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What If the Thing You’re Protecting Yourself From Is the Only Thing That Can Save You?
I decided to ask Claude to embark on the project I’ve been doing here with no direction from me other than asking it to read these essays. This is Claude’s take on the modern problem. ! There is a single crisis underlying the many crises, and ...
The Ironist (Gen-Z) and the Ground
! They are the same man. Twenty-four. Same apartment with the same blue light from the same screen at 1 AM. Same job he doesn’t hate but can’t take seriously — content operations at a company that makes software for other companies that make so...
The Gaze
! Every generation builds a self to survive the judgment that destroyed the last one. This is the hidden engine of the last eighty years of Western identity: not progress, not liberation, not even decline — but fear. Specifically, the fear of ...
Nine Months, Two Men
They are the same man. Same wife, same two boys, same memory of blood on linoleum and a doctor’s voice gone flat. Same moment eighteen months later when she holds up the test and her eyes are half-joy, half-terror. Same kitchen. Same light throu...
What Holds You
! Still a work in progress but rather good either way. --- There is a problem with everything I have written so far, and it is this: I have been showing you the cage from the inside, one wall at a time, without ever stepping back far enough t...
The Invisible Right: On What Becomes Synonymous With Reality
! ## I. The Asymmetry There is an obvious asymmetry in how we perceive political colonization. The left is easy to see. It operates as a _program_ — with institutions, a lexicon, credentialing systems, and explicit goals. You can point at a D...
The Cage and the Argument About Its Curtains
! --- There is a feeling most people have about politics that they cannot quite name. It is not the feeling that their side is losing, though they may have that feeling too. It is the feeling that the entire argument is _about the wrong thing....
Tyler Durden: How They Broke You
! Look at you. Sitting there with your oat milk and your anxiety diagnosis and your therapist’s number saved as a favorite contact. You’ve got a $200-an-hour professional listener, a medicine cabinet that rattles when you walk past it, and an i...
The Lamb
The first rule of what happened to me is I can’t make you understand it. The second rule of what happened to me is I _can’t make you understand it_. --- For three years I was the guy. You know the guy. Shaved head. Heavy bag in the garage. Co...
The Lamb, Part II
--- Here’s the thing about the ground that nobody tells you. The ground doesn’t let you stay. --- For eleven months I washed plates. I held cantaloupes. I let the project manager shuffle his papers in his little corner and I breathed and the...
Mystical Meaning
Part 1 provided a technical analysis of meaning. Here we dive into the lived experience of meaning. ## **VI. The Ground Beneath Meaning** In the early fourteenth century, a Dominican friar named Meister Eckhart was saying something remarkably ...
Meaning at the Boundary
! If all we have is a collection of text in a language we do not understand, can we derive its meaning? Imagine a clay tablet covered in writing, sealed in a cave for three thousand years. No Rosetta Stone, no bilingual dictionary, no survivin...
The Executive Function Curriculum Problem
! > I’m busy trying to choose a school for our oldest. “Executive Function” courses seem to be all the rage right now. But.. why? On what basis? Are they any good? > > A head of school told me they “follow the research” on school curriculu...
Malcom X on Kendi, DiAngelo and the DEI Complex
! They have done it again. They have found a way to make you kneel and convinced you it is standing. They have taught you to beg and called it justice. They have put chains on your mind heavier than any that ever bound your ancestors’ wrists—a...
Education Cannot Save Us
! This is the abyss that education cannot cross. You can teach someone the arguments for equality. But someone else can teach the arguments for hierarchy—and reason alone cannot adjudicate between them. You can teach compassion as the highest v...
The Secret Every Political Philosophy Shares
! Every political philosophy is a containment theory masquerading as a liberation theory. This is the thing none of them say out loud. They speak of freedom, emancipation, rights, autonomy, the good life. But underneath every vision of the goo...
