This essay uses Euripides’ The Bacchae as a lens through which to examine Nietzsche’s framing of Apollonian-Dionysian duality. While Nietzsche treats this opposition as an aesthetic and cultural dynamic, The Bacchae shows what happens when a finite human order encounters a force it cannot contain.

Welcome back. This essay continues discussion of Greek tragedy from my last post, which was niche and somewhat inaccessible for those who have not already read the plays. I knew it would be a less popular post, but it had to be done as part of my ongoing review of historical resonances to my own non-redemptive, tragic framework. This one may be more accessible, as it only discusses Euripides’s play The Bacchae1, which was his second to last and most famous play, written after the age of seventy while in exile from Athens for unclear reasons.2 I will offer a brief summary for those who have not yet read it, and then offer my interpretation. For context, Euripides lived from 480-406 BC; of the other great tragedians Aeschylus was from the prior generation, while Euripides was a contemporary of Sophocles. Plato overlapped but came later at 428/423-348/347 BC.

I was drawn to The Bacchae because of its resonance to my own experiences, and it is quite unlike any of Euripides’ other plays or other Greek tragedies; here its protagonist is the God Dionysus himself, and his presence confronts people with something their ordinary categories of rationality and control cannot contain.

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I. The Story

Briefly, Dionysus is the God of intoxication, of dissolution, of dance, of alcohol, of frenzy, of music and ritual and the night. He comes to Thebes in human form to spread his religion, and he entices women to go out at night, get drunk, party, allegedly fornicate, and to rise to such a frenzy that they attack villages and eat animals alive in a possessed state. The King of Thebes is a young man named Pentheus, who sees this man claiming to be a God come into his land, causing chaos and promoting loose morality (although the herdsman reports the maenads chaste, sleeping apart from men), and he sees him as a threat to law and order. He arrests Dionysus and his followers and throws them in prison; the biblical conversation between Christ and Pontius Pilate mirrors their conversation3 (and the myth of infant Dionysus being torn to pieces and devoured rhymes with Christian communion4). They escape from prison by miraculous means. For disrespecting Dionysus King Pentheus is driven insane, and his possessed mother Agaue and other Dionysian worshippers murder him and tear him limb from limb. Agave then carries her son’s head, believing it’s a lion’s, and slowly is made to see what she holds. This is anagnorisis – the recognition of ones limited position within a divine order, which in this case arrives too late – as discussed in the prior essay. She and her father Cadmus are then cursed by Dionysus, to be sent into exile and suffer additional calamities. This is the fate of those who acknowledge the God but refuse to recognize his essence – that he must be respected and acknowledged, and cannot be contained. Cadmus: “Have mercy on us, Dionysus. We have sinned.” Dionysus: “You know too late. You did not know me when you should.” Chorus: “Gods manifest themselves in many forms, bring many matters to surprising ends; the things we thought would happen do not happen; the unexpected God makes possible: and that is what has happened here today.” Exeunt.

The play can be read as a warning about what happens when a rational order encounters forces that exceed the categories of its understanding. Pentheus encounters something his conception of reality cannot accommodate, and his attempt to force that encounter back into his existing categories becomes catastrophic. The Bacchae is a dark joke on the Athenian enlightenment, where Euripides effectively argues that their rationality will not save them (or you); it will get one torn apart by one’s own mother. The blind seer Teiresias provides the striking counterexample, recognizing Dionysus without attempting to reduce him to categories of ordinary rational judgment, and he fades out of the play untouched after the first act.

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II. Nietzsche’s Argument

I discussed Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) in the last post, and I am generally reluctant to re-engage him much (except for his Genealogy of Morality, which formed a core part of some of my earlier cultural arguments about the egalitarianism underlying modern society) for a number of reasons.5 The work itself is immature and weak – rambling, disjointed, resulting in a later self-criticism6, and it offers no sustained analysis of any tragedies despite holding itself out as a typology of such tragedies. Still, it retains a historical impact because of its exhortative style7 and because of the fascinating duality it introduces.8

In Birth Nietzsche attacks Euripides for leaning into rationality and corrupting the traditional Greek tragedy structure, which he saw as a balance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (i.e. reality as disordered and undifferentiated by forms/unity versus reality as ordered and differentiated by forms, i.e. an aesthetic polarity). Michael Tanner summarizes Nietzsche’s argument:

What happened was that the third of the three Greek tragedians killed [tragedy] by the production of works in which, though few have realized it, knowledge (Wissenschaft) was preferred to wisdom (Weisheit). This is signalized in Euripides’ plays (for he is the villain) by the comparative insignificance of the chorus, and the multiplication of individual characters who think that they can resolve their conflicts by argument, or as Nietzsche puts it, dialectic. As soon as one puts one’s faith in reason and reasoning, as opposed to intuition mediated through music, one has forfeited the possibility of genuine knowledge, which must always be tragic.

There is something real here; Euripides tends to reduce the Gods in his plays to explanatory features of human impulses. As G. Devereux argues in The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides’ Bacchae, this involved innovations in psychotherapy which “is the natural consequence of the basic outlook of a poet who…systematically substituted psychological explanations of human motivation for traditionally supernatural ones.” The fates continue to exist in Euripides’ plays but the metaphysics is sometimes hidden behind argument and dialectic. However, the Greek academic E.R. Dodds sees Euripides as fundamentally irrational in his approach.9

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III. The Exception

Regardless, The Bacchae is a striking exception to Euripides’ alleged approach, which turns rationalism on its head. Nietzsche makes only two brief references to it in his book, weakly hand-waving the play away as a late mea-culpa by Euripides for his earlier rationalism10, because The Bacchae has little to do with aesthetic structure, and the Apollo vs. Dionysus dynamic is inapplicable to it. Nietzsche likely did not engage with the play out of necessity: he sees Dionysus as an intoxicating creative principle, a sort of raw material organizing into tragedy; he can be theorized, incorporated, and made productive – he can be used when combined with Apollo to create art. But Euripides’ Dionysus cannot be balanced and is not a principle of art; he brings catastrophe when human beings mistake their ability to categorize reality for an ability to contain it. He ruins those who try to contain him, and he cannot be made safe through recognition, though refusal to recognize him is disastrous.

Here, the opposition is between an established human order and something that exceeds the categories through which that order understands itself. Pentheus represents an intelligible form of governance: he perceives an apparent threat, assesses its consequences, and attempts to restore order. As the ruler of the land he perceives things in terms of threat/risk profiles. Dionysus appears as a madman pressuring his followers into debauchery and anarchy, undermining law and order for his own benefit. Of course Pentheus would have him arrested as an example so chaos would not spread. But Pentheus is wrong in this case, because Dionysus happens to actually be a God – instead of being a madman, he is a God incarnate. And to not honor the God, to disrespect him, is to risk having the wrath of the Gods descend on one and one’s family and nation, and that’s what happens here. He is wrong because the world he is trying to regulate is not the world he believes it to be.

There is a cybernetic way of describing this problem. W. Ross Ashby’s principle of requisite variety holds that a controller can regulate a field of disturbances only to the extent that its own repertoire of possible responses is sufficiently varied to meet them, while Conant’s good-regulator theorem states that a regulator must contain a model of what it regulates. Pentheus confronts something for which his regulatory architecture has no adequate response because Dionysus falls outside the variety of the world his model recognizes. Dionysus therefore represents unaccounted-for variety: what a finite system has excluded from its model of reality and therefore cannot successfully regulate when it returns; what is repressed accumulates as pressure at the boundary of the model until it returns as something the model can no longer contain.

This tragedy, then, refuses Nietzsche’s schema. Dionysus appears as an untamable, uncontrollable force instead of an aesthetic, creative intoxication, even Pentheus resists Nietzsche’s framing (he represents Saturn (law, structure, repression) instead of Apollo (form, dream, individuation)), and the tragedy is theological, ontological. Its central conflict raises a question: what happens when the structure of reality is not what they believed it to be? As translator Nicholas Rudall notes in his introduction:

The Bacchae is a play rich in themes, and one of its most disturbing is the inadequacy of rational human government in the face of the ecstatic Irrationality of Dionysus….The play is about the inadequacy of human response to the incomprehensible. It is about the necessity of submission and the futility of resistance to divine power….We want to know who is right. We assume that right will be the provenance of the god. But the punishments he inflicts…have little to do with what is “right.” When it comes to human fate the truth lies in the awfulness and majesty of the divine, not in an inappropriate desire for a just balance.

This pervading sense of human impotence in the face of a cruel and inevitable tide of events must have mirrored the mood of Athens as its world collapsed. The Bacchae is, in the end, a document of human folly. Dionysus lacks mercy. And to assume that human wisdom and human rationality are forces that can resist him is a monumental mistake. Pentheus has been a good, competent, and thoughtful king…but Pentheus’s reason cannot comprehend the insignificance of man and the majesty of god….[the play] is at once a celebration of the power of the irrational and a cry for the need for human submission to it….

The original Greek is often archaic, certainly elevated in its diction. I have attempted to suggest a biblical tone as our modern equivalent….[This is in reference in part] in the figure of Dionysus, son of god and mortal woman, the god who was killed and born again, whose blood was wine, who made miracles on earth, and who demanded that all mankind believe in him.

It would be comforting to read this as a simple message to honor the god and be spared, but the play refuses this interpretation. Cadmus honors Dionysus and is exiled and turned into a serpent anyway, Pentheus fails by the standards of a good king, and Dionysus never says he failed by any measure of justice. Teiresias is spared but the play never says why. Nothing in your conduct guarantees what happens to you, and the reader who takes “respect your limits” as the lesson has done to the play what Pentheus did to the stranger: reduced it to a rule that can be managed.

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IV. What is Dionysus’s Purpose?

If Dionysian energy cannot be contained, what use is he? I think good response inverts the question: what becomes possible when one stops demanding that there be a use? Dionysian dissolution can expose the inadequacy of an existing orientation without providing an orientation that should replace it. Such dissolution may clear the ground, but it does not guarantee that anything new will emerge, nor does it specify what should replace what has been destroyed.

Pentheus is not a fool. He has a model of threat, a procedure for response, and an army to enforce it, and most of what we depend on has the same shape. Our strategies work well within the variety they were built for, but none of them tells us what it has left out; from a psychological perspective what is ignored accumulates in the suppressed shadow, lurking, and it will eventually manifest itself in surprising and uncontrollable ways. The Bacchae suggests that the leftover doesn’t announce itself in advance, that there is no reliable way to prepare for its return, and that being a careful person won’t exempt us. The point, then, is to recognize that the structures by which one has organized reality may themselves be partial and contingent. The Greeks did not have the vocabulary of Abraxas, individuation, or somatic incoherence, but their tragedies dramatize the capriciousness of the gods, the permanent tension of irreconcilable opposites, the moments of recognition that destroy and reorder, and the bearing of weight without redemption, and so I see resonances with my own perspective in them.

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V. Conclusion

Nietzsche framed the Dionysian as an aesthetic principle, a creative intoxication that could be balanced with Apollonian form, but The Bacchae reveals a metaphysical force that dissolves order and punishes the failure to recognize it; it dramatizes the return of variety which a finite system excluded from its own model. This is the wisdom of The Bacchae; the god who cannot be contained is the god who must be recognized, but recognition does not save you from the possibility of dissolution. Its tragic lesson is that no finite ordering of reality should mistake its own categories for reality itself.

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1

I read both the Philip Vellacott translation and the Nicholas Rudall translation, and liked them equally.

2

Although he was a critic of the never-ending war with Sparta, which Athens would eventually lose.

3

Pentheus: How comes it that you bring these rituals to Hellas?

Dionysus: Dionysus, son of Zeus, himself instructed me.

Pentheus: Is there a Lydian Zeus, then, who begets new gods?

Dionysus: I speak of Zeus who wedded Semele here in Thebes.

Pentheus: Did he possess you in a dream, or visibly?

Dionysus: Yes, face to face; he gave these mysteries to me.

Pentheus: These mysteries you speak of: what form do they take?

Dionysus: To the uninitiated that must not be told.

Pentheus: And those who worship – what advantage do they gain?

Dionysus: It is not for you to learn; yet it is worth knowing.

Pentheus: You bait your answer well, to arouse my eagerness…

Do you perform these mysteries by night or day?

Dionysus: Chiefly by night. Darkness promotes religious awe.

Pentheus: For women darkness is deceptive and impure.

Dionysus: Impurity can be pursued by daylight too.

Pentheus: You must be punished for your foul and slippery tongue.

Dionysus: And you for blindness and impiety to the god….

Pentheus: I’ll lock you up in prison and keep you there.

Dionysus: The god Himself, whenever I desire, will set me free…

Pentheus: Where is [Dionysus], then? Not visible to my eyes.

Dionysus: Beside me. You, being a blasphemer, see nothing.

Pentheus [to the guards]: Get hold of him; he’s mocking me and the whole city.

Dionysus [to the guards]: Don’t bind me, I warn you. [to Pentheus] I am sane, and you are mad.

Pentheus: My word overrules yours. [to the guards] I tell you, bind him fast.

Dionysus: You know not what you are saying, what you do, nor who you are.

4

Dodds, p. 277: “Late Greek writers explained the (Greek term) as they did the dancing, and as some would explain the Christian communion: it was merely a commemorative rite, in memory of the day when the infant Dionysus was himself torn to pieces and devoured. But the practice seems to rest in fact on a very simple piece of savage logic. The homoeopathic effects of a flesh diet are known all over the world. If you want to be lion-hearted, you must eat lion; if you want to be subtle, you must eat snake; those who eat chickens and hares will be cowards, those who eat pork will get little piggy eyes. By parity of reasoning, if you want to be like god you must eat god (or at any rate something which is [Greek term]). And you must eat him quick and raw, before the blood has oozed from him: only so can you add his life to yours, for “the blood is the life.” God is not always there to be eaten, nor indeed would it be safe to eat him at common times and without due preparation for the reception of the sacrament.”

5

Nietzsche may have responded to the philosophical pessimism he correctly diagnosed (as discussed here) by doubling down on his ego rather than accepting the tragic implications of the collapse he perceived. Jung makes a related criticism in his autobiography, that Nietzsche recognized the death of the Christian God-image but did not recognize the inflation involved in attempting to take up the vacant position himself, transforming the problem into a project of self-overcoming and value-creation. Whether this contributed to Nietzsche’s eventual collapse is impossible to establish from the evidence available. Regardless, I quickly became aware of the danger of reading Nietzsche: having already had a very large ego, I found his rhetoric ego-inflationary, because it turns encounters with the limits of inherited meaning into occasions for imagining that the exceptional individual could overcome those limits through force of will. My own reorientation under the Abraxas God image has made me more cautious about that response, and I can slowly and more carefully now read Nietzsche’s confrontation with nihilism without automatically converting it into an invitation to make the ego sovereign.

6

Nietzsche in his Attempt at a Self-Criticism: “To say it once again: today I find it an impossible book – badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused, sentimental, in some places saccharine-sweet to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking in any desire for logical purity, so sure of its convictions that it is above any need for proof, and even suspicious of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, ‘music’ for those who have been baptized in the name of music and who are related from the first by their common and rare experiences of art, a shibboleth for first cousins in artibus – an arrogant and fanatical book that wished from the start to exclude the profanum vulgus of the ‘educated’ even more than the ‘people’…”

7

A style I don’t appreciate. Discussed in this Note, but many do love this style such as the Bronze Age Pervert, who adopted an exhortative style to keep the masses interested and entertained while containing underlying esoteric hidden knowledge, much like his influence Leo Strauss, discussed here.

8

I tried following it up with Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (1991), which applies Nietzsche’s framework to contemporary culture, but it was terrible as discussed in this Note.

9

See, E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 187: “To judge from extant pieces, what chiefly preoccupied Euripides in his later work was not so much the importance of reason in man as the wider doubt whether any rational purpose could be seen in the ordering of human life and the governance of the world. That trend culminates in the Bacchae, whose religious content is, as a recent critic has said, the recognition of a “Beyond” which is outside our moral categories and inaccessible to our reason. I do not maintain that a consistent philosophy of life can be extracted from the plays (nor should we demand this of a dramatist writing in an age of doubt). But if we must attach a label, I still think that the world “irrationalist,” which I once suggested, fits Euripides better than any other.”

10

See Robert Baldick’s Euripides: The Bacchae and Other Plays, 31: “The Bacchae is – among other things – a demonstration that the consequences of refusing ‘worship’ in this sense to Dionysus are disastrous, since such refusal is a denial of undeniable fact; it is a ‘condemnation’, if you will, of intolerance, violence, and cruelty, all of which are generated when humanity tries to deny either of the two sides of its nature. Thus there is no place for the view once held by a number of scholars, that the play was the poet’s ‘recantation’ – that after a lifetime of intellectualism and disbelief Euripides repented and wrote this play to express and encourage reverence for the gods, by showing the fate of those who oppose them. The question of ‘believing in’ Dionysus was irrelevant.”

Greek tragedy offers a strikingly non-redemptive vision of existence, in which suffering does not necessarily lead to salvation, progress, or ultimate restoration. Across the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, human beings gradually discover the limits of their agency within a world governed by fate, divine powers, inherited guilt, and chance. Set against the modern redemptive expectation that suffering should ultimately be resolved or given a higher purpose, these tragedies instead explore what it means to recognize and endure a world whose deeper order may be intelligible without being benevolent.

In this post I will be providing a review of the extant works of the most famous Greek tragedians, Aeschylus (525-456 BC), Sophocles (497-406 BC), and Euripides (480-406 BC). This was a tremendously prolific period for Greek tragedy, which Aristotle later defined1 as possessing the following characteristics:

Tragedy, according to Aristotle, is the imitation (mimesis) of a serious (spoudaios) action, which is complete in itself…since tragedy imitates action, the most important element of a tragedy is plot (mythos), and character is secondary, a by-product of the action. The character in tragedy should be someone famous or prosperous, and must experience a change or reversal (peripeteia) in status from prosperity to misfortune. This will be accompanied by a recognition (anagnorisis), a change from ignorance to knowledge, and it will result in suffering (pathos). This turn of events will evoke feelings of pity or fear in the audience and effect a catharsis of those emotions – whether we understand that word to mean emotional purgation, purification, or intellectual clarification. To that end, the tragic character must be neither completely good nor completely wicked (since the suffering of such persons would not be fearful or pitiful). Rather, the individual will be someone like ourselves and will fall because of an error (hamartia) that he makes. This error will derive from some aspect of character, such as the sort of violent pride (hybris) that denies the distinction between gods and humans….What is missing from Aristotle’s analysis, however, is any sense of what lies beyond the suffering, any sense of its meaning or larger significance.

