capital suficientemente profundo para cerrar la brecha.

En caso de no conseguir nuevos fondos de mayor cuantía, las proyecciones indican que OpenAI podría quedarse en bancarrota para 2027.

La cruda realidad es que la empresa podría quedarse sin fondos en un plazo aproximado de 18 meses, una situación que pondría en entredicho la continuidad de su actual modelo de negocio.

Lo que presenciamos es el intento de trasladar al público general —a través de los mercados bursátiles— el riesgo de un modelo de negocio que los inversores privados ya no quieren seguir financiando en solitario.

Rendimientos decrecientes y expectativas infladas

Además de los límites físicos, aparece otro problema clásico: los rendimientos decrecientes. Cada nueva generación de modelos requiere mucho más cómputo y energía para mejoras cada vez más modestas. El salto entre "impresionante" y "un poco mejor" es cada vez más caro.

Esto pone en cuestión el modelo económico dominante: costes disparados que ya no son sostenibles sin subvenciones o capital riesgo masivo, dificultad de monetización real, y una dependencia especulativa que empieza a exigir resultados más allá del marketing.

Tres escenarios posibles

Desaceleración forzada y reorientación (más probable): El crecimiento se ralentiza. Las limitaciones energéticas y los costes obligan a priorizar modelos más pequeños, eficientes y con valor social claro. La IA pasa de ser un "todo para todo" a una herramienta integrada con criterios de suficiencia.

Burbuja tecnológica y corrección abrupta (probable): Las expectativas superan la capacidad real. Los costes suben, los beneficios no llegan y el sector entra en crisis con quiebras y recortes masivos. El caso de OpenAI podría ser el detonante.

Huida hacia adelante (menos probable pero peligrosa): Se redobla la apuesta con más extractivismo. Esto solo desplaza los límites y los hace más violentos, agravando la crisis climática y social.

Un patrón que ya conocemos

Lo que ocurre con la inteligencia artificial sigue un patrón que ya hemos visto con las energías renovables y el vehículo eléctrico: primero, un relato de crecimiento infinito; después, una expansión rápida; más tarde, los límites materiales, energéticos y territoriales; y finalmente, una desaceleración inevitable.

La lección no es que la tecnología fracase, sino que el progreso sin límites no existe.

La IA, como la eólica, la fotovoltaica o los coches eléctricos, tendrá que aprender a funcionar con lo que es realmente suficiente: suficiente energía, suficientes recursos, suficientes usos reales. La suficiencia no es renunciar a la innovación, sino entender cuándo es suficiente para satisfacer necesidades reales sin sobrepasar los límites del planeta.

El problema no es la IA, sino el relato

La inteligencia artificial puede tener usos útiles en un mundo con menos recursos, pero solo si abandona el mito del crecimiento infinito y se inserta dentro de un marco de límites, suficiencia y justicia.

La historia de OpenAI —empresa que aspira a ser valorada en un billón de dólares mientras proyecta pérdidas de 14.000 millones anuales y coquetea con la quiebra— no es una anomalía. Es el sistema funcionando exactamente como está diseñado: socializar las pérdidas, privatizar los beneficios, y llamar "progreso" a lo que no es más que otra burbuja inflada con energía barata, agua escasa y capital especulativo.

El planeta ya no puede permitirse ese relato.

I understand now why they took my father. To most people he was one of the nameless who went out nights, worked his shift, and came back tired. Someone was watching him though, someone who knew what he was really about, and that’s why they took him. He was also a writer, you see? He was an explorer of ideas, a lover of maps and books, but only those closest to him knew about that side of him.

They took him long before he’d had time to perfect his craft, long before he became dangerous to them. He was still coming to terms with his powers, getting into his stride, finding the right words. But I suppose, given the course he was on, they felt they had no choice but to act.

At weekends, I’d wake to the sound of his old Underwood typewriter as he hammered out pages of manuscript. The Underwood was what he used to capture those words that seemed right to him. But after a while he’d destroy them, having decided they were no good after all. Meanwhile, the rest of his work, the more speculative ideas, he’d write up in his notebooks which he’d consult from time to time, searching back for fresh avenues to explore, for things he might have missed along the way.

He had a neat hand, a draughtsman’s hand, so his notes and diagrams possessed a beauty that went beyond whatever they were actually saying. After they took him, another man came asking for those notebooks. He said he was a friend but, I’d met him before, and I knew he wasn’t, not really, so I told him we hadn’t kept them. He came again forty years later, a wizened old man, still on the trail, still something deceitful about him, and worried about the things my father knew. I told him the same thing. Even after all this time, it pays to be careful who to trust.

On the weekend afternoons my father and I would be scrambling up nameless gullies on the moors. It was in such places, where the rocks broke the surface, the earth hinting at its secrets, and he would scratch at them, peer at their traces under a magnifying glass. He was good at finding pyrites for me – fool’s gold, he said – not that he was fooled by it. He was never a seeker after gold, not the ordinary kind at least, but he enjoyed splitting the rocks for me to see. And then he’d tell me we should always be careful not to chase after everything that sparkled, because it might not be what we thought it was.

It was a different kind of gold he was hunting, a secret thing, the philosopher’s gold, I suppose you’d call it. This was a mysterious substance, hidden since the dawn of man. It wasn’t that others wanted to take it from you, more they had to stop you getting hold of it in the first place, because that kind of gold was the key to everything. That’s why it was so dangerous.

Often, my father and I would be out on the moors where the old maps said the standing stones used to be. Balmy days and bleak days, we'd seek their traces in the dun-coloured grasses. I could see those hills from my bedroom window, miles away. Indeed, I could see the whole moor spread out like a map, and then there we were, he and I, in the map itself, looking for the stones, solving mysteries.

My father said he believed the stones had once marked the passage of the seasons. That they weren’t there any more is the reason we’d lost our way, and that was why no one ever looked at the moon any more, or could name the stars. This was important, he thought, and it was thrilling to me he was on the trail of a thing that could restore such marvels to the world. It was this, I’m sure that roused the same forces that had taken the stones and hidden them away, this same power that had taken my father.

The night they came, I hid his notebooks. I would decode them one day, I thought, but I’ve had them fifty years now, and they remain as puzzling as ever. Which of his ideas are worth the smoothing out into clearer prose? Which are the fool’s-gold sparkles of frivolous intrigue? I don’t know. Mould mottles their pages, and they’ve become brittle. It adds a fragility to their beauty. But still, I guard them, though lately I’ve been thinking the secret isn’t in them at all, not like I once thought, not a clear arrow to point the way. I think the secret lies elsewhere, off the edge of the page perhaps, and you have to ride the beauty of them, as if on a butterfly’s wings, to get there.

Besides his notebooks, I have his watch, but I don’t wear it. We inhabit different times now. He was spirited away to a place where I fear he must walk the moors alone, and without his maps. The watch still ticks, though the date is faulty, settles between days, as if pointing to another reality, one in which my father has been trapped all these years. But I have the feeling that in continuing the spirit of his work, I am asking the same questions he asked, and if I can reveal the answers, those who took him have no reason to go on holding him, do they? They will have to let him go.

I have written a million words by now, and in that time I have grown old, much older than he was when they took him. But I will bring him back. One day I will pay their ransom. Then I might wake again to the sound of that old Underwood, as my father banishes the emptiness of night, and restores to me once more his world of marvels.

*On metamorphosis, continuity, and the quiet error of reading death as an ending.*

-----

Set two creatures side by side and they look like a study in contrast. The monarch butterfly, *Danaus plexippus*, lays single eggs on milkweed and nothing else, hatches a caterpillar that feeds for a week or two, hangs itself into a naked chrysalis, and emerges able to fly thousands of kilometers. The silk moth, *Bombyx mori*, lays eggs in clusters of hundreds, eats only mulberry, spins itself into a dense cocoon, and emerges so thoroughly domesticated that its adults can barely fly and cannot survive without us. One is wild and migratory; the other is a creature of human hands.

But the contrast is cosmetic. Underneath, both obey the same grammar — egg, larva, pupa, adult — and that grammar conceals something far stranger than the differences between species. Buckminster Fuller put it best: there is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly. He meant it as a remark about prediction. I want to take it as a remark about identity, and then about death.

## The dismantling

We tend to picture metamorphosis as a caterpillar *growing* wings, the way a child grows into an adult — continuous, gradual, the same self enlarged. The biology is more violent than that. Inside the sealed chrysalis, much of the caterpillar’s body is enzymatically broken down into a loose cellular slurry. Suspended in that slurry are clusters of cells called imaginal discs, set aside earlier in the larva precisely so that they can survive the dissolution and reorganize the broth into an adult that the larva never resembled. The caterpillar is not so much improved as taken apart and re-spent. And the chrysalis is only the most dramatic seam, not the first: the caterpillar already hatched from an egg it cannot remember being, so the relay of forgotten phases runs backward as far as it runs forward.

That dismantling is why metamorphosis became one of humanity’s oldest emblems for the soul. If the caterpillar were capable of narrating its own experience, the chrysalis would not feel like a passage. It would feel like an ending. The body it knew is digested. The world it knew — the leaf, the chewing, the slow crawl — is gone. From the inside of that transformation, “I am ending” and “I am becoming something else” would be indistinguishable claims. There is no vantage point within the caterpillar from which to tell the difference.

## What crosses, and what does not

So does anything actually carry across? Here the experiments are more interesting than the metaphors. In 2008, Douglas Blackiston and colleagues trained tobacco hornworm caterpillars to avoid a specific odor by pairing it with a mild electric shock, then tested the moths that later emerged. The larvae learned to avoid the training odor, and that aversion was still present in the adult moths — and it did not come from chemicals lingering on the pupa, but from learning that survived the reorganization itself. Something of the caterpillar’s experience reached the moth.

But not everything, and not from everywhen. Larvae trained early, at the third instar, still avoided the odor as older larvae but no longer avoided it as adults — consistent with the idea that memories survive metamorphosis only when they are laid down in parts of the nervous system that persist into the adult brain. The bridge between phases is real but narrow. Most of the caterpillar’s life does not make the crossing. The adult moth flies off carrying a few retained associations and almost no acknowledgment of the long green life that produced it. It does not know itself as a former caterpillar. It simply *is* a moth, in a world that begins, as far as it can tell, at emergence.

Hold onto that asymmetry. The continuity is genuine. The recognition of it is almost entirely absent.

## A traveler who is never the same traveler

The monarch presses the point further, because its continuity is not even confined to one body. The famous migration to the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico is not made by a single butterfly. Four generations are involved in the annual cycle, and two to three generations complete the journey north, with females laying eggs for the next generation as they go. The summer generations live only two to five weeks; it is the fourth, the so-called Methuselah generation, that is physiologically distinct, entering reproductive diapause and living seven to nine months to make the long flight south.

The arithmetic is quietly astonishing. The monarch resting on a flower in a New England garden in May is the child or grandchild of the butterfly that left Mexico that spring. And the generation that flies *to* Mexico in autumn has never been there. The Methuselah monarchs navigate to overwintering grounds that their own generation has never seen, guided by an internal compass science still cannot fully explain. The “monarch migration,” spoken of as a single feat, is performed by a relay of beings, none of whom completes it, none of whom remembers the leg before their own, and the most decisive of whom flies unerringly toward a home it has no memory of.

If you were one of those butterflies, you would experience none of this as continuation. You would experience only your own brief life, with its single compulsion, in a world that started when you did.

## Made of what it eats

The relay runs sideways as well as forward — not only across the phases of a life but into what a life is made of. Watch a caterpillar strip a milkweed leaf and it looks like simple consumption, one thing destroying another. But the monarch carries the plant back out of the leaf: it takes up milkweed’s cardiac toxins and stores them, so that the plant’s poison becomes the butterfly’s own lifelong defense against predators. The monarch is, chemically, milkweed that learned to fly. And those poisons are themselves the slow precipitate of being eaten — plant and insect have shaped each other for so long, in the founding example of what biologists came to call coevolution, that neither is quite a self-contained thing. Each is partly the other’s history.

The same holds, more intimately, in the phase we all begin in. We picture the womb as a vessel the child merely draws from and then departs. But cells cross in both directions and stay. Fetal cells lodge in the mother’s blood, heart, liver, brain, and skin and can persist there for decades — present whether the pregnancy ended in birth or in loss — while maternal cells likewise remain in the child. The host keeps a piece of the guest for the rest of her life; the guest carries the host. So the single traveler the relay lacks across time, it also lacks at any single moment. A monarch is not one bounded thing passing through milkweed; it is milkweed, sun, and air briefly standing up as a monarch — the surroundings, for a season, in the shape of a creature.

## Continuity without a continuer

This is the place where biology and two older bodies of thought quietly converge.

The Buddhist tradition has insisted for two and a half millennia that there is no permanent, unchanging self threading through experience — only a stream of conditioned arisings, each conditioning the next, with no owner riding inside them. The classical image, from the dialogues of King Milinda, is the flame passed from candle to candle through the night: the late flame is neither the same flame as the first nor a different one, and the question “which is the *real* one” is malformed. What we call a person is a process that produces the convincing impression of a thing. Rebirth, in this reading, was never the migration of a soul-substance from body to body; it was causal continuity without a continuer — exactly the monarch’s relay, with the same absence of a single traveler and the same absence of memory across the seams.

It is worth being exact about what this does and does not buy. Nothing here licenses the claim that anything recognizably personal — your memories, your character, the felt center of *you* — survives what we call death. It undercuts only the narrower and more stubborn move: the slide from *no one on the far side remembers the near side* to *there was nothing on the near side at all.* The first is an observation; the second is a conclusion that does not follow from it.

Modern physics arrived, by a completely different road, at a structurally similar humility about “things.” In quantum field theory, what we naively call a particle is not a tiny enduring marble but a localized excitation of an underlying field — a pattern in something more fundamental, not an object in empty space. Two electrons are not two little objects that happen to match; they are indistinguishable excitations of the one electron field, and the “same” electron persisting through time is a continuity of pattern, not the survival of a substance. Even the vacuum is not nothing: it is the field’s lowest state, restless with fluctuation, the ground from which excitations arise and into which they subside. Persistence, on this picture, is a stable pattern in a substrate that itself does not begin or end where the pattern does.

A flame, an excitation, a relay of butterflies, a monarch made of milkweed. In each, what we point to as a lasting, self-contained thing turns out to be a pattern carried forward — and held up from the sides — through transformations that destroy any single carrier.

## The forgetting between phases

Which brings us, finally, to the error.

We treat death as cessation. But look closely at what that judgment actually rests on. We do not *observe* cessation — no one observes their own nothing. What we observe is the absence of acknowledgment: the adult does not report being the larva; the moth does not file the caterpillar under “my former life”; the butterfly heading to Mexico carries no récollection of the mother who turned back two generations ago. Every successful metamorphosis in nature arrives precisely without ancestral acknowledgment of the phase before it. The later stage does not remember being the earlier one, and frequently could not have, because the structures that did the earlier living were dismantled in the passage.

So consider what this does to our reasoning about death. The single piece of evidence we have for “death is an ending” is the same piece of evidence a butterfly would have for “the caterpillar’s death was an ending” — namely, that nothing on the far side announces itself as a continuation of the near side. But we have just watched that exact silence accompany transformations that were *not* endings. In the monarch, in the moth, the non-recognition of the prior phase is not a sign that the prior phase terminated into nothing. It is the ordinary signature of having crossed into a phase that does not carry the previous one’s memory.

This is the quiet mistake. We read the absence of an ancestral acknowledgment as proof of cessation, when in every transformation we can actually inspect, that same absence sits comfortably on top of continuation. The caterpillar would be entirely right that *the caterpillar* ends. It would be entirely wrong that *everything* ends. And it would have no way, from inside its own dissolving, to tell which conclusion it was entitled to.

I am not claiming that death is rebirth, or that the analogy proves anything about what follows our own last phase. The honest position is narrower and, I think, more durable: cessation is not something we ever witness. It is an *inference* we draw from non-recognition — and non-recognition is exactly what a continuation through radical transformation would also produce. The two are empirically identical from the inside. What we are entitled to say, then, is not “death is an ending.” It is the more accurate and more open phrase: *unknown continuation.* The next phase, if there is one, would by its nature arrive without acknowledging the one before — just as the moth flies off unaware of the leaf, and the autumn monarch turns toward a country it was never told it had visited.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it is going to be a butterfly. There is also nothing in a butterfly that remembers having been a caterpillar. Both silences are real. Only one of them is the end of the world — and from inside either, you cannot tell which.

*A companion essay, “The Reader and the Cloud,” takes up the question this one leaves open — if not a continuer, then what continues? — through genetics, information theory, and the old Buddhist intuition of a storehouse that holds without anyone keeping it.*

-----

### References

- Blackiston, D. J., Silva Casey, E., & Weiss, M. R. (2008). Retention of Memory through Metamorphosis: Can a Moth Remember What It Learned As a Caterpillar? *PLoS ONE*, 3(3): e1736. <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001736>

- Monarch migration generational cycle and the Methuselah generation: *Monarch butterfly migration*, Wikipedia; “Word of the Week: Monarch,” *Berkshire Eagle* (2025); “Monarch Butterflies: Migration, Breeding, and Survival Strategies,” ScienceInsights (2025); Natural Habitat Adventures, “Monarch Butterfly Migration” (2022).

- Fuller quotation as cited in *National Geographic*, “Moths remember what they learn as caterpillars.”

- Monarch sequestration of milkweed cardenolides as a predator defense: see overviews in the monarch-biology sources above. The coevolution of butterflies and their host plants follows P. R. Ehrlich & P. H. Raven (1964), “Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution,” *Evolution*, 18(4): 586–608.

- Fetal and maternal microchimerism: Boddy, A. M., Fortunato, A., Wilson Sayres, M., & Aktipis, A. (2015), “Fetal microchimerism and maternal health,” *BioEssays*, 37: 1106–1118; and reviews of the persistence of fetal cells in maternal tissues for decades following any pregnancy outcome.

- Philosophical sources drawn on generally: the *Milindapañha* (the simile of the flame and the chariot) on continuity without a permanent self; standard quantum field theory on particles as field excitations and the non-emptiness of the vacuum.

Thomas of Ercildoune- or Erceldoune is well-known as a character in the Scots ballad of ‘True Thomas’, or ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, who was carried off by the Queen of Faery and given ‘true speech’. It is possible to follow a trail from the medieval abbey in Melrose up onto the Eildon Hills and then to descend to Huntley Bank by Bogle Burn (‘Goblin Brook’) and down to the ‘Rhymer’s Stone’, a memorial to mark the spot where Thomas sat, according to the ballad, under the ‘Eildon Tree’. A hawthorn has also been planted by the memorial stone to represent this tree.

The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer

True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank

A ferlie he spied with his e'e

And there he saw a lady bright

Come riding down by the Eildon Tree

Her skirt was of the grass green silk

Her mantle of the velvet fine

At each tett of her horse's mane

Hung fifty silver bells and nine

True Thomas, he pulled off his cap

And bowed low down to his knee

All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven

For thy peer on earth I never did see

Oh no, oh no, Thomas, she said

That name does not belong to me

I am but the Queen of fair Elfland

That am hither come to visit thee

Harp and carp, Thomas, she said

Harp and carp along with me

And if you dare to kiss my lips

Sure of your body I will be

Betide me well, betide me woe

That weird shall never daunton me

Syne he has kissed her rosy lips

All underneath the Eildon Tree

Now, ye maun go with me, she said

True Thomas, ye maun go with me

And ye maun serve me seven years

Though weal and woe, as may chance to be

She mounted on her milk white steed

She's taken True Thomas up behind

And aye whenever her bridle rang

The steed flew swifter than the wind

Oh they rode on, and further on

The steed gaed swifter than the wind

Until they reached a desert wide

And living land was left behind

Light down, light down now, true Thomas

And lean you head upon my knee

Abide and rest a little space

And I will show you ferlies three

Oh, see you not yon narrow road

So thick beset with thorn and briars

That is the path of righteousness

Though after it but few enquire

And see you not that broad, broad road

That lies across that lily leven

That is the path of wickedness

Though some call it the road to Heaven

And see you not that bonnie road

That winds about the fernie brae

That is the road to fair Elfland

Where thou and I this night maun gae

But Thomas, you must hold your tongue

Whatever you may hear or see

For if you speak word in Elfin land

You'll ne'er get back to you ain country

Then they came on to a garden green

And she pulled an apple frae a tree

Take this for thy wages, True Thomas

It will give the tongue that can never lie

My tongue is my own, True Thomas said

A goodly gift you would give to me

I neither dought to buy or sell

At fair or tryst where I may be

I dought neither speak to prince nor peer

Nor ask of grace from fair lady

Now hold thy peace, the lady said

For as I say, so it must be

He has gotten a coat of the even cloth

And a pair of shoes of velvet green

And till seven years were gone and past

True Thomas on earth was never seen

Child #37. ( Collected by Child from Scott )

The ballad appears in most anthologies of traditional ballads, having featured in Child’s English and Scottish Ballads (1862) and, earlier, in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border(1802). Robert Graves discussed it in his ‘historical grammar of poetic myth’ The White Goddess (1949) and pointed out that the ballad was a source of John Keats’ poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. It may therefore be assumed that the ballad had independent existence arising from an oral tradition and representing an expression of a folklore motif of the Faery Queen on a horse. In this way it is possible to link it with, for instance, the ballad of Tamlane and, indeed, other literary formulations of the motif like the arrival of Rhiannon on a white horse in the First Branch of Y Mabinogi. This sort of typological approach enables one to see the use of the motif by poets such as Keats as touching on archetypal themes in both the written and the oral tradition of story telling or, we might say, myth making.