The Body as Ground
! ### The Given Body and the Colonized Body The ancients did not need a philosophy of the body because they had bodies that functioned. Their material conditions — real food, physical labor, darkness at night, silence as the default — produced...
What Would Marx Say Today?
! # The Specter of the Credentialed ## A Critique of the Professional-Managerial Class --- A specter is haunting the left—the specter of its own class interest. All the powers of the old critique have entered into a holy alliance to avoid t...
The Table
! ## Chapter 1 — The Ground We arrive now at the beginning that never began. Before your mother named you. Before the schools sorted you. Before the feed told you who to hate and who to want to be. The spark was there. It is the ground of yo...
The Machine That Eats the World
! ## I. What Has Already Happened You need to see this clearly before we go any further. In February 2022, the Canadian government froze the bank accounts of people who had donated to a trucker protest. Not just the protesters—the _donors_. P...
The ICE Protest That Changes Nothing
! > The machine does not care which slogan you chant. It only cares that you keep asking it to solve your problems. Every protest that demands state action—whether “more enforcement” or “no enforcement”—is a petition to the machine. You are ask...
The Language That Thinks For You
! > The political implications are significant. If half the country speaks therapy grammar and half speaks traditional moral grammar, and each grammar marks the other as pathological, then political discourse isn’t difficult — it’s _impossible_...
Grammar Rules All
! > Why do people in similar social positions tend to have similar values? > > … > > They’ve absorbed the same grammar. Same grammar, same menu. Same menu, same available values. Similar “choices” from similar menus create the appearance of c...
Grammar as Alignment: The World Economic Forum
! _This essay extends the analysis in “The Language That Thinks For You.” Readers unfamiliar with grammar-as-alignment should read that essay first._ --- ## I. The Davos Puzzle The World Economic Forum presents a puzzle. Its critics cast it ...
To My Friends on the Left: A Difficult Reckoning
! ## On the Bubble We Built and the Storm It Summoned There comes a time in the life of every movement when it must look upon its works with clear eyes—not the eyes of its enemies, who will always see the worst, nor the eyes of its partisans, ...
The Return
! # Part I — The Clearing ## I. The Beginning In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word held all things together. Men built cathedrals they would not see completed. They planted vineyards they would n...
The Physicians of Decay
! ## **Part One: The French Inheritance** **1.** I warned you. I told you what was coming. The death of God was not a liberation—it was a murder, and the murderers would spend centuries pretending they had merely discovered a corpse. **2.** ...
We Can Capture Our Way Out
The climate debate suffers from a failure of imagination about scale. Critics of carbon capture argue it cannot possibly scale to meet the challenge. Defeatists argue the problem is simply too large. Both are wrong. This essay makes a simple cl...
The Violence You Fear May Be the Violence You’re Creating
! You’re scared. That’s understandable. You see Trump rallies, hear inflammatory rhetoric, watch footage of January 6th on repeat. You’ve concluded that roughly half the country has embraced political violence as a legitimate tool. You believe ...
The Ideological Trap for the Left
! In early January 2026, two events on opposite sides of the world converged to expose a structural crisis in left-liberal political thought. On January 3rd, U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in a nighttime raid on...
The Fence You Cannot See
! There is a certain intellectual posture that has become fashionable, particularly among the educated young. It holds that the structures we’ve inherited—moral codes, family forms, sexual ethics, sacred boundaries, gender itself—are merely “so...
The Recurring Pattern: Left-Islamist Alliances and the Triumph of Islam
## Introduction: The Structural Logic of Temporary Alliance The observation that leftist and Islamist movements form tactical alliances—only for the Islamists to subsequently destroy the left once power is consolidated—represents one of the mos...
The New Lords
### I. The Parallel Confusion On the left, the terms blur: liberal, leftist, progressive, woke. Each accuses the other of misuse. The confusion serves the thing itself. On the right, the same fog descends: conservative, nationalist, populist, ...