The golden age of Greek tragedy ended with the Spartan victory over Athens in the decades-long Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) when Sparta installed the Thirty Tyrants as rulers in the city. It took some time to go through their corpus but less than one might have imagined, because only six or seven of Aeschylus’s 70-90 plays are extant, seven of Sophocles’s tragedies out of over 100 plays survive, and eighteen or nineteen of Euripides’ plays out of over 90 remain; what was preserved vs. what was lost is mostly due to the vicissitudes of history.2

My approach here is similar to my review of the television show Two and a Half Men, where my analytic deep-dive impulses were used so that my intense, excavating and investigative mind wouldn’t spin on itself; although the material here is heavier, higher status and more academic than a sitcom revolving around a Job figure paired with his hedonistic brother. These plays were performed in Athens’ Dionysian theatre in a yearly competition in front of up to 15,000 people, comprised of the chorus and a few all-male cast members in masks (Aeschylus introduced a second actor, Sophocles a third) and they often used historical events to allude to important political themes which Athens – as a belligerent expansionist power with a highly involved and unstable democratic citizenry3 – was undergoing.

The evolution of the tragedians reflected the evolution within wider society, mirroring the gradual transition toward secular rhetoric and rationalism via the sophists compared to the older form of mystery beneath the Gods, per classicist professor E.R. Dodds. Offloading the crucifixion of opposites remained a common denominator of the masses, both then and now.4 This transition was critiqued by Nietzsche in his uneven Birth of Tragedy, and the trends eventually culminated in the worldview of Socrates and Plato.

I. On Nietzsche

Nietzsche in his early work provides an aesthetic critique of Greek tragedy, finding what he believed to be Euripides’ rationalist perspective to be deficient, a decline compared to the order vs. chaos balance (Apollonian vs. Dionysian) of the older tragedians. At the time he was trying to justify Wagner’s works as a rebirth of the old art form, but he later abandoned this approach after experiencing disillusionment with Wagner. He then partially wrote off the work as amateurish, in line with attacks by critics.5 However, The Birth of Tragedy continues to be popular because the Apollonian vs. Dionysian dichotomy is an interesting and rich interpretive lens. What I would have loved to have seen Nietzsche do, though, instead of creating a broad narrative around the tragedians, was to go through each of the works one by one, or at least the major works, in order to establish his core point; he doesn’t do this, which means he is telling instead of showing. His points would have been much more effective if he showed the evolution of Greek tragedy toward rationalism by covering in detail the themes of the extant works and how they fit together. I will do something similar here by offering a brief review of each work chronologically.

Why do this? Because of my ongoing interest and fascination with non-redemptive worldviews, especially non-redemptive worldviews which offers cosmic legibility (even if amoral) instead of nihilism. Interesting questions arise: what did the ancient Greek worldview involve? What were the psychological, cultural, and political effects of such a perspective? How does it align with and differ from the privatio boni and the Abraxian perspectives? These issues have deep relevance to the so-called ongoing “meaning crisis”, rooted in failure of the Christian (and secular progressive) redemptive egregore which we are all experiencing today.

II. The Tragic vs. Redemptive Perspectives

As Stephen Esposito wrote in Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus, Heracles, Bacchae, the Greek perspective is very alien to us today, because the Abrahamic religions are essentially redemption-focused. Therefore, they must fundamentally deny the nature of tragic existence, even if there are slight counter-examples one could point to (Ecclesiastes, Job, etc.), but it was entirely possible to remain psychologically stabilized under such a tragic perspective:

Unlike the Israelites and Christians, the Greeks had no Bible or sacred book with a fixed truth (and so no religious fundamentalism, no “holy wars”), no Covenant with any deity, no Savior, no divine Revelation, no Prophets, no Decalogue, no dogma, no creed, and not much in the way of organized religion. In short, the Greeks did not have the “safety-net” – if that is the right expression – of the possibility of deliverance / redemption by the grace of an eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, holy, just, merciful God of steadfast love…By their very constitutions the ancient theologies of the Hebrews and Christians might be said to preclude the possibility of a tragic world-view. Indeed, “one might even go so far as to say that for the Hebrews a ‘tragic’ world-view would itself be a sin: a denial of God.”…[for the Greeks] higher powers stalked the world, powers who ferociously protected their own turf, powers often beyond good and evil, powers unlike God, who Himself created good and evil (Isaiah 45.7). In such a world, human responsibility is radicalized; no safety-net exists except courage and friendship….

The monotheistic traditions of the Israelites and the Christians have not produced a genre of tragedy…For the Greeks, from Homer onwards, “man” is precariously poised between beast and god…the mutability of the human estate – perhaps the most persistent theme of Athenian tragedy – makes mortals susceptible to free-fall at a moment’s notice….ephemeral, insubstantial, fleeting, finite, and always yearning – that is how the Greeks viewed man’s lot in the world….for the Greeks there was no Redeemer, no Messiah, no Promised Land, no Second Coming, nor much in the way of an afterlife. Once the curtain fell, the show was over.

George Steiner echoes this point in The Death of Tragedy, where he writes: “Tragedy is alien to the Judaic sense of the world…Christianity is an anti-tragic vision of the world. [It] offers to man an assurance of final certitude and repose in God. This leads the soul toward justice and resurrection…Real tragedy can occur only where the tormented soul believes that there is no time left for God’s forgiveness.”

Furthermore, Esposito argues that an understanding and appreciation of a non-redemptive worldview may, paradoxically, allow one to better cope with misfortune on this plane because of the narrowing gulf between redemptive expectation and reality, and to teach certain virtues.6

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III. Rating Criteria

According to Matthew S. Santirocco, Aeschylus holds out hope that the will of the gods will be ultimately revealed to us, Euripides “problematizes” the gods (pushed back on to an extent by Greek tragedian translator Paul Roche7), while Sophocles keeps the role of the Gods enigmatic.8 I don’t think these generalizations quite hold up, as we will see in the following reviews. They will be graded on the basis of the following factors:

1. Dramatic structure: Does the play work as a story? Is it easy to read, engaging, and make sense on its own terms (this is affected too by the translation used – Fagles was excellent, for example, although his Serpent and the Eagle introduction in his Oresteia trilogy was overwrought);
2. Anthropology: What does the play imply about human nature and human agency? I prefer plays where the behavior highlights universal as opposed to particularist themes;
3. Cosmology: What kind of reality do the gods, fate, necessity, chance, pollution, etc. imply? I prefer plays where the cosmology contains a legible moral system, even if it is amoral. A world governed by fate, pollution, divine necessity, inherited curses, divine jealousy, erotic compulsion, etc. can be cosmically meaningful without being morally comforting (this is why Shakespeare’s works do not resonate with me, even though I’ve tried to read him many times9);
4. Epistemology: How much can human beings actually understand about that reality? I prefer plays which do not assume that ultimate reality can be understood via rationalism and secular rhetoric – like Nietzsche, I think the stronger works are those where human experience is always partial, finite, and groping largely in the dark under mysterious forces that are beyond the scope of understanding; and
5. Novelty: The deus ex machinas, the human sacrifices, the conflicts over burial of the dead, the same stories told from different angles get boring after awhile; they are strongly reminiscent of modern day superhero movies (“capeshit”) telling variations of the same origin stories.10 Now, the below plays were not read in chronological order (I read Aeschylus last instead of first, even though he was the earliest tragedian), and there was some degree of rating benefit from being read earlier and some degree of penalization for being read later; I tried to account for this dynamic once I became aware of it. Furthermore, most of the plays read had historical and cultural contextualization by the translator in physical book form, but a number of the lesser plays which were harder to acquire I read online and did not, and this may have detracted to an extent from my understanding. This isn’t fully specified below but it does impact some of the reviews.

With that said, let’s briefly review the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides based on the above factors. Chronology is based on production date, not composition date.

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IV. Rating Aeschylus

1. The Persians (472 BC). Aeschylus’s oldest surviving work and the second part of an otherwise lost trilogy, it details the aftermath of the defeat of the Persians at the decisive Battle of Salamis. Over half of the dialogue is by the chorus, and much of the rest is either by the mother of king Xerxes, her husband Darius’s ghost, and a bit by Xerxes wailing about his loss. It wasn’t clear to me whether the play meant to mock the Persians or empathize with them; the ambiguity is a mark of strength. But the play is short and it is very one-dimensional; the Persians lose, attribute the loss to the anger of the Gods, and they wail about it. Rating: 3/10.
2. Seven Against Thebes (467 BC). This is the earliest Greek tragedian account of Oedipus’s sons Polynices and Eteocles, who kill each other in one to one combat, fulfilling a curse by their father, and is the third part of a trilogy, the other parts of which are not extant. The original myth dates back at least to Homer’s The Odyssey if not further, and the overall myth later inspires Sophocles (Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus), and Euripides (Hypsipyle, The Phoenician Women, and The Suppliants). I don’t really like the chorus explaining so much of the plot; I do understand that Aeschylus expanded the number of actors on stage and invented Greek tragedy as we know it, but I prefer the chorus to take a more background role and for there to be a more dramatic, show-not-tell larger cast. I found this one to be boring. Rating: 3/10.
3. The Suppliants (463 BC). The first part of a tetralogy, the other parts having been lost. Same problem with the prior plays; too much chorus, and the chorus here is the protagonist (a group of women fleeing arranged marriage). The plot features a king torn between protecting them (and risking war with those pursuing them) or turning them away (risking Zeus’s rage). Rating: 3/10.
4. Agamemnon (458 BC), part one of the Oresteia trilogy. This is a powerful play, dealing with rich themes – the wife of Agamemnon who waits ten years to avenge her daughter (murdered by her husband as a sacrifice necessary to allow the Greek ships to set sail for Troy), Cassandra the prophetess destined not to be believed, knowing she was heading to her and Agamemnon’s doom; the role of blood guilt, how it haunts Agamemnon’s family generationally (his father fed his nephews and nieces to his unknowing brother as part of a power struggle; did the infamous South Park episode take its inspiration from it?). The dialogue is a bit flowery for me, but the plot does move well, and there is something archetypal to the story and aspects of this story were later repeated by the other tragedians from various angles. The Gods are alive and heavily influential, and everyone has some justification for their actions; as Nietzsche stated regarding Aeschylean tragedy: “all that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both” – this is an excellent line. However, it is not to me as strong as Oedipus the King or The Bacchae, because those deal more directly with mankind’s smallness and ignorance in relation to fate and the Gods. Rating: 8/10.
5. The Libation Bearers (458 BC). Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, kills his mother and her lover to avenge his father’s death. Part of this is to fulfill prophecy, but part of it is free will – knowing the prophecy, he decides to fulfill it. This is much less interesting as a hook than Oedipus struggling against his destiny, or even Cassandra knowing her upcoming destiny, lamenting it, but heading toward it anyway. Also, I didn’t like that Orestes didn’t acknowledge his mother’s motivation for murdering Agamemnon – his own sacrifice of his daughter and Orestes’ sister as a way to seek favor from the Gods for the Trojan war effort. The character is unbalanced, and hanging over both him and his family is the multi-generational blood guilt. I would typically give a play like this, which was pretty two dimensional, a 4/10, but seeing how much power it had over the subsequent tragedians where they kept remixing this from various angles, I will give it a Rating: 6/10. Even though I read this out of order (late in the process), I am consciously awarding points for being first chronologically here.
6. The Eumenides (458 BC). Orestes is put on trial for the murder of his mother; the Furies want him convicted, while Apollo (who egged him on) and ultimately Athena want him to be declared not guilty. The vote is a tie, which means not guilty. The Furies, furious, are placated by an increase in power and respect so long as they let go of their anger, which they agree to do. This play isn’t a tragedy, because no murders happen here and it has a redemptive ending – further, the underlying message is that institutional, governmental justice is required for events with intractable problems for societal stability. I was conflicted on this one; it articulates the necessity of government to ascend beyond blood-for-blood violence (and also inherited blood guilt11), but it also seems to me to be a secular solution – although Apollo and Athena both feature heavily in this play, neither of them are omnipotent, they clash with the Furies (who Athena didn’t even recognize initially), and so this one lacked the metaphysical focus which so interests me. I would give this a 5/10 – it is slightly better than The Libation Bearers because it highlights issues beyond blood vengeance, but will elevate it to Rating: 6/10 based on novelty and the effect it had on future tragedians. This is a strange note for the earliest of the three tragedians to end on – one might have expected Aeschylus, writing first, to have the most fate-heavy, most metaphysically total plays in the corpus, with the shift toward secular/rationalist resolution belonging to Euripides per Nietzsche’s original decline narrative. Instead the earliest surviving trilogy ends by explicitly retiring the old vengeance-cosmology in favor of a human court, which is an important data point against the clean Aeschylus-mystery → Sophocles-opacity → Euripides-rationalism decline story that Nietzsche promoted.
7. Prometheus Bound (uncertain, authorship and date disputed). This one is excellent, quite mythic. Prometheus is bound hard to a rock to suffer torture at the orders of Zeus, because Prometheus gave mankind the gift of fire. Prometheus had been told by his mother a prophecy of what would happen, that Zeus would be overthrown, and that Prometheus could not die; he laughs in the face of the Gods and their torture. He is willing to deal with Zeus to change the prophecy, but only on equal terms; he hides his prophecy in the meantime and mocks them. Io, hounded by Zeus and Hera, seeks his guidance, which he offers, but it terrifies her and she runs out. Hermes comes to try to talk sense into Prometheus, but the latter shoos Hermes off, and Zeus strikes Prometheus into a much more agonizing fate at the end. The plot is excellent, riveting; the themes are timeless – fate vs. free will, punishment for doing the right thing, how pain changes perception. Excellent. It ends on a cliffhanger, so this was likely part of a longer work, no longer extant, called Prometheus Unbound. Rating: 9/10.

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V. Rating Sophocles

1. Ajax (450–440 BC). The Trojan War hero Ajax kills himself after he’s embarrassed in front of the Greeks for being bewitched into killing the Greeks’ own captured livestock. Athena is directly involved in this play influencing outcomes but human will is a major factor; the tragedy is weakened by the arrogance and hubris of Ajax’s personality. This play echoes situations arising in both Antigone (a clash over burial rites) and Euripides’ Heracles, and the second half is much stronger than the first. Rating: 5/10. Longer review here.
2. Antigone (442 BC). The plot on this one is narrow-scope and it highlights the importance of moderation over clinging dogmatically to any particular polarity, however, it didn’t quite hold my attention. One moment – when Antigone argues a brother can’t be replaced with both parents dead, while a husband or child can – is noted as being a historically strange plot device, not justified by the motivation of the character within the story itself, and especially strange because the brother at issue is dead, not alive. Rating: 4/10. Longer review here.
3. Women of Trachis (440–430 BC). I really enjoyed this one, and it surprisingly had echoes of Oedipus the King to me. The heroic Heracles is returning home after being gone for more than a year, bringing back war booty in the form of female sex slaves. His wife Deianeira is sympathetic with the women who have lost their homes and families, but accepts that her husband cheats on her rampantly; she uses what she thinks is a magic cloak to try to keep his love, but the cloak turns out to be poison and it kills him instead; horrified, she then kills herself. Heracles reveals on his deathbed that the poison used – from a long-dead centaur – fulfills a prophecy he was told about how he would die, and he was also told his labors would end at this time, it just wasn’t clear whether it was from victory or death. So it appears that, like in Oedipus, humans act with what they think is free will, but it turns out to be part of a larger plan – and one may note that Heracles had vigorously done the will of the Gods, and death was the repayment (although they elevated him to Godhood after death). I liked this one because it shows the limits of human reason and willpower; it wasn’t quite as good as Oedipus, though, because Oedipus actively tried to escape his fate, whereas here the characters acted without broader knowledge of what would transpire. Rating: 8/10.
4. Oedipus the King (430 BC). This reworking of a much older tale, for which Homer offers an earlier version, earns its reputation as the greatest play of Greek tragedy, although I would argue that The Bacchae is close behind. Oedipus is told his fate, does everything he can to avoid it, but in trying to avoid it causes it to happen. It highlights the nature of free will vs. fate, and suggests that fate dominates – except that free will exists in whether to embrace one’s destiny or resist it. Plotting and dialogue is top notch, and Oedipus’s inquisitive, strong character adds to the ultimate tragedy. This one hits hard, especially the end. Rating: 10/10. Longer review here.
5. Electra (420–410 BC). This features a simple revenge plot: Agamemnon is killed by his wife Clytemnestra because he sacrificed their oldest daughter to the Gods in order to be allowed to sail to Troy; now Clytemnestra’s children Electra, Orestes, and Chrysothemis want revenge. Orestes concocts a scheme and carries it out, killing his mother and her paramour Aegisthus. There is very little conflict in terms of ideas other than whether Agamemnon was correct in his actions – he was very reluctant and only sacrificed his daughter because he faced mutiny and paralysis for his fleet if he didn’t accede, but Clytemnestra didn’t think he had any right to kill her. The Gods don’t feature in this play, but it’s also not psychological. It’s a flat, inert, 2-dimensional thing. Rating: 2/10.
6. Philoctetes (409 BC). Philoctetes is given the bow of Heracles but he is stranded on an island alone with a wounded foot that won’t heal. Neoptolemus, a young man, and Odysseus come to retrieve him after receiving prophecy that Troy won’t fall without both Philoctetes and his bow. They trick him into giving up his bow, but Neoptolemus feels guilty at his treachery and returns it and promises to take him home – but in a deus ex machina, Heracles appears and tells Philoctetes to obey and he agrees. This play was OK, but I didn’t really like the subject matter – tricking an injured man out of the tool he uses to stay alive – and while I understand the competing forces at play (individual vs. collective need, honor vs. pragmatism, desire for revenge vs. giving in to necessity, etc.), the pacing dragged and I just wasn’t pulled into the drama very much. Using deus ex machina bothers me when the play around it is already dragging and thin, and doesn’t bother me as much when the surrounding material is doing real cosmological work (see Ion). Not a bad play, but it doesn’t possess the deeper issues that entice me. Rating: 5/10.12
7. Oedipus at Colonus (401 BC – posthumous production; written earlier). The plot is weak and it was a struggle to get through, although it does hit on interesting themes about accepting one’s fate (and one’s responsibility for it vs. lack thereof), Oedipus’s relationship to family/friends/nation, and the strange forms such redemption may take. Rating: 4/10. Longer review here. I will note that the sort-of “trilogy” of Antigone → Oedipus the King → Oedipus at Colonus, where Antigone stubbornly insists on her polarity and is destroyed, Oedipus has a large ego and thinks he can rationalize himself out of destiny and fails, then Oedipus more humbly accepts his portion in life, mirrors the Jungian conception of the individuation process (which typically occurs in the second half of life after the ego fails, previously discussed here) and also the Ecclesiastian conception of embracing one’s portion, discussed here and less directly here.