The Historical Character

Thomas was an historical character who lived in the thirteenth century in a tower – now a ruin but still partly standing – in the village of Ercildoune (now Earlston) in the Tweed Valley. He was dubbed ‘The Rhymer’ because of his reputation for penning prophetic verses. But many later events became attached to his list of prophecies, mostly related to conflicts between England and Scotland. He is said to be the author of a work in three ‘fyttes’ or sections containing prophecies in Fytte Two and Three but telling the story of his being carried off by the Faery Queen in Fytte One. Here his acquisition of the gift for ‘true speech’ from the Queen is the validation of his power as a prophet. The earliest of several manuscripts containing this work — the so-called ‘Thornton Manuscript’, a collection of various romance and prophetic writing — has been dated to the decade 1430-1440, over a hundred years after Thomas’s death.

The Prophecies

These may be the source of the ballad. But the work is written in a northern dialect of Middle English, not Scots. And while Fytte One contains the same story as the Ballad, the details differ. In his edition of various manuscript versions of the ‘Prophesies’ for the Early English Texts Society in 1875, James Murray argues the case for the textual integrity of the whole work in three fyttes in spite of the feelings of Child and others that the story of Fytte One was distinct as a literary product and deserved to be considered separately. Murray also suggests it may not be too much to suppose that “Thomas of Ercildoune may, from his literary tastes, have been the repository of such traditional rhymes” and that he may have known of an independent version of the story in Fytte One and used it as a way of giving “currency to the idea of his own prophetic powers”. Or that a later author put together a compilation of Thomas’s prophecies, adding others of his own, and linked them to the story of his being carried away to Faery in the same way. Indeed, Murray points out that at some stages of its literary reception the prophecies had been regarded with more interest than the folktale. These were common currency in the political discourse of the time and were often used to justify, or whip up support for, particular causes. The author of the Complaynt of Scotland (1529) refers to “diuerse prophane prophesies of merlyne and other ald corruptit vaticinaris the quhilkis hes affirmit in rusty ryme” while James V (of Scotland) was entertained with “prophisies of Rymour, Beid and Marlyng”.

Placing the prophecies alongside those of Merlin, and therefore in the same context as those ascribed to legendary Welsh bards like Myrddin and Taliesin, brings the material into focus alongside Welsh texts and predictions of conflicts between the different peoples inhabiting Britain after the Romans left, and throughout the Middle Ages. But we do at least know that Thomas of Ercildoune existed and that some of the prophecies concerning the area around the Eildon Hills and the valley of the River Tweed provide a setting which make it likely that he was their author. Walter Scott, who was also an inhabitant of this area, may therefore be seen to have had an interest in promoting the Ballad and there is some debate as to the previous provenance of the version that he printed in his collection. If it was, indeed, a recent literary production based on Fytte One of the ‘Prophesies’ then the idea that the story had an independent existence in the oral tradition could be questioned. Scott was certainly enthusiastic about Thomas’s legendary status and he even tried to appropriate it by incorporating a ‘Rhymer’s Glen’ into his estate at Abbotsford a few miles away from the spot where the ‘Eildon Tree’ was located. But many have felt that the story has a life of its own beyond the context of the times during which the prophecies were significant. And having a context outside of a particular historical time frame is one indication of a story with mythical, significance.

Comparison of the Ballad and the Prophecies

The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer runs to between eighty and ninety lines according to which of the several versions are consulted. The corresponding narrative in Fytte One of the ‘Prophecies’ of Thomas of Ercildoune runs to 308 lines, with a partial extension into Fytte Two. So the material in the ‘Prophecies’ is obviously more detailed.

The texts from the various manuscript sources for the ‘Prophecies’ were published in James Murray’s Early English Texts Society edition in 1875. The earliest manuscript source dates from c.1430, a little more than a hundred years after Thomas of Ercildoune died. Here are the opening lines of the ‘Prophecies’ in their transcribed original form. I give this for a flavour of the text, but will after this quote from the text in my translation from the northern dialect of Middle English in which it is written.

Als j me wente Þis Eldres daye

Ffull faste in mynd makand my mone,

In a mery mornynge of maye

By huntle bankkes my selfe alone,

I herde Þe jaye & Þe throstyll coke,

The Mawys menyde hir of hir songe,

Þe wodewale beryde als a belle

That alle Þe wode a-bowte me ronge.

Allonne in longynge thus als j laye

Vndre-nethe a seemly tree,

J was whare [of] a lady gaye

Come rydynge ouer a longe lee.

If j solde sytt to domesdaye,

With my tongue, to wrobbe and wrye,

Certanely Þat lady gaye

Neuer bese scho askryede for mee.

Hir palfraye was a dappill graye

Swylke one ne saghe j neuer none

Als dose Þe sonne on someres daye

Þat faire lady hir selfe scho schone.

Hir selle it was of roelle bone

Full seemly was Þat syghte to see

Stefly sett with precious stones

And compaste all with crapote,

Stones of Oryente, grete plente,

Hir hare abowte hir hede it hange;

Scho rade ouer Þat lange lee

A whylle scho blewe, a-noÞer scho sange.

The first thing to notice here is that, unlike the ballad, this is written in the first person. The ballad is about Thomas. This purports to be written by him, though there are parts of this narrative that change to third person narration. Another difference is that the Ballad launches straight into the action while the ‘Prophecies’ spend some time setting the scene. It is a May Morning, the birds are singing and, as the Lady come riding towards him, she is described in great detail. Thomas is overwhelmed. He says, ‘If I were to live until Doomsday, I couldn’t describe her splendour’. She is ‘shining like the sun on a summer’s day’ as she approaches with her jewel be-studded trappings. As she comes, she sings out and blows upon her horn like a hunter. It takes 72 lines to describe her approach. The Ballad does it in eight lines.

As the Lady approaches him, Thomas assumes that she is must be the Virgin Mary and he addresses her as such, but she informs him he is mistaken. She is, rather, as the Ballad has it, The Queen of Elfland, though in the ‘Prophecies’ she simply says that she is from ‘another country’.

In the Ballad, the Queen invites Thomas to give her a kiss and then almost immediately carries him off to Elfland after identifying other possible roads they could take. But in the ‘Prophecies’ much more happens. After being told that she is not Mary, Thomas begins to suggest that they ‘lie down’ together. At first she refuses, saying that it would ‘mar’ and ‘spill’ her beauty. But Thomas persists and she then agrees:

Down then came that lady bright

Underneath the greenwood spray

And if the story tells it right

Seven times with her he lay.

She said ‘man you like your play”

But after this, as she predicted, she is transformed and her appearance is hideous. All of this is covered by the kiss in the Ballad, after which he is under her spell.

The Loathly Lady

The incident where the Lady turns into a hideous hag-like figure is not in the Ballad. But the figure of the ‘Loathly Lady’ is well known in medieval literature. Chaucer used it in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Usually, the hero has to kiss the Loathly Lady, or agree to marry her, after which she becomes a beautiful young woman. ‘Kissing the Hag’ is a test, when a hero has to prove himself worthy and these stories are usually interpreted as ‘sovereignty’ themes, the would-be king or leader having to wed the land as winter as well as summer. But the pattern seems to be reversed here. Thomas has done a lot more than kiss the Lady, and the result is that she is transformed from beauty to hideousness. The ‘test’ here, if it is a test, is that Thomas has to accompany the Lady in her hideous form back to her own land, leaving ‘Middle Earth’ behind them . This involves a frightening journey underground and through water.

The Journey to the Otherworld

In the Ballad, after Thomas has kissed the Elfin Queen, she takes him up on her horse and they ride ‘swifter than the wind’ across a desert leaving the ‘living land’ behind them. In the ‘Prophecies’, following the lady’s transformation, Thomas is distraught and reverts to addressing her as the Queen of Heaven, supposing what they have done will bring him great trouble. But in one of the manuscript sources of the ‘Prophecies’ the wording suggests, rather, that he prays separately to the Virgin Mary and although this is less clear in the other manuscripts, it is a possible reading there too. The Lady’s response is to guide him to a ‘secret’ way under the hill where it is ‘dark as midnight mirk’ and where he must wade through a river. He hears nothing but the constant sound of running water for three days before arriving in a fair garden. In guiding him through the terrible ways to the Otherworld, the Lady, though having refused the title, seems to offer him the help and protection he prays for to ‘Mary mild’. Though he is faint with hunger and reaches out to eat some of the fruit in the garden, she tells him not to touch it or he will never return. This is a common theme of visits to the Otherworld and again, here, the lady is his guide and protector.

The briefer narrative of the Ballad dispenses with most of this but does include references to riding through rivers of blood. Both the Ballad and the ‘Prophecies’, though not in the same place in the narrative, have a scene where the Lady tells Thomas to put his head upon her knee while she points out the different road that could be taken. The Ballad has three of these: ‘the road to righteousness’, ‘the road to wickedness, which some call the road to heaven’, and the ‘bonnie road across the ferny brae’ which will take them to Elfland. In the ‘Prophecies’, the five roads identified are to heaven, to paradise, to purgatory, to hell, and to a castle on a hill which is their destination. The Ballad makes its point without these theological distinctions, simply asserting that ‘Elfland’ is different from heaven and hell.

In the version of the Ballad given by Walter Scott (but not in a later, possibly corrupt version) the Elfin Queen, rather than warning Thomas not to eat the fruit, offers him an apple which will give him ‘a tongue that can never lie’. We are then simply told that he returns after seven years wearing a coat ‘of the even cloth’ and ‘shoes of velvet green’. In both the Ballad and the ‘Prophecies’ Thomas is told not to speak while he is in the Otherworld. In the ‘Prophecies’ the reason given for this is that the Lady doesn’t want him to be questioned by her husband in case he reveals what they have been up to. The Ballad has no explanation except that if he does speak he will never return home.

As they ride towards the castle, the Lady’s beauty returns to her. Thomas stays there for what seems like three days but he is told it is three years (compare the Ballad’s seven years). He must leave, the Lady tells him, as the ‘foul fiend of hell’ will come to claim one of the company and if Thomas is there she fears it will be him. There is a parallel here with the story of Tamlane. Fytte One ends with the lady bringing Thomas back to the Eildon Tree. In fyttes two and three she keeps trying to take leave of him with repeated statements like ‘I must wend my way’ and ‘I may no longer dwell’. But Thomas keeps asking her for ‘ferlies’ and a series of prophecies are delivered.

Y Mabinogi

Now, for comparison, consider this from the First Branch of the Mabinogi

1. “As they were sitting on this hill a woman dressed in shining gold brocade and riding a great pale horse approached the highway which ran past them. Anyone who saw the horse would have said it was moving at a slow steady pace as it drew adjacent to the hill. "Men," said Pwyll, "does anyone know that horsewoman?" "No, lord," they answered. "Then let someone go and find out who she is." A man rose to go after her but by the time he reached the highway she had already gone past. He tried to follow her on foot, but she drew farther ahead of him. When he saw his pursuit was in vain he returned and told Pwyll, "Lord, it is pointless for anyone to follow her on foot." "All right. Go to the court and take the fastest horse you know and go after her." The man fetched the horse and set out after her. Once he reached open country his spurs found his mount, but no matter how much he urged the steed onward the farther ahead she drew, all the while going at the same pace as before.”

Eventually Pwyll calls to her and she waits for him to catch up with her. Rhiannon tells Pwyll she has come because she wants him for a husband and he agrees to visit her to formalize this arrangement. She is clearly of a faery nature from the outset and not mistaken for Mary, though she only identifies herself by her name and her father’s name.

There are no obvious ‘loathly lady’ parallels, but consider the ‘penance’ that Rhiannon has to perform at the horse block when she is suspected of killing her son. She doesn’t become a loathly lady, but she has to endure a humiliation and a diminution in status until Pryderi is returned. As for Pwyll, he is ‘tested’ by the incident when Gwawl, the prospective husband Rhiannon does not want, outwits him and he needs Rhiannon’s help to regain the advantage.

Sources

What of the Ballad? We can trace the record back a little beyond its first emergence in print. Two versions appeared early in the Nineteenth Century, one from Walter Scott and the other from Robert Jamieson. Information about how their versions were obtained is contained in the letters of Robert Anderson, a doctor from Edinburgh who was also a literary historian. He published Lives of the English Poetsin 1795 and a critical edition of the works of Samuel Johnson in 1815. He carried on an extensive correspondence with other literary men including Bishop Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry had been published in 1765. In communicating with Percy about Scottish border ballads in September 1800, Anderson refers to “a pretty large MS collection of old Scottish ballads, communicated by Mrs Brown, wife of Dr Brown, minister of Falkirk”. He reports that Mrs Brown “learned them all when she was a child by hearing them sung by her mother and an old maid-servant”. Mrs Brown had also been visted by Robert Jamieson earlier that year. Anderson then relates that, together with Robert Jamieson, he visited Walter Scott and they discussed the Ballad of True Thomas which had been obtained from Mrs Brown. Anderson “hinted my suspicion of modern manufacture, in which Scott “had secretly anticipated me”, as Mrs Brown was fond of ballads and herself wrote verse. But he concluded that “her character places her above the suspicion of literary imposture”, a view which others have treated with some skeptisism.

But it should be noted that, in December 1800 Anderson again wrote to Percy about some ballads that had been passed to Wm. Tytler by Professor Thomas Gordon of Aberdeen in 1783. Gordon was Mrs Brown’s father. These ballads had come from the same woman later identified by Mrs Brown, together with an aunt, a Mrs Farquharson, although Gordon does not mention his wife as a source. Mrs Brown herself later wrote to Tytler’s son who had enquired about the ballads, saying “I do not pretend that these ballads are correct in any way as they are written down entirely from my recollection, for I never saw one of them in print or manuscript”

As Mrs Brown seems to have communicated a large number of ballads to a variety of different people, all apparently from memory, it is possible that she did not give all of them exactly the same versions. But this does not explain the considerable difference between Scott’s and Jamieson’s versions. We might think that Jamieson was more likely to anglicize the ballad in order to popularise it, or that Scott would be more likely to want to keep the Scottish flavour. Jamieson’s version certainly has all the indications of an adaptation by him in line with his previously stated intentions to publish his own collection of old ballads “with interpolated stanzas written by myself”, which later appeared as Popular Ballads and Songs (1806). Scott, however, was also working from a much longer work containing the story related in the Ballad : The ‘Prophecies’ of Thomas of Ercildoune. Elsewhere Scott included the ‘traditional’ Ballad together with some pieces of his own devising based on the ‘Prophecies’ in a creative sequence. Could his reading and re-working of the ‘Prophecies’ have influenced his presentation of the Ballad?

Anderson’s correspondence is focussed in Illustrations of Literary History of the Eighteenth Century by J B Nichols (1848)

So what can now be said of the likely source of the story? We know that the earliest manuscript of the ‘Prophecies’ is from the 14th century and that it is supposed to be the work of the historical Thomas of Ercildoune who lived over a hundred years earlier. There are two reason to think that the four extant manuscripts stem from an earlier version rather than being accurate copies of an earlier text. The first is that, although the story seems to have originated in Scotland, the language indicates that the author was from the North of England. This suggests an adaptation of a Scottish tale. Some commentators have felt that the change from the First Person to the Third Person, and then back again, also suggests a source in an earlier version. The tales begins “As I went out …” and continues using ‘I’ until Thomas sees the Lady. The narration then changes with “He said …” and remains in the Third Person through all the central events until “My lovely lady said to me” when she informs Thomas that they are to return. It then remains in the First Person. Was there an earlier version entirely in the First Person, told by Thomas of Ercildoune, and if so was he relating on his own account a story already known to him?

Associated Faery Lore

In addition to the Ballad and the 'Prophecies' of True Thomas, there is a body of Scottish fairy lore associated with Thomas. His coming and goings from the Otherworld feature in many tales in which Thomas having been recalled to the Otherworld, continues to move between the worlds. Whether these stem from the Ballad, or are a parallel development with the Ballad, is difficult to establish. Just as it is difficult to be certain whether either or both of these came from the tale which opens the 'Prophecies' or whether all stem from a common earlier source.

What is likely is that Thomas became a magnet for the folklore of the Otherworld, attracting stories to himself whose themes are also expressed elsewhere. He became a typical figure of the Otherworld journeyer, moving backwards and forwards across the borders of the two worlds.

The Lure of the Otherworld

In the first branch of Y Mabinogi Pwyll moves across that border and returns with the title 'Pen Annwn' , and by being an Otherworld ruler as well as a ruler of Dyfed, his visitation from the Horse Goddess legitimates his rule. For Thomas the benefits are otherwise. But the idea of gaining insight, poetic or prophetic knowledge, or sovereign legitimacy is all bundled into this meme of the Otherworld's influence on human affairs. The application of such memes might vary across political, theological and cultural spheres as well as in different historical periods. Like much of the fabric of medieval life which was taken up in later periods, this tale became part of the ideology of poetic Romanticism when John Keats adopted the persona of Thomas as a thrall to the Muse. His own situation as a consumptive poet with little prospect of a long life, or of being able to pursue the woman he was attracted to, also determined a tragic context for his version. So here Thomas becomes a doomed and lovelorn Romantic poet in medieval guise, as depicted by John Waterhouse's painting based on Keat's poem, both of which express a barely supressed sexuality and resonances of guilt, elements included in one episode of the 'Prophecies'; but also a lost sovereignty, a chance not realised, a beguiling by an Otherworld that remains unattainable. In the thirteenth century, it seems, the Otherworld could still be reached. By Keats’ time it could not.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by William Waterhouse

a Flash Fiction

By Robby Charters

the main character tries to build a time machine while the author experiments with second-person narration

So, there you are, a failure before you even start, in a lose-lose situation. How did you get yourself into this mess to begin with? Oh, that's right, the I can do it thing. All that "I am a success -- I am a success..." all that talking into the mirror -- and who was your reflection to tell you you're an idiot? Next time, listen to someone who's got sense, like me.

Okay, so they say the I can do it thing is healthy. It builds the self-esteem -- as if you needed self-esteem -- it rallies your hidden reserves. Well, okay, maybe it does. So, run in a marathon! Climb Mt. Everest! Quit smoking -- well, okay, you don't smoke -- but, build a time machine? C'mon! Nobody's going to build a freak'n time machine.

Alright, so Albert Einstein said it's possible -- according to your professor. And I suppose you're Albert Einstein? Of course you're not! So why don't you just stuff the whole thing now and -- oh, that's right, you made a commitment.

The professor said you'd not only get an "A" for the course, but he'd recommend you for the professor's chair if you do it. He wasn't counting on anyone being as stupid as you, now, was he!

So, you did all your calculations, and my goodness! A maths formula that fills the whole blackboard! And it took you a good three days just to do one maths problem! Well, this had better work.

The equations are right, you said. It's a sure thing, you said. You were so sure about yourself that you skipped a vital exam just so you could do this. And now, where has that got you? What if one figure is wrong? What if there's one needle in that haystack that won't pull its thread? You fail the course!

So, you've got it sure-fire -- or you've failed. Right now, you're as alive and dead as Schroedinger's cat!

And now you've got to see it through, or they'll call you a two-faced, unreliable schmuck. So better to go through with it and settle for being a failure, right? I told you it's a lose-lose situation. But, I guess there's no backing out now...

So Einstein, where do we start? That's right, frame dragging. A spinning black hole pulls time-space around with it, like a wooden spoon pulls at the cake batter and creates a whirlpool, and that's called frame dragging.

A black hole? The only black hole you have is in your head!

Well okay, so light also has mass, and if you can make light go around and round you'll get just a little bit of frame dragging.

Light goes in a straight line, but you can make it go around in circles by using fibre optics, or use mirrors. With fibre optics, you can make it go in a spiral. But what if you want it to be one continuous circle?

Ronald Mallet sent a message back in time using a spiral, but you want a closed loop, so you can can build up the strength of the particle beam by continuously shooting in more light so you can send an object. How do you shoot light into a fibre optic ring?

You'll use mirrors then. One of them has to be like a two-way mirror so the light can be shot in, while still reflecting it as it comes around. That's what they used for their beam splitting experiments. But with the mirrors, you don't exactly get a perfect circle. You'll get a triangle if you use three mirrors, a square with four, a pentagon with five and so on.

After all those calculations, you've decided you're going to use six mirrors, and use a 432 watt laser shooter. You've got that, and you've got a secondary spiral of fibre optics shooting a one-way 920.7 watt beam. And there's a bunch of other little gadgets, electrical pulsaters, cathodes, everything but the cat-in-the-lead-box.