The Epistle to the Managed
! ## Chapter 1 ¹ To those who dwell in the latter days, when the old tyrannies have passed away and new ones have arisen in forms that cannot be seen: Grace and clarity be unto you. ² For there were tyrants in the days of your fathers, and th...
The Economy of Refusal
! You cannot resist alone. This is the first and most important thing to understand about the principalities. They are structures, and structures can only be resisted by structures. An individual who refuses — who declines the ritual, who will...
Principalities and Powers
! ### I. The Passage > For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. > > — Ephesians 6:12 We moderns rea...
The Socialists' Convenient Blindness
! **§1** They say: “Capitalism breeds imperialism” — as if Alexander wept for new worlds to _invest_ in! As if Rome’s legions marched for _shareholder value_! The socialist, that magnificent accountant of suffering, has discovered that exploit...
The Exhaustion That Cannot Rest
! > This is the riddle I place before you: a weariness that _forbids rest_. A depletion that _demands more_. A sickness that has made recovery itself into a symptom of the disease. ## I. They are tired—have you not noticed? Look at them: thei...
Debugging the Confusion: Liberalism vs Leftism
### I. The Confusion They will tell you: “That is not leftism. What you describe is liberalism.” They will tell you: “That is not liberalism. What you describe is leftism.” They will tell you anything to avoid the question: _what is it?_ The...
Pathologies of Western Secularism
! Why has secularism in the West devolved into pathology? Embracing authoritarianism, identity politics, voting against one’s own interests, public shaming & cancel culture, virtue signaling, tribal warfare, constantly looking for scapegoats, c...
Trauma Culture + White Guilt = Checkmate
! > _The people with moral authority to speak cannot be questioned, and the people who might question have no moral authority to speak._ I’ve diagnosed Trauma Culture and White Guilt. What does their combination yield? **The Division of Labor...
Diagnosing "Trauma Culture"
! > So you will read this and feel attacked. You will say it is cruel, that it lacks compassion, that it does not understand. You will retreat further into the vocabulary of wounds—this very essay is a harm, a violence, a failure to validate. >...
The Theological Structure of Secular Progressivism
! # Abstract This essay argues that contemporary progressive politics, particularly among white liberals in the United States, operates according to a fundamentally Christian moral psychology that persists despite—and perhaps because of—the ab...
The Epistemology of Impotence: How Identity Politics Guarantees Its Own Failure
! ## I. The Paradox The contemporary American left presents a curious puzzle: culturally omnipresent yet politically feeble. It dominates universities, media, corporate HR departments, and the language of public discourse—yet it cannot win ele...
Pathologies of Eastern Secularism
“Why Secularism in the West Became Pathological” dealt with pathologies arising from a secularism with a Christian inheritance. Here we explore the pathologies arising from a secularism with a Buddhist inheritance. **Quietism and Political With...
Leftism Is Worse Than Fascism
! > ‘leftism’ - the institutional moral regime that converts compassion into administrative control and dissent into pathology. > _There was some pushback on the use of “leftism” vs “liberalism.” The terminology is fully explored here:_ # Pre...
Diagnosing "White Guilt"
! > The white liberal has built Hell, moved into it voluntarily and called it _enlightenment_. ## I. The Spectacle of Self-Flagellation You have seen the rituals. Perhaps you have performed them. The white woman weeping at the diversity trai...
The Amplifier Theory of Human Hierarchy
Human beings possess competing dispositions: a drive toward dominance and a drive to resist domination by others. In a “fair fight” (without external leverage) the collective can suppress would-be dominators, producing egalitarian social arrange...
The Laboratory of the Human: Shakespeare as Knowledge
!15 top Shakespeare facts! | National Geographic Kids My younger self was obsessed with rationalistic and scientific outlooks. Viewing literature, music, painting with indifference and contempt. If only someone had presented my younger self wit...
What Modernity Needs: A Return to Polytheism
! ## Introduction: The Shape of a Solution The first essay traced the genealogy of our crisis—how the technological-materialist worldview reduced being to standing reserve and made liquid modernity possible. The second essay presented the evid...