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VI. Rating Euripides

1. Alcestis (438 BC). The oldest of Euripides’ surviving works – although he had been producing plays for seventeen years already – this is a strange play, occupying the pro-satyric fourth slot (leaning toward comedy) with a redemptive conclusion. The tone is wildly uneven and the topic is ridiculous; a wife offers to sacrifice herself so that the husband may live longer, until Heracles bests death and brings her back to life. I really don’t know what to make of this one, the plot is unlike anything else I’ve seen; so for the novelty factor and for the ease-of-read I’ll give it a Rating: 5/10, even though its ambiguity gives it a dilettantish, whimsical feel.
2. Medea (431 BC). This one is really disturbing about a mother who kills her children in revenge against her ex-husband, and it has a very rationalist bent where Medea chooses to commit horrors after weighing the pros-and-cons; the Gods in this one are blamed for human psychology, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a legible cosmic order. It ends with a disturbing amoral deus ex machina. I’ll give it a Rating: 5/10 because the horror, despite the weak metaphysics, leaves a lasting impression. Longer review here.
3. Children of Heracles (430 BC). Eurystheus, the king known for giving Heracles his labors, tracks down Heracles’ children in order to murder them so that they do not grow up and seek revenge against him. The King of Athens wants to protect them, but he consults multiple oracles and all tell him that a virgin of noble birth must be sacrificed for the protection to be effective; one of Heracles’ daughters volunteers herself. This play is flat and two-dimensional, but it was interesting to see how human sacrifice could be used as an extraordinary means of trying to secure favor of the Gods. Rating: 3/10.
4. Hippolytus (428 BC). Hippolytus turns down the advance of his stepmother Phaidra, who kills herself but blames him. There is a lot of Sophistic debate in this one and the plot falls apart because it doesn’t make sense why Hippolytus would keep his stepmother’s rejected advance a secret after her underhanded tactics; the oath he swore would not have been made under a condition that the stepmother could then bludgeon him with it. Rating: 3/10. Longer review here. (Note: this is a remake of an earlier lost play called Hippolytus Veiled; in the earlier version Phaidra is portrayed as a bold sexual predator and the audience hated it and it failed, which surprised Euripides; he discusses his disappointment at its failure in the excellent but short recollection in Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra, translated in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides by Anne Carson, although this might have been an imaginative reconstruction).
5. Andromache (425 BC). This was seen as an unpopular play when it was performed, and I didn’t like it much; Andromache, the wife of Hector until he was killed, becomes a slave wife of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus, who then also marries a princess from Sparta named Hermione. A fallen prince Orestes arrives and carries off Hermione after arranging for Neoptolemus’s death. Andromache comes across as sympathetic, subject to a series of very negative life twists, living a life at the whims of others, and everyone has some claim to their positions, but the play is boring and it isn’t plotted very well. The agon or debates between the characters are strong. It ends with a deus ex machina. Rating: 3.5.
6. Hecuba (424–423 BC). This one is similar to The Trojan Women below in the sense it deals with what happens to the losing women of war – slavery, rape, death, suffering, mourning, and gets the same Rating: 6.5/10. Hecuba, the queen of Troy, loses all of her children to the war, and she seeks revenge against a Trojan ally that had betrayed her and killed her last son. This one is heavy and tragic, and there are no Gods present; Hecuba’s daughter’s nobility while being sacrificed to honor Achilles was a high point, and even though the play wasn’t overtly psychological, Hecuba’s descent into a revenge-oriented mindset was an interesting one to watch.
7. The Suppliants (423 BC). I was bored by this one and ended up skimming it; retrieving the bodies of the dead against opposition is a theme that has been done to death (ha) in Antigone and Ajax, among others. The speeches are way too long, the themes are flat and boring, the drama is stilted; this was just highly uninspiring. Rating: 2/10.
8. Electra (c. 420 BC). This tells the tale of Electra and her brother Orestes murdering their mother because she killed their father. This story had already been covered by both Aeschylus and Sophocles; this telling mocks Aeschylus’s version to an extent by poking holes in the earlier version’s plot. The story is well written, I enjoyed the part about inspecting sacrificed entrails as a divination tool, and the question here is not really fate vs. free will, but the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy – Orestes does not want to kill his mother, but feels compelled to because of a prophecy made by Apollo. Still, I don’t think it works that the mother and lover are killed at different times, Electra is a fairly unpleasant character, and the story ends with her trading-up husbands to a much higher class husband. Rating: 6/10.
9. Heracles (416 BC). Heracles saves his family from the local ruler, but then is possessed by the Gods (as revenge for a slight) and murders his own family. The plot and pacing on this one are strong, but the outright body possession takes out the moral agency of the main character and dampens the tragedy, and the ending is kind of bizarre. This one does not have too much of a rationalist leaning. Rating: 6.5/10. Longer review here.
10. The Trojan Women (415 BC). This depicts the aftermath of Greece’s victory over Troy and how the women and children, filled with grief, were divvied up among the victors as slaves or to be killed. This play is not tragedy in the usual sense – the tragedy has already happened when the curtain rises. It premiered shortly after Athens’s ruthless and infamous massacre of the men of Melos and enslavement of its women, making the play’s depiction of cruelty deeply relevant and critical of Athenian foreign policy. It also discusses the whimsy and the erraticism of the Gods, for whom favor is always temporary and subject to reversal. Poseidon and Athena go from enemies to co-conspirators purely out of pride. One leaves this play with a feeling of Demiurgic heaviness; we suffer either from the gods’ absence or their arrival. Rating: 6.5/10.
11. Iphigenia in Tauris (414–412 BC). I actually couldn’t read this one, the only one of the tragedies I felt unable to read, because I disagreed with the premise. It was like the underwhelming play Helen (see #13 below), but worse, because the core plot forces an underlying historical tragedy to be rendered near meaningless. As background, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter at the behest of an oracle in order to derive good tidings for the war against Troy, a horrible and tragic act; but in this play the results of the tragedy are rendered moot, toothless, because Iphigenia, the sacrificed victim, is swept away into a new land to begin a new life. This just doesn’t work. Tragedy does not exist to be merely swept under the carpet; the important thing is dealing with its implications. Rating: 0/10.
12. Ion (414–412 BC). Ion is lovely because the play is set-up as a tragedy but which provides for hope and grace at the end, quite unexpectedly – here the deus ex machina worked for me. This is contrasted with The Bacchae where intense doom manifests for all involved, even the arguably undeserving. The Gods conspire and have a very strong impact on human action, but human agency is still partially retained, and the Gods plans often go awry. Rating: 8/10. The trap of political sovereignty is discussed briefly in this Note.
13. Helen (412 BC). Helen of Troy never went with Paris to Troy; instead, the Gods sent a clone of her and she spent the war in Egypt in chastity. Menelaus, her husband, tries to rescue his real wife (after the clone disappears) from the Egyptian king who wants to marry her. Was this intended as a send-up lampooning justifications used for war, that the pretexts aren’t real and the bloodshed was for naught? The meaning of the war was casually wiped away using the pretext of a clone – it put a mockery to everyone involved, including the capricious Gods – and perhaps this was an early evisceration of propaganda used to generate war, that many died for no reason at all. But the plot doesn’t work and is silly. Rating: 2/10.
14. The Phoenician Women (411–409 BC). This one was terrible; it had the same characters and themes associated with Sophocles’ Antigone (442 BC) and Oedipus the King (430 BC), but from the angle of Oedipus’s two sons who fight and kill each other. The theme of oracle predictions and human sacrifice to appease the Gods was interesting, but everything else had already been done and better in those two prior plays. Apparently there is debate about whether this is even an Euripides’ play. The plotting drags and the dialogue isn’t anything special. Rating: 2/10.
15. Orestes (408 BC). This is a wild one – per Theodore Buckley in The Tragedies of Euripides, “the play is among the most celebrated on the stage, but infamous in its morals; for, with the exception of Pylades, all the characters are bad persons.” Orestes and his sister Electra are condemned to death for the murder of their mother (who in turn had killed their father Agamemnon); their uncle Menelaus refuses to step in to save them (because his standing among the Greeks for causing the Trojan war is so low), so Orestes moves to kill Menelaus’s wife Helen – but she is saved by Apollo – and to kidnap and potentially murder his daughter Hermione, but Apollo steps in at the end with a deus ex machina and puts everyone into their rightful place. This play features plotting, action, and chaotic anarchism; it is disturbing, and perhaps reflects Euripides’ feelings toward the failing Peloponnesian War that peace is a high virtue. But it doesn’t touch on the metaphysical/ontological issues I care about, and so ultimately had trouble holding my attention. Rating: 4.5/10.
16. The Bacchae (405/406 BC, posthumous production). In this one, considered to be the strongest of Euripides’ plays, Dionysus manifests in human form, causes chaos in King Pentheus’s lands, and then results in the murder of Pentheus by his own possessed mother. The theme of this one is how limited rationalism is in the face of an irrational God, which stands starkly in contrast against Nietzsche’s argument about Euripides-as-rationalist-endpoint-of-tragedy. This is a truly excellent play, Rating: 10/10, and I will cover it separately in its own post.
17. Iphigenia in Aulis (405/406 BC – posthumous production). Agamemnon is told by an oracle that he must sacrifice his daughter to the Gods or the war on Troy will go disastrously.13 He complies, but only after hesitation and attempting to backtrack, and other events conspire that the tragedy is carried out. This is a good psychological play and tragic, but the ending (where the daughter disappears and a deer is sacrificed) is widely considered an interpolation by someone after Euripides had died (he died before the play was finished) and undermines the whole tragic nature of the story. While I understood Agamemnon’s crucifixion between desire for victory against the Trojans, the responsibility of command, and his love of his daughter, that he even considered sacrificing his daughter (which has rhythms of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac) speaks very poorly of his character, although child sacrifice was treated in a different context in ancient Greece than today. I would give it a Rating: 8/10 up until the interpolated ending, which undermines it to a Rating: 6/10.
18. Cyclops (uncertain date), the only surviving Satyr play. A retelling of Odysseus blinding the Cyclops, it has some funny one liners and a lot of rhetorical sparring. The Cyclops is blinded in part because of his arrogance and dismissal of the Gods. Pretty entertaining, but not very serious stuff. Rating: 6/10.
19. Rhesus (uncertain date and authorship; it may be a very early satyr-esque play with underdeveloped author voice). This is a retelling of the Rhesus episode from The Iliad, where Odysseus sneaks into the Trojan camp and assassinates the Trojan ally stealthily. The Goddess Athena appears and talks out of both sides of her mouth, predicting the future. This one was pretty good; I didn’t really appreciate Odysseus’s underhanded tactics, even though they were brave – they were not honorable, but effective and understandable tactics. One of the themes is how much trust one should extend; Hector is (incorrectly) suspicious of Rhesus arriving to the war late; the guards (incorrectly) accept Odysseus’s code word when briefly caught; Rhesus’s soldier doesn’t know who to believe about who killed his king. But the metaphysics are underdeveloped in favor of action, the plotting drags and the characters are mostly two-dimensional. Rating: 6/10.

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VII. Analysis

Looking at the scores:

Aeschylus averages 5.42 based on only seven plays, with the highest being Prometheus Bound at 9/10 and the lowest being The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, and The Suppliants at 3/10 each.

Sophocles averages 5.42 (exact same score) also based on only seven plays, with the highest being Oedipus the King at 10/10 and the lowest being Electra at 2/10.

Euripides averages 4.82 based on nineteen surviving plays, with the highest being The Bacchae at 10/10 and the lowest being Iphigenia in Tauris at 0/10.

Looking at these scores, certain commonalities stand out. As mentioned before the reviews, I prefer plays where the cosmos is intelligible even if it is horrifying, and human agency is real but bounded, often proving insufficient to the task at hand. Ion qualifies because the Gods’ plans often go awry and human agency stays partially real, even though things turn out well here. The ones I really loved were recognition plays; in Oedipus the King Oedipus recognizes what he is too late to matter, in Bacchae Pentheus fails to recognize it at all, Agave recognizes as catastrophe arrives, Teiresias recognizes in time and exits untouched – anagnorisis as the dawning of the understanding of one’s actual relationship to reality (which is necessary but not sufficient for a high score). Plays that taught epistemic humility – that we are finite beings acting half-blind under a totality far bigger than our understanding – is an important emphasis. Wisdom in this reading isn’t flourishing, integration, happiness, moral progress, liberation, mastery, or transcendence, it is knowing what kind of world you are in, knowing what you can and cannot do within it, and not confusing recognition with control. If a play’s underlying cosmology is unintelligible I did not like it as much, or if the characters do not act in accordance with their underlying personalities, or if divine intervention is arbitrary. I think that my approach is strongly related to my early experiences facing childhood double binds where no decision made was good enough, and also related to my coherence primary stabilizer.14

I will note that in prior posts I recommended a rebirth of the Gods within the psyche as a way of living as finite beings under a God-image of totality, but the City Dionysia served as a kind of institutional-scale version of this, and it still drove itself off the cliff at Melos. The individuated path is very hard to keep balanced, especially on an institutional level, where institutional incentives heavily lean toward offloading onto the Other for destruction.

With respect to Nietzsche’s argument, his story requires Euripides to be a rationalist flattening of the older mystery-tragedy, but we can already see that happening under Aeschylus in The Eumenides. The trajectory isn’t a decline from mystery through Sophocles’ opacity down into Euripides’ rationalism (although the role of the chorus does lessen and the plays do become more psychological), it’s more that each playwright had a few plays where mythic/divine material achieved full weight and a large number that were of uneven quality and scattershot in message. The problem with Nietzsche is that his paradigm focused on aesthetics rather than transformation. In a subsequent post, perhaps the next one, I may discuss in greater detail how his scheme falls apart in Euripides’ last play The Bacchae, which is by far the least rationalist, most irrational-divine-overwhelm work in the entire corpus of Greek tragedy and which, to me, makes it among the very best.Subscribed

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1

Per Sophocles: The Complete Plays, translated by Paul Roche, in the afterword by Matthew S. Santirocco, p. 394.

2

From here: “The vast majority of works of ancient Greek literature that have survived to the present day have survived because they were copied throughout the Middle Ages by scribes living in the Byzantine Roman Empire who were literate in Greek. As a result of this, the works of ancient Greek drama that have survived are mainly ones that appealed to the Byzantine Romans’ literary tastes.”

3

See Costica Bradatan, In Praise of Failure, p. 77 about how unstable democracy as a form is, using modernity as an example: “Large-scale access to higher education over the last half century hasn’t resulted in a more enlightened citizenry in the West so much as a significant decrease in the intellectual quality of the education itself. The more people who get a college education, the less demanding it becomes, and the shallower the outcomes. The system produces enough decently trained professionals (doctors, engineers, teachers), but it doesn’t affect the inner lives of these people in such a way as to cause a major change in society. The profound humility that genuine democracy presupposes – the notion that you are no better than the next person and that, for all your education, you may be wrong and the other right; the acute awareness of your libido dominandi and the internalized need to keep it in check – is not something to be expected upon graduation from the modern university….Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University, observed casually that, at American universities, the arts and sciences faculties “display scant interest in preparing undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a liberal education.” It appears that we have to learn to live with a conundrum: democracy remains only a dream without an education capable of transforming human nature, yet such a transformation does not seem possible on a large scale.”

4

Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 74:

“In a guilt-culture, the need for supernatural assurance, for an authority transcending man’s, appears to be overwhelmingly strong. But Greece had neither a Bible nor a Church; that is why Apollo, vicar on earth of the heavenly Father, came to fill the gap. Without Delphi, Greek society could scarcely have endured the tensions to which it was subject in the Archaic Age. The crushing sense of human ignorance and human insecurity…the accumulated burden of these things would have been unendurable without the assurance which such an omniscient divine counsellor could give, the assurance that behind the seeming chaos there was knowledge and purpose….Out of his divine knowledge, Apollo would tell you what to do when you felt anxious or frightened; he knew the rules of the complicated game that the gods play with humanity; he was the “Averter of Evil”. The Greeks believed in their Oracle, not because they were superstitious fools, but because they could not do without believing in it. And when the importance of Delphi declined, as it did in Hellenistic times, the main reason was not, I suspect, that men had grown (as Cicero thought) more skeptical, but rather that other forms of religious reassurance were now possible.”

5

See, for example, E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 50: “In his thought, though not in his literary technique, Sophocles (save perhaps in his latest plays) still belongs entirely to the older world…Aeschylus, on the other hand, struggling as he does to interpret and rationalize the legacy of the Archaic Age, is in many ways prophetic of the new time” – even though Aeschylus came before Sophocles and Euripides. And p. 187: “To judge from extant pieces, what chiefly preoccupied Euripides in his later work was not so much the importance of reason in man as the wider doubt whether any rational purpose could be seen in the ordering of human life and the governance of the world. That trend culminates in the Bacchae, whose religious content is, as a recent critic has said, the recognition of a “Beyond” which is outside our moral categories and inaccessible to our reason. I do not maintain that a consistent philosophy of life can be extracted from the plays (nor should we demand this of a dramatist writing in an age of doubt). But if we must attach a label, I still think that the world “irrationalist,” which I once suggested, fits Euripides better than any other.”

6

“Using Aristotle as a springboard, I suggest that tragedy made the Athenians better citizens by teaching the following: that the ground of the human condition is one of constant change, conflict, and fragility in which man is not the measure of all things (i.e. not self-sufficient), in which reason and intellect, man’s distinguishing trait, is often morally impotent against the forces of evil and darkness that are inherent in human nature and in which there is a frequent eruption of irrational, mysterious, and other-worldly forces (e.g. erotic passion, madness, chance, ancestral curses, oracles, Furies, gods). Despite the constraining yoke of these necessities tragedy teaches that men and women are still deeply responsible for their destinies (i.e. “man” makes morality)…the plot of an Athenian tragedy arouses in the spectator particular emotions (pity, fear) and this is healthy because these emotions have tremendous cognitive value, because working through such emotions enhances our understanding of life’s complexity. Such understanding is essential to the moral, spiritual, and political education of good citizens. Or expressed somewhat differently, character (ethos, one’s settled moral disposition) determines destiny (daimon), but that destiny (or the daemonic power controlling that destiny) simultaneously determines character. Thus, there is an unrelenting but productive tension between the two.”

7

See Euripides: Ten Plays, p. ix: “Women, war, and God were his perennial themes. And, of course, the human condition….When it comes to God, there are those who see a problem and accuse Euripides of being an atheist. This premature and unjust assumption is, I believe, based on his apparent dismissal of the gods and his distrust of Apollo. The truth is that a sense of divine presence and omnipotence is taken for granted in all his plays. His “dismissal” of the gods was a plea to look further and deeper than a wine-bibbing Bacchus, an inept Apollo, or a rollicking Heracles….In all of these quasi-deus-ex-machina escapes from reality it is as though Euripides were saying: “You want a happy ending, but can’t you see that the ending would not have been happy? Very well, I’ll give you an ending that you can’t believe in.”