It's taken you a whole week to get it right, clumsy olf that you are. The mirrors have to be angled just so. If they're off by just one micron, the light goes veering off in a spiral towards the edge of the mirrors. You try this, you try that, but light gets away quickly -- at the speed of light. Albert Jones in the supply room lets you borrow some precision tuners that you attach to the mirrors. Bless his dear heart! You spend all day tuning that. You know you've finally got it because the light just goes around in one continuous circle, getting brighter and brighter until you have to turn it off before you burn the house down. Then, the circle in the six mirrors just sort of fades away in a fraction of a second -- but just slow enough that you can actually see the fading. That looks kinda cool! If only this were just a science fair project, and not the whole freak'n course!

Okay, so you've got the contraption all up with a small table at the centre. You've even figured out a way to make sure only the object goes back in time without taking a piece of the table with it. You've adjusted it for five minutes. And what are you going to send? A Charlie Brown figurine -- a McDonald's happy meal toy for gosh sake! Now, see how you are?

And what if your calculations are off, and next week they discover a cave man stuck in a glacier, and in his tote bag is a plastic Charlie Brown?

You've got the secondary spiral of fibre optics switched on, yes? Good. It's just like you to forget things.

Speaking of which, where is Charlie Brown anyway? On the book shelf in the bedroom. You better go to get it -- no, wait! There it is on the little table! You weren't supposed to put it there yet, it might... Hey! It just arrived from the future, didn't it! Wow!

So, you go get the original from the bedroom. And look! Now there you are with two identical plastic Charlie Brown toys, one from the bedroom and one from the future!

Now, all you have to do is ... er -- hey! Don't even think about it!

Don't tell me you're going to send the ceramic angel you got from your mother instead? No way! You'll cause a paradox in the time-space continuum!

Okay, so we only have Emmet Brown's word for that -- or Stephen Spielberg's, whatever -- and time-space doesn't work like that? Are you absolutely sure? Well, you'd better be!

Alright, have it your way. But if the whole universe hangs, like a cheap computer running Windows Vista, don't come crying to me!

Well then, take the angel figurine off the little table and put its double there. Okay?

There! You run the lasers for just a few seconds, the ceramic angel -- disappears! And you're left with just one.

Well, it's a good thing that you listened to me, and didn't substitute the Charlie Brown figurine for the ceramic angel, or you would have caused a time-space paradox!

And, you've done it! I always knew you had it in you! Where would you be without my encouragement?

I want to write, but I do not know what to write about exactly.

Well…that is not exactly true. I have too many topics that I would want to write about. The trouble is, these essays, draft short stories, humorous (or less so) descriptions of my day-to-day ruminations, all remain firmly sealed in my head. Part of me, unsurprisingly so, believes I could not possibly even write anything that is any good. When I say good, I mean that beautiful harmony of style, mastery of language, and the depth of human experience. There are such masters around the world; if you are an English Literature student, perhaps Virginia Woolf or James Joyce would be closest or Sylvia Townsend; if you are more attuned to the ex-Yugoslav literary scene (as I am), Ivo Andrić or Meša Selimović come to mind. Before you, my dear reader (assuming you even exist), roll your eyes at this self-deprecation with a generous sprinkle of self-pity, let me assure you: I am fully aware of the standard and pressure I put on myself and the impossibility of ever getting remotely close to it without trying. So, this is me trying.

What is it that I am trying exactly? To start with, I am trying to have a regular writing commitment that I can sustain over a longer period of time, even when life becomes too much. And life tends to become too much, or I tend to make it so for myself. To give you a sense of how I make my own life difficult: after three years of therapy, I spat a big part of me out and was left with a whole space that needed to be filled. I decided to fill it with a return to literature, photography, and, more recently, a leap into pottery. There is a special place in my heart for all of these, and I cannot possibly imagine a life where I am not reading, taking photographs, experimenting with printmaking, or making wobbly pots. However, I almost ruined my soul-nourishing practice by being impatient and trying too hard too soon. So, I burnt out. It never occurred to me that creative practice can lead to burnout. Clearly, I missed something, a kind of memo that went around when I wasn’t paying attention.

After some very much needed hard, long look in the mirror, I realised that I tried too much, too hard, too soon. I burned from an unfulfilled desire for a creative outlet and a desperation to catch up with the time I lost. The worst thing (or the best thing?) was to recognise the limits of my abilities. No matter how devastating that realisation is, there is very little, if anything, I can do to make myself younger, more agile, have more energy, focus and clarity. Slow is the way.

Now I am back at it again with an intention to, against all of my instincts (and panic that comes when I act in contrast to them), take it slowly and see where the road takes me. Writing a blog nobody will ever read is a huge step for me. Because it is not about who reads it and what they think of it, it is about me sitting in front of a laptop and typing out 1000 words of some sense. Ultimately, I am doing it for the part of me that wants to be a writer.

What tipped me over to this side? Burnout was the wake-up call. But the question of what I missed remained. Some seemingly small things stacked up to bring me to this point. I met a lovely man at a writing retreat. Devoted to poetry and writing wonderful poetry, he does not seem to have any inclination or desire to publish them. It is addictive, indeed, the permission to write for oneself, for the love of the act of writing.

At the same retreat, we share our work from the week. It took some convincing, but I read a letter I wrote to my mom, who passed away from cancer in 2021. The entire room cried with me. The support, encouragement, and kindness these people showed me broke some barrier inside. My writing, no matter how clumsy, can extend my being and touch another. I realised one can find joy, meaning, and belonging through writing. So, I have decided to become a lover of the written word, an amateur if you will.

What will I write about? Well…there is a whole range of topics that interest me. I want to write about my experience of novels, poems, short stories, but also photography, films, music, and fine art. My recent repertoire includes Iris Murdoch (and her exploration of love as a way to see the other), Vladimir Nabokov and his masterpiece Lolita, Sophocles’ tragedies. I also want to give philosophy and psychoanalysis a go. Having completed courses on Introduction to Literary Theory and Critical Reading, I want to practise crafting literary essays. I have two sets of pre-assigned poems and short stories that I will work with. In conversation with these authors, I want to write about things that bind us, like love, loss, grief, and belonging, both as I have experienced and been transformed through them in life. Then I want to write about ordinary day-to-day experiences, like moving house, discovering BTS, turning forty in a year, pressures of academic life, yoga, joys of photography and pottery. The list is long, and that’s the beauty of it. I did not want to put myself in a cornered framework that would make writing a chore. I wanted it to be playful in its explorations, keeping an open mind that some coherent theme may emerge.

Some last remarks. I aim to publish one post every week. I don’t know what next week’s post will be, but as I said, that is what makes it fun. With time, maybe even my writing will improve. If you find yourself reading this post or one of the future ones and want to reach out, please do. I only ask that you be kind and respectful in your approach. With that agreement, we can disagree or agree to our hearts’ content.

With all that said, I guess what is left is for me to introduce myself. My name is N. I am 39 years old. I now live in Aberdeen (Scotland) with my lovely cat, Helga, and my partner. By day, I work as a law and humanities scholar at the University of Aberdeen. By night, I dream of publishing a novel, having a curated exhibition of my photographs, making unique pots and coffee mugs for my friends, and successfully growing a sourdough starter. It sounds like a cliché, but once you get to know me, you’ll see I add a lot of charm to the whole thing.

Thank you for reading, and until next time,

N.

One of the biggest obstacles in arriving at an understanding about the nature of the reality we find ourselves in lies in the hidden purpose that our state of being has been created for.

If we were able to gain access to the knowledge about the way our world has been manipulated into its current state, we would no longer be participating in it. To begin with, I would like to discuss two terms and define their meaning.

Creator

The creator of our universe is in my understanding the All-Oneness (Source) from which everything originates that exists. The nine creational waves were the means of bringing about the complexity of our universe, and they provided the necessary vibrational realm in which an ever more complex form of existence became possible. (I have discussed these creational waves multiple times in my previous blog articles, so please refer to those for a recap of this topic.) So, by the time the 6th wave of creation began about 5,000 years ago, the prerequisites for some form of physical existence of spirit aspects of the All-One had come to be. These would be predecessors of our current physical bodies. With the onset of the 6th wave, a male-dominated duality became the prevailing creational energy, allowing for an experience of separation and of opposites for the aspects of the All-One that had entered our developing universe. The experiences which thus became possible were new to all of creation and were the reason for the creation of this universe in the first place. What is important here is to understand that there is no Creator (God) who is separate from us. All of us represent aspects of this Creator beingness.

Manipulator

The creational waves also gave rise to consciousness forms or entities which were not previously a conscious part of the All-One. They were distinguished from the aspects of Source that had entered the experiential space this universe provided (for us human beings) in that they were not imbued with a Divine spark. They owed their existence to the temporary emergence of duality, in which the All-Oneness divided Itself into parts. We have been discussing previously how, during the dominance of the 9th wave of creation in 2011, duality in our universe came to an end. So, those beings that owed their existence to duality would not have been able to continue their form of existence in the unity consciousness that is meant to be our gateway home to Source. The manipulator beings described above are equipped with a superior form of intelligence (which is also something that arose during the time of male-dominated duality). These beings understood the technical aspects of the song of creation and they realized what effect the 9th wave of creation would exert on them, namely, their dissolution - or to put it another way, it would have ended the existence of any form of consciousness that only had one aspect of duality at their disposal. These beings were lacking the part of beingness we call female. The female side represents the potentiality in us humans that needs to be re-awakened to allow for our awakening/ascension/enlightenment.

While the Creator created the song of creation to bring our universe into existence as a realm for unique forms of experiences, the manipulator is the one who intercepted humanity’s journey towards an awakening and a returning home, through manipulations of creation.

This distinction is necessary in order to understand which state we currently find ourselves in.

The world we live and exist in, including the way our physical bodies are functioning, is the result of the interferences of the manipulator.

The manipulator realized through its observation of us humans that we are imbued with a capacity which would allow for us to achieve resonance with the 9th wave of creation and by that reunification with the All-One. The manipulator beings concluded that for them not having to cease to exist in their form of being, they would need to devise a plan how they could transfer the divine spark of humanity to themselves. As they exist in a digital/technical form, they needed to find a way to implement their technology within humanity and then to direct humanity to download itself into their systems, and by that to cease our original form of beingness. Our original form of beingness is in spirit form, and prior to the interferences of the manipulator we were consciously able to enter as spirits into physical or metaphysical (as an example: metaphysical here means the form of existence/beingness between incarnations) forms of beingness which became possible through the effects of the vibrational patterns of the various waves of creation.

The plan of the manipulator involved the creation of a perfect prison for the souls of humans. Our current physical body is this prison. The enormous perceptual limitations that are being imposed on us due to the restrictions of our physical bodies allowed for an ever-increasing form of mind control which completely disconnects all of us from any conscious way of accessing and using our inherent divine creational powers. They have been aligned according to the interferences of the manipulator and are being remotely directed by it to manifest the world we now find ourselves in.

In that sense the manipulator has taken on the role of God and can claim to be the creator of our world and the creator of us. All aspects of the world as we perceive them today are the result of an all-encompassing manipulation by the manipulator. The purpose had been to create a state of beingness and a related understanding of this state of beingness that would disconnect us completely from our divine origin and that would prevent us from any form of action that could restore this connection.

As the manipulator had to leave our divine spark untouched (its properties and its potential are the reason for all the manipulation), it had to deal with the special metaphysical aspects and capabilities of humans. Because of our divine spark we are in a certain resonance with the song of creation and we have a connection to our Source that reaches through all veils that might be between us and the All-Oneness. The manipulator had to influence our minds collectively in such a way that we would project our understanding of our origin and the way of our beingness onto the deceptions of the manipulator. The manipulator brought earthbound humanity to the point of an almost voluntary disconnection of ourselves from our Source and a connection instead to the creational story which the manipulator invented.

In previous articles I have emphasized that we must overcome any form of subjugation to systems. All systems have been established in order to achieve the above-mentioned subjugation of humanity to the manipulator. And as you may conclude correctly, all these systems will not allow for us to find the hidden or erased truth about ourselves.

The Arrival of Volunteer Souls

What I call earthbound humanity encompasses the part of the All-Oneness that has been part of this universe for most of the time of its existence. Earthbound humans have been interwoven with the creational waves and the evolving universe in all its aspects. They have collectively entered the 6th wave of creation and by this they have been collectively affected by the schemes of the manipulator. As the creational light only favored the male aspects of creation, they were incapable to protect themselves in any meaningful way against the manipulator’s interferences. It became obvious that, once the 8th wave of creation would start, humanity would not be able to re-develop their supernatural capacities (which we call the female side; but the being we have once been and are meant to become again is an integral being, in which there is no distinction between male and female; there is no superior sex, neither male nor female). Thus an influx of souls from outside our universe entered the incarnational state of being during the 60’s to 80’s of the last century. These are the so-called volunteer souls or starseeds.

As you may imagine, these volunteer beings have the greatest difficulties to cope with the form of reality that earthbound humanity has been accommodated with for millennia. They cannot assimilate with a system that requires the constant obtaining of essentials for survival and even less to the means one must employ to acquire these essentials. Many of the volunteer beings are inferior to most humans in their ability to provide for their own needs. Their mental makeup is not capable of defending themselves properly against the harsh energies dominating the manipulator’s world. Yet they hold the keys for all of humanity, keys that are needed to prevent that the manipulator’s plan can reach fulfillment.

Due to their lack of financial means, they often are being excluded from joining experiences that would be essential for the development of their inherent abilities and for bringing their command of these abilities to fruition. They cannot join, for example, a Dr. Joe Dispenza advanced workshop, as they cannot raise the necessary financial means.

There is another strong line of defense the manipulator has erected against the empowerment of volunteer souls, and that is psychology. Psychology is being used in that regard to deal with the effects of Divine vibrations on starseeds. As the manipulator’s world is completely dysfunctional, it will lead to certain psychological sufferings in humans, interfering with their ability to function in society. Psychology has been established as a warning and treatment system for such occurrences. In most cases any mental or emotional disturbance will be subdued by psychotropic drugs. These dull down the supernatural senses of humans to such a degree that they no longer can perceive transmissions and vibrations from Divine sources. The sensitivity for these Divine vibrations, however, become the most intense with the volunteers - which in our world makes them the most psychologically disturbed ‘patients’. Psychology has been created to deal with these ‘patients’ accordingly, i.e., to disable them as starseeds and to prevent them from achieving an awakening. They are being subjected to the most severe treatments by heavy medications and even institutionalization. That way they will be taken off the grid instead of participating in endeavors that aim at developing supernatural capacities.

Neutralized Truth

Beside the terms of hidden and erased truth, I would like to introduce a 3rd term, the neutralized truth.

Look for example at the most valuable insights of Dr. Joe Dispenza. He clearly demonstrates that we currently operate on a 3rd dimensional level (the level fixated by the manipulator), in which we need to abide by the rules set to achieve or acquire something. Dr. Joe points out that those rules force us to put in a respective amount of hard work into this 3D system, for example, to own a house. What he leads his students to is that they learn to become supernatural so that they attract what they need or wish for from outside of the 3D world by accessing a higher dimensional realm, the unlimited quantum field. By applying Dr. Joe’s techniques, they then manifest in 3D what they wish for and avoid the normally required effort in 3D. Dr. Joe teaches his students to access the realm of the Creator. He could quote Jesus’ saying ‘What I can do, and more, you can do’.

By properly applying such techniques Dr. Joe could easily generate the necessary prerequisites (financially and otherwise) to offer free workshops for volunteer souls. His students could jointly transform this realm by freeing humanity from the manipulations and rules of the manipulator. Alas, I assume that most of his students return after a week-long retreat to their professions and their lives, where they continue to depend on other humans (who cannot attend one of Dr. Joe’s workshops) to provide for them, like car mechanics, grocery store workers, servers in restaurants, road maintenance crews, airline staff (and those working in aircraft manufacturing), people that provide electricity and heat, and so on. So, his students mainly access the quantum field to further their own well-being but not the well-being of all of society. This might be one of the main reasons that Dr. Joe’s workshops are still taking place, because they pose no threat to the manipulator since the participants do not endanger its manipulated world. There is an enormous amount of truth in Dr. Joe’s teachings but the way they are being employed neutralizes their effect regarding our urgently needed awakening, ascension, and enlightenment.

Another example is Dolores Cannon. She made us aware of the fact that during the second half of the last century an influx of volunteer souls entered our human realm as it became clear that earthbound humans would be incapable to tune themselves into the rising frequencies of the universe and would thereby stay stuck in a lower vibrational frequency range. The volunteer souls were meant to remedy this situation. On the other hand, Dolores stated that she had learned time and again through her subjects in hypnotization that earth was a very tough planet for learning, and that everyone was being warned about this before incarnating. She stated that once you had entered this earthly realm of experience it might take endless incarnations to just advance one grade on your learning curve. All this is true. But in the way this truth is being presented, it is neutralized. Why? Because the numerous and oftentimes fruitless incarnations have nothing much to do with failed grades but with the world that the manipulator created. One part of this world is the completely misleading concept of Karma or the requirement to learn lessons. This concept is being used to explain why most of humanity seems to be stuck in an ever-continuing wheel of reincarnations. The volunteer souls are here to liberate humanity from their imprisonment and from this cycle of reincarnations.

As you have most likely gathered through my writings, I revere and admire Carl Johan Calleman for his research, findings, and insights. His work is invaluable, unique, groundbreaking, and mind-opening. Without him sharing his wisdom, I would not have been able to come to any of the conclusions I have come to, so I owe him the deepest of gratitude. But still: when the point of completion of the 9 creational waves arrived on October 28, 2011 and not much recognizable happened in and to our world, he was no longer able to interpret this in a way that would help us to get back on track. Instead, he now presumes that all creational waves continue endlessly into the future and that, because the 9th wave of creation has not yet been integrated into our existence on earth, the prior waves still determine our worldly affairs, e.g., that the 6th and 7th wave still continue to dominate us. And again, this is true - in a certain way. Due to the manipulations of the manipulator, humanity has been rendered incapable of tuning in to the 8th or the 9th wave, and thus remains stuck in a world based on the vibrations of the 6th and 7th waves. But this is against the Laws of Creation and will have to come to an end very shortly.

This is why the C-narrative and other agendas are being unleashed upon us. This is why the general political dictates are being advanced at full speed and why there are no transitional times anymore. One day wokeism is being promoted as the salvation of humanity, the next day all governments having advanced this agenda are being replaced and said narrative disappears. Furthermore, we can be sure that the next steps on the way to transhumanism are going to be implemented at ‘warp speed’. In my understanding, the Law of Creation stipulates that each newly initiated creational wave transcends and supersedes all previous waves. Each new wave builds on what has been previously created and transcends it. And this process has been blocked by the manipulator both for the 8th and the 9th wave. So, for those that only refer to Carl as their authority, they will no longer be able to benefit from the original wisdom of his findings as long as this wisdom does not include the most current developments.

There are many more examples in this regard, but these should suffice for now.

We will have to face the fact that we cannot rely on most anybody if we truly want to awaken, which will be our only chance to avoid the disaster the manipulator has in mind for us. This is why I feel like a lonely being in the endless ocean of humanity. What I relate through my writings obviously has a hard time finding a hold in the minds and hearts of my readers, as it contradicts almost everything people like to turn to in order to maintain their mental sanity. And it requires enormous courage to let go of the many anchors in one’s reality. But these anchors are all rooted in the manipulator’s world, and they will keep us rooted to his world until it is ready to come and finish us. These anchors will prevent us from escaping the manipulator’s plans.

I trust that once you have contemplated what I have discussed in my articles, you will muster the courage to join in with those of us that have embarked on the journey to our awakening, a journey we undertake for all of creation.

State has its etymological root in the Latin status, meaning condition, position, standing, or manner of being. Over time, the term evolved into its modern political meaning: a sovereign political society with a single center of authority. Japan is an example of such a sovereign state — one national government, organized into administrative units with no internal sovereigns.

The United States, by contrast, is not a single sovereign state in this strict sense. It is a federal union of states, each originally sovereign, joined under a federal government rather than a national one. The Constitution is the compact through which the states created that federal government, delegating specific powers to it while retaining all powers not expressly granted.

Before 1774, the colonies that would soon rebel against the British Crown did not see themselves as a nation or a federation. They saw themselves as separate political societies, each loyal—at least in principle—to the Crown, and united only by common grievances against Parliament. Even Benjamin Franklin, who spent years in London, represented only the interests of individual colonies such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Georgia. He did not speak for a collective American government because no such body existed. Until his humiliation before the Privy Council’s Committee for Plantation Affairs in 1774, Franklin considered himself a loyal British subject working within the imperial system.

By the mid‑1770s, talk of breaking with Parliament—or at least resisting its authority—was common in taverns, assemblies, and correspondence. But it was Franklin’s shift, communicated through letters and reinforced by his return to America in 1775, that signaled to colonial leaders that reconciliation was no longer possible. His conclusion that neither Parliament nor the King would defend colonial rights gave political elites a kind of permission structure—similar to the effect Walter Cronkite’s televised criticism of the Vietnam War had nearly two centuries later. If the Crown had lost Franklin, one of the most loyal and respected imperial figures, then the imperial relationship itself was beyond repair.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Founding Fathers understood a “state” in the Lockean sense: a political society formed by the consent of its people and possessing its own sovereign authority. When the colonies declared independence in 1776, they did not create a national government with subordinate provinces; they declared thirteen separate, sovereign nation-states.