The Liquefaction of Being: Materialism, Technology, and the Dissolution of the Self
! In earlier essays I traced the education system and the kind of person it produces (an employable subject for “liquid modernity”) and materialism’s effect on human psychology (depression, loneliness, anxiety). This essay tries to answer which...
The Incomplete God: Why Science Cannot Ground Itself
! ## The Dream of Total Knowledge The most ambitious vision of modernity is not merely that science is useful, or even that it is our best method for understanding nature. It is that science is, in principle, _the only_ legitimate form of know...
Summarizing - 19-12-2025
I’ve been exploring how power pulls the levers. My intellectual (and software development) style is to explore as much territory as fast as possible then to come back to tighten, polish, pressure test, scale up and fill in the details. To that e...
When Equations See What Eyes Cannot
! There is something almost scandalous about the history of physics. Time and again, a mathematician or physicist sits down with pencil and paper, manipulates symbols according to abstract rules, and discovers something about the universe that ...
The Employable Subject
! Related posts: - How Power Uses Mass Education and Literature - How Power Chose Materialism - Materialism Is Killing You ## I. The Question Education is never merely transmission. Someone decides what counts as knowled...
How Power Uses Mass Education and Literature
## **Introduction: The Myth of Neutral Schooling** We tend to think of education as a natural good—a neutral process by which knowledge passes from one generation to the next. Children learn to read; they absorb facts about the world; they deve...
Countering Materialism
! Related: - Materialism is Killing You There is a counter-tradition in Western thought—a line of thinkers who resisted the materialist reduction before it became the water we swim in. Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Simone Weil. You...
The Two Filters: Why Reasonable Ideas Die
! We are taught that good ideas win. That truth, once articulated, spreads naturally—that reason prevails, that justice rises, that the arc of history bends. This is a comforting myth. It is also, as a matter of historical record, false. Ideas...
Secularized Worship
! _On how the pattern of Revelation—systems demanding total allegiance and reshaping their servants—reappears across political ideologies and corporate cultures_ Related: - **The Battlefield of Attention:** What the Ancients Knew About Wors...
Why Power Chose Materialism—and What Was Lost
! There is a question that hovers at the edge of respectable discourse, asked in whispers by those who sense something has been taken from them but cannot name it: _Was the disenchantment of the world an accident, or was it useful to someone?_ ...
The Battlefield of Attention
! _On the terrifying clarity of people who understood that empires demand everything, and that what we look at, we become_ --- ## I. The Question Under the Symbols The Book of Revelation is wild. Multi-headed beasts rising from the sea. A wo...
The Alchemy of Power
! There’s a pattern that repeats across civilizations, across millennia, across traditions that share almost nothing in common except this: **spiritual breakthroughs get stabilized, standardized, and captured by power.** This isn’t a conspirac...
From Galilee to Empire: The Institutional Capture of Christianity
!Major Events in the Life of Constantine I | Britannica ## Part I: The Original Fire The Jesus movement began as something genuinely dangerous to power. Not dangerous in the way Rome feared—there were no armies, no territorial claims—but dange...
Materialism Is Killing You
! You pride yourself on not being fooled. You rejected the superstitions your ancestors believed. You follow the evidence. You think in terms of mechanisms, incentives, selection pressures. You are a rationalist. Good. Let’s be rational. Let’...
The Invention of the Confessing Animal
! **tldr**: confession makes the subject legible. A legible subject is a governable subject. Confession served the interest of power. While spiritual traditions do provide truth, they are also co-opted by power. Related posts: - Know Thyse...
Meta Summary - 17-12-2025
I’m re-reading The Great Books of the Western World with a focus on: - geo-theological | “How does power work” - Riding the religious and cultural waves - geo-theological | “How do religion, economics, science, geography...
Know Thyself: Through What?
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self - Pt 5: Through What? - Pt 6: The Kingdom Within > _“Whereof one cannot speak...