8

Sophocles: The Complete Plays, p. 395,

For Aeschylus the meaning of suffering is to be found in the divine design, since he at least holds out the hope that the will of the gods, which is often painful for human beings to endure, has some larger purpose, which will be ultimately revealed to us. Euripides, on the other hand, problematizes the gods: in some plays they are reduced to an artificial plot device, the so-called deus ex machina; but his last play, the Bacchae, is obsessed with divinity…Sophocles falls somewhere between these two positions. In his plays the will of the gods is always enigmatic, which may explain the important role that oracles play in his works, especially oracles that are misleading, misinterpreted, or ignored. The world of Sophoclean tragedy is one in which neither one’s intellect nor morality can avail against the inscrutable will of the gods.

9

He has works of tragedy, yes, but they operate under an illegible cosmic moral system, focused on the motivations of particular characters and the human themes that arise from this – but that is not my layer of interest, I am interested in what the human experience states about the structural realities of this realm and the God image that it reflects. So I don’t particularly care that Othello is jealous, Hamlet is indecisive, Macbeth is ambitious, etc., except insofar as those things illuminate something about the structure of reality.

10

Athenian tragedy worked from a shared mythic canon (the house of Atreus, house of Labdacus/Oedipus, the Trojan War cycle) the way modern franchise cinema works from a shared universe of pre-established characters – Greek audiences already knew Electra would kill her mother the way a modern audience knows Bruce Wayne’s parents die in an alley. My novelty fatigue with the third or fourth burial-dispute or revenge-matricide play is like watching another billionaire-orphan origin story, except the Greeks had a century and three generations of playwrights working the same handful of houses rather than a single studio churning yearly installments. I would argue that certain psychic structures within a society or civilization are told and retold across much of a culture’s storytelling output, so this is not unique to either Greek or modern American civilization.

11

Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 33: “[Familial, generational blood guilt] is the teaching of Hesiod, of Solon and Theognis, of Aeschylus and Herodotus. That it involved the suffering of the morally innocent was not overlooked: Solon speaks of the hereditary victims of nemesis as “not responsible”; Theognis complains of the unfairness of a system by which “the criminal gets away with it, while someone else takes the punishment later”; Aeschylus, if I understand him rightly, would mitigate the unfairness by recognising that an inherited curse may be broken. That these men nevertheless accepted the idea of inherited guilt and deferred punishment is due to that belief in family solidarity which Archaic Greece shared with other early societies and with many other primitive cultures to-day. Unfair it might be, but to them it appeared as a law of nature, which must be accepted: for the family was a moral unit, the son’s life was a prolongation of his father’s, and he inherited his father’s moral debts exactly as he inherited his commercial ones….As Glotz showed…the liberation of the individual from the bonds of clan and family is one of the major achievements of Greek rationalism, and one for which the credit must go to Athenian democracy.”

12

I also read Edmund Wilson’s famous Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow essay within the same-named book, with the core point being that Philoctetes’ wound (the thing that isolates and repels others) and his bow (his extraordinary gift, the thing the collective needs) are inseparable, the same fact viewed from two angles: greatness and affliction as one bound-together condition; but its psychological/biographical register did not grip me like a metaphysical/structural one might have.

13

Fatalism/determinism under the Gods gave way to an offloading of responsibility for one’s behavior, which was also reflected simultaneously in one’s relationship to astrology (where the planets were the visual embodiment of the Gods), and it is one of the main reasons why Augustine claimed to reject astrological determinism. See his Confessions, Henry Chadwick translation, p. 54: “On the same ground I did not cease openly to consult those imposters called astrologers, because they offered, so to speak, no sacrifices, and no prayers were addressed to any spirit for the purpose of divining the future. Yet a true Christian piety consistently rejects and condemns this art….Astrologers try to destroy this entire saving doctrine when they say: ‘The reason for your sinning is determined by the heaven’, and ‘Venus or Saturn or Mars was responsible for this act’. They make a man not in the least responsible for his faults, but mere flesh and blood and putrid pride, so that the blame lies with the Creator and orderer of the heavens and stars.”

14

Whatever decision I made, criticism and undermining followed regardless, which left my “unconscious and psychic wiring” treating decisions as provisional and never complete, and worldviews as inherently partial rather than whole. That’s similar to the structure that I find most resonant in Greek tragedy: effort and intelligence applied in good faith, met by an outcome that was never actually contingent on the effort in the first place. Oedipus doesn’t lose because he was foolish or lazy, his intelligence and vigilance are the mechanism of his downfall. A double-bind childhood also teaches that a legible structure exists (the criticism is real, patterned, predictable in its arrival) even though the structure itself offers no way to satisfy it. That’s functionally identical to a cosmos that is legible, even amoral, even crushing, as long as it makes sense. Oedipus’s world is comprehensible, consistent, rule-governed, and utterly indifferent to the protagonist’s merit or effort. A story like that would be almost unbearable to someone whose stabilizer is meaning or attachment, because it offers no comfort and no relational repair. For someone whose stabilizer is coherence, it’s close to ideal, because the legibility itself is the payoff, independent of whether the outcome is good.

The following is a glossary of some of the key terms I use repeatedly in my writing, organized alphabetically. Many of you will already be familiar with them. The intent is to offer the glossary so new and unfamiliar readers may become acquainted with the otherwise obscure terminology used.

This glossary will be included on the header and may be updated from time to time.

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Abraxas

The Jungian term for God as totality, the ultimate unity of all opposites (light and darkness, good and evil, creation and destruction, matter and spirituality, hot and cold, greed vs. asceticism, etc.) – God as quarternity, not trinity, comprising the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and Satan. Jung originally articulated it in his Liber Novus, which wasn’t published fully until decades after his death, while the Seven Sermons to the Dead sub-portion was released during his life. He retreated from this horrifying conception of totality in his work, afraid that it would destabilize his patients and hurt his reputation, eventually offering a bridging myth in Answer to Job with the idea of an evolving but unconscious God. Abraxas is unconscious because consciousness arises from subject/object differentiation, and such distinctions are otherwise united within totality – life exists in order to add consciousness to totality via the lived crucifixion of opposites. Abraxas is not to be worshipped or identified with but to be recognized as the limit-condition of existence and individuated away from. See also: Crucifixion of Opposites, God-image.

Coherence (as a primary stabilizer)

The psychic configuration in which reality must not appear contradictory as a precondition for psychological stabilization. Contradictions on one level of existence (politics, culture, psychology, spirituality) are felt as intense and growing psychosomatic pressure which may only be resolved once the contradictions being faced are resolved, at least provisionally. When reality makes sense, the coherence-regulated psyche is relatively stable even if bleak; when reality does not make sense, it destabilizes even if life is comfortable. This work is intended primarily for this regulatory type, but not entirely, as anyone may cross the threshold under sufficient duress. See also: Stabilizers, Threshold.

Consciousness

A state of being which allows oneself to perceive, understand, and reflect on the external and internal world. It arises as a natural consequence of subject/object differentiation and while bearing and navigating the crucifixion of opposites. Consciousness born from limitation is the one thing that Abraxas lacks, as the opposites are otherwise united within it. See also: Abraxas, Crucifixion of Opposites.

Crucifixion of Opposites

The permanent condition and unbearable tension of inhabiting a reality constituted by irreconcilable poles (good and evil, matter and spirit, love and hatred, greed and asceticism, short term versus long term, light and darkness, persona vs shadow, masculine vs feminine, rational/scientific vs irrational/spiritual, action vs. reflection, justice vs. mercy, order vs. chaos, hope vs. lucidity) – see the term Opposites for how the term is specifically used here. It is the condition of consciousness and a base condition of reality. The crucifixion must be borne somewhere by individuals – either offloaded to institutions, collapsed into antinomianism, or held internally via individuation. See also: Consciousness, Enantiodromia, Individuation, Offloading, Opposites.

Egregore

A collective regulatory architecture which forms when sufficient individuals direct attention toward a shared symbolic object – a god, a nation, a team, an ideology – and that shared attention generates a field that in turn shapes what those individuals attend to next. This is a second-order cybernetic process in the von Foerster sense, and the egregore exerts back-pressure on individual God-images into compliance and conformity with the collective form, which is why they are often perceived to have taken on a semi-autonomous form. They follow predictable feedback-loop dynamics with growth, saturation and rupture. See also: God-Image, Noetic Commons, Regulatory Architecture.

Enantiodromia

An ancient concept from the Greeks and Taoism where a system, energy, or polarity, when pushed to its extreme, inverts into its opposite. Popularized in the modern era by Carl Jung, who used it to explain why the spiritual, anti-materialist energies at the start of the Christian era have been morphing into its opposite, seen in the symbol of the twin fish.

Energy Metabolism / Mythic Typology

A diagnostic framework describing how energy circulates in the body (its movement), how cheap or expensive different actions are (its metabolism), and what the psyche ultimately protects (its regulation). The God-image is the highest order force which impacts and is impacted by these other processes, and both affects and is affected by collective egregores. Mythic and planetary archetypes (Dionysus, Saturn, Hermes, Apollo, etc.) serve as heuristic interfaces for these energies, allowing an individual to relate to them without identifying with them, as one cannot relate to Abraxas/totality without inflation, collapse, or paralysis. See also: God-Image, Stabilizers, Regulatory Architecture.

God-Image

The highest-order psychophysiological regulatory architecture which organizes perception, affect, interpretation, motivation, contradiction tolerance, and bodily coherence. As metabolic beings the God-image affects every nested belief beneath it, screening reality, filtering out competing perspectives, and maintaining psychic equilibrium, resulting in unstated hinge propositions. It is in line with predictive processing (Andy Clark’s “deep priors”) as an evolutionary efficiency mechanism – humans have a model of what the world is, and sensory perception is used to identify errors to the model and update them instead of continuously generating a model from scratch. Inherited from ones family, wider culture, and impacted by both genetics and events, the God-image may suffer a forced revision along with the concomitant reorganization of all lower level beliefs if psychosomatic pressure forces one past the threshold. See also: Abraxas, Hinge Proposition, Privatio Boni, Regulatory Architecture, Threshold.

Good and Evil

These are not ontological categories under this framework’s God-image, unlike the privatio boni, because Abraxas contains both within itself and therefore there is no cosmic backing, no ledger, no afterlife enforcement. Instead, they relate to the consequences of offloading the crucifixion of opposites onto others. “Good” means actions which sustain differentiated consciousness by not offloading into predation, projection, or scapegoating, while “evil” means collapsing another’s differentiated consciousness into an object serving one’s psychic economy. This is a claim about an act’s psychic consequences, not personal preferences, and is therefore not a claim of moral subjectivism even though it lacks the metaphysical enforcement privatio boni supplies. See also: Abraxas, Crucifixion of Opposites, Offloading, Privatio Boni.

Heleq

The term used in Ecclesiastes (2:10, 3:22, 5:18, 9:9) meaning “portion” or “lot” in Hebrew to describe what remains after every attempt to find a container for the crucifixion of opposites (wisdom, wealth, legacy, pleasure, etc.) has been tested and found insufficient. Insufficient does not mean empty but hebel, a term used dozens of times in the text and which translates as “breath” or “vapor”, something ungraspable. Heleq involves embracing finite experience and limiting the scope of one’s focus to what one can accomplish in one’s life, accepting responsibility for what one can affect while disclaiming responsibility for what one cannot change (see also the opening portion of the Serenity prayer) without collapsing into either despair or illusion. In the framework of this work, heleq is the path of individuation and differentiation under an Abraxian God-image, without any metaphysical promises that it accumulates into redemption.

Hermes of the Threshold

The adopted pseudonym of the author. Hermes describes a threshold function and not an identity here; it is the mediator and psychopomp which metabolically circulates meaning between incompatible energetic registers of his psyche (Saturn vs. Dionysus, or conscious order and chaos), articulating the impulses of each register and synthesizing them via writing output. The intent is primarily to increase psychosomatic regulation and coherence toward wholeness (an increase in one’s ability to live without splitting, projecting, or falsifying reality, even if it is painful), and is not intended to resolve into either rigid doctrine or escape.

Hinge Proposition

A Wittgenstein term involving propositions so fundamental that they are not believed but acted on, and that make all other beliefs possible. The redemptive person’s hinges include suffering is temporary, justice will be done, and that meaning exists. These are the conditions that make arguing possible, not things that people argue for. The Abraxian perspective hinges include suffering is permanent, justice is a human projection, and meaning is maintained, not given. When a redemptive person encounters Abraxas they do not encounter a disagreement, they encounter a different set of hinges – a different bedrock – and no amount of argument can reach across that gap because arguments presuppose hinges, and the hinges are different. Operating from a different perceptual apparatus creates loneliness, but that loneliness is hinge-structural, not social. See also: God-image.

Individuation

The internal response to the crucifixion of opposites. The ego holds the opposites consciously without ego-choosing one pole over the other, which can be quite mentally and emotionally painful, and over time – which may be fast or it may be extensively drawn out – a provisional answer arises from within or without called the transcendent function, a “third thing” received and felt as intuition. The intuition should still be balanced against one’s intellect and emotions, but intuition receives a higher standing than it has otherwise carried in the modern era. Individuation increases one’s consciousness toward wholeness, and this incidentally adds to what totality lacks, but it offers no metaphysical guarantee, no redemption, and no final destination. It is difficult, uncomfortable, and lonely, and it is like balancing on a tight-wire over an abyss with the danger of collapse ever-present. It is constitutionally unavailable to most psychic configurations under ordinary conditions, but it may be thrust upon oneself if existing containers prove insufficient at bearing the crucifixion of opposites. See also: Crucifixion of Opposites, Threshold, Transcendent Function.

Kelipot

Literally “husks” or “shells” in Hebrew. In Lurianic Kabbalah, it means a stratum of impurity that traps divine sparks within it, where performing the mitzvot and effectuating tikkun olam (the “repair of the world”) to free the divine sparks, and is meant as a never-ending process. In this work the term is used to describe elite networks who exploit the lower tier of humanity and other lifeforms (“kelipot”) in an ontological hierarchy, where those outside the covenant are treated as instrumentally expendable without moral contradiction. The tragedy is that consciousness and power are inverse properties, so those who ascend to the top of a power hierarchy invariably have decreased consciousness. See also: Ontological Hierarchy, Tikkun Olam.

Noetic Commons

The shared, collective background assumptions, values, perceptual filters, and moral categories which a society uses to establish societal norms, guidelines, and meaning, affected strongly by the highest order egregore of shared belief. It is the aggregate expression of the collective demand by most people to offload the crucifixion of opposites to institutional authority. Elite networks shape and funnel this collective demand, but they do not generate it – they are providing most people what they want, which is to not think about finitude, death, or the uncertainty of existence. See also: Egregore, Offloading.

Offloading

The psychological process of displacing the crucifixion of opposites onto external institutions, authority figures, or cosmic narratives, so that one does not feel psychosomatic distress at the extreme uncertainties of life and an unknown afterlife. This is overwhelmingly the most common response to the crucifixion of opposites (compared to antinomianism or individuation). It is efficient and psychologically stabilizing most of the time and it is also a rational thing for most people to do under most circumstances, because it frees up psychic energy to devote to life – to friendships, work, hobbies, etc, but it trades consciousness for stability. Ego inflation occurs if one sees oneself as superior to those who offload, because feeling superior misses the issue of energy economics and efficiencies. See also: Crucifixion of Opposites, Noetic Commons, Resilience.

Ontological Hierarchy

A metaphysical, stratified, hierarchical structure of being in which some types of people are considered intrinsically superior or inferior to that of others, with correspondingly different moral obligations. In this work, it is one of the three features that make a framework optimal for upper elite control (along with non-redemptive theology and infinite interpretive flexibility) because it allows them to operate efficiently and ruthlessly without a universal moral ethos otherwise creating emotional, moral psychological friction against certain actions perceived as necessary for continued control. See also: Kelipot.

Opposites

Not intended as antonyms in the ordinary sense. Rather, two conditions count as opposites when they are actualized and foreclosed branches of a single selection event: differentiation process by selection at every scale (cell, embryo, species, ecosystems), and to select is necessarily to select against something else, which does not cease to exist as a possibility, only as an actuality. The selected and the foreclosed are bound together by the single act that produced both outcomes and are unintelligible apart from each other. Pushed across the full range of what could be selected for or against at any juncture, this relational structure produces something closer to a spectrum than a binary. See also: Crucifixion of Opposites, Enantiodromia.

Pilpul

The Talmudic method of dialectical reasoning involving infinite interpretive recursion, where any text can generate endless commentary and any position can be supported or refuted depending on need. In this work, pilpul is the mechanism which offers the upper elites utilize “infinite interpretive flexibility” which they require to retain control over the masses with maximum efficiency, and it is one of the three core features of upper elite rule (along with ontological hierarchy and non-redemptive theology). See also: Ontological Hierarchy, Regulatory Arbitrage.

Privatio Boni

Literally “absence of good” in Latin. The theological doctrine formalized by Augustine, inherited from Neoplatonism that God is all good and emanates his goodness into the nether, where evil is merely a lack or privation of the good. It encourages people to identify with good and avoid evil so that they can go to Heaven and avoid Hell when they die. But because the foundation of this reality is the crucifixion of opposites, suppression of evil into the unconscious accumulates pressure and is eventually projected outwards onto designated enemies or otherwise leaks out in uncontrollable ways. The privatio boni is the metaphysical expression of the psychological demand to offload the crucifixion of opposites onto a cosmic authority that promises final resolution, where offloading is the most efficient and rational way for most people to relate to reality under most conditions. See also: God-Image, Offloading.

Regulatory Architecture

A structure at individual or collective scale that maintains equilibrium by governing how energy, attention, and contradiction are metabolized, in a cybernetic loop. God-images are individual regulatory architectures while egregores are collective ones, and they influence each other. This framework argues that these architectures are not merely beliefs but psychophysiological systems with measurable effects on perception, embodiment, and social coordination. See also: Egregore, God-Image, Stabilizers.

Regulatory Arbitrage

The practice of operating outside of a collective regulatory architecture’s constraints while still benefiting from the social stability provided by the architecture itself. In this work, the upper elites are described as deploying regulatory arbitrage by publicly enforcing the privatio boni while privately operating under a non-redemptive, antinomian framework that exempts them from its moral constraints. See also: Egregore, Noetic Commons, Regulatory Architecture.

Resilience

The capacity of a psychic structure (whether internal or external) to contain and metabolize the crucifixion of opposites without collapse. Individuation gradually develops internal structures capable of holding the crucifixion (via differentiated energies, gods, archetypes), while offloading the crucifixion onto institutions to hold it does not develop those internal structures. The question is not whether to bear the crucifixion, but where and by whom. See also: Crucifixion of Opposites, Offloading.

Somatic Incoherence

The persistent and intensifying psychophysiological friction produced when phenomenological data arising from lived experience systematically contradicts one’s conscious highest-order God-image. Somatic incoherence is the primary driver of God-image threshold-crossing: when it exceeds a certain intensity the existing regulatory architecture can no longer hold, and reorganization becomes necessary rather than optional. Somatic coherence or incoherence depends on the individual and depends on upbringing, disposition, and life experiences. See also: Coherence, God-Image, Threshold.