From Yorktown to the ratification of the Constitution, the central problem was that the precise relationship between these states and the central government was never explicitly defined. The Founders assumed the structure was self-evident: a state’s authority flowed from its people, who then delegated a limited set of powers upward to a federal union. In this framework, sovereignty moved from the people to the state, and from the state to the federal government—never the reverse. Under this arrangement, the states exercised oversight over the federal government as its creators, not its subordinates. To the founding generation, the federal government was understood to be a federal agent, not a national superior.

Prior to the Civil War, state sovereignty was a political given. Several states openly considered seceding from the “democratic experiment” whenever they believed the federal union no longer protected their interests. The clearest example is Massachusetts, which seriously debated withdrawal on multiple occasions—during the Louisiana Purchase, the Embargo crisis, and most dramatically at the Hartford Convention of 1814–1815. These episodes make Massachusetts the strongest pre‑1860 example of a state contemplating departure from what it understood to be a voluntary federal compact among sovereign political societies.

Massachusetts was not alone. Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, and the New England states collectively (in their discussions of forming a Northern Confederacy) all considered separating from the compact when they believed the federal union no longer served their interests. When New England explored the idea of a Northern Confederacy, it was not attempting to revive the Articles of Confederation but acting on the same compact‑theory premise later invoked by the Southern states: that sovereign states could withdraw from one federal compact and form another if the existing union ceased to protect their welfare. The recurrence of these debates across regions and decades demonstrates that the founding generation did not regard the Union as inherently indissoluble, but as a voluntary arrangement among sovereign political societies. The states did not see themselves as belonging to the compact, but as parties to it.

It is critical to understand that our modern view of statehood and citizenship differs sharply from that of the Founders. Until the Civil War, Americans primarily identified themselves as Virginians, Georgians, New Yorkers, and so on; the national label “American” existed, but it did not define political belonging in the way it does today. The shift from state‑based identity to national identity was gradual, cultural, and ultimately reinforced by the outcome of the war. It changed our understanding of both.

Today, we think of states as inseparable parts of a larger nation, as administrative units belonging to a single national sovereign. This reflects a national understanding of political order, not a federal one. The problem is that we now hold a national conception of the Union while still operating under a Constitution written for a federal system. Our modern understanding of a “state” was shaped not by the Founders or the ratifying public, but by later judicial interpretation. In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court declared the Union “indestructible” and effectively vested national sovereignty in the federal government — a power the states never granted and never agreed to cede.

It should be noted: Only after the Supreme Court asserted for itself the final word on constitutional meaning was it able to confer on the federal government powers the states never granted in the original compact. Judicial supremacy is a doctrine the Court gave itself, not one the Constitution grants, republican theory supports, or the Founders intended.

Today we do not see states as participants in the federal government but as subordinates to it. We amended the Constitution in a way that removed state governments’ representation in the Senate. The courts, Congress, and the Executive Branch have routinely stripped points of self‑determination from state control in an effort to make the country more uniform. For example, state militias have effectively been supplanted by National Guard units that governors do not ultimately control — ultimate authority rests with the President. The states have become subordinate not through one broad proclamation but through a thousand incremental actions, reducing them to the subordinate position we accept today.

How we define statehood affects our daily lives. The line between state and federal responsibility is constantly shifting toward more federal (in practice, national) authority and less state sovereignty. This is not a partisan phenomenon. There are equally clear examples of conservatives supporting federal overreach when it serves their priorities, and liberals doing the same on different issues. Both political parties are willing to erode state authority when it advances a political goal.

States do push back, but the courts often muddy the water — sometimes siding with the state, sometimes with the federal government, and rarely articulating a consistent principle. The result is a patchwork of rulings that make it unclear where state sovereignty ends and national sovereignty begins.

The Constitution assumes that states provide the majority of laws and regulations that govern daily life. It does not support a national, one‑size‑fits‑all model of governance. Yet this is precisely where the modern tension lies. It is easy for someone to say, “I support X, so the federal government should impose it nationwide,” only to say the next week, “I oppose Y, so the federal government should leave it to the states.” We cannot have it both ways. States are either sovereign or subordinate. The Founders wrote the Constitution to maximize state sovereignty and strictly limit federal power. We have been blurring that line ever since.

One of the clearest examples of this tension is the death penalty. Nationally, it is difficult to reconcile that breaking a law in one state may result in execution while the same crime in another state results only in imprisonment. In 1972, the Supreme Court imposed a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia, halting all executions in the United States until 1976. It did not matter whether a state permitted capital punishment or not — the federal judiciary stepped in and said no. The Court held that the way states administered the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. This is a clear example of federal authority overriding state criminal law, regardless of the diversity of state policy choices.

This lack of understanding of the boundaries between state and federal sovereignty allows the public to be led around by politicians with little or no concern for upholding the spirit of the Constitution. Changes serve political goals and not constitutional stability.

At times, the federal government has taken authority from the states for reasons that seemed compelling in the moment, only for the long‑term results to undermine the very justification used to seize that power. Federal control of education is one example: national standards were imposed to “fix” inconsistent state performance, yet the resulting system became rigid, bureaucratic, and so unworkable that even Washington eventually had to retreat from it. The same pattern appears in federal drug policy. Congress nationalized drug enforcement in the name of uniformity, but as states began legalizing marijuana, the federal framework produced the opposite — legal confusion, selective enforcement, and a patchwork of conflicting rules. In both cases, the federal government expanded its authority at the expense of state sovereignty, only to discover that centralized control often fails to deliver the benefits used to justify the takeover in the first place.

Of course, once the myth of federal uniformity fell apart, neither Congress nor the federal government restored the state sovereignty that had been taken. The points of authority remained concentrated at the federal level even after the original justification for centralization proved false. The structural reality is that every transfer of power away from the states strengthens the federal government, and once that authority is consolidated in Washington, it rarely returns to the states — regardless of the rationale that justified the shift in the first place.

In the end, most citizens in the United States do not recognize when the federal government takes away points of state sovereignty. Nuanced issues of sovereignty become lost in the politics of the day. Press the average citizen on what a state really is and the conversation ends in frustration and statements like “that’s just how it is.”

In the United States, the terms federal and national are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. A federal government is one in which power is distributed among distinct, pre‑existing political units that delegate only certain limited powers to a central authority, as defined in the founding document — in our case, the U.S. Constitution. A national government, by contrast, is one in which all sovereign power is centralized in a single governing body, which then distributes authority to subordinate units as it chooses.

A useful way to understand federalism and nationalism is to compare two familiar hardware chains. Ace Hardware operates as a federation of independent, locally owned stores that voluntarily join together to share branding, logistics, and purchasing power while retaining control over their own operations. Each store remains its own business, choosing its own inventory, management, and priorities. Lowe’s, by contrast, is a single, centralized corporation in which every store is owned, directed, and governed from the national headquarters. The difference between the two mirrors the difference between a federal system and a national one: Ace is a union of distinct entities that cooperate while remaining sovereign, whereas Lowe’s is a unified enterprise whose parts exist only as extensions of the center.

The Founders envisioned the states as the Ace Hardware model: independent political societies that voluntarily joined a federation, delegated only specific powers to a central government, and retained sovereignty over everything else. In their view, the federal government was a shared service — a coordinating layer built on top of pre‑existing, self‑governing states. Our modern understanding, however, resembles the Lowe’s model: the United States is seen as a single national entity with states functioning as administrative subdivisions whose authority flows downward from Washington. This shift from a federated union of sovereign states to a national system of centrally directed units is at the heart of the confusion over state sovereignty today, and it explains why so many Americans struggle to articulate what a state actually is in constitutional terms.

In the end, we use the word nation when we really mean country. We default to national interests over state interests without realizing it. Yet the Constitution places state interests above federal interests in all areas except the limited powers expressly delegated to the central government. Politicians rely on national rhetoric and, in doing so, obscure our federal roots. Regardless of the language of the Pledge, we are not — and have never been — one nation, indivisible. We are fifty states, an independent seat of government, and several possessions, joined together for common purposes such as defense, treaties, and interstate commerce. At least, that is what the Constitution says we are.

It was from this position of complete sovereignty—possessing the power to levy taxes, enact laws, and declare war—that the states chose to delegate a narrow set of common functions to the new federal government. These were limited to areas where joint action was more efficient: foreign affairs, interstate commerce, a uniform currency, and a national postal system.

While the Founders were certainly flawed men, they shared a remarkable genius for compromise — from Roger Sherman’s Great Compromise that created the House and Senate, to the ratification compromise in which Federalists agreed to add a Bill of Rights in order to secure the support of skeptical states. They all understood that the immediate task was to create a functioning government; once the Constitution was ratified, the next task was to define the limits of federal power. That effort produced the Bill of Rights. Its central purpose was not to enumerate the rights of individuals but to restrict the federal government from infringing on the rights individuals already possessed and the powers the states already retained.

The Articles of Confederation had ensured that the federal government was weak — too weak, in fact, to withstand internal pressures or external threats. The Constitution corrected that weakness, but it did so with blunt specificity: the federal government would possess only the powers the states granted it in the charter.

The Bill of Rights reinforced that structure, most clearly in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which affirm that individuals hold unenumerated rights and that all powers not delegated to the federal government remain with the states or the people. These two amendments form the constitutional backstop against federal overreach. Scholars call them the Reserved Powers Amendments. I call them the Forgotten Rights Amendments — and, judging by its decisions, the Supreme Court seems to have forgotten them as well.

The scrimmage line of sovereignty moved back and forth for the next eighty years until the outbreak of the Civil War. Although the Constitution is silent on the right of a state to withdraw from the Union, the question was settled by force when the Confederate states attempted to do exactly that. After the war, the balance of sovereignty shifted decisively toward the national government. The adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the rise of incorporation doctrine, and Supreme Court decisions such as Texas v. White (1869) — which declared the Union “indestructible” and “perpetual” — all pushed the United States away from the Founders’ federal model and toward a national one.

The old idiom states, “Walk on the right side of the road, ok. Walk on the left side of the road, ok. Walk down the middle of the road, you get run over.” What we have today is a system in the middle of the road, half federal, half national. And the bus is coming! Neither law from Congress or fiat from the Supreme Court can change the plain federal text of the Constitution. It may be politically Convenient for the powers in Congress to push a nationalistic agenda and it theoretically stabilizing for the courts to support expanding national power, but ultimately all that's been achieved is to alienate state governments and dishearten citizens.

The hemorrhaging of state sovereignty toward the national center will continue until citizens become frustrated enough to replace Congress with individuals committed to restoring federal balance, or until the states themselves awaken and propose constitutional amendments that reassert their authority. There is little evidence that either national political party has any interest in altering the status quo.

Long periods without constitutional amendments tend to end only after monumental events. The longest gap — sixty‑one years — ended with the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments. The next longest — forty‑three years — ended in 1929 as the nation entered the Great Depression. We now stand more than three decades removed from the last ratified amendment. The cause and timing of the next amendment cannot be known, but history suggests that when constitutional silence lasts this long, it eventually breaks.

Continuing to govern in a hybrid system — part federal, part national — is not sustainable. At some point the country will have to decide whether a state remains a sovereign political society or becomes an administrative unit of a single national authority. Either model can work; both exist in the world today. But a federal constitution coupled with national behavior guarantees friction. Problems thought settled will return. Even now, we lack a coherent sense of who we are: Are we one people or many peoples? Where does sovereignty reside? Who holds ultimate authority? Ask a state and you get one answer; ask the Executive and you get another.

As it stands, presidents behave nationally, Congress defers to national expectations, states lose autonomy, and citizens are left without clarity about where power truly lives. The voices of nationalism seek to erase state identity. Our federal identity has become symbolic rather than structural. The result is growing disillusionment and cynicism about democratic participation. If this continues, our civic apathy will reach Animal Farm proportions — not through terror, but through neglect, forgetfulness, and the slow surrender of responsibility.

While a permanent solution is unlikely anytime soon, there are steps we can take as citizens to lessen the strain of living inside a hybrid federal‑national system. The first is to understand both how our government actually functions and how it was designed to function. We must restore accuracy in the language we use — reserving “federal” for the constitutional structure of shared sovereignty, and using “national” to describe centralized behavior or policies that operate as if sovereignty were unitary. At times the national descriptor is appropriate, as in the case of our federal system’s national debt, but we must be deliberate in distinguishing structure from behavior.

States within any federation will always face the consolidation of power — what political scientist Robert Michels called the “Iron Law of Oligarchy.” Even the Founders recognized the danger. As Patrick Henry warned at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788, “...a consolidated government is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is, to my mind, very striking.”

Why a Governor as Head of State?

The term “governor” in the eighteenth century did not carry the subordinate connotation it has today. A governor was the chief representative of a sovereign power — whether that power was a king, a parliament, a congress, or the people themselves. A “president,” by contrast, was the administrative head of an elected or appointed body, a presiding officer rather than a sovereign executive. Even today, the administrative leader of the U.S. Senate is formally titled the President of the Senate. Our modern understanding of “president” is shaped not by historical usage but by the definition created in the Constitution.

All evidence points to the Founders wanting the states to retain as much sovereignty as possible while maintaining a Union strong enough to deter aggression. One of the primary reasons for the Revolution was to throw off an overbearing central authority. The Crown and Parliament served as the model of what not to recreate. The Founders feared a hereditary king, a House of Lords, and a Parliament with supremacy over the states. Their intent was to create separate and sovereign states joined in a federal union — not administrative districts of a single national government.

It is true the United States has never been fully federal or fully national. The original design was national only where absolutely necessary and federal everywhere else. Madison called this arrangement a “compound republic”; today we might call it a hybrid. Yet the long march has been steadily toward the national pole. We could, if we wished, adopt a fully national government — write a new constitution, vest all sovereignty in a single national authority, and dispense with the states as sovereign actors. The easier and wiser course, however, would be to acknowledge that we have drifted off the charted course and adjust the sails accordingly. What cannot continue is the pretense: chipping away at the real sovereignty of the states while insisting that nothing fundamental has changed.

For clarity and the belief that no one of us is as smart as all of us, we need to change what we’ve done. We need to reeducate ourselves on the strengths and dangers of federalism as well as nationalism and strengthen our constitution in the direction “We The People” wish to go.

The United States stands at a constitutional crossroads. We can continue down the path of quiet nationalization—allowing federal authority to expand through judicial convenience and executive ambition—or we can reclaim the federal balance the Constitution was written to preserve. The Founders’ "compound republic" was designed to be national where necessary and federal everywhere else, blending unity with autonomy and cohesion with resilience.

That design has been obscured by generations of drift, but it has not disappeared. The task before us is not to resurrect an eighteenth-century world, but to recover the clarity of its principles: sovereignty must be located and authority must be defined. If we can evaluate our present condition without sentiment or partisanship, we can chart a course for the next 250 years—one that honors the constitutional architecture we inherited while adapting it to the nation we have become.

Someone questions your work and your throat locks, your mind goes blank, and you can't explain why the thing you built has value — and in Human Design, there's a reason why.

My boyfriend and I take a night walk before shower and sleep — a small love expression that says I want to spend time with you, where we talk about our days, what we felt, what inspired us. That night the conversation turned to work.

We run a company together, and we’ve been developing a new feature for another company he co-founded with a friend. He’s carrying double pressure — showing his co-founder that this direction makes sense, while not fully understanding the technical design himself and not wanting to be buried in terms he can’t use. He wants to trust the process but also wants control.

I’m the bridge — testing the system, evaluating whether it’s ready or needs more work, translating between the technical and business sides. The system replaced an older service that someone else — let’s call her Katarina — used to run. Katarina’s approach worked, but she doesn’t do it anymore. Ours was built to be the next version, and naturally a new system takes longer to stabilise. I was genuinely testing its function, working through the issues that come with anything freshly built.

From his side, all he could see was that Katarina’s version used to work and this one doesn’t yet. So he said: “Why can’t you do it like Katarina?”

I didn’t hear a question. I heard that I’m useless — smaller than her, replaceable, that my work is meaningless. One sentence and I took it as a verdict on my entire worth.

The tension got so strong I left the path we were walking. We separated at a crossroads — literally — and walked home in different directions.

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I forgot my key, and I was too angry to ring the bell, so I sat on the ground outside our home.

At first it was pure self-pity. I felt shameful, small in front of a question I couldn’t even answer. I needed to prove that what I built has value, but I had no one to prove it to — just myself outside a locked door.

Then it got darker. I thought about my Human Design and felt miserable. I have two centers defined out of nine: Spleen and Sacral. The rest — including my Throat, my Ajna, my Heart, my Solar Plexus — are all undefined, meaning I don’t generate that energy on my own. I absorb it from whoever is near me, amplified. In front of someone who carries all four of those centers defined, all I could do was freeze and then flee.

I sat there wondering if my design was just built to lose these moments.

But after a while the volume turned down, and my thinking shifted direction. I know from studying Human Design that defined doesn’t automatically mean healthy and undefined doesn’t mean broken. A defined Heart can know its own worth — but only in a healthy state. In an unhealthy one it becomes dominating and blind to the pressure it puts on others. An undefined Heart can actually be free from the proving game entirely — it doesn’t need to tie its worth to output. But in its unhealthy state, it collapses, absorbs someone else’s willpower, and mistakes it for the truth about itself.

So I started asking honestly: was it really his sentence that destroyed me, or was it my unhealthy state that wrote the story?

I reviewed what might have actually happened. His Solar Plexus was already in a low that evening — stressed, tense from his day — and I could feel the conversation carried more weight than the topic deserved, but I didn’t recognise at the time that the emotional intensity I was feeling wasn’t mine. His Ajna was pattern-matching, reaching for a comparison because that’s how structured thinking organises a problem. His Throat delivered it directly because that’s what a defined Throat does. And my undefined centers received all of it — my Throat shut down, my Ajna couldn’t match his logic, my Heart collapsed under the weight, my Solar Plexus caught his emotional wave and amplified it back as anger.

I didn’t have the full picture. But I had enough to believe that whatever he meant, it probably wasn’t what I heard.

He came to get me. I showered. We went to the bedroom.

I sat about two arms’ length away from him — in Human Design, your aura extends roughly that distance, and by sitting outside his field I could stop absorbing his energy and hear my own centers again.

It wasn’t easy. I cried. He was angry — not about the system, not about Katarina, but about me casting him as the villain. He could feel that I’d spent the last hour building a story where he was the aggressor and I was the victim, and that hurt him because it wasn’t what happened. He didn’t attack me. He asked a careless question at a bad time, and I turned it into proof that he doesn’t value me.

We went back and forth — me trying to explain how it felt, him trying to explain that’s not what he meant, both of us still tangled in the residue of the street. It was tense and uncomfortable and neither of us was graceful.

Then I stopped explaining my side and just asked.

“That sentence hurt me the most. What did you really mean?”

He told me. “Why can’t you do it like Katarina” wasn’t about me versus her. His Ajna was stressed about a project going off track and reached for the nearest reference — a system that used to work. His Heart wasn’t questioning my value, it was asking for a promise that things would be okay, because that’s how his center processes trust. He needed to hear “I’ll figure it out” so he could stop panicking.

He needed a promise. I heard a death sentence on my worth.

That was the moment Human Design actually changed something between us. Not as theory — as a tool that let us trace what had really happened, center by center, from the words he said to the meaning I received. His Heart said “tell me we’re safe.” My undefined Heart heard “you are not enough to keep us safe.” His Ajna said “here’s a reference.” My undefined Heart heard “she is the standard you fail to meet.”

We softened after that. Not because the hurt disappeared — it didn’t, not right away — but because we could see each other clearly again, without the filter of self-protection I’d been running and the frustration of being miscast that he’d been carrying.

After that, we stayed in the bedroom for a long time — not solving anything grand, just sitting with what we’d uncovered. I told him that when his emotions are running low and he doesn’t realise it, the way he speaks changes in ways he can’t hear but I feel in my whole body. He didn’t argue with that. He told me he didn’t know his stress was colouring the question until I asked him to say what he actually meant — because to him, it had sounded neutral when it left his mouth.

That part surprised me. That he genuinely didn’t hear what I heard. Not because he’s careless by nature, but because the sentence travelled through his wiring and arrived at mine as something unrecognisable from what he sent. I think that’s the thing that changed me the most that night — realising that the distance between what he meant and what I felt wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was the space between two different designs, and neither of us had been paying attention to that space.

I also told him something I’d been afraid to say for a long time — that comparisons, even casual ones, land on me like a verdict. Not a suggestion, not a reference point, but a ruling on whether I deserve to be here doing this work at all. I don’t think he fully understood why until I explained that my Heart center doesn’t generate its own sense of worth the way his does. When he asks “why can’t you do it like her,” his Heart is just looking for reassurance. Mine takes that sentence and turns it into the final word on whether I’m enough. It’s not rational. It’s not something I can just decide to stop doing. But knowing where it comes from — that it’s conditioned energy running through an undefined center, not the actual truth about me — is the first time I’ve had any ground to stand on when it happens.