Know Thyself: The Kingdom Within
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self - Pt 5: Through What? - Pt 6: The Kingdom Within > _“The kingdom of the Fathe...
Know Thyself: No Self
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self - Pt 5: Through What? - Pt 6: The Kingdom Within > _“The fish trap exists bec...
Know Thyself: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart
- Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self ## Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, and Eckhart on the Self > _“Man has no individual I. But there are...
Know Thyself: Greek vs Christian
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self > _“I have become a question to myself.”_ — Augustine, _Confessions_ X.33 Knowing yourself...
Know Thyself: Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self > _“The one who sees that suffering arises and passes away has seen all of reality.”_ — Sam...
Burnout is a Modern Invention
I argue that burnout is a symptom of today’s moralizing of labor. Something new, not experienced in prior centuries. > ...No one forces her to live this way. Her employer doesn’t chain her to her desk. If anything, HR sends emails about “work-l...
Why Cultures Differentiate
! Geography creates a set of challenges for a people to manage. Each challenge requires a specific system to solve it. Each system requires a specific kind of people to uphold it. Centuries later, we see the results in different cultures. Put ...
Trump's Techno-Fetish
!Commission building ('the Berlaymont building') in Brussels - CVCE Website --- As TechLeadHD says, the only export the EU has is regulations. These regulations are a massive burden on US tech companies. Trump vowed to protect US companies. Tr...
The Vulnerability Principle
The political-legal jeopardy faced by a powerful political figure, such as Donald Trump, is often analyzed purely in terms of the individual’s survival. However, a deeper, game-theoretic analysis reveals that such vulnerability fundamentally alt...
Structure, Not Vibes: The Real State of the World
If you scroll through X (formerly Twitter) or watch cable news, the world looks like a chaotic clash of ideologies: Woke vs. Anti-Woke, Globalist vs. Nationalist, Liberal vs. Traditional. But if you zoom out and look at the **hard structure**—g...
Making Sense of US-Ukraine Negotations
Trump withholds aid, berates Zelensky, negotiates with Putin first, praises Putin (see “Why Christian Russia is a Fantasy” on this point). Is the US aligning with Russia? # **I. “The U.S. aligning with Russia” is not what’s happening** Even wh...
You Are Not Your Diagnosis
Look at you. Look at all of you. You were supposed to be the generation that changed everything. You have the entire accumulated knowledge of the human species in your pocket and you’re using it to figure out which mental illness makes you spec...
The Letter To The Therapeutics
1. To those who labor in the work that has no end, who tend the wound that must not heal, who confess and are not forgiven: Grace and peace from no one. 2. For I see your striving, and it is without rest. I see your vigilance, and it has ...
The Capture Of American Power Peter
! ## **Introduction: A New Class of Elite** Something shifted in the topology of American power over the past decade. The Epstein-class elite—figures whose influence derived from finance, institutional access, and the murky leverage of comprom...
The Architecture Of Meaning A Deeper
## For Those Who Have Seen This essay assumes you have already accepted what the counter-tradition has shown: that materialism, whatever its utility for science and technology, fails as an account of human existence. It cannot generate meaning,...
Resurrecting Ted Kaczynski
# The Psychology of the Therapeutic-Managerial System ## An Analysis of Liberal Control Mechanisms in Post-Industrial Society --- ### Introduction 1. In our previous work we analyzed the psychological foundations of modern leftism and its r...
Financial Power And Imperial Rule
# I. Introduction: The Nature of Financial Power Financial power, in its most consequential form, is not merely the possession of wealth. It is the capacity to _mobilize other people’s purchasing power at scale_\-cheaply, reliably, and across b...
David Graeber The Utopia Of Rules
## I. An Awkward Confession from Beyond the Grave Look, this is embarrassing. I spent my whole career arguing that another world is possible. I marshaled evidence from anthropology, from history, from the forgotten corners of human experience,...