Stabilizers (Psychic)

The primary regulatory needs around which a psyche organizes to avoid the unbearable tension of the crucifixion of opposites. The five identified in this work are: (1) attachment and belonging, (2) esteem and status, (3) meaning and narrative, (4) control and agency, and (5) coherence and truth-consistency. Most people have several, but one dominates. The dominant stabilizer determines how lived experience is interpreted and whether it serves to reinforce or undermine psychosomatic coherence, and they have different failure modes. The intellect is generally used in furtherance of one’s primary stabilizer, not the other way around. See also: Coherence, Regulatory Architecture.

Threshold

The point at which the psychosomatic cost of remaining inside one’s existing God-image exceeds the cost and uncertainty of adapting a new God-image. Threshold-crossing is a forced recognition produced by intense and unrelenting somatic incoherence, not a choice, and there is a near-universal process by which such reorganization occurs. Threshold-crossing is typically conducted from one redemptive God-image to another, and adopting a non-redemptive, tragic God-image typically only occurs if or after redemption as a category has been exhausted. The framework’s intended audience are those who have already crossed or are actively approaching crossing this threshold. See also: God-image, Individuation, Somatic Incoherence.

Tikkun Olam

Literally “repair of the world.” In Lurianic Kabbalah, the cosmic task of gathering divine sparks trapped in the kelipot through the fulfillment of mitzvot. Here, it is framed as psychologically incentivizing a perpetual momentum engine where, because reality is seen as permanently broken and the necessity of repair is infinite, any action may be reframed as serving divine repair when interpreted by rabbinical authorities. This provides a permanent justification for action that elite coordination utilizes for maximally efficient rule. See also: Kelipot, Ontological Hierarchy.

Transcendent Function

The intuition which arises mysteriously from outside the ego as a provisional answer when the opposites have been held in suspense long enough without collapse. It should not be listened to blindly but balanced against intellect and emotions, although it receives greater weight than modernity ascribes to it. The transcendent function guides the individuation process and provides a local orientation toward wholeness without ever achieving finality or involving any metaphysical guarantees of final redemption. See also: Crucifixion of Opposites, Individuation.

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Welcome back. In this post I would like to address some questions posed both by critics and which arose from my own doubting, acidic, recursive process about whether the Abraxian framework I’ve articulated can be disconfirmed, or whether it is self-sealing. Most religious beliefs are self-sealing where evil is treated as God either testing people, punishing for transgressions, or that His plan operates beyond human understanding. In other words, “self-sealing” is defined as all evidence, whether good or bad, gets absorbed by the framework. This is common with any metaphysical framework, and my own work is not exempt from this critique. In a sense this is a follow-up to my Collapse of the All Good God: Part 2 essay; the Q&A format worked well there, and so I will be using it again here. What follows is an epistemological audit, peeling apart the layers of argument and asking what evidence, if any, would confirm or disconfirm each layer? This is going to be strange.

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The Questions

1. Doesn’t defining Abraxas as totality, containing good and evil and the other pairs of opposites, make the theory unfalsifiable?

If my argument were simply that Abraxas contains everything inside of itself and nothing exists outside of it, then yes, this would be an unfalsifiable closed system. But my argument is narrower: that reality contains no metaphysical ordering principle that resolves the opposition of the opposites. The tensions inherent on this plane between the opposites – between good and evil, light and darkness, matter and spirituality, hot and cold, love and hate, life and death, an infinite number of such pairings – are built into the fabric of reality itself, where these ideas and influences only make sense in terms of their opposites, and therefore it’s more about the absence of a conclusive resolving structure than a claim that everything belongs to one big category.1 It is falsifiable in the sense that observing a conclusive resolving structure would be evidence against this argument.2

2. There’s still a gap between how something feels in the body and what the universe actually is. Isn’t extrapolating from the first to the second improper?

If that was the argument, yes, but it’s not easy to separate these layers. As I’ve discussed previously, my process has been to start on a lower level of observation – politics and culture, mainly – and I would analyze it obsessively until it hit up against irreconcilable contradictions in that layer. My whole Neoliberal Feudalism 130,000 word essay was about this exploration, with over 1,000 mostly establishment citations revealing, in a recursive process, the seams and incoherence of that level of analysis. Once the level hit up against irreconcilable contradictions, the psychosomatic pressure increased in my body until I found an outlet for it – which required me to try to resolve those contradictions at a higher level of abstraction, mainly psychology, until the process repeated and I tried to resolve it with spirituality/metaphysics (the Neofeudal Review project), until the psychosomatic pressure grew again and finally forced resolution on the highest level of the belief hierarchy, that of the God-image. Once I underwent a God-image transformation, I no longer felt nearly as much psychosomatic pressure and I experienced (and continue to experience) a process toward metabolic stabilization. So it isn’t necessarily the case that the metabolic feeling of stabilization or the earlier pressure proves Abraxas, it’s that the God-image stabilizes me metabolically, and the lived experience of that, if it is sustainable longterm with positive mental and psychological benefits that accrue, functions as evidence that the God-image is tracking something real about myself and my experience – although only indirectly, if at all, about reality beyond it.

This is why my work is primarily geared at those who are undergoing a similar crisis. It’s not primarily intended as a conventional philosophical argument aimed at convincing a neutral observer of a metaphysical proposition, although that intent does exist too. This perspective is primarily offering a regulatory architecture, designed to offer a framework to reduce psychosomatic incoherence for those who are approaching a threshold God-image state (where the cost of externally offloading the crucifixion of opposites has come to exceed the cost of bearing it internally, where all redemptive alternatives have been exhausted or falsified), discussed here and here. This threshold is not based on a “special” group or those who are only coherence-regulated; it can happen to anyone whose primary stabilizers (attachment, esteem, meaning, control, coherence) fail and they have exhausted redemption options – and it is happening more and more often as we transition from the aeon of Pisces to Aquarius. Trust in institutions has been collapsing and people are increasingly “redemption hopping” from container to container, desperately hoping someone, anyone, anything can bear the terror and pain and uncertainty of existence for them. Before, the collective egregore (discussed here) of Church and State carried the crucifixion of opposites for people through providing shared narratives, rituals, and expert mediation, but this is increasingly becoming more and more difficult to maintain. The question is increasingly changing from “Is this belief true?” to “Does this understanding contain my experiences without requiring denial, projection, or faith?” This is an age which demands proof, not belief, even if that proof is phenomenological.

Given that the Abraxian ontology emerges from the cascade upwards in the belief hierarchy via psychosomatic pressure, there are three levels of claims here, and the strength of the evidence decreases as one moves up the chain of argument. With this in mind, the three levels of evidentiary claim are as follows:

• Phenomenological: This is the strongest claim, because it is something I actually experience firsthand. Success is determined by whether incorporating a non-redemptive, tragic God-image makes my experiences more metabolically coherent and stabilized over time or not. This is the strongest claim, because it’s about something I actually experience.
• Pragmatic/abductive: This is still primarily a claim about me rather than the world, but it provides some evidence that if I retain my revised God-image over time and if it improves and stabilizes my psyche then it is some evidence that the God-image is a good fit for how I process reality. It is weaker than the phenomenological layer.
• Ontological: This is the weakest claim and the hardest to establish, whether the lower layers somehow describes what the God-image actually is. Just because something feels true doesn’t mean that reality is structured according to my feelings. Success is measured by whether one can continue functioning without collapsing into antinomian predation or offloading the crucifixion of opposites onto institutions or experts.

3. But if collapse, instability, or fragmentation count as evidence against the pragmatic/abductive layer of the framework, couldn’t a critic just say that shows Abraxas is bad for me, not that it’s false? After all, truth can be destabilizing, while falsehood can be stabilizing; how does the pragmatic layer proof the ontological layer?

Yes, collapse, fragmentation, and instability only test the pragmatic/metabolic layers. I had initially proposed in The Collapse of the All Good God: Part 2 that undeniable cosmic justice or verifiable afterlife rewards would count as ontological counter-evidence, but this is a weak ontological counter-claim. I wrote:

What would break Abraxas? Three possibilities: (1) discovery of a non-totalizable remainder (grace, Self, consciousness-source) that can’t be absorbed into the opposites – this would require further god-image evolution, (2) lived experience that contradicts the framework (e.g., undeniable cosmic justice, verifiable afterlife rewards), (3) a psyche metabolically incapable of holding tension who nonetheless achieves wholeness through a different structure – this would prove Abraxas isn’t universal even for coherence-types. I haven’t encountered any of these yet, but the framework remains falsifiable in principle, which is why it’s phenomenological reporting rather than dogma.

On reflection this isn’t really right, because one could argue that even an afterlife wouldn’t necessarily contradict a God-image of totality; it could just be assigned one layer within totality rather than evidence against it. Ouch! Given the more precise claim above that no final ordering principle resolves the opposites, what is required is a demonstrated principle under which good and evil are proven to be derivative (good luck proving that). I don’t see an operational test for this, and I don’t know what would count as demonstrating it or whether it’s even possible to do so. It’s more like a conceptual countercondition than a Popperian falsifier.

In the Collapse: Part II essay I also considered the possibility of some “non-totalizable remainder” – grace that can’t be absorbed into the opposites, basically – that could also be a similar countercondition, but I’m not sure what it would actually look like either; perhaps even if it happened to me I would simply reinterpret it as another feature of totality. There’s another track of evidence I’ll discuss below, that of recursive political/cultural prediction, because it’s an approach that doesn’t depend so much on phenomenology.

4. Doesn’t this theory change the observer, which contaminates the very experience I’m using to test it?

Yes. If I believe in a God-image of totality, then I will interpret events and experience through that lens, which may then serve as confirmation of the validity of the theory – circular logic. This is common among any God-image; if one’s perception of reality constantly violated their God-image, either one would compartmentalize it (resulting in psychosomatic buildup over time) or it would require changing higher level beliefs.

Here’s an example which illustrates this concept. Consider two people: one believes reality is benevolent and a privatio boni all-good God is in charge; as an optimistic, positive, extraverted individual with a shallow focus on the injustices of the world, their nervous system stabilizes around this and “evil” is seen as stated above – a test, punishment, or God’s will being beyond human comprehension. All experiences reinforce this belief and the individual is stabilized. Alternatively, the other person believes reality is tragic, that nothing lasts and everything is ephemeral ala Ozymandias, that life is pain and “evil” confirms that God just doesn’t care; as a pessimistic introvert, the sync between a God-image of Abraxas and perception is psychically stabilizing for this individual (i.e. me). Both of these people can honestly report that their God-image works for them, but because these views are incompatible the “real” God-image cannot be both. This means that metabolic coherence is evidence for whether a specific God-image is a good fit for an individual, but not evidence about what God actually is. So the phenomenological layer cannot reach the ontological layer. But I would argue that if a God-image of totality results in psychological stability over a long period of time, this says something about whether people can inhabit such a non-redemptive, tragic worldview in the modern era (as opposed to, say, the ancient Greeks in a cruder, more primitive era), or whether the heartaches, failures, diseases, deaths, losses will inevitably result in collapse without redemptive hope acting as a long term stabilizer. So this is a cybernetic process: metabolic experience provides evidence over time whether a God-image “works” for my psyche over time (which is a public experiment with a test subject of one), and this unusual God-image in turn reshapes my psyche – both sides are tied to each other.

5. So the first track is phenomenology and whether it results in longitudinal, recursive stability. What’s the second track, and why does it matter?

The second track is cultural and political predictions, conducted for more than a decade now in a recursive fashion. Because it makes claims outside my interior experience such as political incentives, cultural shifts, institutional decay, the behavior of ideologies, all rooted in how one responds to the crucifixion of opposites, these claims may then be tracked independently. The idea is that we are entering a period where the institutional containers for the crucifixion of opposites are failing, and that people are increasingly being forced to carry their own psychic weight – and this is catastrophic for those ill prepared, clinging to a redemptive God-image in a historical epoch which is becoming increasingly grim, increasingly neofeudal and obviously predatory. Those with redemptive God-images are increasingly and desperately “hopping” from one redemptive higher level belief to another, focused on the political Current Thing, turning to Eastern Orthodoxy, hoping the next cultural warrior influencer will save them, because the underlying collective feedback loop that previously sustained their energies is being starved. Tracking this trend and understanding the offloading function gives this track its predictive power.

Now, the predictions have to be specific enough where they could fail – if they’re too vague any outcome could be read as confirmation, which just reproduces the self-sealing problem one level up. One is incentivized to issue vague predictions because retroactive reinterpretation is cheap while specific predictions are expensive – expensive in time, processing power, energy, and reputation. I feel this in myself, of course, and my own predictions have slid between specific enough and too general – something I’ll work on in my upcoming 2027 predictions. I’ve been wrong about a lot of my predictions over the years, and while it’s not entirely comfortable it is absorbable into my framework so long as I am willing to update recursively my predictions over time – the more wrong an important prediction is, the higher up of a belief that requires changing.

In other words, so long as the model is being updated in light of new information it is not self-sealing on that level and it should, in theory, so long as one is smart enough and honest enough and persistent enough, allow one to hone in on what is actually “true” over time on a political and cultural level. What would threaten this isn’t wrong predictions but wrong predictions whose updates require a revision of the base assumptions generating the predictions in the first place – I have not come across this yet, but I’m made plenty of lower level revisions and expect to make plenty more.

So the question here is whether political and cultural predictions over a sustained period of time, so long as they are sufficiently novel and specific, converge on something more “real”, or whether it doesn’t, or worse, whether the predictions are increasingly obfuscated and generalized to increase one’s “hit rate” to increase credibility with readers. If the answer is the former, then it’s a different category of evidence than merely “this works for me.” But even if the political and cultural layers converged on increased accuracy over time, this would not prove that reality is metaphysically Abraxian, just like Newtonian mechanics did not prove Newtonian space, time, and gravity were final ontology. It establishes some sort of instrumental utility but may also suggests that it is perhaps tracking something beyond it, some sort of underlying, background metaphysics, even if it is weak abductive evidence. Furthermore, if this perspective consistently outcompetes other perspectives in terms of political/cultural predictions in the long-term, it makes these other perspectives look empirically weaker, even if it does not logically disprove them.3 So both phenomenological and predictive tracks create opportunities for the framework to fail, which matters abductively even if they are short of offering actual proof.

As stated above, this is therefore a kind of experiment conducted in public. It is a strange one because it isn’t a double-blind study conducted in a laboratory with Rockefeller Institute funding, and I am part of what is being observed (see the observer effect) which changes the evidence available to me. There is no clean separation between hypothesis and observation that a conventional scientific experiment would require (although such supposed separation is a weak fiction; social and professional incentives and institutional pressures cannot be properly acknowledged without undermining the results themselves, which in turn contributes to the massive and acute replication crisis). I can make my assumptions, predictions, revisions, failures, and other factors visible and continue testing whether my recursive framework offers increased explanatory power over time, or alternatively whether continued contact with reality forces another future revision of the God-image itself.

You can see my 2026 predictions here (which will be framed more tightly for 2027 predictions), my series on the upper elites and their intentions here, and fairly recent and tighter predictions about the Democrat Socialists of America here.

6. Doesn’t the Abraxian perspective inherently risk an inevitable sense of inflationary superiority, an anti-redemption redemption narrative – “I’m one of the few who can bear totality, and my alienation proves it”?

Yes, and I have discussed this extensively – the human psyche really wants a redemptive narrative, even if it is an elitist gnostic one, even if is an inverted one, and it can easily become an identity: I see what others don’t, I have the strength to hold the opposites internally that others are too weak to, I see the tragedy underlying reality (an endless cornucopia of violence, of differentiation followed by discarding what is not selected, of the ouroboros snake eating its own tail, forever, as a base condition) better than others, people are still trapped inside the mainstream frameworks while I’ve exited it like Neo in the Matrix. Isolation would be absorbed wrongly as evidence of my superiority, which is an ego-inflating, self-sealing, inflationary trap; it is close to a religious person saying suffering proves their faith or a revolutionary arguing that persecution proves the system fears their truth. The danger is that when one self-seals, one’s perspective becomes more and more divorced from reality over time, ultimately resulting in a rather rude awakening when the suppressed data outside of one’s immediate perception comes crashing back in.

This forces an unpleasant confrontation with an emerging foundational principle: no psychological consequence of holding an Abraxian belief should count as evidence for the truth of that belief. This is a painful but necessary line to draw. Under this principle my psychic stabilization doesn’t prove Abraxas, my alienation doesn’t either, neither does my feeling that it is profound, or my ability to tolerate horror that others don’t, or my understanding of their perspective and their lack of understanding of mine, or a belief that suffering is automatically evidence of depth, or that individuation is superior and guarantees success. This isn’t a glorious, shining road full of superiority and grandiosity; it’s like walking a tightrope over an abyss, where the Self serves as a local guiding influence toward wholeness without final destination or redemptive guarantee, and failure, collapse and inflation are just as available as provisional success. If you don’t feel the horror and terror of this while walking it, you aren’t on it. Feelings explain the phenomenology but not the ontology, and this gulf cannot be bridged no matter how much I would like it to.

7. Does individuation quietly smuggle a redemptive narrative back in that if you individuate, you’ll live a better life?

Not really. Individuation offers an orientation toward wholeness without a redemptive final stage being achievable. Furthermore, because the process involves an unending circumambulation around the center of the Self (“progress” toward wholeness as an organizing principle can go sideways or backwards for extended periods), it can mean losing status, relationships, certainty, career success, or conventional happiness, and total collapse lurks around every corner. There are no guarantees here. So while in some sense individuation does contain a belief that the Self orients a person toward wholeness and wholeness is an attractive measure by which one may measure one’s life (defined as an increase in one’s ability to live without splitting, projecting, or falsifying reality, even if it is painful), this isn’t a claim about receiving happiness or worldly success or afterlife redemption. Furthermore, the results towards wholeness can be assessed psychosomatically by the person undergoing the experience – the results are felt in the here and now.

8. If redemption is not the goal of this perspective, what remains if or once every container for the crucifixion of opposites fails?

This is why Ecclesiastes is important, covered previously here. Qohelet asks if works will stabilize him psychologically, or pleasure, or wisdom, or wealth, reputation, legacy, companionship – the answer is repeatedly no, no, no. It is not that these things are empty, but they are hebel – breath, vapor, amorphous. One can’t own them, their essence is elusive, ungraspable; they are good but they cannot bear the crucifixion of opposites which is the foundational axiom of the Abraxian perspective (discussed further in #9). This is anti-sealing; Qohelet lets the results of each container to play out as an experiment, and they fail – and he acknowledges their failure – despite his hope that they succeed.

The answer he arrives at is much weaker than redemption: receive your portion in life, recognize your limits, and live without final resolution. This is what he called heleq. “Eat, drink, and enjoy your portion” means this is what is available to us, so inhabit your portion of life without demanding it provides more than it actually does or that it will be permanent. There is also a major shift in personal responsibility which occurs, to be discussed below, in both directions (what one is responsible for, what one is not responsible for).