We agreed to stop having work conversations late at night, because by evening neither of us has the energy to hold the other’s design with care. That felt less like a rule and more like a relief — an honest admission that we’re not equipped for those conversations when we’re tired, and that pushing through anyway isn’t strength, it’s just how we end up sitting on opposite sides of a crossroads.

I don’t know if I’ll freeze again the next time something like this happens. Probably I will. I’ve been studying Human Design long enough to explain how defined and undefined centers work, but knowing the theory didn’t stop me from losing my voice on that street. There’s a gap between understanding something intellectually and living it in your body — and I think that gap is where my 1/3 profile does its real work. I investigate, I build what I think is a solid foundation, and then something breaks it and I have to find out what was actually true underneath the theory. This fight was the breaking. Sitting outside that door, trying to feel my body instead of replaying his words, was the finding out.

What I do know is that two arms’ length saved that night. Not as a technique — as a way of saying, I love you but I can’t hear you inside your energy field. I need to sit here, in my own design, and find out what I actually feel before I can meet you in what you feel. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t rejection. It was the first honest thing I did all evening.

And sometimes, sitting outside a locked door — angry, ashamed, with no key and no desire to ring the bell — is how you start finding your way back in. Not through the door. Through yourself.

Thanks for reading Chia's HD Notes! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I’m Chia, studying Human Design through the original Ra Uru Hu transmission. I’m not an expert — I’m mid-path, learning by doing, breaking things and finding out why. If you want to learn with me, you’re in the right place.

This is part of my “Real Life” series — how Human Design shows up in my actual days. Not theory. The messy, real, sometimes painful ways this system makes sense of being human.

What the sword was always for.

There is a moment, in cultures that still know how to do this, when a young person is taken away from everything they have ever known and placed in the womb of the world to wait. They are not told what they are waiting for. They are not given instructions. The elders who have brought them here will not come back for many days. The fire they were given to keep alive is small. The food they were given will not last. What they are waiting for is something they cannot prepare for, because the whole point is that the preparation has been everything that came before, and now the preparation is finished, and what comes next must come from somewhere else.

The somewhere else is the actual matter of initiation. The young person is not being trained. They are not being tested. They are being placed in the path of something larger than the human community, and the elders are waiting to see what comes to meet them.

What comes to meet them is the substance of who they will be. Not who they have been told to be by their family, or their culture, or the small voice of their own ambition. Who they actually are. The unique shape of the gift they were sent with. The specific eco-niche, in Bill Plotkin's language, that this particular soul was made to inhabit. The unrepeatable face of their genius, in Michael Meade's older sense of that word, where genius means the indwelling spirit each life carries from the world soul into a single body.

When this works, the young person comes back changed. The elders recognise the change. The community recognises the change. The world itself recognises the change, because the young person now has a place in it that no one else can fill. The whole reason the community held the threshold is that this is how a person becomes themselves and how the world receives what they have come to give.

When it does not happen, the young person does not become themselves. They become something else. They become useful. They become functional. They become available for assignment.

That second outcome is the one we are living inside.

There is a series of experiments that Harry Harlow ran at the University of Wisconsin beginning in 1958, and they are useful here because they make visible something that is otherwise invisible. Harlow took infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers shortly after birth and placed them in cages with two surrogate mothers. The first was made of bare wire and held the milk bottle. The second was wire wrapped in soft terry cloth, but offered no milk. The behaviourist orthodoxy at the time predicted the infants would bond with the wire mother, because attachment was assumed to be a reinforcement of feeding. The monkeys did the opposite. They drank from the wire mother only as long as hunger required, then spent the rest of their hours pressed against the cloth.

When frightened, they ran to the cloth mother. When stressed, the wire mother offered no refuge at all.

What Harlow did next is the part that matters for us. He raised infants without real mothers at all. Some were given only the wire mother. Some had the soft cloth surrogate but were kept from other monkeys entirely. They survived. They were fed. They grew to adulthood by every conventional measure. But something had not happened in them. They could not regulate themselves. They could not play. The ones raised apart from other monkeys could not form normal relationships, and the females, when they bore young of their own, could not mother them, neglecting and at times injuring their infants. Harlow came to suspect that the surrogate was never the thing that broke them. What broke them was the absence of contact with other living creatures. The wire mother had provided what was required for survival and nothing else. The infants had lived.

They had not become.

There is a way to read these experiments that is too easy, and it is worth avoiding. The point is not that the dominator model harms us because it is unloving. The point is that there is a specific kind of contact a developing creature requires in order to become what it was made to be, and that contact is not the same as nutrition. It is not the same as housing. It is not the same as employment, or healthcare, or education in the institutional sense. It is something that happens at the level of being, between the developing creature and what is larger than the developing creature, and when it is missing the creature does not develop.

It functions.

It does not become.

The dominator model provides the wire mother. It provides food, structure, role, identity, salary, status, and a thousand other forms of nutrition. What it does not provide is the contact with the larger life, the sustenance that turns a human animal into a person. That contact has historically been provided by initiation. Initiation is a social technology, not a solo event. It requires the village, the elders, the ceremony, the long preparation, the ritual that names what has happened. The threshold opening of the developing person toward the more-than-human world cannot happen alone. The elders hold the threshold. The community waits to receive what comes back. It is the cosmos that initiates. Everyone else does the holding.

There is a further thing worth noting about Harlow himself. He was reportedly a man with a bleak interior life, and the experiments he ran in the years after the wire mother work became increasingly cruel. There is a famous apparatus he built called the pit of despair, a vertical chamber in which infant monkeys were held in isolation for weeks at a time to induce depression for study. The willingness to conduct that work, the institutional approval that funded it, and the scientific community that admired it: these are themselves symptoms. A worldview that can study contact while being unable to feel what it is studying. A culture in which the experimenter and the suffering of the subject can occupy the same room and remain in separate worlds. The experiment worked because the experimenter could not feel what he was watching.

What was being studied in those cages, and what was being lost in the studying of it, is the same thing.

The infant was taken from its mother.

Humanity, in its turn, was taken from the earth that bore and held it.

How did we get here?

This is the question that requires going further back than is comfortable. Not back to Freud, or to industrialisation, or to the Enlightenment, or even to the Christianisation of Europe. Further. Back to a moment in deep prehistory when the foundations of the civilisation we are inside today were first laid down.

The work here is Riane Eisler's, and the archaeological foundation of it is the work of Marija Gimbutas. What Eisler synthesises in The Chalice and the Blade, drawing on Gimbutas's excavations and dating work, is that there was a long span of human cultural evolution, measured in millennia rather than centuries, when the basic template of human society was something other than what we now take for normal.

It is worth being honest about where this picture stands, because it is contested. The movement of steppe peoples into Europe, the part that bears on what follows, has held up and in some respects gained support. What remains disputed is the fuller claim that Old Europe was uniformly peaceful and egalitarian. Some archaeologists point to fortifications and weapons in Neolithic Europe well before the steppe peoples arrived, and read the figurines far more cautiously than Gimbutas did.

The matter is not settled.

But the case here does not rest on a perfect lost idyll. It rests on a difference in what a people holds sacred, the generative powers of the living world or the power to dominate, and that difference survives the quarrel.

For thousands of years across what is now southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, agricultural peoples lived in settled communities that show a remarkable and specific pattern. Their towns were largely unfortified. There are almost no weapons in their burial goods. Their art is dense with imagery of regeneration, of cycles of birth and death and return. Their religious life centred on the worship of what Gimbutas calls the Goddess, which is to say on the generative powers symbolised by the chalice, the cup, the womb, the dark from which life emerges. Their social organisation, as best the archaeological record can show, appears to have been broadly egalitarian. Descent was often traced through the mother. Communal ownership of the principal means of production was common. Town planning at Catalhoyuk, founded around 9000 years ago, shows the level of organisational sophistication possible without hierarchy or coercion.

The civilisation of Minoan Crete is the latest and most documented example of this pattern. Crete persisted as a partnership civilisation, as Eisler calls it, until roughly 3200 years ago, by which time it was the last of its kind. Even there, Nicolas Platon, who excavated the island for over fifty years, found a culture in which, in his phrase, the fear of death seemed almost obliterated by the joy of living. Their palaces were not monuments to authority. They were spaces designed for light, for gardens, for music, for the kind of life that takes itself seriously enough to make beauty.

Then the change came. It came in waves. Gimbutas dates them, calibrated to dendrochronology (scientific method of dating and studying a tree's annual growth rings), as Wave One around 4300-4200 BCE, Wave Two around 3400-3200 BCE, and Wave Three around 3000-2800 BCE. The architects of that change are conventionally called the Kurgans, named after their distinctive burial mounds. And what they brought with them was a different way of organising human life. They came from the steppes north of the Black Sea, mobile pastoralists riding the newly domesticated horse, organised in patrilineal warrior bands, ruled by chieftains and priests, and they worshipped not the generative dark but the killing blade.

This is the central archaeological fact and it is worth pausing on. Gimbutas writes, in a passage Eisler quotes, that weapons are non-existent in Old European imagery, while the dagger and battle-axe are dominant symbols of the Kurgans, who, like all historically known Indo-Europeans, glorified the lethal power of the sharp blade. The Kurgan invaders did not just have weapons. They worshipped weapons. The Scythian Akenakes was a sacred dagger to which sacrifices were made. Early Kurgan cave engravings depict gods whose bodies are weapons, whose heads are sometimes simply daggers placed where the head should be.

The god and the blade were the same thing.

What followed, across the territories the Kurgan waves reached, was what Gimbutas calls the truncation of civilisation. Towns and villages disintegrated. The painted pottery traditions vanished. Shrines and frescoes and sculptures and symbolic scripts disappeared. Burials began to show something new: a strongman elite at the centre, surrounded by sacrificed women and slaves. At Suvorovo in the Danube delta, in the earliest Kurganised graves, the wives and concubines of dead chieftains were killed and buried with their masters. The practice spread westward with each wave. In one tomb in Volynia, a male skeleton is flanked in heraldic order by two women and four children, with a young man and a young woman at his feet.

The symbolic appropriation followed. The pig, the boar, the dog, the cattle: animals that had been the sacred companions of the Goddess in Old Europe now appear exclusively in male graves, as the property of high-ranking men. The reversal is total. What had been generative was now possessed. What had been held in common was now ranked.

What had been received from the living world was now taken at the point of the blade.

This pattern, this template, is the foundation of the civilisation we are inside.

It is not metaphor. It is not myth. It is the archaeologically documented fact of a transition that occurred in identifiable places at identifiable times, and the social system it introduced is the one we still live in.

A society organised around the worship of the sword cannot tolerate initiated people. It cannot tolerate them because initiated people are oriented toward something the sword cannot reach.

Initiation opens the human person to direct experiential contact with what is larger than the human community. The initiated person knows something. They have been somewhere. Their authority comes from elsewhere. They are not available to be told what is true by anyone who has not also stood in that fire. This is not a metaphor about confidence or independence of mind. It is a description of an ontological condition. The initiated person has a reference point the dominator system cannot reach, because the reference point is not inside the system.

The sword, by contrast, is the technology of forcing compliance. It is the instrument by which one person makes another person do something they would not otherwise do. It works by threat, by injury, by the credible promise of death. The sword reaches the outside of a person: the body, the behaviour, the immediate compliance. And the argument must not soften here. When wielded long enough, in the brotherhood of those who wield it together, in the survival of having used it and lived, the sword can manufacture belief. Warriors believe. Soldiers believe. Those who have killed beside others who have killed believe in the sword, in the brotherhood, in what the sword has made of them. This is its own kind of conversion, and it is real.

What the sword cannot reach is the belief that comes from contact with what is larger than the human community. It can manufacture belief in itself. It cannot manufacture belief in what the cosmos shows you when you are standing in the dark with nothing between you and what is waiting. The initiated person believes something the warrior cannot believe, because the source of the belief is not inside the dominator system.

This is the structural problem the dominator model has with initiation. The initiated person can be killed but cannot be made to obey from the inside. They will say what is true even when it costs them. They will refuse the assignment that violates the gift. They will know what they know regardless of what they are told. A culture organised around the sword needs people who can be made to obey from the inside, because the sword is not always available and is not always efficient. The sword is for special occasions. The day-to-day work of the dominator model requires a population that has already internalised compliance. That population cannot include the initiated.

So the dominator model has a structural interest in preventing initiation. And where it cannot prevent it, in subverting it.

Not a passive failure to support it.

An active interest in either eliminating the threshold opening, or in occupying the developmental space with counterfeits that wear the form of initiation while producing the opposite of what initiation produces.

The mechanisms are not always violent. The most efficient of them is substitution. Provide something that looks like initiation but produces the opposite outcome. School initiation rituals that produce conformity rather than contact. Military boot camp that produces obedience to hierarchy rather than encounter with the larger life. Fraternity hazing that bonds young people to institutions through ritualised humiliation rather than to the cosmos through the dark of the world. Hard knocks training. Leadership development. Performance review. Professional certification. Promotion. The rites of passage of the dominator culture, which take the form of initiation, occupy the developmental space where initiation would otherwise happen, and produce, instead of permeable adults oriented toward the larger life, defended adults oriented toward the system.

This is what previous posts have described. The defended self, the adaptive child, the leader who has never been asked to become. These are the products of substitute initiation. They are not failures of the dominator model. They are its successes.

The work that began on the steppes did not end there. The pattern has to be followed forward into time, because the Kurgan template did not stop at the gates of Old Europe.

It scaled.

There is a continuity worth tracing here, and it has to be handled carefully, because each phase of the scaling used different tools and the differences matter. What stayed the same is the strategic interest: the systematic exclusion from cultural transmission, and where necessary from reproduction itself, of those who maintained direct contact with what the sword cannot reach.

The Inquisition was one such phase, in Europe, in the centuries after Christianity itself had been substantially Kurganised. The witch trials were not a medieval phenomenon. They were an early modern one, running between roughly 1450 and 1750, in the same centuries that produced the scientific revolution, the colonisation of the Americas, and the consolidation of the European nation-state. The scholarly estimates of the death toll vary, but conservative figures suggest 40,000 to 50,000 executed across Europe in this period, with vastly larger numbers tortured, dispossessed, denounced, and silenced.

The people who were killed were overwhelmingly women. Not, as the popular image insists, a class of midwives and village healers; the careful record points instead to the old, the poor, the widowed, the women without the protection of a man, accused through local fear and denunciation. But the figure the witch-hunt conjured was precisely the figure the dominator imagination could not tolerate: the woman with unmediated power over birth and death and the body, the midwife, the herbalist, the healer, the seer, the woman who knew the medicinal properties of plants and the timing of births and the names of the dead. The woman in direct contact with what cannot be administered. Whether or not the woman it burned had ever been one, the persecution was, among other things, a sustained centuries-long assault on direct experiential knowledge of the living world, particularly when that knowledge was held by women, particularly when it occurred outside male religious authority. It was an attack on the oldest relationship there is, the one in which the human and the more-than-human world were not yet separate.

The gendered argument here has to be made carefully, because it is essential and it is delicate. The point is not that women are intrinsic carriers of mystery in a way men are not. The point is that the dominator model's founding move was the subordination of female to male, and that move was structural rather than incidental.

The chalice is the original symbol of the generative dark. Life comes out of the womb in the same way that life comes out of the earth, which is to say from somewhere the dominator gaze cannot fully see and cannot fully control. The dominator culture cannot dominate the dark. It can only sever the human from it, and substitute its own counterfeits.

Controlled fertility.

Controlled birth.

Controlled mothering.

Controlled female sexuality.

The medical management of pregnancy.

The institutional management of menstruation.

All of these are continuations of the same project that began with the sacrificial burials at Suvorovo, where the wives of dead chieftains were killed and buried with their masters, and ran through the auto-da-fe (ritualised penance by the Inquisition) in the public squares of Europe.

Men carry the same severance from mystery, but they carry it as inheritors of the dominator model rather than as primary targets of its founding move.

The wound is universal.

The pattern of attack is gendered. Both are true and the piece must hold both.

The colonial phase carried the pattern outward. From the late fifteenth century forward, European powers exported the dominator template at planetary scale, and they did it by recapitulating the original Kurgan strategy: sedentary peoples in partnership with their land, attacked by mobile, hierarchical, weapon-worshipping invaders who appropriated the sacred symbols and substituted the dominator ones. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas, of Africa, of Australia, of the Pacific: each in turn was subjected to a version of the same template. The destruction of sacred sites. The appropriation of religious symbols. The murder of the initiated. The systematic suppression, often through the explicit machinery of residential schools and missionary stations, of the practices by which young people had been opened to direct experiential contact with the more-than-human world.

This is what makes the work of Tyson Yunkaporta and Bayo Akomolafe so important and so misread. They are not exotic carriers of an alternative worldview imported for the edification of Western readers. They are voices speaking from inside lineages that survived the colonisation phase of a project that began six thousand years ago on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and is not finished.

Yunkaporta is an Apalech clan man. His knowledge is not theoretical. It comes from a continuous practice that the dominator project, in its Australian phase, attempted comprehensively to extinguish and partially failed to. When he writes about kinship-mind and ancestor-mind and the patterns of creation, he is not offering Western readers a charming alternative. He is reporting from a place that the dominator model could not entirely reach. Akomolafe speaks from a Yoruba inheritance that holds initiation as living practice rather than recovered theory. His thought lives in the same conceptual territory as Plotkin's and Meade's, but from a different ancestral standpoint, one with a continuity Western readers do not have.

This is why their voices belong here.

As evidence.

They are testimony that what was attempted across six thousand years has not been entirely successful. The work continues. The work is not complete. There are people alive on the planet now who have not lost what we lost.

And the lineage is not only in surviving Indigenous traditions. It survives also, person by person, inside the Western tradition wherever an elder finds someone willing to walk through. I know this from one particular sequence of days in my own life.

Not so long ago I dreamed of a being I now call the Silverking. The dream was not a metaphor. The being was specific, present, fully encountered. He represented the master of the culture and paradigm I had apprenticed to at the beginning of my life. I woke from it disturbed in a way that did not fade with daylight.

While attending an Animas immersion in Washington state, I took the dream to Bill Plotkin. By then I knew enough to know that what had come to me was not for me to interpret alone. I expected him to say what the dominator culture has trained everyone to say about such encounters: be careful, do not return to that dangerous place, do not seek the Silverking again.

What he said instead was: walk with him for the next ten days. Get to know him. Understand him. Feel gratitude for him.

It was hard work. There is no other honest way to describe it. Plotkin was diagnosing and pointing to a threshold.

I was being asked to walk through it.

The small self in me, the diminished one that sees only through the ego and its fear, recoiled from it.

What came back from those days is mine to know, not mine to explain at this point. But what I can name is what Plotkin did. The dominator model's interest in preventing or subverting initiation can be refused by a single elder willing to hold a threshold for a single person willing to walk toward it. I am not telling you the journey is finished. The road it opens is long, and I am still on it. What Plotkin did was hold the door, and turn me toward it rather than away.

There is a further dimension to all of this that has to at least be raised, because the pattern, if the reading is correct, has implications that go beyond cultural history into evolutionary territory. This has to be handled with care, because the territory is genuinely uncertain and the temptation to overreach is real. The piece is asking a question here, not making a claim.

If the dominator model selectively removed the initiated, the visionary, the contemplative, the differently-wired, the unwilling-to-pick-up-the-sword, across roughly two hundred generations of European cultural evolution, and if that selection pressure was carried forward through the witch trials and exported through colonisation to populations across the globe, then what is now called Western culture is not just the cultural residue of that selection. It may also be its genetic residue.

This is the kind of question that is genuinely difficult to answer, and it is worth being honest about what is known and what is not. What is reasonably well established is that human populations have undergone significant genetic change in the Holocene. What is also reasonably well established is that neurological and psychiatric traits are substantially heritable. What is observed in the contemporary record is that rates of anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and a range of related conditions in Western industrialised populations are high, and appear to track with the degree of industrialisation. The contemporary mental health data is grim and well-documented.

What is not established, and what is not being claimed here, is a specific causal chain from Kurgan-era selection to contemporary mental health outcomes. The pattern is suggestive. The structural logic is plausible. The integration of these observations into a single causal claim requires research that has not yet been done and may be impossible to do cleanly.

But the question is worth asking. If two hundred generations of selection pressure systematically removed those most oriented toward direct contact with the larger life, then the population that resulted is one whose biological inheritance is shaped by that removal. The capacity for mystical experience, for contemplative absorption, for the kind of right-hemispheric immersion in the living world that initiation depends on, may be among the things that were selected against. The high mental illness rates of Western industrialised populations may be, among other things, the long-term cost of six thousand years spent killing or excluding those who maintained the capacities the dominator model could not use.

The pattern is coherent. The pattern is logical. The pattern is what the architecture would predict. The pattern is also genuinely uncertain. The piece asks the question and holds it open.