9. Doesn’t the framework make a final claim at the meta-level, that opposites are permanently co-constitutive and that reality contains no final resolving structure? If so, doesn’t this create the closed epistemic system I claim to avoid?

Yes, and this should be admitted instead of hidden. The framework is closed at the meta-level because it asserts an axiom that consciousness arises only from the permanent unresolved tension of opposites and may be constitutive of reality itself, and so any system promising a final resolution of that tension is deficient (and this includes all mainstream religions). This is a settled claim within the framework – there is no eschatology, no Second Coming, no return of the Hidden Imam, no Messiah, no culmination of historical materialism into classless equality, no sacred democracy perfecting mankind (although one may always be proclaimed, of course, as part of elite stratagems). All of these are dynamited.

However, this closure is not arbitrary; it is required for a psyche experiencing an intense psychosomatic mismatch between one’s perception of reality and inherited redemptive God-image. The closure acts as a kind of spiritual surgery: when faced with a gulf between perception and conscious belief, one can either (1) try to ignore it or otherwise falsify one’s perception of reality to match the inherited God-image (which doesn’t work well longterm), or (2) change one’s God-image to match one’s underlying perception of what reality actually contains. If the meta-level was left open that the opposites could be resolved, or that suffering might be redemptive, this framework would collapse into ambivalent relativism and leave the coherence-regulated psyche suffocating. In other words, the closing of the meta-level is what bridges the gulf between experience and God-image. This accomplishes four things psychologically:

1. It halts vertical escalation. For a coherence-oriented individual, a contradiction does not stay local – it climbs upward from event to meaning to worldview to God-image. This framework removes that escalation by fixing the ontology; if the purpose of life is to experience the crucifixion of opposites then there is nowhere higher for the anxiety to go. It can remain at the local level.
2. It converts a threat to the God-image into confirmation of the God-image. In a redemptive system, suffering is a problem for the God-image; it must be explained away as test, punishment, or beyond man’s understanding, which all feel deficient. But because the ontology is fixed here, suffering becomes expected as a condition of living, which validates the model rather than threatens it. This increases energy efficiency by allowing attention to be redirected from vertical to horizontal interactions.
3. It eliminates the search for a hidden resolving principle. The coherence-oriented individual is often trapped in a perpetual quest to find the cosmic justification that will make everything cohere; this is exhausting and metabolically expensive, leaving much less room to actually live life. The framework forecloses that search.
4. It provides a stable bedrock. Even if the crucifixion of opposites is cold and unyielding it is stable, and for a psyche that has experienced the vertigo of a collapsing redemptive framework, a stable floor is preferable to endless freefall.

Therefore the self-sealing nature at the ontological level is both a logical vulnerability and a regulatory utility. The trade-off is unlimited epistemic openness in exchange for the ending of vertical escalation, the inversion of threat into confirmation of the God-image, the termination of the search for cosmic justification, and the provision of a stable floor. The meta-level axiom is not empirically proven but it makes the system cohere for the psyches that need it.

10. So is the framework self-sealing or not?

Only the ontological layer is. I’ve built in exposure points relating to collapse, fragmentation, and functional failure which count against the phenomenological layer even though it doesn’t touch the ontological level directly, and an experience of repeated failed predictions which hit up against foundational parts of the framework would count against the recursive cultural/political level of understanding ( alternatively, successes would show the model is useful, not that its metaphysically true). This is why I’m trying to hold myself to the “no psychological consequence of the belief counts as evidence for the belief” rule.

I can’t fully close the pragmatic/ontological gap detractors press on, but my point isn’t that phenomenological resonance proves ontology, it’s that a metaphysical hypothesis acquires provisional credibility when it organizes experience coherently without requiring denial of disconfirming experience in a sustained manner (track 1), and especially when that coherence is reinforced by independently testable predictions which survive contact with reality (track 2). Both converge on a claim to stop demanding reality resolve its contradictions merely because we find them painful.

11. If the ontological layer is closed and settled, why does the framework remain open at the ethical and practical level? What guidance is offered, if any?

The framework is prescriptive at the ontological level (it tells you what reality is not) but proscriptive at the practical level (it tells you what not to do – don’t offload, don’t collapse, don’t act out – but it does not tell you what to do in any specific situation). This is an inversion of most belief systems; for example, the privatio boni is prescriptive at both levels, where it argues both that God is all-good and therefore you must obey his commandments and listen to his institutions or go to Hell, and this in turn generates specific ethics, politics, and daily practices. The God-as-totality perspective avoids telling you what to do because any fixed prescription derived from the ontology would be a false abstraction: if reality is irreducibly contradictory, then no single rule or set of rules can adequately navigate it without collapsing into one pole or the other. A prescriptive ethics would be a form of offloading (externalizing the crucifixion onto a rulebook) which the framework diagnoses as an error. Prescribing specific actions would recreate the very institutional capture and moral fanaticism the framework is designed to avoid. The privatio boni produces scapegoating, crusading psychology, and institutional hierarchy because it claims to know both the nature of reality and the specific will of God, while the Abraxian framework refuses to derive specific commands from its ontology.

There is always a cost for any approach or perspective in this paradoxical, contradictory reality, though; it is a question of what is the cost and where it is borne. The cost of this openness is that the framework is deficient in encouraging collective action, it is morally indeterminate in concrete crises (relying on the transcendent function of the Self for guidance), and it leaves the individual reliant on the subjective, unpredictable individuation process for orientation. On the flip side, the framework avoids the fanaticism, scapegoating, and institutional capture which afflict prescriptive systems, and it provides diagnostic clarity and somatic stabilization without creating a new ideology, hierarchy, or moral police. Whether this trade-off is acceptable depends on your psychosomatic needs: if you need a comprehensive moral, political or social system as an offloading function for the crucifixion of opposites to provide stability, it will feel incomplete and frustrating. If you are the intended audience – someone whose highest-order redemptive architecture has failed under the weight of irreducible contradiction, and who has recognized that no lateral switch to another redemptive framework can resolve the incoherence, thereby requiring a non-redemptive, tragic container that does not tell you what to do but does tell you what not to collapse into – it may be a helpful architecture which doesn’t reproduce the problem it diagnoses.

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Conclusion

Ultimately, reality appears to me to fundamentally consist of irreconcilable opposites, and the response I find most appropriate is to psychologically individuate enough to inhabit these opposites without requiring resolution. I have good reason to believe this framework is a useful way for me to inhabit such an apparently contradictory world. I have some reason to believe it tracks features of that world because of its predictive utility. More broadly, the continued absence of a serious contradiction between the framework and lived experience is itself part of the abductive case – it isn’t proof, but an ongoing reason for retaining the hypothesis provisionally. I do not yet have a method for establishing that its metaphysical interpretation is true, nor a fully operational falsification criterion for that interpretation, and I doubt such a proof is possible. But ultimately, this life must be lived, and if an Abraxian perspective stabilizes my psyche better than the alternatives available to me, then that is sufficient for my current purposes. I do not need to prove that Abraxas is the final metaphysical truth in order to decide that this is the framework I can most honestly and coherently live within.

There is a faint analogy to Pascal’s Wager, though the wager here is different.4 Pascal argued that believing in the face of uncertainty about God’s existence required a cost/benefit analysis: belief was cheap with the potential for unlimited reward, but failure to believe could result in eternal damnation; therefore, the rational response should be belief. The wager here isn’t about maximizing a metaphysical cost/benefit analysis, but about choosing how to inhabit uncertainty in this realm, on this plane, when metaphysical certainty is unavailable. Since worldviews will inevitably organize perception and action, the question becomes which one can survive sustained contact with experience, prediction, criticism, and revision. While Pascal asks which belief is rational given the stakes of being wrong, the Abraxian wager instead asks which framework is worth inhabiting given the impossibility of certainty. It is therefore not a wager that Abraxas is true, but a wager that the hypothesis that best survives reality is worth inhabiting provisionally.

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1

Yes, I understand that the axiom “reality contains no final ordering structure” is ironically a final ordering structure. The denial of the floor is the floor, which creates an uncanny valley effect. This approach halts vertical escalation of experienced contradiction up the chain of belief to the God-image and provides psychological stability (to some anyway), allowing one to recenter one’s energies horizontally to addressing people and experiences situationally.

2

Any sufficiently comprehensive ontological system eventually hits the Münchhausen trilemma, where if one asks “but why?” deeply enough it ultimately terminates in infinite regress, circular reasoning, or an unproven foundational/axiomatic commitment, depending on the specific ontology. Scientific naturalism can explain the “how” but not ultimate “why”, idealism prioritizes consciousness but has trouble explaining the external world, classical theism has twisted itself in a knot over the problem of evil in relation to endless evidence that “evil” is ontologically real and not merely the absence of good, Spinozism has trouble defining its reliance on a necessary substance, Buddhism relies on a redemptive exit of the birth/death life cycle so long as one meditates and detaches enough. There is no neutral epistemic standpoint outside all ontological commitments from which one can verify a comprehensive worldview without remainder. The Abraxian framework’s foundational commitment is that consciousness arises only from the lived experience of unresolved opposites, and that living such opposites – being crucified between them – gives to totality the one thing that it lacks, because consciousness arises from subject/object differentiation which are otherwise united within it. The relevant standard is whether a metaphysical framework makes its assumptions and vulnerabilities explicit, remains open to feedback, and performs better than alternatives in offering psychic stability, resilience, and an increased understanding of the world on a predictive basis.

3

To be more precise, the specific predictions are of a cybernetic/sociological sub-model, that shared narrative structures lose their capacity to metabolize accumulated contradiction under certain conditions. That sub-model does not itself require the metaphysical claim that good and evil are co-original and irreducible; a purely materialist systems-theory account with no God-image and no totality metaphysics attached could theoretically generate similar predictions. So when a prediction lands, what’s confirmed most directly is the sub-model, not the ontology sitting above it. The metaphysics gets whatever credit follows from having generated and organized the sub-model in the first place.

4

Alternatively, the Abraxian wager may be understood through William James’s The Will to Believe, where he argued that the right to adopt a hypothesis cannot be decided on intellectual grounds alone, provided it is living, forced, and momentous. A live option for one psyche is dead for another; forced for one, easily avoidable for another. Below threshold conditions the Abraxian perspective will read as bleak, unnecessary, even perverse; it becomes forced and thereby known only past a specific pressure point when the cost of maintaining a redemptive architecture exceeds its stabilizing capacity, and lateral escape to another redemptive frame is no longer available.

Human beings organize experience around an ultimate orienting image. When that image no longer accommodates lived reality, psychological pressure builds until a new organizing image emerges. Because this organizing image is embodied as well as conceptual, changing it involves years of cognitive, emotional, social, and bodily reorganization.

Welcome back. In this post I would like to discuss the process of God image changes. For new readers, a “God image” is a Jungian term meaning that humans as limited, finite creatures cannot know God itself; what we have is an image in our minds of what God is, which may change over time and is always incomplete versus what infinity might actually comprise. In the sense used here, the God image doesn’t even have to be about “God” – rather, it is the highest-order psychophysiological regulatory architecture of the psyche. This is the foundational organizing principle that determines perception, affect, motivation, contradiction-tolerance, and somatic coherence. A God-image screens reality, filters out competing perspectives, and maintains psychic equilibrium. All lower-level beliefs are nested beneath it.

In cognitive science, the predictive processing framework describes a related phenomenon at the mechanistic level. Andy Clark argues that the brain is not a passive receiver of sensory data but an active prediction engine, constantly generating expectations about what it will encounter. Sensory information primarily serves to correct errors in those predictions. The reason for this is energy efficiency; it is much cheaper energetically to possess a conception of the world and only update as necessary to the extent the conception is wrong than to continually generate such a conception from scratch. At the highest level of this predictive hierarchy – Clark’s “deep priors” – is something structurally analogous to the God-image: the foundational assumptions that determine how all lower-level predictions are organized, weighted, and revised.

Where Clark’s framework and this one diverge is in their orientation. His framework is computational, while my account insists that high-level prediction errors aren’t just Bayesian updates, they’re experienced as existential dread, as the crucifixion of opposites, that the body keeps score of epistemic collapse. So Clark describes the mechanism (how the brain constructs and revises predictions) while my focus is on the architecture: what happens when the highest-order predictions/the God-image can no longer be sustained. Clark treats the highest-level predictions as revisable with new evidence, while I argue that the God-image is constitutive: some beliefs are so deeply embedded in a person’s generative model that ordinary evidence is insufficient to modify them directly, so significant change may therefore require a restructuring of the model in which those beliefs participate. Such deeply embedded change requires not revision but reorganization – a crossing of a threshold into a new highest order belief. Such a crossing restructures everything nested within it over time when the old architecture becomes unbearable. This could also be understood as a collapse in precision weighting at the highest level, forcing a reorganization not just of the predictions but of the metacognitive framework that evaluates prediction error. (I recently reviewed Clark’s The Experience Machine and noted where his framework complements and where it falls short of a phenomenological account.)

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The Anatomy of a God-Image Change

I am not unique in experiencing a God image change, in my case from a redemptive, loving God to a horrifying God of totality, which I call Abraxas (a label for the unity of all opposites, including good and evil). Plenty of people go from believing formal religions to being secular non-believers or atheists (or the opposite), many adopt or lose a political platform as their religion or a cultural identity, many marry into other religions or convert from the religion of their upbringing. This is the backbone of many autobiographies, the loss of one’s core faith and then either its rediscovery (apologia) or its replacement (such as Augustine, covered previously). My understanding is that the conversion process is relatively similar regardless of the particular form that one’s God image change takes:

1. An individual receives a certain inherited background and worldview from their parents, social circle, and community, which includes a particular God image (the highest order belief, which may even be secular in the form of communism, capitalism, race, etc.).
2. The individual develops cognitive dissonance between what they perceive as reality and their inherited God image.1 This dissonance involves intellectual doubt, moral criticism, emotional suffering, and disaffiliation from a community.2 Trauma, especially in early life, major life changes, stressful events, and low self-esteem are key triggers.3
3. The individual tries to resolve the cognitive dissonance in favor of the established community but is unable to do so.
4. The cognitive dissonance grows and the individual looks for alternative solutions.
5. The individual tries out alternative solutions. Such changes may initially be in a form less than the God image (mid-level beliefs), but inevitably involve that layer because the psyche demands it, a point Augustine makes4 as does William James.5
6. The individual finds an alternative solution that works better for them than the perspective provided by their background. What exactly the individual finds resonance with depends on a combination of upbringing, genetics, culture, disposition, and one’s particular stabilizers (attachment and belonging, esteem and status, meaning and narrative, control and agency, coherence and truth-consistency).
7. The individual increasingly experiments with the alternative solution, which continues to solidify as a better option for them (or, alternatively, it doesn’t, and they may ultimately reaffirm their original faith in a new context6).
8. The individual considers the possibility of exit and the costs involved, including loss of community, loss of financial and social support, loss of reputation, and risks of the unknown.
9. The individual exits, either in a faster or slower fashion, adopting the practices, customs, beliefs, and worldview of the new worldview. One may note that this process – from the beginning search for an alternative God image, finding one that resonates, and the exit – involve gradations and threshold conditions; one does not seek out such fundamental changes on a whim, one is typically either consciously or unconsciously pushed into it due to psychosomatic distress.
10. The new God image installation continues and develops somatically in the body over time, through many disruptions where the body reconfigures expectations and responses based on the new highest order beliefs. (This process is deepest for God image changes, but also occurs for various mid-level belief changes).7
11. The somatic changes continue occurring for the person for many years, decades, or likely forever. One retains vestiges of the prior worldview – it never fully disappears, and which continue to frame how one views the world.8 9

The process is structurally similar across all god-image changes; what differs is the direction and the cost. Most God image changes are lateral between varying redemptive worldviews (i.e. a belief that with the right action or orientation, things will get better in the future, either in the secular realm or in the afterlife), and there is plenty of literature, beginning with Augustine’s Confessions on changing from a non-redemptive to a redemptive perspective. As I wrote in a Note, the greatest distinction in belief is not between secularism vs. religion, or religion vs. ideology, but between redemptive worldviews vs. non-redemptive worldviews.

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From Redemptive to Non-Redemptive God Images

I was interested in understanding the literature around God image change, but the problem is that the type of God image change I was and continue to experience does not seem to have much precedent – this is a structural observation, not a moral one. I have discussed portions of my story many times, but I was placed into intense double binds in childhood where no matter what action I chose, I would be criticized and undermined passive aggressively; this rendered my unconscious and psychic wiring to consider decisions to be of a provisional and turbulently changing nature; this in turn led me to see arguments and worldviews as always partial, never complete, and a feeling of hypervigilance. This was a subconscious process which I was not aware of consciously. A God image of totality, then, preceded my intellectual understanding on a somatic level by decades. The body believed what it believed first; it was my mind that took a very long time to catch up. This isn’t meant in an inflationary “special” way; the literature on god-image change is almost entirely about lateral or downward transitions – from believer to secular, from one religion to another, from redemptive to redemptive framework, or even from deconversion to back to the same faith, which is John D. Barbour’s focus in his excellent and very readable Versions of Deconversion (1994), where he focuses primarily on God image changes primarily within the Christian milieu, including an analysis of autobiographies by Augustine, Bunyan, Newman, Ruskin, Gosse, Sartre, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass, Charles Eastman, Malcolm X, C.S. Lewis, Edwin Muir, Dorothy Day, and Tolstoy, some of whom I may cover more directly in the future. One study of exit from a high-somatic-density religious framework – Lynn Davidman’s decent Becoming Un-Orthodox (2014), on Orthodox Jews who left Haredi communities – documents the inverse of what I experienced. Her informants began with maximum somatic density with 613 rigidly-held commandments, a full ritual life, and a body saturated with daily practice, who moved toward diffusion with loss of structure and inherited meaning.

My trajectory was and is the opposite: I began with total diffusion – a secular upbringing with no ritual, no religious body-knowledge, no structure, with a privatio boni all good God image – and moved toward density and weight: the slow, painful installation of a horrifying god-image of totality, where all human experiences both good and bad add to it. Their exit cost from heaviness-to-lightness was giving up the rituals which offered meaning to human action, while my exit cost is the construction of a framework that may bear the weight of existence (from lightness to heaviness). The literature has little to say about the diffusion-to-density direction; two exceptions are from secular to religious Judaism, which Davidman discusses in another book, Tradition in a Rootless World (1991), where practitioners take on the responsibility of regular rule-based religious practice10, and the example of Julian the Apostate, who abandoned the Christianity of his upbringing for Hellenism, which I will discuss further below.