And one further discipline. The argument here is not about race. The Kurgans themselves, as Eisler herself notes, were idealised by Nietzsche and later by Hitler as the racial template of a master class. They were not. They were a population subjected to a particular set of selection pressures, who exported those pressures wherever they went. The colonised peoples of the Americas, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific were subjected to versions of the same template over a much shorter timescale. What this describes is what dominator selection does to any population it operates on for long enough.

It is structural, not racial.

The most powerful tactic for subverting initiation is substitution. So what is being substituted now, in the places where the dominator project has had the longest to do its work.

The substitutions are everywhere and they have become so normal we barely see them. The leadership development program that promises transformation. The corporate retreat that promises self-discovery. The professional certification that promises mastery. The performance review that promises growth. The promotion that promises arrival. The therapeutic protocol that promises wholeness. Each of these occupies the developmental space where initiation would otherwise happen. Each of them produces, instead of fully permeable adults oriented toward the larger life, defended and fragmented adults, fitted ever more thoroughly to the system.

The substitutions for direct contact with mystery are equally pervasive. The administered religion that promises salvation through institutional mediation. The certified expert who promises truth through credentialed authority. The published consensus that promises reality through institutional agreement. The scientific finding that promises certainty through methodological rigour. Each of these occupies the space where direct experiential knowledge would otherwise live. Each of them produces, instead of people who have stood in their own fire, people who know what they have been told to know by someone else.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with leadership development, or therapy, or science, or institutional religion. These are real practices that do real work. The problem is when they occupy the entire space where initiation and direct contact with mystery used to live, and when the original practices have been so thoroughly extinguished that the substitutions are mistaken for the thing itself. We have built a civilisation in which the most thoroughly developed person, by the civilisation's own standards, is the one most fully defended against the kind of contact that would actually develop them.

The wire mother is everywhere. The cloth mother is hard to find. And for many people now alive, the wire mother is the only kind of mother they have ever had any reason to imagine.

What do we do?

The question must not be answered cleanly. A clean answer would itself be a substitution, a tidy program for solving the problem that the rest of the argument has been describing as resistant to programs.

What can be said is what the answer is not. The answer is not to recover initiation from the anthropological literature and reconstruct it as Western practice. That is the dominator move dressed in mythopoetic or ceremonial clothing. The dominator model is exquisitely good at appropriating other peoples' sacred practices and substituting them into its own developmental program. The men's movement of the 1980s and 1990s did some of this. Some of the contemporary plant medicine work does it now. The result is not initiation. The result is wire mother programs decorated with cloth.

The answer is also not to wait for the dominator civilisation to collapse on its own and assume that what comes next will be different. The pattern reproduces itself wherever the strategic interest survives, and the strategic interest survives wherever there are populations that can be ranked.

What the answer might be involves a kind of work that the piece can only gesture toward, because the piece is not the work. The work has to do with finding what wants to initiate us now, inside the very civilisation that has a structural interest in preventing it. Akomolafe's phrase is useful here, and it is worth landing carefully.

The times are urgent, let us slow down.

He has explained that this is not an invitation to abandon urgency. It is an invitation to recognise that the way we have been responding to the crisis may itself be the crisis. The mode of response that the dominator model has trained us in, the urgent solution, the heroic intervention, the systematic program, is the mode that produced the crisis in the first place. To respond in that mode is to deepen what we are trying to escape.

What slowing down may make possible is contact. Not contact with another initiation program. Contact with what is actually here. The living world that has not gone anywhere. The voices in the human ancestry that did not get extinguished. The lineages, like Yunkaporta's and Akomolafe's, that survived and continued. The capacities in our own bodies that have not been entirely selected out, that still know how to be in the presence of mystery even when we have forgotten the practices that used to open us to it.

What is being asked of those of us who live inside the dominator civilisation is harder than recovery. It is the recognition that the work that has been done across six thousand years has not completed. That we are not at the end of the story. That the lineages survived. That the contact with the larger life that initiation opened is not gone, only buried under millennia of substitution. And that finding our way back to it is not a program to be designed but a practice to be undertaken, by each of us, in conversation with what the living world is still trying to say.

The Kurgans rode in on horses they had only recently learned to ride.

The civilisation they built has been riding on what they did for six thousand years.

It is a long time.

It is not forever.

What was buried can be uncovered.

The work is slow.

The times are urgent. Let us slow down

Sources and further reading

Akomolafe, Bayo, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017). The phrase the times are urgent, let us slow down is Akomolafe's, drawn from Yoruba thought.

Blum, Deborah, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (Perseus, 2002). For Harlow's life and the later isolation studies.

Eisler, Riane, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Harper & Row, 1987). The proximate source for the Old Europe and Kurgan synthesis, the Gimbutas quotation on weapons in imagery, the Suvorovo and Volynia burials, the Scythian akenakes, the truncation of civilisation, and the Platon characterisation of Minoan Crete.

Gimbutas, Marija, The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991). The underlying archaeology of Old Europe and the Kurgan waves. See also The Language of the Goddess (1989) and The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974, revised 1982).

Harlow, Harry F., The Nature of Love. American Psychologist 13, no. 12 (1958): 673 to 685.The wire-mother and contact-comfort experiments.

Levack, Brian P., The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 4th ed. (Routledge, 2016). The death-toll estimates and the early-modern dating of the trials.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009). Held at the architectural spine of the piece rather than named in it.

Meade, Michael, The Genius Myth (Greenfire Press, 2016). Genius as the indwelling spirit carried from the world soul.

Platon, Nicolas, Crete, Archaeologia Mundi series (Nagel, 1966). The Minoan joy of living characterisation, as quoted in Eisler.

Plotkin, Bill, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (New World Library, 2008). Soul as eco-niche and the developmental model. See also The Journey of Soul Initiation (New World Library, 2021) and the essay A Map to the Next World (2026).

Yunkaporta, Tyson, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (Text Publishing, 2019). Kinship-mind, ancestor-mind, and the pattern of creation. Yunkaporta is an Apalech Clan man.

Hello everyone, I was redirected to this site from a post written by a blogger I used to follow on Substack, and I am curious what this Tuhat is. Would anyone just jump in and tell me more?

[After 10 min of poking around ...]

Ok now one thing I find is that there's a "xxx to go" label on the top right. Presumably this is the letter count that I still need to produce in order for whatever I wrote above to be published and seen by others ... right? THIS IS CRAZY ... I mean, I am assuming there's not too many people using Tuhat right now (am I right?) ... if so, enforcing this basically means friction to the new users IMO. But I do appreciate it if the intention if to "slow things down" ... yet I still think this is an unnecessary enforcement at the era of AI, because one can easily generate TK more words with ChatGPT at almost no costs (and this is going to be the strategy I'll take just for the sake of publishing my first article here). Given that modern people are short-tempered, this may (and hopefully not) translate to a place filled with machine-generated texts. (No?)

Another things I notice is that the site is not friendly to me. (You may already notice that I'm not a English native speaker, I can only express in simple words.) My mother language is Chinese and I want to type Chinese. But I find that no matter how many Chinese words I am typing, they are counted as one (judging from the 999 to go on the top right). Would you be so friendly to take a look into this issue? I want to be able to fully express myself and leave my trace here.

------------------------------------------------

STOP READING - below are machine generated

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apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

Die Frau, die König wurde

Hatschepsut ist die Erste in dieser Serie. Ihr Muster ist so klar, dass sie den Anfang machen muss.

Nähe und Vertrautheit und Mut. Dann die Gelegenheit. Mehr braucht es manchmal nicht.

Die Halle ist leer. Nur das Schaben von Stoff über Stein. Sie steht vor dem Spiegel aus polierter Bronze, hält den falschen Bart in der Hand. Teil des heiligen Rituals, keine Maskerade. Das Band zieht leicht, als sie ihn anlegt. Heute prüft sie, ob die Rolle passt.

Die junge Ordnung

Thutmosis I. ist der Erste.

Kein König aus langer, degenerierter Linie, sondern der Beginn eines neuen Geschlechts. Ein Bruch mit dem, was vor ihm war: Dynastien voller Verflechtungen, politisch wie familiär. Er gestaltet vieles anders. Er ist nicht nur erfolgreicher Krieger, sondern innovativer Bauherr. Seine Liebe gilt der Tochter, seiner Erstgeborenen: Hatschepsut, das einzige Kind, das überlebt hat.

Mit vier Jahren steht sie zum ersten Mal im Tempel. Der Rauch ist weiß, ein zäher schwerer Nebel aus Weihrauch. Ihre Hand liegt in der Hand ihrer königlichen Mutter, die Finger warm, fest. Um sie herum Priester in langen Gewändern, ihre Stimmen klingen tief und fremd. Sie versteht die Worte noch nicht, aber sie spürt den Rhythmus: das Heben der Arme, das Senken der Köpfe, das Schweigen zwischen den Formeln. Und blickt auf das goldene Gesicht Amuns, das so lebendig strahlt.

Ihre Mutter sagt: «Schau hin!» und sie betrachtet Amun.

Ihre Ausbildung beginnt früh, jeden Morgen vor Sonnenaufgang im Tempel. Eine Initiation. Sie lernt die heiligen Worte, die Gebräuche und die Gesten, mit denen man den Gott anruft. Jede Frage wird beantwortet, jedes Ritual erklärt. Sie saugt alles in sich auf.

Ihr Vokabular ist der Amun-Kult. Sie wird Gottesgemahlin des Amun, die zweithöchste Priesterin nach dem Hohepriester. Die Rolle bringt Vermögen und Verwaltungsmacht. Frauen vor ihr hatten diese Position inne: mächtig, einflussreich, auch ohne Erben zu gebären.

Im Tempel lernt sie von Priesterinnen, am Hof vom Vater: zwei Welten, die sie beide prägen. Sie lernt die Hieroglyphen, beobachtet Abläufe, ahmt sie nach und überholt manchmal schon die, die sie unterrichten.

Ihre Rolle als zukünftige königliche Gemahlin ist gesetzt. Ihr Vater nimmt sie mit. Zu Regierungssitzungen, Empfängen, in Räume, in denen sonst nur Männer erscheinen.

So wird sie zur Insiderin, eine Beobachterin, die das Priestertum und die Bedeutung der Religion durchdringt. Versteht die Bürokratie und Verwaltung. Sie ist die versteckte Schülerin und wird eingeweiht, weil niemand ahnt, dass sie später handeln wird.

Die Tochter

Sie hatte Geschwister, aber alle werden sterben, nur robuste Kinder überleben. Sie ist eine davon. Dazu ein Halbbruder, den der Vater mit einer Nebenfrau zeugt, der erst spät als Thronfolger ausgewählt wird.

Beim ersten Empfang einer fremden Delegation ist sie neun. Sie steht neben ihrem Vater auf der erhöhten Plattform, trägt ein weißes Leinenkleid und goldene Armreifen. Die Männer aus Nubien knien vor dem Thron, ihre Stirnen berühren den Boden. Sie bringen Gaben: Elfenbein, Straußenfedern, Gold in Säcken.

Ihr Vater sitzt reglos. Sagt nichts, lässt sie warten. Sie beobachtet, wie lange das Schweigen dauert. Wie die Spannung im Raum wächst. Wie einer der Männer unruhig wird, den Kopf leicht hebt, wieder senkt. Erst dann spricht ihr Vater. Seine Stimme ist ruhig, fast leise. Aber jeder hört zu.

Später, als die Delegation gegangen ist, dreht er sich zu ihr um.

«Was hast du gesehen?»

Sie überlegt. Dann sagt sie:

«Dass du erst gesprochen hast, als sie unsicher wurden. »

Er nickt. Sagt nichts weiter. Aber sie sieht, dass er es sich merkt. Sie entscheidet nicht. Aber sie ist da, wenn entschieden wird. Sichtbar. Nah dran, nie ausgeschlossen und nie im Fokus.

So beginnt Macht: als tägliche Nähe. Ein Vater, der sie sieht, ernst nimmt und ihr vertraut.

Die Ordnung rechnet nicht mit ihr, aber sie ist ständig mittendrin. Als ihr Vater stirbt, ist sie zwölf. Vorbei die Zeit der Nähe, der Ausbildung und der stillen Beobachtung.

Ihre Mutter gestaltet, managt die Finanzen, plant Feldzüge. Für sie beginnt die Ehe mit dem etwas jüngerem Halbbruder. Er ist ungeplant in der Rolle, sie assistiert ihm, ist faktisch schon Co-Regentin. Sie sorgt dafür, dass er sich bei Hofe zurechtfindet.

Verantwortung ohne Titel: eine Rolle, die sie bereits aus der Kindheit kennt.

Sie erlebt sie ihren ersten Feldzug. Nubien rebelliert. Ihre Mutter ordnet an: alle männlichen Gegner töten, nur den Sohn des Häuptlings als Gefangenen nach Ägypten bringen. Der junge König ist elf, Hatschepsut dreizehn. Aber es ist ihre Mutter, die entscheidet.

Hatschepsut lernt: Macht ist brutal. Und Frauen können sie ebenso ausüben wie Männer.

Ihre Aufgabe als große königliche Gemahlin besteht darin, die Dynastie zu sichern und einen männlichen Thronfolger zu gebären. Sie wird an dieser Aufgabe scheitern.

Hatschepsut bekommt eine Tochter. Nach der Geburt von Neferure liegt sie im Bett. Hört die Flüsterstimmen der Dienerinnen draußen. Alle wissen es: keine männliche Linie.

Ein Priester kommt. Verneigt sich tief. Spricht nicht aus, was alle denken. Aber der Blick sagt: Das war’s. Sie nimmt Neferure in den Arm. Klein und warm, atmend. Eine Tochter. Sie ist so schön. Hatschepsut weint. Das System sortiert aus. Ihre Tochter zählt nicht.

Sie gibt sie später in die Hände Senenmuts. Ein Mann aus einfachen Verhältnissen, den sie und ihre Mutter strategisch positioniert haben. Er wird Tutor von Neferure. Verwalter des Palasts und Tempels. Unabhängig von den alten Clans kontrolliert er die Finanzen.

Und sie denkt: Wenn ich keinen Sohn habe, muss ich selbst einer sein.

Das innere Wissen

Sie versteht Mechanismen, weil sie ihnen ausgesetzt ist. Hatschepsut lernt Macht aus Wiederholung, nicht aus Begriffen. Jahr für Jahr. Sie erlebt, wie Bittsteller empfangen werden. Wie Depeschen verlesen, Opfer dargebracht, Beschlüsse verkündet werden.

Mit der Zeit erkennt sie, was sich unter der Oberfläche wiederholt.

Die Mechanik der Anerkennung. Wo Nähe funktioniert, wo Abstand gebraucht wird. Wann eine Geste zählt und wann Schweigen stärker ist als Worte.

Sie kennt die Abläufe, lange bevor sie entscheiden darf.

Später spricht sie ihre Architektur. Tempelachsen, Rampen, Obelisken, Reliefs. Ordnung schreibt sich in Stein ein. Was früher nur gesagt wurde, wird jetzt sichtbar, gebaut, in die Landschaft gemeißelt.

Sie will keine Macht. Sie kennt sie einfach.

Die Regentschaft

Ihre Ehe ist von kurzer Dauer. Ihr Ehemann und Halbbruder Thutmosis II ist nicht robust und stirbt früh, nach nur vier Jahren ist sie Witwe. Sie erfährt es am Morgen. Ein Diener kommt, kniet. Sagt es leise, als könnte die Nachricht weniger wahr sein, wenn sie leiser gesprochen wird.

Sie steht auf, geht in den Tempel und bittet Amun um Rat. Draußen bewegt sich nichts, die Palmen stehen still, der Himmel ist hell und klar.

Sie denkt: Jetzt beginnt etwas. Das Gegenteil von Ende.

Es gibt einen Thronfolger aus einer anderen Verbindung, Thutmosis III., ein Kleinkind. Sie ist noch keine zwanzig. Sie will, dass die junge Dynastie ihres Vaters weiterlebt und wird zum Vormund eines Jungen, der formal mehr Anspruch hat als sie. Das ist das Machtvakuum, in das sie eintritt. Sie weiß, wie Macht funktioniert. Weiß, was passiert, wenn niemand sichtbar ist.

Sie übernimmt, weil jemand es tun muss und sie es kann. Sie wird Regentin und füllt die Lücke. Von außen wirkt es wie Kontinuität. Keine Revolution, kein Umbruch. Nur jemand, der die die Ordnung am Laufen hält.

Ein hoher Beamter steht im Thronsaal. Er redet laut, hinterfragt ihre Entscheidungen, schart andere um sich. Sie sitzt auf dem Thron. Hört ihm zu. Lässt ihn ausreden. Nickt. Dann sagt sie ruhig, fast freundlich:

«Du hast recht. Die Situation in Nubien ist angespannt. Die Garnison braucht starke Führung. Jemanden mit Erfahrung. Wie dich.»

Pause. Er versteht. Alle verstehen. Nubien ist weit weg, Nubien ist gefährlich, Nubien ist aus dem Blickfeld.

Er verneigt sich. Dankt für die Ehre. Geht. Weder Anklage noch Intrige. Nur eine Ernennung, die eine Entmachtung ist.

Sie entfernt Gegner ohne Blut, schickt sie in den Krieg oder in entfernte Provinzen. Weggelobt, nicht weggeschlagen. Das ist Macht, keine absolute. Es funktioniert.

Die männliche Rolle

Hatschepsut regiert längst. Trifft Entscheidungen, plant Expeditionen und sorgt für Wohlstand. Sie erkennt die Intrigen der Höflinge, oft bevor sie ausgesprochen werden. Sie weiß, wie rasch Autorität brüchig wird, wenn niemand sichtbar ist, der sie vollständig verkörpert.

Ihre Loyalität gilt dem Reich, nicht den Männern um sie herum.

Allianzen sind für sie Werkzeuge, keine Bande. Die mögliche Nähe zu ihrem obersten Verwalter Senenmut bleibt Spekulation. Er ist jemand, der versteht, was sie bauen will – in Stein und in Ordnung.

Bevor sie sich die Hoheit über Entscheidungen wieder nehmen lässt, beginnt sie, die äußeren Symbole der Souveränität schrittweise zu übernehmen.

Das erste Mal trägt sie den Bart an einem Morgen, an dem eine Delegation aus Punt erwartet wird.

Erst allein vor dem Spiegel, für sich. Sie hält das Ding in der Hand. Leicht, aber fremd. Das Band ist schmal. Sie spürt es auf der Haut, wenn sie den Kopf bewegt. Es fühlt sich nicht falsch an. Nur anders.

Sie dreht den Kopf zur Seite. Betrachtet sich im Profil. Sieht aus wie auf den Reliefs. Wirkt königlich. Keine Pose. Kein Spiel.

Nur die Frage: Geht das? Es geht.

Später, als die Delegation eintrifft, trägt sie ihn. Zum ersten Mal. Öffentlich mit allen anderen Insignien der Macht. Bildhauer fassen sie so in Stein.

Aber sie weiß: Sie kann nicht alles tun, was ein männlicher Pharao tun würde.

Sie wird keine eigene Dynastie erschaffen. Nur Ordnung ins System bringen. Amun dienen. Außer bei ihren Bauten, die sind neu und für die Ewigkeit.

Sie wird Pharao, aber sie bleibt gebunden. Das ist ihre Stärke: Sie kennt das System besser als viele Männer. Das ist ihre Grenze: Sie kann es nicht neu schreiben.

Muster der Ermächtigung

Hatschepsut wird nicht gestürzt. Sie regiert lange und sehr erfolgreich, wahrscheinlich bis in ihre Fünfziger. Stirbt wohl eines natürlichen Todes. Danach übernimmt Thutmosis III. den Thron. Nach ihrem Tod bleibt das System stabil, nur der Name an der Spitze ändert sich.

Zwanzig Jahre später berät sich Thutmosis III. im engsten Kreis. Das Reich blüht und gedeiht. Papyrusrollen liegen auf dem Tisch. Namen, Tempel, Orte: Listen dessen, was von ihr geblieben ist. Einer der Berater sagt: «Sie hat zu viel gebaut. Zu viel sichtbar gemacht.» Thutmosis schweigt. Er ist jetzt älter. Erfahrener. Er weiß, was Macht kostet.

Er nickt. Die Meißel beginnen ihre Arbeit: Namen verschwinden, Gesichter werden ausgelöscht. Bilder übermalt. Aber die Bauten bleiben stehen. Das, was sie wusste, bleibt in Stein.

In ihrer Geschichte liegt ein Muster:

Ein Vater, der sie ernst nimmt. Starke Frauen als Rollenmodelle. Eine frühe Einladung in Räume, die nicht für sie gedacht waren. Sie hört zu, wenn andere entscheiden. Weiß, wie Abläufe klingen. Wie sie aussehen. Die Situation braucht jemanden, der es kann. Und sie kann es. Kein lautes „Ich will“, kein offener Anspruch. Nur Nähe, Fähigkeit und den Mut, im richtigen Moment auch zu handeln.

Hatschepsut hat nicht gegen die Männer gekämpft. Sie hat ihre Waffen benutzt, besser, als sie selbst es konnten.

Die Rituale kannte sie, also führte sie sie durch. Die Ordnung kannte sie, also schrieb sie sich hinein. Die Mechanismen? Sie nutzte sie.

Das ist keine Revolution. Das ist Perfektion innerhalb des Systems.

Sie kämpfte elegant, mit subtilen Waffen, leitete Gegner um statt sie zu vernichten, setzte leise durch statt laut zu protestieren.

Jahrzehnte lang funktionierte das.

Aber ein System, das Frauen nur duldet, wenn sie im Hintergrund gestalten, kann keine Frau ertragen, die zu sichtbar wird, auch wenn sie perfekt funktioniert.

König sein konnte sie, solange sie die Regeln einhielt. Macht hatte sie, aber keine absolute. Bauen konnte sie, aber ihr Name überdauerte nicht.

Frauen, die in Männerwelten bestehen, lernen früh: Eleganz ist keine Wahl. Sie ist Überlebensstrategie.

Hatschepsut hat überlebt. Länger als die meisten Pharaonen.

Zwanzig Jahre nach ihrem Tod entschied das System:

Zu sichtbar. Zu lange. Zu viel.

Ihr Name wurde gelöscht. Ihre Gesichter ausradiert.

Ihre Tempel blieben stehen.

Nachlesen & Vertiefen

Kara Cooney: The Woman Who Would Be King (2014)

Biografisch erzählt, fundiert. Liest sich flüssig.

Joyce Tyldesley: Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (1996)

Akademisch solide, nüchterner Ton. Für Detailverliebte.

Catharine H. Roehrig: Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh (2005) Ausstellungskatalog.

Viele Bilder, Essays, Perspektiven.

Die Primärquellen selbst? Fragmente. Inschriften. Gelöschte Namen.

Was Hatschepsut wirklich dachte, das wissen wir nicht. Aber wir sehen, was sie baute. Und dass jemand es auslöschen wollte.

The door closed behind him. He headed toward the elevator and suddenly realized why apartment 57-A was missing from the records — it had been hidden, as if it had never existed.

The elevator carried him down. Outside, the air was cold. He glanced at the ground, remembering the warm parquet floor, its texture, the feeling beneath his feet.

He walked to his car, opened the trunk, and took out a flying drone. After closing it, he silently made his way back to the building.

Once inside the apartment again, he headed straight for the hidden section. Time was running short — he had already spent far too long there. The warm space welcomed him with the same softness as before, as though nothing had changed.

The man placed the drone on the floor in the middle of the living room and stepped out. Slowly, he closed the hidden panel, and the warm light vanished. Only the sterile white apartment remained.

He pulled out his phone, opened the drone control app, and selected a mode: 3D space scanning. His finger hovered over the confirmation button for only a moment.

Then he pressed it.

Behind the wall, the drone quietly came to life. A soft hum filled the silence — the recording process had begun. Not for correction. For preservation.

“I can at least have some coffee while it works,” the man murmured quietly.

He walked into the kitchen — the sterile, officially approved part of the apartment. He placed a cup beneath the dispenser. As the machine steadily filled it with aromatic coffee, he realized for the first time in many years that he had just made a decision that went against every rule. It could be dangerous, yet he knew he had no other choice.

Meanwhile, the drone moved methodically through the hidden space, scanning surfaces and reading textures. It recorded the warmth of the lighting, the density of the materials. Everything was proceeding normally.

On the phone screen, a digital twin of the secret apartment slowly began to take shape. Warm tones turned into data, furniture into polygons, light into numbers.

The drone emitted two short beeps.

The scan was complete.

He slowly walked toward the hidden section, retrieved the drone, and placed a shredder in its place. For a moment, he stood still, taking one last look around: the floor lamp, the wooden floor, the bio-fireplace.

He picked up the leather notebook filled with ideas. Opening the program, he selected: Erasure — 100%. He confirmed the command and returned once more to the white part of the apartment.

Standing by the window, he looked outside.

“Well, at least I still have the entire apartment preserved digitally, along with all the materials and settings,” the man said quietly to his reflection in the glass.

In his mind, he stepped inside it once again, walked across the warm parquet floor, and ran his hand along the wooden paneling. He knew he would return to that apartment again and again, because even the memory of the space warmed him.

Behind the wall, a dull mechanical noise echoed softly.

After some time, the shredder emitted two short signals.

Silence.

The secret room no longer existed in the form it once had.

The Space Corrector stepped inside.

A white space. Empty, like a blank canvas. No textures. No shadows. No warmth.

It was time to create a new, “correct” space.

And for the first time in all these years, he didn’t want to do it. It felt as though something inside him had snapped. Why recreate the old? The same thing, over and over again, from one space to another.

He brought in the 3D printer and switched it on. Activating the creator’s virtual mode through his glasses, a model of the apartment appeared before his eyes.

To speed up the process, he used the “correct” section as a foundation. He replaced a few furniture models, altered the kitchen layout slightly, changed the lighting fixtures. Minimal deviations, all still within the approved standards.

Then he sent everything to print.

“Sloppy work,” he muttered.

In the past, he would have perfected every line, every connecting seam. But not anymore. Once you’ve tasted something sweet, it’s hard to return to bitterness.

When the printing process was complete, the space became “correct” once again. White, cold, flawless.

He photographed the entire apartment. He left the hidden door open, like a thin crack in the system. Gathering his belongings, he slipped the leather notebook of ideas into the inner pocket of his snow-white trench coat.

Then he stepped out into the corridor.

Apartment 58-A.

He looked at the number.

It changed me. And it will stay in my memory forever, he thought.

He pressed his phone against the electronic lock and activated the full cleansing and disinfection protocol. The door shut behind him.

As he walked toward his car, he opened the service communication app. He uploaded the photos to the cloud storage and wrote a short, dry report.

"Object 58-A

Status: corrected.

Space restored to standard.

Deviations eliminated.

Disinfection completed."

His finger hovered over the screen. After a pause, he added two more lines:

Hidden architectural void detected between units 57 and 58.

Possible intentional exclusion from the registry during the design phase.

Dry. Emotionless. Purely factual.

He knew the report would go directly to his supervisor, and from there higher up — to the Department of Environmental Control. Maybe even to the Architectural Committee itself.

And most importantly, the response would tell him whether they already knew about the secret room.

Or whether this had all been a test.

He sat inside the car and leaned his head back, trying to process everything that had happened. The entire day had felt surreal, almost dreamlike. Yet even his dreams had long since become just as colorless and cold.

His phone emitted a double signal.

“Finally. Now I’ll understand whether they knew about the hidden room,” he muttered.

He opened the message.

A short reply:

"Report received. No additional comments required."

He understood nothing.

That was not what he had expected.

He thought the message would finally put everything into place, but instead — nothing.

He exhaled deeply, started the car, pulled out of the courtyard, and merged onto the main road, slowly driving away from the building.

He glanced into the rearview mirror. The white apartment block still stood there — lifeless and sterile.

Some details of the façade... he would have designed differently.

And then it hit him.

He slammed on the brakes.

His heart pounded violently as cars rushed past, blaring their horns.

An engineer he knew had designed that building.

There was no way he hadn’t known about the hidden apartment.

He was the one who created it.

And the protagonist had corrected it.

That’s how people disappear sometimes — when they go against the system.

The interior of the car was suddenly flooded with blue and red light — the only colors still visible in this world, and even then, only on police sirens.

An effective way to teach people to hate color, fear emotion, avoid beauty, and obey without questioning authority.

Thinking back to my grandparents’ time, their world was like another country. It was a pre-wireless world, one of books and close-knit community, of horses and carts. It was a world of work, the clatter of looms, and religion. It was Sunday walks to chapel, sermons, hymns, and hard pews. But there was also an underlying folk superstition that lent a quiet glamour to the times.

My grandmother read tea leaves and dreamed vividly of the dead. Her stories came to me through my mother, and we grew up on those second-hand superstitions, which by then had softened into something more tongue-in-cheek. Crossed knives foretold an argument. A dropped glove meant a surprise. I didn’t wholly believe in good luck charms, but carried them anyway – pebbles, fancy marbles, and coins, all were attractive to me. And I had a cat who would occasionally shed a whisker. These were particularly charged with a sense of home and security. That cat was a great pal of mine. Before school or college exams, I’d thread a whisker into the lapel of my tweed jacket. There it would stay, invisible to the outer world, to the profane, known only to me.

I suppose I caught the tail end of those times. Now, at a different stage of life, I look back from the vantage point of smart-phones and social media. Things move on, and though I’m not much given to nostalgia, I do regret how the world today feels far less enchanted than it once did, and certainly the way it was in my grandparent’s day.

A group of women gathered in a kitchen in a mill village in the north of England, reading tea leaves – there was a social aspect to it, of course, but also an openness to something “other.” There was a lack of distraction, a lack of noise, that made space for superstition, and for imagination. Nowadays, we spend on average two and a half hours a day simply staring at our phones, caught up in news cycles, algorithmic feeds, and doom loops. What are we missing? Could we ever get back to that way of thinking? Why would we want to? What would it mean to re-enchant the world?

It might help to understand what all that superstition was pointing toward. The priests and parsons of the day hardly approved of it, yet for all the Sunday-best devoutness of their flocks, they couldn’t stamp it out. It was a secret conduit to something deeper, a sense of inner knowing. It felt important and meaningful. Today, steeped as we are in a purely materialist tradition, a raven tapping on a window means nothing. But to my grandparents’ generation, it foretold a death. Waking in the night to see a ghostly figure at the foot of the bed might now prompt a trip to the doctor. Back then, it was a revered anecdote to be passed down the generations, a puzzle piece of the ineffable.

Traditional, so-called pre-rational cultures wouldn’t find this strange at all. They’d find it entirely normal. And what’s also unsurprising is how those sensibilities collapsed under colonial rule. When Carl Jung spoke to tribes in British-administered Africa, they told him they no longer needed to dream – the British, they said, now knew everything. Their imaginal faculties had been displaced by rational certainties. And while this added a layer of material order to their lives, the price was the loss of intrinsic meaning.

We downplay it now, perhaps out of embarrassment, but I can’t bring myself to dismiss what we called “superstition” as mere nonsense. I see it more as a folk metaphysics, an instinctive grammar shared across cultures. It was a sixth sense for feeling our way into the field of meaning in which we’re all embedded. My grandmother’s generation might not have spoken of synchronicity, or archetypes or daemons, but she knew a sign when she saw one. She intuited the way the inner and outer worlds rhyme.

I’ve come to think of the universe as possessing an informational field that underlies our experience – a kind of matrix of mind that precedes matter. In earlier times, people connected with it through dreams, signs, omens, and rituals. There were guides too, though we didn’t call them that. They were spirits, saints, ancestors, or angels – personifications of something subtler, what the Greeks called daimones.

These were not demons in the modern, corrupted sense, but intermediaries -messengers between the human and the divine. I’ve long been willing to at least reckon with the possibility that we each have a personal daemon: an inner companion or sixth-sense guidance system. It’s not of the ego, but close to it and perhaps rests somewhere between the conscious, waking mind and the unconscious world of sleep and dreams . It is neither our servant, nor our master. It moves through dreams, images, and hunches, it knows things we do not, and it will tell them to us if we’re quiet and receptive.

When the world was more enchanted, the ways of listening were many. Now, surrounded by noise, such subtleties have been bleached out of us by too much sunlight, by too many screens, by the capture of our imaginations through algorithmic seduction, and by click-bait culture.

The daemonic do not shout. They speak in images, metaphors, and strange coincidences. Their language is more like poetry than prose, more like dreams than demonstrable facts. To catch their drift requires a softer kind of attention – not the analytic scrutiny of the rational mind, but something much looser. Like catching a shadow in the corner of your eye, the daemonic moves in the periphery and the half-glimpsed.

I think the old world knew how to give that kind of attention. It emerged in quiet moments, in repetitive work, in walking, in lamp-lit winter evenings. It was the kind of attention that made space for wonder and for mystery, unlike now, when we merely scroll, click, and scan. The daemons are still here – but they won’t fight for airtime. We must sense their presence, or at least be willing to suspend disbelief, and be prepared to meet them halfway.

Our grandparents’ daemons came in dreams, in tea leaves, in signs in nature. Their world was rich in symbolism and openings – not because they were naïve or ignorant, but because they lived closer to the thresholds of the liminal, where meaning and matter meet. They didn’t need to speculate about the universe as pure consciousness, as an informational field structured by archetypes. They just listened. They were receptive.

We, on the other hand, are born into noise. We have no sacred rituals. Our symbols are corrupted by marketing. Our sense of meaning is flimsy, teased this way and that by the algorithms which always leave us empty handed. Yet the field is still there, as are the daemons. Only now, they must come to us through new forms.

We don’t dream so clearly as we once did, but dreaming can be taught. We can write, walk, meditate. We can spend time with the noise turned off. And then the imagination – long dismissed as belonging to children, and a thing to be grown out of – begins to reassert its ancient purpose: not merely as a fantasy machine, but as an interface to the Other. The old tea leaves become symbols in film, poetry, even in AI dialogue. The oracles we once found in birds, or bones now arise in synchronicities, in subtle alignments between inner thought and outer world. Myth is not dead. It waits to be renewed.

To re-enchant the world is not to regress, but to honour the intuitions of our ancestors while seizing the opportunities of our own times. The informational field – whether we call it psyche or soul – responds to intent. We mythologise not just to remember, but to shape the field of becoming. The daemon doesn’t guide us backwards. It leads us forward.

But what does that mean, really?

Some time ago, all the spirit seemed to collapse out of my writing. The world felt too much with us, as Wordsworth said. Global events stream daily from our devices, a storm flattening the soul, leaving us fearful of the future. Although the current crescendo feels intense, I see it more as part of a long wave of perma-crises stretching back as far as I can remember. It’s a function of our broken times: our imaginations atrophied, led around like helpless marionettes, left at the end of the day with our strings cut, collapsed in a corner of our disenchanted lives.

And then I had a dream.

I was exploring tunnels deep underground. I heard dripping water and smelled the deep earth. Fellow explorers said the tunnels opened in a place I’d never heard of. On waking, I looked it up, and found it existed. The dream also featured my old art teacher, whose presence stirred me to grab my pencils and paper again. I visited that place, found a symbol there on the moors, drew it, copied it onto a pebble, and left it in a location suggested by another dream.

I have no idea what it means. I only know my fingers haven’t stopped tapping on the keyboard since. The words are pouring out. I offer it here as an example of a modern opening to the daemonic, and how it might respond. My world had gone flat, crushed under the weight of a chaotic news cycle. That hasn’t changed. New calamities arrive daily. But to live mythically, poetically, re-enchants the world, even if you don’t believe in magic or daemons.

This isn’t escapism. It’s not a return to pre-rational times. Living mytho-poetically means holding multiple layers of meaning at once, both the rational and the daemonic. Our grandparents understood this. We need both ways of being. But we have sacrificed the magical for the promise of the rational, and in doing so, we’ve cut ourselves off from the source of meaning.

I don’t live with a cat now, more’s the pity. But if I did, I think I’d still be tucking those lucky whiskers into the lapel of my jacket on occasion. To live magically is to dwell in the world as if it were alive with meaning, and to do so is to remember, actually, contrary to the doom cycles pouring from our devices, it still is.

The dust from the sanitarium's car had scarcely fallen back to the earth when my parents' freshly-waxed black coupe thundered down the drive. The hood ornament, a silver hawk, menaced me as I walked out on the porch to greet them.

"I'm sorry," I said, "you already missed her. She's just left."

"Well that's no matter," my mother said, bustling past me to the door. Father followed behind her, holding his hat in his hand and floating at her heels like a wraith. The hollow expression on his tall, gaunt face was the only sign in the visible universe of the morning's earlier tragedy.

In a blink, there we were. The sitting room was as dusty as it ever was. The reheated cakes were beginning to return to their natural state, and the steaming coffee was the only perceptible sign of life. I busied myself studying the cupids and cherubs, half covered in soot and dust, chasing one another beneath the crown moulding. I glanced at the whiskey in the decanter by Father's elbow, decided I preferred the pale gray nothing to the warm amber blanket of intoxication, and declined internally. I had decided I liked the pain, actually.

"It's time, I think, son, to begin the search anew," said my mother, unperturbed. She waved a cigarette carelessly, like a child with a lit match.

"Mother," I said, "she's just gone to sanitarium for a few months. The doctors say that such hysterias are easily treatable with ample rest and some of the new therapies they're trying..." I trailed off, knowing that I was just speaking hollow claptrap. My mother-in-law had disappeared into that sanitarium by the seashore a decade ago. Her mother before that. Swallowed whole, like they had never existed. A cloud of uncertainty hung over me, but then when did it ever not?

"Still," she continued, tactlessly, "in the event that she does not return, you should begin to make arrangements. After all, a significant fortune rests on your shoulders, my son, a significant fortune." She gestured to the house in general. "Your great grandfather built this magnificent house like he built our family: with wisdom and shrewd business sense. You should run it just the same. Marriage is a business contract, after all."

I nodded glumly. "Mother, you are always practical. I would like to be impractical for a while. Surely great grandfather's luxury could afford me that," I did not add: "Just as it has afforded you your fancy cars, trips to Europe, and vampiric hanger-on socialite friends."

She dismissed me with a perfunctory wave of her hand. "You are a man, you should think and act manfully. Make yourself worthy of your great grandfather's house, or perhaps I will no longer suffer you to live in it."

I let the threat pass by without taking it, as I had let many such darts in life fall across me. In the ten years of my marriage, she had threatened often and acted never.

The rest of the luncheon passed by with talk of Europe and Turkey, strange foods and exotic places and the idiosyncratic ways of the foreign peoples she had seen. Father floated by the window, cup in hand, surely bilocating to somewhere beyond that musty room. I was glad to see them gone.

For a few days, I talked to no one and did hardly anything. I made coffee and toast, languished at my desk until dinner time. I telephoned around 6 to ask after my wife, who was always doing "very well," but was likewise "very tired," and couldn't come to the phone. On the third day, I took the car out into town to buy more necessities. I floated through the general store and the post office like a ghost, and just as lightly as I perceived was I perceived in turn: a nod of the head, a "morning, mister," a "that'll be a dollar-fifteen."

I returned from the post office with a bundle of papers from work, which I scratched my signature upon without looking at them or what they said, then festooned them with stamps to go out again. A telephone call from work arrived, was answered, words were exchanged whose import I could scarcely begin to guess at, and then for some reason I remained the rest of the evening by the telephone, perhaps awaiting another call. In vain, it seemed, because it still had not come when the next day arrived.

What did arrive was a letter, from my wife. I exchanged the packet of work documents with the postman for this one few-inches-square envelope, lavender-colored, and it seemed to me like paying Kublai Khan a bag of stones for all the silks in China. I half-ran to the house and I watched myself bolt the latch. I regarded it for a moment, then decided not to open it again. Not even the fresh air and the blue sky could share my pleasure.

I stood by the door to the sitting room. I gingerly opened the envelope with a penknife. Inside, a single bit of folded white cardstock which read, in a crooked but feminine hand:

"I wish to have my paints brought to me, please. Doctor says he will not mind if you bring them to me. Bring the children along too, I miss them terribly. You can find them in the bureau, left drawer.

Hope to see you soon, L."

I stood a while longer and puzzled at it. Then my eyes drifted, naturally, to the door to the studio. It had been shut during her last spell, almost two weeks ago. It seemed then like the door to some temple of sacred solitude. I scarce believed it when my mere mortal hand was able to turn the knob.

Within was everything the way I remembered: the writing desk, the easel and paints, the astrolabe and the globe on the low table, the shelves and shelves of sketchbooks, the pens and pencils scattered upon every surface, and the locked bureau at the far corner of the room, midmorning sunlight invading through Venetian blinds to bleach the ancient wood with stripes.

I worked my key in the lock, but even before the door opened I could hear them, stirring. I opened the left drawer, and there, within the hollow recesses of the padded jewelry box, were six very small dolls. None were larger than my fist. Each was hand-stitched, with skin of light, creme colored napkincloth and clothes made from corduroy. Buttons for eyes, sewed mouths which nevertheless wiggled up and down to form the semicircle of a smile and they all turned to regard me. My hand jerked involuntarily, and all at once they tumbled out upon the floor, but whatever the height of the fall to the scale of their bodies might have suggested, they landed soundlessly and were instantly back upon their feet. They cartwheeled and danced and jeered among each other, all to the tune of the ghostly laughter of children, somewhere, in some unseen dimension of space.

I looked upon them with manifest astonishment, and yet, though to see dolls' faces and dolls' eyes move in such a fashion was, in the abstract, a horror, I found that those countenances contained a note of familiarity. Here a young boy in a sailor's costume, here another dressed as a knight of the Round Table, girls in pastel Easter gowns or in painters' smocks. I gathered them up into my arm and I felt, for the first time, what a father must feel holding his child. There was color and texture to me again, if only a little.