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Why Redemption Scales and Tragedy Doesn’t

A trajectory from diffuse secular redemptive to dense tragic non‑redemptive follows the same structural steps as other God‑image changes, but the direction makes all the difference. Most mass-scalable religious systems contain significant redemptive architecture and preserve teleological rescue structures – whether Christianity (believe in God and Christ will make things right in the Second Coming, and in the afterlife he will sort the good and evil into Heaven and Hell), Judaism (perform the mitzvot and God will bless the Jewish people with success per the Chosen covenant11), Islam (submit oneself to God, live according to divine guidance with the hope of eternal reward in the afterlife), Buddhism (renounce cravings and be released from the wheel of birth and death samsara cycles), political solutions like communism, capitalism or socialism (peace on Earth and material prosperity is achievable with the right combination of human activities), or atheism (which almost always retains secular-progressive moral teleology beliefs but with the belief in God dropped). Even Stoicism is redemptive adjacent (align one’s behavior with Logos and it becomes easier to live) as are the Hellenic mystery religions (understand and accept the birth/death/rebirth life cycles and become free from that knowledge).

Therefore, a transfer from one redemptive God image to another redemptive God image has a much smaller gulf and associated intellectual and somatic change than a transfer between redemptive and non-redemptive God images. A change from a Hellenic non-redemptive worldview – everyone goes to Hades upon death, life is tragic, final redemption does not exist – to a redemptive one like Christianity is radical, but it is radical in the sense from going from a worldview of weight to a worldview which weighs much less – one feels so much better and freer to believe that one may go to Heaven when one dies, that redemption is possible and will occur, that God cares, versus the heavy Hellenic tragic view. The transition from Orthodox Judaism to secularism is also a reduction in weight as physical responsibilities decrease, but both are redemptive.12

Regarding Julian the Apostate’s partial attempt, who I have discussed previously, even his case shows incomplete somatic uninstallation; his Christian upbringing retained a strong residue after his conversion to Hellenism. Furthermore, his attempt to update Hellenism to compete with Christianity was destined to fail, because he was trying to graft onto a non-redemptive framework the competitive advantages of a redemptive one, which is a structural impossibility. The competitive advantages of a redemptive framework – hope and faith in the future, shared tribal allegiance, an approved enemy, centralized coordination, justice after death as long as one believes and follows the rules, all of which are enormously incentivizing toward group action – are not features that can be bolted onto a non-redemptive rootstock, they are emergent properties of the redemptive grammar itself. Julian wanted to copy Christianity’s almsgiving and regional, centralized priesthoods, but it was a rear-guard and losing action. The features that made Christianity win against Hellenism are inseparable from its redemptive grammar.

An Abraxian perspective is inherently non-redemptive and, as I wrote in a Note, it takes the tragic elements from both Christianity and gnosticism while rejecting their redemptive parts, creating an almost uncanny valley effect. Taoism is non-redemptive, too, but it is lighter and more flowy, arguing that to accept things as they are makes for easier living – in other words, it is non-tragic13; Hinduism is also non-redemptive, but the Western conversion to Hinduism almost always involves a prior romanticization that selectively filters the darkness, so it functions less as god-image change than god-image tourism. Under an Abraxas perspective, to be alive is to experience the crucifixion of opposites, which is a permanent condition. One may offload the experience of the crucifixion to institutions or to act it out via antinomianism, but the crucifixion remains and is an ontological feature of this reality.

There is a near zero institutional or cultural support for non-redemptive God images, and for good reason – they are structurally incapable of generating a noetic commons, which is the shared egregore which governs collective thought and action. A god-image that does not promise rescue or salvation is very inefficient at mobilizing populations, because mobilization is incentivized by the promise that participation will be rewarded in this life or the next. As Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge argue in The Future of Religion, religion (including secular redemption beliefs) will never disappear because people need “compensators” – systems of belief promising that rewards presently unavailable to them “will be obtained in the distant future or in some other context which cannot be immediately verified.” And as Davidman argues in Tradition, p. 152, “In her book on Catholic Charismatics, Meredith McGuire describes how “the millenarian dream that the perfect New Order is imminent” operated within the community as a powerful order-creating mechanism. The millenarianism in the Lubavitch worldview similarly served to create a well ordered universe for the [new initiates]. It reassured them that although the world did indeed seem to be in a critical state, that in itself was a sign that change was imminent. And because by joining this community they were allying themselves with “the ultimate source of order” – the Rebbe – they would “have a privileged position in the unknown glorious future.” This redemptive grammar is not true or false, it is structurally necessary for any god-image that aspires to scale beyond the individual. Non-redemptive frameworks can only survive at the individual level, sustained by personal constitution, not by cultural infrastructure, unless they are non-tragic such as Taoism and some versions of Buddhism). Tragic non‑redemption – the crucifixion of opposites held consciously – has severe structural difficulty scaling, because it offers no relief and no collective ritual that does not collapse into antinomianism or withdrawal – redemptive systems scale through shared promises; tragic systems can propagate only through shared recognition among people who have independently crossed the same threshold. This is why the experience feels uncharted: I have found little literature that maps from redemptive to non-redemptive tragic God images because no one has traveled this road at scale, and the road cannot be traveled at scale by design. It is really no fun to go from a psychically “light” perspective to a “heavy” perspective; alternatively, going from a “heavy” non-redemptive God image to a “light” redemptive God image is a tremendous weight off the psyche, which is partially why Christianity outcompeted its Hellenic competition; the process appears to me to be going in reverse now due to ratcheting neoliberal feudalism and technological advances, as discussed in this Note.

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The God Image Gulf

Adopting a non-redemptive God image offers a much broader and more nuanced perspective, an ability to consider that all positions emerge from partial functional orientations within totality and that holding the tension between them is the operative task. This is a much colder perspective in the sense that there is no God is coming to save us, that we are each responsible for our own actions, but warmer in the sense of increased interpersonal ethics and respect for each person’s particular process. The coldness and the warmth are the same thing experienced from different angles. It is also quite lonely, and the translation cost in explaining an Abraxian perspective to those within a redemptive perspective is very high as well.

The deep reason for the translation cost is not that Abraxian claims are harder to understand, it is that the gulf is not an argument gap but a hinge proposition difference. Using Wittgenstein’s framework from On Certainty (although I have major issues with his style): every worldview rests on hinges – propositions so fundamental that they are not believed but acted on, and that make all other beliefs possible. The redemptive person’s hinges include suffering is temporary, justice will be done, meaning exists. These are not things they argue for, they are the conditions that make arguing possible. The Abraxian perspective hinges include suffering is permanent, justice is a human projection, and meaning is maintained, not given. When a redemptive person encounters Abraxas they do not encounter a disagreement, they encounter a different set of hinges – a different bedrock – and no amount of argument can reach across that gap because arguments presuppose hinges, and the hinges are different. This is why the experience is not that I am failing to explain myself, it is that I am operating from a different perceptual apparatus entirely. The loneliness is not social, it is hinge-structural.

Because crossing the divide is so energy intensive, the desire for silence increases over time. I am more present in my interactions with others, I do not react to the horrors of this world with nearly the emotional energy that I devoted to it in the past – it is not that I am indifferent, I am still saddened by them, but hearing of or seeing such horrors no longer causes a challenge to my highest level beliefs, so there is both good and bad that arises from the God image as it increasingly reorganizes me somatically. Whether this god-image is livable in the long term I do not yet know, but it has worked for me provisionally thus far.

This process doesn’t feel like much of a choice, either – the choice was between remaining “lost” or going through the painful process of self-discovery. My path chose me, and the freedom one has is to embrace one’s unique path or to run from it and suffer increasing psycho-somatic pain as a result. As Marie Louise von Franz argued in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales,

This is why, according to Jung, not becoming conscious when one has the possibility of doing so is the worst sin. If there is no germ of possible consciousness within, if God made you unconscious and you just stay that way, then it doesn’t matter; but if one does not live up to an inner possibility, then this inner possibility becomes destructive. That’s why Jung also says that in a similar way one of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power. That is another aspect. If somebody has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn’t use it, that psychic energy turns into sheer poison. That’s why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities.

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1

See John D. Barbour’s Versions of Deconversion (1994), where he states, p. 206:

A “disjunction between theory and experience” often generates the elements constitutive fo deconversion: intellectual doubt, moral criticism of an inadequate way of life, emotional upheaval, and rejection of a community or a conception of society. This is especially so when the disconfirmed theory is not simply a philosophical perspective but approximates a Sartean project of a lifetime. Such an identity-forming theory is in effect a faith commitment, and rejecting such a worldview and project is tantamount to a loss of religious faith. The theme of identity transformation, which becomes more and more prominent in twentieth-century autobiography, often involves a form of deconversion. The faith that is lost is less frequently in a historical religious tradition and increasingly a matter of devotion to some secular substitute, an ideology or commitment that claims to provide the final and normative terms for understanding one’s life and determining one’s conduct.

2

Barbour, p. 2:

A deconversion has four basic characteristics that different autobiographers may emphasize to a greater or lesser extent. Deconversion involves doubt or denial of the truth of a system of beliefs. Second, deconversion is characterized by moral criticism of not only particular actions or practices but an entire way of life. Third, the loss of faith brings emotional upheaval, especially such painful feelings as grief, guilt, lonelinenss, and despair. Finally, a person’s deconversion is usually marked by the rejection of the community to which he or she belonged. Deconversion encompasses, then, intellectual doubt, moral criticism, emotional suffering, and disaffiliation from a community. Every autobiography discussed in this book involves at least three of these four dimensions of deconversions, although in particular cases one element may not be present. For instance, in Grace Abounding Bunyan does not reject a religious community, and the nature of his deconversion is rather different from Augustine’s. In his Apologia John Henry Newman makes few moral criticisms of himself or his former faith, as he precisely measures his increasing doubts about the Anglican church and, after considerable emotional suffering, joins the Roman Catholic Church.

3

As Lynn Davidman writes in Becoming Un-Orthodox, a study of Orthodox Jews who joined mainstream society, p. 21,

Many spoke of feeling marginal in their own communities, the result of having grown up in families that differed in obvious ways from the majority. In some cases, one parent had been lost to death or divorce; in others, the mother and father had profound religious differences; or, more distressingly, within these families the defectors experienced sexual, physical, or verbal abuse, or a combination. Hasidic teachings emphasize that if one observes all the commandments, families will be joyous, warm, and close. It was painfully obvious to my informants that the emotional dynamics of their families fell far short of this ideal. Other significant predisposing factors to exiting included: an acute awareness of gender inequality; exposure to secular relatives; and exploring forbidden media such as television, movies, Internet sites, and books (including philosophical treatises on relativism)….Both my respondents and I began to feel at a young age that following the prescribed religious practices of Orthodox Judaism did not yield the promised experience of wholeness, morality, and sanctity. The ex-Hasidim whom I interviewed described how their community’s metanarrative and the physical rituals through which it was enacted began to lose sense and meaning for them, as they (like me) became increasingly aware of the contradictions in their lives. As we questioned the disjunctions we felt and found ourselves unable to assuage our doubts, our commitments to Orthodoxy and the bodily ritual practices that are at its core began to waver. We ought to test the truth claims of Orthodoxy by violating one of the hundreds of commandments that guide all aspects of Orthodox Jewish daily life.

Or see Barbour, 209: “The large number of versions of deconversion that involve a struggle for autonomy in relation to the writer’s parents (for instance, those by Augustine, Mill, Ruskin, Gosse, and many apostates from cults) indicates that the loss of faith is often closely related to the task of forming personal identity in the context of one’s family.”

4

Barbour, p.15: “For Augustine deconversion is necessarily only a stage in a longer process, since human beings long to trust and believe in something beyond themselves. One cannot rest in deconversion; the heart and mind and soul will search restlessly for a new center of devotion, trust, and love. Placing one’s faith in anything other than God inevitably leads to disappointment. The Confessions describes not only a deconversion from Manicheism and conversion to Christianity but a series of conversions to and deconversions from various other objects of Augustine’s ultimate concern: philosophy, the unnamed friend who dies, the orator’s career, Neoplatonic wisdom, and the pleasures of “woman’s love”.”

5

Barbour, 74: “James anticipates functional definitions of religion (such as Paul Tillich’s conception of “ultimate concern”) when he holds that no one can live without a commitment that is, in effect, religious. This would mean that one can never rest in loss of faith. Only the divided self on the verge of either collapse or conversion could be said to lack some conviction which functions as a faith. James’ discussion of the loss of faith is ambiguous because while he presents permanent skepticism as a real possibility, he also holds that every human being, even the one who has been through “counterconversion,” has some “habitual center of personal energy” that functions like a religious faith to give meaning and purpose.”

6

The Puritans even make a system out of it. Barbour, 22: “The Puritan way of salvation generated a continuing cycle of deconversions and reconversions, as each moment of confidence and assurance yielded, slowly and subtly, to presumption, pride, or complacency. Noted by the Puritan’s scrupulous conscience, one’s very assurance caused a new round of despair about one’s moral condition and doubts about one’s election, precipitating a new need for deconversion in the form of repentance and struggling away from sin. Whether one regards this negatively as a classic double bind or vicious cycle, or positively as a profound means of revitalizing the basis of religious commitment and regeneration, the Puirtans forged a tight bond between the cycles of deconversion and conversion.”

7

This is an interesting post by a man named Dragos Roua, who commented on this concept in regards to his relationship to money. He grew up poor and became wealthy, but his body’s response to money lagged significantly his intellectual understanding and it took a very prolonged period, tested against various real world situations, before his body began to somatically accept his new situation, and the updates grew less intense and more sporadic over time but they never fully stopped – our early hardwiring takes a very long time to overright.

8

For example, see Barbour, 57: “Especially fascinating in Victorian versions of deconversion are the ways in which Christian rhetoric and values are appropriated in a writer’s attempt to express a new vision of human destiny. The language of Christian culture and community usually imposes itself even when an agnostic or atheist writer expresses confidence that one can live without the consolation of religion, without certainty about human origins or destiny, and without a divine justification for morality. Often the metaphors and structural elements of conversion narratives provide the organizing terms in which a writer envisages movement away from belief in God to agnostic principles and a new understanding of human existence.” And p. 211: “A central theme of this book is that deconversion is rarely if ever a total transformation of character and religious concern….Every author considered here can be shown to have been permanently marked by the faith he or she supposedly rejected. Thus one aspect of the religious significance of deconversion narratives is the deep and pervasive influence of religious commitments and ways of thought even on those who have abandoned a historical religious tradition.”

Or, take Ruskin, for a specific example, 68: “As many scholars have pointed out, there is also much continuity between Ruskin’s evangelical background and his secular vocation, especially in terms of such moral values as hard work, self-denial, service to humanity, and struggle against moral evil. Many of his aesthetic interests and presuppositions, such as his interest in allegorical interpretations of art, can be understood as characteristic expressions of his religious sensibility. Like so many Victorians, and like most authors of deconversion narratives, Ruskin was deeply influenced by his religious upbringing long after he consciously rejected it.”

9

Davidman, p. 184: “Neuroscientists have recently emphasized the ways experience effects changes in the biology of our brains. Building on this insight, I can say that defectors’ earlier experiences and practices have been hardwired into their psyches. We could almost say they have become part of our “psychic DNA.” The cultural tool kit and its embodied presentations continue to remain entrenched in our deepest selves.”

Further on this topic, I read the cyberneticist book The Tree of Knowledge (1987) which contained helpful discussions regarding how biological “hardware” relates to “software” downloaded from the environment (examples of a newborn lamb who, taken away from its mother for a couple hours, would not run and play with other animals thereafter; and two young Hindu girls raised by wolves, when reintegrated into human society, never became fully human).

10

Tradition in a Rootless World, p. 184, regarding women: “These behavioral changes included strictly observing the Sabbath, following the laws of kashrut, and even changing sexual behavior to conform to the community’s norm of no physical contact with men before marriage. “Conversion” to Orthodoxy involved no professions of faith or testimonials; rather, it comprised an accretion of observances.” And p. 202: “The price of joining is too high for most people because of (1) the ritualism of Orthodox Judaism, (2) the marginality and separation involved in adopting this way of life, and (3) the limits set on a person’s choice for a partner.” And p. 222: “Newcomers must make change sin their behavior that affect all aspects of their daily and social lives. There are many individuals who value the relative absence of restrictions in their lives enough to find Orthodoxy unattractive.”

11

Yahweh is a redemptive God for the Jewish people, but he is also demanding and wrathful in a way that the Christian God is not. Per Davidman, p. 141: “Hasidic socialization aimed to convince children that they would be severely punished by God if they failed to obey their parents or observe all 613 biblical commandments as they were interpreted in their respective communities. Hasidic children did not grow up with a conception of a loving and forgiving God; instead, they were told that God was harsh and stern and would penalize them for every transgression, even accidental ones. Esther, one of my respondents, highlighted this point. “The whole religion revolved around trying to escape or avoid punishment. And the fear – like God is a monster, really, to such an extent that if you are not nice today, then you will later have sick children. Similarly, if you don’t show proper respect to your parents, you will live in poverty for the rest of your life.”…The basic message was that if they violated God’s laws, he would send them every possible sorrow, sickness, and tragedy.”

12

Per Davidman, quoting someone named Binyamin, p. 82:

Whether I believed in the Hasidic teachings or not, at the bottom line, the only thing that mattered was following the commandments. At one point, when I was sort of debating, I was speaking with my stepfather about God and why it doesn’t make sense and this and that, and he said: “Binyamin. You don’t get it. Judaism doesn’t have to do with believing in God or not! Nowhere in the Shulchan Aruch [the most authoritative Jewish legal code, authored by Rabbi Joseph Karo in 1563] does it say to believe in God. It’s all about doing. Judaism doesn’t have to do with believing in God or not. It’s a lifestyle, a way of living. And just like every lifestyle, in everything you do there’s a manual. So Judaism as a manual, the Shulchan Aruch, and it tells you what to do from the moment you wake up until the moment when you sleep. And you follow this manual. Whether you believe in God or not, that isn’t as important.

Davidman adds on, p. 102: “[These] stories demonstrate the greater importance of actions over beliefs in the Haredi world. Questioning was written into the ancient texts; it was not problematic. But acting out bodily resistance to Jewish laws is a momentous event that might be the first step in defecting. These respondents were deeply aware of the difference between intellectual questioning, an internal, mental process, and violating a commandment, a physical act, as evidenced by the reported intensity of the physical experience.”

13

More specifically, the Tao contains both light and dark as co-original – the yin-yang is not good-conquering-evil but irreducible polarity. Wu wei (non-action, effortless action) is not alignment with the good but alignment with what is, which includes darkness, death, and dissolution. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao, so it has genuine apophatic depth. And crucially, Taoism does not promise escape from suffering; it promises something more like the dissolution of the resistance to suffering, which is not the same thing. The sage flows with what is, including horror, without fighting it.