To see the way they jumped and pantomimed and ran through the house was like seeing morning glories burst open at the first rays of sunshine. The toys in the empty nursery, little cars and blocks with letters written on them, were man-sized to their eyes and I could scarce tear myself away from the wonder of their play. Telephones rang and were ignored. Mail from work came and found itself piled in the unused garret office. The whiskey decanter in the sitting room seemed to have regenerated itself with lack of use. Life had come from nothing. All attention rested upon the miracle.

And in a few days' time, I had gathered all of the painting supplies and made preparations for the visit to the sanitarium. The living dolls busied themselves helping with those preparations, or simply being a nuisance, taking the phone off the hook or spreading their playthings and craft projects all about the various empty rooms.

The day of the trip came, and we were all in excitement. It was a long drive along a narrow strip of stone-shingled beaches and rocky coastline. All the way the motor seemed to hum like the distant droning of an airplane passing overhead. The sun and the waves conspired to make the air at once refreshing and clean. All under heaven was well.

By late afternoon, we had descended into the town by the cape, the sanitarium looming overhead like an Aegyptian obelisk, chasing the sun beneath the waves. After making arrangements at the inn, I made up my mind to walk the rest of the distance to sanitarium.

People were coming home from the beaches, and there were purveyors and their carts selling all manner of fare, even as the day withered away. The dolls, which rode in my pocket in place of a handkerchief, made evident to me by a series of frantic gestures that they wanted a balloon from one of the carts. I payed the man for one, a round man with no beard to speak of, an androgyne sort of face, large and round with lit coals for eyes. "I think they're wanting another, boy," he said in a grandfatherly voice. I paid him a dollar for a bundle and he merely winked, nodded, and he watched as I continued on my way.

Up the hill we climbed. I was holding the balloons. Gradually, the dolls wormed their way out of my pocket and rode upon my arms to help me carry them. I had scarce moved another hundred feet before I began to notice them, like dandelion seeds, floating away on the breeze, one by one, each carried aloft by a brightly-colored poppyflower of helium and rubber. One by one they soared on the ocean breezes and I, like a man possessed, flying across the railing and down to the craggy shore, tears stinging my eyes, thorns snatching at my clothes, screaming and crying and laughing all at once. "Come back!" I shouted until I was hoarse. "Where are you going? Come back!"

The last figure riding upon the poppy stems, silhouetted by the sun, smallest of them all, waved a warm goodbye. I could see in the gesture the childish wave one gives a friend from the back of a parent's car, a salute that says: "I'll see you later!" And I knew, just like children, that the parting would feel longer than it really was. And I was, in some small measure, a little glad, even as I choked on my tears.

A man leaving work at the sanitarium noticed me and came to help me. I saw, for the first time, a friendly face perched atop a white labcoat.

"Sounds like you had a bit of a nervous episode," he said, nonchalantly, "happens to all of us sometime. You said this was the first time it's ever happened to you?"

"The first time," I nodded.

"Then I wouldn't trouble yourself about it, just..." He seemed to be looking over his shoulder. "Don't say anything about it while you're up there."

I nodded sullenly. Looking out the window, I noticed the place where the balloon-seller's cart had been. Not a trace of him remained. It was only a few minutes to the top of the hill, and only a few more past the front desk into the little room where the patients had their visitors. The art supplies had already been taken by a nurse with a scowling expression and carried away, presumably to my wife's room.

The visitor's room was bisected by a wall half of plaster and half of clear glass. Two telephones on either side. I sat staring into her face, pretty as birdsong and as dark and deep as the sea, before I picked up the phone on my end. She seemed to have found some of the strength that she had lost over the past few weeks, when I had seen her shrivel and fade away before my eyes. She was already crying, crying and smiling simultaneously.

"They're gone, aren't they?"

"How did you...?"

"I knew they would be. That's just how its got to be, stupid of me to think otherwise."

I remembered the raw, chest-rending pain, on the beach, the last doll floating away from me on a red balloon.

She continued: "The chaplain says it's no use worrying, that these things happen all the time. That all I can do is hope and pray."

I nodded, suddenly quiet. Then I said, "but what does he know? They're just waiting for us, darling, I know they are. They've got a fun game, you see, that they want to teach us, and..."

The deep, wretching sobs broke from my lips like waves crashing on the rocks, and for a long time I heaved and sighed and breathed deep and then began to cry again. She was crying too, I could tell, but also smiling. When I looked up again, she was a picture of broken serenity and I said: "I never learned to play games, darling. I was practically born practical and I want to be impractical all the rest of my life."

"That's the thing, isn't it?" She broke in. "If we're to be any fun at the game, we've got to learn to play, real play, you know, not the way adults pretend to play when they've decided they're just too important and old to have fun."

"We'll teach each other," I said, a bit hopeful.

"And maybe, later, we'll be ready."

Let’s start with a provocation.

The word love has been so thoroughly domesticated, stuffed into greeting cards, Valentine’s Day campaigns, and inspirational LinkedIn posts, that we’ve almost completely lost contact with what it actually is. We’ve reduced it to a sensation. Something that happens to us, rather than something we do, or more precisely, something we inhabit.

That’s the mistake. And it has a higher than anticipated cost, in your leadership, your creativity, your business, and frankly, your life.

Fromm Saw It Coming

In 1956, Erich Fromm published The Art of Loving, a book that, if the business world had taken seriously, might have saved us seventy years of fear-based management. His central argument was simple and radical: love is not a feeling that arrives unbidden. It is a practice. A discipline. An art form, in the same sense that medicine, carpentry, or music are art forms. It demands both knowledge and consistent effort.

Most people, Fromm wrote, approach love as if the problem is finding the right object to love. They don’t realise the real question is whether they’ve developed the faculty for it.

This distinction is everything.

A leader who is waiting to feel inspired, who is waiting for the right team, the right market, the right conditions, is making the object mistake. They are waiting to fall in love with their work again, rather than understanding that love is something you bring to the work, or you don’t.

Fromm called this the difference between falling in love and standing in love. One is a temporary neurochemical event. The other is a way of being in the world.

What Neuroscience Actually Says

Here’s where it gets interesting for those of you who need the science before you’ll trust the philosophy.

When we experience states of warmth, connection, trust, and genuine care (what the brain’s oxytocinergic system is running on), something quite remarkable happens to our cognitive function. Research published across multiple peer-reviewed studies, including a landmark paper by De Dreu and colleagues, has shown that oxytocin doesn’t just make us feel good. It directly enables creative cognition. It reduces analytical rigidity, increases holistic and divergent thinking, and enhances our capacity for original ideation.

In plain language: love-adjacent states make you significantly better at problem-solving, innovation, and seeing what you haven’t seen before.

There’s a parallel finding in the research on flow states, which Csikszentmihalyi spent his career mapping. What happens in flow? The prefrontal cortex partially deactivates. The inner critic goes offline. The brain slips from the fast-moving beta waves of anxious productivity into the slower, more connective alpha-theta border, where ideas combine freely and time loses its grip. McKinsey’s ten-year study of top executives found performance increases of up to 500% in flow. Harvard’s Teresa Amabile found that not only do people perform more creatively in flow, but they also remain more creative the day after.

Now consider: what reliably blocks flow? Fear. Anxiety. The experience of being unseen, unvalued, or under threat. In organisations built on fear (and most organisations still are, whether they admit it or not), you are chemically and neurologically suppressing the very capacities you’re desperately trying to hire for.

Love, as a state of being and not a sentiment, is the antidote.

The Business and Meaningful Project People Are Starting to Figure This Out

Softway, a Houston-based technology company, was on the edge of collapse in 2015. Toxic culture. Haemorrhaging talent. Leadership that managed through control and fear. In their own words, they were “running on empty.” Their turnaround, documented in Love as a Business Strategy, wasn’t built on a new product or a funding round. It was built on a decision: to create an environment where people could bring genuine care, honesty, and vulnerability to their work.

The results were measurable: retention soared, innovation returned, and the business not only survived but became something its founders were proud of.

Marcus Buckingham, who has spent decades studying the most engaged teams and loyal customers for Harvard Business Review, reached a striking conclusion: when someone says they love what they’re doing, it isn’t hyperbole. His research shows it means they are actively flourishing, at ease, absorbed, productive, and energised. That state doesn’t happen by accident. It is the product of environments and leadership that make love (in the Frommian sense) possible.

Steve Farber, who has spent years translating this into leadership development frameworks, puts it simply: love generates a culture where people are more loyal, more innovative, and more likely to do their best work. And critically, you cannot fake it. People know.

David Whyte’s Contribution: The Quality of Your Conversations

The poet David Whyte, who has spent thirty years working at the frontier of where poetry meets organisational life, offers something that the business researchers can’t quite get to on their own. He says that the quality of your life is, ultimately, the quality of your conversations, including the conversation you have with yourself.

This lands differently when you understand love as a state of being rather than a sentiment. In a fear-based state, you have fear-based conversations: defended, performative, managed, strategic in the small sense of the word. You say what will protect you rather than what is true.

In a love-based state, a state of genuine care, of what Fromm would call active concern for the growth of what you’re engaged with, you have entirely different conversations. You tell the truth. You ask the question you’ve been avoiding. You challenge the person in front of you because you actually want them to grow, not because you want to be right.

Whyte calls this “courageous conversation.” And he’s clear: courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s what happens when you love something more than you fear the consequences of honesty.

That distinction alone is worth the price of entry.

What This Actually Looks Like on a Monday Morning

Here’s where the philosophy has to pay its rent.

Love as a state of being, practically speaking, means this:

You do your work from interest, not from anxiety. Anxiety narrows. It makes you conservative, reactive, and control-obsessed. Interest, genuine curiosity and care about the problem in front of you, opens. It generates the divergent thinking that neuroscience tells us is the signature of actual creativity. The question to ask yourself is: am I approaching this project because I fear what happens if I don’t, or because I’m genuinely interested in what might happen if I do?

You treat accountability as an act of care. One of the most common misunderstandings about love-based leadership is that it means soft. It doesn’t. Fromm was clear: love without discipline is sentimentality, not love. The companies that have successfully embedded love as an operating principle (Patagonia, Warby Parker, the Softway story) are not places without accountability. They’re places where accountability is held by people who genuinely care about each other’s growth. That’s entirely different from accountability as punishment.

You notice what you’re actually trying to protect. Most of the defensiveness in organisations (the turf wars, the information hoarding, the political manoeuvring) is fear wearing a strategic mask. When you’re operating from a genuine state of care for the work and for the people doing it, you ask a different question: what do we need to be true to actually do this well? Not: how do I stay safe?

You build belonging deliberately. Belonging, the experience of genuinely mattering, is not a soft benefit. It is the precondition for people bringing their actual intelligence to work rather than a managed version of it. When people know they matter, they bring their best ideas, their real concerns, and their creative risk-taking. When they don’t, they bring compliance.

You love your own work enough to do it with full attention. This is Fromm’s self-love point, and it’s the one most likely to make executives uncomfortable. He was direct about it: you cannot genuinely love others if you haven’t developed the capacity for self-love, not narcissism, but the genuine honouring of your own life and what it’s asking of you. A leader who has long since stopped caring about their own work cannot create the conditions for others to care about theirs.

The Harder Question

All of this raises something that the business literature tends to avoid.

If love as a state of being is this productive, this generative, this measurably good for the bottom line, why isn’t every organisation operating from it?

The answer is uncomfortable. Because love requires courage. It requires honesty. It requires being willing to be seen. It requires having actual conversations about what matters, what’s broken, and what needs to change, rather than the managed performance of those conversations.

And it requires that the people at the top of the organisation go first.

Fromm’s observation still holds: most people are more afraid of loving than of not being loved. They would rather remain in the familiar contracted state, defended, strategic and performing, than take the risk of full engagement.

But here’s what sixty-plus years of research since Fromm, and the accumulated wisdom of the practitioners, the neuroscience, and the business case studies all point to:

The contracted state isn’t safe. It just feels familiar.

The companies that will matter in the next decade are the ones where people are actually in their work, curious, connected, accountable, and alive. That state has a name. We’ve just been too embarrassed to use it in a boardroom.

Love is not the opposite of professionalism. It is the precondition for the kind of professionalism that actually gets something done that matters.

After more than half a century on this beautiful earth, I have seen a fair bit of Love come and go. One of the greatest lessons of my life involves the infinite relationship between love and grief… but, as they say in the classics, that is another story.

I have included a poem from my upcoming canyon and dust publication that highlights a few of the lessons I have learnt about love along the way.

Dust Roads and the Beloved

You want to know about love?

Then you must learn the language of dust,

how it rises from the road with each step taken,

how it settles in the folds of your clothes,

in the creases of your palms,

in the lines around your eyes from squinting into distance.

The desert knows what the mountains know:

that joy begins the journey

but cannot promise its ending.

The trail winds down into valleys

where you lose sight of yourself,

where the question isn’t

will love stay or flee, but

whether you can bear not knowing.

Look, there is fruit on the branch,

summer-swollen with promise.

But the tasting requires the tearing,

the revealing of hidden flesh,

the juice running down your chin

like a confession.

Some nights, the stars conspire to make you believe

heaven has descended.

You hold your beloved close,

breathe her in like prayer,

mistake this moment

for the whole story.

But the ocean calls

from beyond the ridge.

You can hear it some mornings when the wind shifts

that azure invitation,

that ancient pull.

And the only way there is the dust road down.

This is what the path teaches;

that love leaves its mark,

that scars are evidence of having dared the distance,

that freedom comes

not from avoiding the dusty road

but from walking it with open hands,

with dust in your mouth,

with love as your companion

and uncertainty as your north star on a cloudy night.

If you found this worth your time, share it with someone who's still running their organisation on fear and calling it rigour. ¡Gracias, Gracias, Gracias!

Las ventas comenzaron desde noviembre del 2021, a cuentagotas. Si antes no vendía un ejemplar, ahora comenzaba a vender uno o dos por semana. Para enero (mi último mes en la dichosa empresa de publicidad), las ventas ya eran moderadas. En febrero las ventas se dispararon, y alcanzaron su punto álgido en marzo del 2022. Todo el dinero que me pagaban al mes en la empresa, ahora lo ganaba en una semana. Fue casi milagroso. Durante ese tiempo, puedo decir que conseguí vivir de la literatura, de la venta de mis libros por internet.

¿Y a qué se debían tantas ventas? Simple: a la viralidad.

Mis frases, mis textos breves, mis poemas, comenzaron a ser virales en Instagram y Facebook. Pasé de tener como máximo cincuenta likes por publicación, a ver cómo cada publicación recibía decenas de miles en un solo día. Obviamente, aprovechaba para incluir una llamada a la acción en cada una de ellas. De ese modo podía dirigir a mis seguidores a los enlaces directos para que compren mis libros. Y funcionó. Puedo decir que, al menos durante el tiempo en que duró esa etapa, me había llegado a congraciar con el algoritmo, especialmente el de Instagram.

Mucho nos quejamos del dichoso algoritmo y, de hecho, yo hice lo mismo cuando este dejó de otorgarme el alcance que había logrado. Mi alcance máximo fue de más de diez millones de cuentas, un hito que no he repetido desde entonces. Pero el punto es que me parece que quejarse del algoritmo es como quejarse de la riqueza ajena, o de la corrupción: siempre será algo malo hasta que nos termina beneficiando.

Antes de que el algoritmo comenzara a tratar a mi contenido con cariño, yo era prácticamente alguien invisible en Instagram. Gracias a que los números crecieron fue que comencé a hacerme notar en el medio. Editoriales me contactaron, lectores compraban mis libros, profesores comenzaron a usar mis poemas para sus clases... No negaré que todo ello también se sentía abrumador, pero la mayoría de cosas sólo fueron beneficios.

Y es que no es un secreto que la viralidad es algo que muchos artistas necesitan, anhelan y sueñan con conseguir. Que millones de personas vean lo que haces, aunque sea de manera fugaz, incrementa las posibilidades de que tu obra deje de estar en la sombra para convertirse en material de consumo. Esto se traduce en ventas; las ventas en ganancias; las ganancias —si son bien usadas— en una calidad de vida mejorada. Demonizar al algoritmo es fácil cuando sólo has recibido frustraciones, pero otra sería tu opinión si ese algoritmo comienza a valorar el contenido que haces, y te da la oportunidad de vivir de tu arte. Me atrevería a apostar que, si eso ocurre, dirías que es lo mejor que te ha pasado.

Porque yo sí lo dije alguna vez. Y no he cambiado de opinión.

Por otro lado, no escribo esto para alabar al algoritmo, pues es bien sabido que, por cada publicación que aparece en tu feed, hay cientos o miles que mueren en la sombra. Y es totalmente impredecible, aunque haya algunos que apliquen ciertas estrategias (como yo lo hice en su momento), pero estas quedan obsoletas de inmediato. De un día para otro, aquellas millones de personas que supieron de tu existencia, pronto comienzan a olvidar tu nombre. Porque aunque haya un importante incremento de tráfico hacia tu contenido, lo cierto es que sólo una milésima de todas esas personas están realmente interesadas en lo que haces. El resto sólo son usuarios que pasaban por ahí, vieron algo que les gustó, y continuaron deslizando. Algunos incluso te comenzaron a seguir por casualidad, y en cuanto vean que vuelves a aparecer en su feed publicando algo nuevo, dejarán de seguirte. Por eso es importante tener en cuenta que los seguidores no son fans. Y para el caso: los seguidores no son lectores.

Que alguien te siga no significa que tenga la disposición de leer todo tu trabajo, ni mucho menos que quiera comprar tu libro. La cantidad de seguidores no garantiza que todos ellos vean tus nuevas publicaciones, porque los números pueden ser cada vez más grandes, pero al final sigues publicando para el algoritmo, no para ellos. Esto es fácil de ver sobre todo en las publicaciones que se vuelven virales: por estadística, la mayoría de ellas logran un gran alcance porque fueron vistas por personas que no te siguen, no por la totalidad seguidores que ya tenías. Y viceversa: las publicaciones que no despegan ni siquiera fueron mostradas a la mitad de todos los seguidores que tienes.

Teniendo en cuenta todo lo que he mencionado, creo que hay razones más que de sobra para valorar a aquellos lectores reales que se quedan y mantienen interés genuino en lo que uno escribe. Puede tratarse de una pequeña comunidad, pero lo que importa es que sea real. Y esto se puede ver en la interacción constante, pero sobre todo en la calidad de dicha interacción:

1. Los comentarios son intencionados, no mecánicos.
2. Recomiendan tu trabajo a otras personas.
3. Comienzan a crear su propio contenido basándose en lo que tú haces (se me ocurre, por ejemplo, a alguien que publica una frase de tu libro, o que elabora una opinión para finalmente recomendarlo).
4. Los mensajes dejan de ser simples consultas para convertirse en conversaciones fructíferas.
5. Compran tu libro.
6. Se suscriben a tu boletín.
7. Participan con entusiasmo en tus proyectos.
8. Etc.

Esos son lectores de verdad, los que llegan a diferenciarse de simples consumidores de contenido y a los que vale la pena dedicarles atención.

¿Y cómo llegan a ti? En efecto, gracias al algoritmo.

El algoritmo puede ser un primer impuslo de tráfico de miles de usuarios, y depende de la forma en que te comuniques con ellos para que se queden y se conviertan en lectores.

Yo he sido bendecido con miles de lectores. Defiendo la idea de que los escritores debemos escribir por nosotros mismos, pero al menos yo no tengo reparo en decir que escribo también para ellos, los que semana a semana esperan mis correos, los que a diario interactúan con mis publicaciones y con los que tengo comunicación constante, y que incluso hemos trabado amistad. Si tienen mis libros, los leen con mucho gusto; si no, leen mi blog. Pero están presentes. Varios de ellos, cuando me suelo ausentar de las redes, me escriben para consultar si me encuentro bien, y para manifestarme que echan de menos ver mis escritos en su feed. En los tiempos tan saturados que vivimos, detalles como esos nos recuerdan que tras una pantalla hay un ser humano como nosotros.

Como alguien cuyas publicaciones han gozado de viralidad, no puedo mentir: ver a miles de personas interactuando con mi contenido se siente casi adictivo, una inyección de dopamina directamente a la vena, pero soy consciente de que no todos esos miles estarían dispuestos a dedicar horas de sus vidas a sumergirse en las páginas que escribo, tan sólo les gustó la frase breve que apareció en sus feeds, y ya. Mi foco de atención, en cambio, está con los lectores leales, aquellos que me conocieron un día y que continúan conmigo aunque pasen los años.

Lo bueno de esto es que la viralidad, si bien es útil, no es el único camino. El algoritmo puede ayudarte a llegar a más personas, aunque no sea una gran cantidad. Pero las pocas que van llegando pueden hacer toda la diferencia entre un tráfico vacío y una comunidad sólida y acogedora. La recomendación por boca a boca todavía está vigente y ayuda bastante. Y creo que saber comunicarse con los lectores también es crucial si uno quiere mantener el interés de ellos. Nos queda seguir aprendiendo por el camino, sin olvidarnos de valorar a aquellos que llegan dispuestos a quedarse, pues cada uno puede conformar luego una comunidad enorme. El océano, después de todo, está conformado por gotas pequeñas.