However, Taoism differs from the Abraxian position in a critical way: it is fundamentally serene. The Tao is simply what is, and acceptance of what is produces a particular kind of peace. There is no crucifixion of opposites in the Jungian sense, no requirement to hold the tension actively and suffer it consciously. The Taoist response to horror is to flow through it, not to hold it as co-original and irreducible. This produces a different psychology: the Taoist sage is characterized by detachment and fluid non-resistance; the Abraxian position is characterized by active conscious holding of irresolvable tension, which is painful by design. Taoism is non-redemptive but also non-tragic. Abraxas is non-redemptive and tragic.

Online political rhetoric is full of phrases that assert unearned authority, claim undefined group identity, foreclose alternatives, and smuggle in redemption narratives. This essay examines the grammar of capture – the linguistic patterns that replace thinking with tribal performance – and offers a path toward more individuated speech.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” – Wittgenstein

Someone the other day on social media wrote something along the lines of, “We need to do [action].” This particular comment was in the context of a political post advocating electoral accelerationism, purging the GOP of establishment/Zionist types by hoping Democrats win as many seats as possible in 2026 elections so that a Groyper right would later be ascendant (lol), but the expression “we need to” is used regularly in all sorts of contexts. I found myself triggered by the expression – I felt physical agitation – and I pondered why this was. After reflection, the answer seems to be that it assumes commonality without demonstrating it:

1. They imply an undefined group identity. The speaker claims to speak for a “we” that has not been defined. Who is this “we”? Does it include the reader? On what basis is the reader included or excluded? Does “we” mean Americans? Humans? Conservatives? Whites? Anti-Zionists? Does the reader agree to the shared interest? It’s usually arrogant in the context it is used. In propaganda and online tribalism, “we” is often an act of epistemic annexation. By declaring what “we need to do” or what “we know,” a speaker attempts to bypass your consent. They graft your identity onto their agenda without your permission, forcing you into a false binary: either accept membership in their undefined collective or actively break rank and become an outsider.
2. They assert unearned authority. The speaker positions himself as the one who knows, the one who has seen through the deception, the one who can lead others to the truth. This authority is not demonstrated, it is assumed. “Need” – it assumes that there is a specific option that must happen, and the tone places the speaker in the role of decider/leader. On what basis is this authority derived from?
3. They claim to have examined all alternatives. The speaker implies that they have considered all options and arrived at the correct conclusion, but this examination is not shown, the alternatives are not addressed. The conclusion is asserted, not argued. Have all the options been objectively assessed? Would the reader necessarily agree with the analysis? Why is the speaker making that assumption?
4. They smuggle in a redemption narrative. The speaker implies that if the proposed action is taken, things will get better. Whether it is the Groyper right hoping for a cyclical reset or tech-dissidents waiting for institutional collapse, the underlying narrative structure remains theological. It relies on a secularized version of original sin (the enemy’s corruption), an apocalyptic awakening (the red pill), and a promised paradise (the societal restoration that follows victory). This is the redemptive structure – the promise that suffering will be rewarded, that justice will be done, that the arc bends toward the good. But this promise is not grounded in the structure of reality; it is hope, not analysis.

So “we need to” is an implicit assertion of “here’s a group, you’re a part of the group, I am the leader of this group, I have properly assessed all options, follow me to redemption.” This isn’t meant to assert that groups don’t form or exist or that leaders don’t arise from that formation, of course, but this isn’t how that expression is commonly used on the internet.

This contemplation then pivoted toward asking what other common online expressions express an underlying intent other than what the surface words appear to mean. Below is a list of common expressions I brainstormed that apply and why I think they’re not “on the level”. I will note that I am not entirely guilt-free from the following idioms; sometimes they are heuristic – rhetorical shortcuts employed – and sometimes it is old habits that die hard, but I do try my best to avoid them where I can.

Before I list them, a disclaimer: these expressions are common in the reactionary and dissident spaces. This is not because these spaces are uniquely guilty of lazy rhetoric – the left and the establishment have their own set of misleading expressions, movements I have critiqued extensively elsewhere. Rather, it is because this was my own world for a long time. I spent years immersed in these spaces, and I can speak to their rhetorical habits with firsthand knowledge. I have evolved past them to a different relationship with language itself. The purpose of this essay is structural analysis: how language captures us, and how we can try to refuse the capture.

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The Pattern

First, let me name what the below expressions have in common. Generalizing the “we” analysis above, they perform one or more recurring operations: claiming unearned authority, presupposing an undefined collective, foreclosing alternatives, and converting contingent political hopes into redemptive necessity.

1. Unearned authority. The speaker positions themselves as the one who knows, the one who sees clearly, the one who can lead others. This authority is not demonstrated, it is assumed.
2. Undefined group identity. The speaker claims to speak for a “we” that has not been defined. Who is included? On what basis? Not specified.
3. Unexamined alternatives. The speaker implies that they have considered all options and arrived at the correct conclusion. But this examination is not shown, the alternatives are not addressed.
4. Redemptive promise. The speaker implies that if the proposed action is taken, or if the identified enemy is defeated, things will get better. This is the redemptive structure – the promise that suffering will be rewarded, that justice will be done, that the arc bends toward the good.

The following list does not mean that ordinary practical language is intrinsically manipulative. They can be legitimate shorthand if the speaker identifies scope, evidence, counterexamples, and uncertainty. Rather, these phrases become capture-language when they conceal the speaker’s authority, erase the boundaries of the relevant group, foreclose contestable alternatives, and turn an uncertain political possibility into a moral necessity.

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The List

“Right” / “Left”

These are the foundational tribal labels. They are used constantly, yet almost never defined with any precision. What does “right” mean? Traditionalism? Libertarianism? Nationalism? Capitalism? White identity? The term is used to encompass all of these and more, often shifting meaning depending on the context. Who is included? Which factions are excluded? The terms are used to imply that all factions within the category share the same goals, values, and strategies. The speaker claims to know what “the right” believes, wants, or is doing, and also assumes that their understanding of “the right” is accurate and complete. Furthermore, these terms are often used to dismiss internal dissent within a coalition – e.g., “the right” is accused of something, and therefore any criticism of that accusation is dismissed as “leftist.” The binary dramatically reduces the ability to analyze nuance and conflicting ideas within a movement. There is also a redemptive promise: if “the right” wins, or if “the left” is defeated, things will get better.

The problem is not that political factions do not exist. They do. The problem is that “right” and “left” are usually employed as black boxes – they explain everything and therefore explain nothing. They are placeholders for complex, contested, and internally divided coalitions.

“The Elites…” / “The Globalists…”

These are the dissident equivalents of “the establishment” and are almost never defined. Who specifically? What institutions? What mechanisms? The vagueness allows the speaker to project whatever they hate onto the category. The speaker claims to know who the elites are and what they are doing. This knowledge is asserted, not demonstrated. They also imply that they are not part of the elite – they are the people, the ordinary, the excluded. But “the people” is never defined. The speaker implies that the elites are the cause of all problems. But this is asserted, not shown. And it also offers a redemptive promise: if the elites are removed or defeated, things will get better.

The problem is not that elites do not exist, they do. The problem, as above, is that the term is used as a black box – it is a placeholder for resentment, not an analysis.

“The Woke Mob…” or “Woke Mind Virus”

A construction that treats progressive activists as a single, coordinated force, and is used as a smear to dismiss concerns about inegalitarianism as irrational or dangerous. The speaker claims to see through the “woke” narrative. This insight is asserted, not demonstrated. Elon Musk uses this term constantly. The terms are also undefined: what does “woke” mean in this context? Is it transsexualism, is it homosexuality, is it mixed-race marriage? Is the women’s right to vote “woke”? Is it a complaint about society allowing these identities and relationships, promoting them, or forcing them? What is the “mob” or “virus” in this context, and in what relationship is it a “woke mob”? It spreads from person to person? What is the mechanism, how does it work, and how is it cured? Under what conditions is it cured? What is the cost of “cure”?The speaker also implies that “wokeness” is the cause of social decay, and alternatives are not considered. The redemptive promise is that if “wokeness” is defeated, society will return to sanity and order.

“Redpilled…”

A term from The Matrix, used to mean “awakened to the truth.” Often used to signal in-group membership. The speaker claims to have special knowledge that others lack. This knowledge is not demonstrated. The group identity is assumed: “We” are the redpilled, the awakened, the ones who see clearly, but “we” is undefined; one may ironically note that The Matrix directors both became transsexual and stated “redpilled” related to transsexual identity, which is diametrically different from the common “right wing” context. The speaker implies that they have seen through the illusion, but the “truth” they claim to have discovered is asserted, not argued. The redemptive promise is if you take the red pill, you will see the truth. The truth will set you free.

“Critical Thinking…”

Often used to mean “thinking like me.” Used to dismiss opposing views as uncritical or sheep-like. The speaker claims to be a critical thinker but this is asserted, not demonstrated. The group identity is not properly defined: “We” are the critical thinkers, the ones who think for ourselves. But “we” is undefined, as is “thinking.” Ironically, “critical thinking” often means turning off one’s critical thinking abilities to follow the opinion of the speaker. The speaker implies that those who disagree are not thinking critically, and the alternatives are not considered. The redemptive promise is if you think critically, you will arrive at the truth. The truth will set you free.

“Do Your Own Research…”

A construction that implies the speaker has done the work and the listener has not. It positions the speaker as intellectually superior while evading the burden of presenting evidence. The speaker claims to have done research, but does not present it. The work is invisible. Group identify is undefined: it implies that “we” are the researchers, the ones who think for ourselves, and it assumes that “research” leads to the speaker’s conclusion. Alternative conclusions are dismissed as not real research. The redemptive promise is if you do your own research, you will see the truth. The truth will set you free.

“Common Sense…”

A construction that equates the speaker’s position with obviousness. Used to dismiss opposition as irrational or dishonest. The speaker claims to possess “common sense,” which is defined as their own position. “We” are the sensible ones. Those who disagree are not sensible. Alternatives are not considered; they are not “common sense.” The redemptive promise is if we use common sense, we will solve the problem.

“It’s Obvious…”

A way of saying “I am right” without argument. The speaker’s position is so obvious that it does not need to be defended. “We” see the obvious. Those who don’t are blind. Alternatives are not considered, they are not obvious. The redemptive promise is we accept the obvious, we will act correctly.

“The Window Is Closing…” “We can’t afford to wait…”

Assumes a limited opportunity. Often used to pressure others into agreement. The speaker knows when the window will close, “We” are the ones who see the opportunity, and the speaker assumes that the window is real and closing. The redemptive promise is if we act before the window closes, we will succeed.

“The Solution Is…”

Asserts a solution without evidence. The speaker knows what the solution is, “We” are the ones who know the solution, but other solutions are not considered. If we implement the solution, the problem will be solved.

“You Don’t Hate Them Enough”

Asserts an unpunished criminal conspiracy worthy of hatred. The speaker claims to know who constitutes “they”, blames “them” for a litany of alleged wrongs of the world, and is telling you what your feelings should be about it. “You” don’t have the speaker’s knowledge of “their” unspeakable criminal behavior, but if you did, you would hate them more than you currently do, the lack of which speaks to your current level of ignorance and deficiency, until it rises to such a level as to constitute “enough hatred.” (This phrase is a form of emotional conscription; it does not seek to inform or persuade, it seeks to recruit your affect. The speaker does not want you to think, they want you to feel. And they want you to feel in a specific, intense way that serves their agenda. It is the grammar of capture applied to emotion.)

If “you” “hate” “them” “enough”, then it will somehow lead to real world action where “they” will be punished, leading to a rebalancing of the world. But until “you” “hate” “them” “enough”, the world will remain broken – and it’s your fault that it is so, as the glorious, enlightened speaker is so kind as to tell you.

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Why This Matters

What unites these expressions is their function: they allow the speaker to assert authority without demonstrating it, to claim group identity without defining it, to foreclose alternatives without examining them, and to promise redemption without grounding it in reality. But these expressions are structurally misleading, even if they are not consciously intended to be so by the speaker: they perform epistemic and social operations that exceed what their literal content acknowledges. They argue something different than what the surface words actually mean. They replace thought with performance, they assert authority without justification, they claim group identity without demonstration, they smuggle in redemption narratives without evidence. All of these collapse distinctions that should remain differentiated: speaker / audience, observation / interpretation, fact / value, evidence / assertion, individual / collective, possibility / necessity, analysis / prescription, uncertainty / certainty, present condition / redemptive future.

As I’ve explored elsewhere in examining language as an active forcefield shaping the architecture of consciousness, these idioms are psychic technologies. These kinds of expressions are a mechanism by which egregores (as discussed here; it is not being used in an occult sense) maintain themselves; they are the grammar of capture. Finite beings necessarily compress reality into models. Capture begins when the compression becomes invisible to the person doing it. These expressions function as the feedback loop’s maintenance signals. When someone says “we need to” or “the elites are…”, they are broadcasting a signal that reinforces the collective attention pattern, pulling individual god-images back toward conformity with the egregore’s requirements. The social friction of not repeating these expressions – the confusion, hostility, or exclusion that follows – is the egregore’s back-pressure mechanism enforcing compliance. Each phrase analyzed above hints at the user’s underlying stabilizer function, a linguistic technology that allows the user to regulate their psyche through group identity rather than internal pressure-bearing. A phrase like “we need to” is better understood as a linguistic cue or micro-ritual of recruitment, and it can activate a stabilizer: “We” may recruit attachment and belonging, “redpilled” may recruit esteem and special knowledge, “The solution is…” may recruit agency and control. “The arc bends…” may recruit meaning and narrative. “It’s obvious…” may provide pseudo-coherence. They provide recruitment without suffering the cost of individuation.

The point here is not to ban the word “we,” or to pretend that collective action is avoidable. Every relationship, institution, and project requires some provisional commonality. The question is whether the speaker makes that commonality visible and contestable: who is included, what is being asked, what evidence supports it, what costs it carries (for every action carries cost, no matter how wonderful it seems at first glance), and who may reasonably dissent. Non-capture language does not abolish coordination, it makes the terms of coordination legible.

Actual thinking – looking at the roots of ideas, seeing how they are connected to other ideas, recognizing the limitations of any particular label or approach – is scary, difficult, uncertain. We (yes, here I use the word as applied to all living beings) are all limited beings crucified by the opposites under totality. We see narrowly, through a glass darkly. What our models must exclude does not disappear; it accumulates as unprocessed pressure until it returns in a form we can no longer contain. This is the tragedy of existence. The tragedy is not that we are captured by egregores, but that we seek capture because the alternative – bearing the crucifixion of opposites internally – is metabolically expensive. Offloading the crucifixion onto institutions or ideology is a smart strategy for most people because it frees up energy that would otherwise be consumed by agony and paralysis, allowing them to actually live.

The alternative to misleading rhetoric, then, is precision and humility. When you are tempted to say “the elites,” ask yourself: who specifically? what institutions? what mechanisms? And then say that instead. When you are tempted to say “we need to,” ask yourself: who is “we”? on what basis am I including others? have I examined the alternatives? And then say that instead. When you are tempted to say “the solution is,” ask yourself: how do I know? what am I not considering? what if I’m wrong? And then say that instead. My framework’s own language is not immune to these patterns, I am not perfect; precision and humility are ongoing disciplines rather than achieved states (and I recognize the irony of claiming a superior position in this post – “I see what others do not” – but such is unavoidable in picking apart these language games; what matters is that the argument is explained, dissected, and not asserted).

This is not easy, social, or comfortable. It is the path of individuation – the refusal to offload responsibility onto vague collectives or hidden enemies, the refusal to assert unearned authority, the refusal to smuggle in redemption narratives that are not grounded in the structure of reality. ¹ What non-capture language looks like is the specific, the provisional, the first-person, the interrogative, hermetic speech which circulates between registers without resolving them into doctrine. Compare “We need to destroy the system” with: “I think institution X is producing outcome Y through mechanism Z. My proposed intervention is A, but I haven’t ruled out B or C, and I don’t know whether the intervention would produce unintended consequences.” The first sentence is cheap because its costs are invisible and unpaid – someone still has to supply the missing specifics, absorb the unexamined risk, live with the consequences of an action no one actually argued for. The second sentence is expensive because the speaker pays those costs up front, in public, by name. This is why individuation is difficult and capture is attractive: capture lets you export the bill. In other words, language is individuated if it acknowledges its own limitations, does not claim finality, and remains open to revision. Ultimately, it is a refusal to employ linguistic shortcuts that otherwise allow you to escape responsibility for your own epistemic position.

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1. ↩︎

Individuation, in this framework, is the internal response to the crucifixion of opposites: the ego holding the opposites in suspense without resolving them through external authority or acting-out, until a provisional orientation emerges from within. It offers no cosmic protection, no guarantee, no redemption, only increased consciousness, which is expensive and which most psychic configurations cannot sustain under ordinary conditions. The linguistic behaviors described in this essay are the speech-equivalent of that same discipline.

Beneath its surface as a sitcom review, this essay explores the appeal and ultimate limits of the hedonic fantasy embodied by Two and a Half Men. Along the way it examines Charlie Sheen’s collapse, Jon Cryer’s quiet professionalism, changing cultural norms, and the author’s psychological relationship to the world the series portrays.

This is a post about the show Two and a Half Men, which aired for 12 seasons from 2003 until 2015. I’ve watched it over the years and always found it enjoyable – the Charlie Sheen version (season 1-8), anyway – and, after starting a sporadic rewatch (and trying to find one particular episode which made me laugh uproariously back in the day and which I just couldn’t find) I decided to watch the series in order and grade them season by season. There are 262 episodes overall, and I calculated early that if I watched 3 a day it would take me 87 days to get through. I don’t really feel like focusing on so-called “dissident” films or shows anymore – my definition of what “dissident” entails has changed pretty radically in the past year or two1 – and my Andy Kaufman-esque beat-by-beat April fools post analyzing beat-by-beat How Stella Got Her Groove Back went over as well as a hot lead balloon.

Sheen is an interesting case because he is so charismatic and likable, even as he is known for being rogueish – he presents as having heart underneath. His life was easy, full of endless high profile film roles and then this show, where he became the highest paid actor in the history of television making $1.8 million an episode, while doing a tremendous amount of drugs and having endless amounts of sex in between two failed marriages. Yet due to the nature of hedonic adaptation combined with satiation – where one gets used to whatever baseline one has, no matter how good, and needs even greater “hits” to get excited – he grew bored with what he had (or the drugs finally got to him), torched his reputation by ranting publicly about having “tiger blood”, having sex with transsexuals and getting AIDS and his career basically died, while blowing through his fortune on alimony and child support and paying the sexual blackmailers over $10 million (they had a video of him getting a blowjob from a transsexual, apparently, and Sheen was desperate to keep his “man’s man” reputation, correctly intuiting that his career would end if he was seen as a bisexual with AIDS).

Why do this season-by-season watch and commentary, and why should I (or you) care? First, I think the show is ultimately a great cautionary tale about having it all and then losing it. Materialism does not bring happiness. Chuck Lorre had originally pitched the show as a combination of a Job figure – a good person where everything goes wrong in his life no matter what he does (a reference made explicit in S8E4) – with restrictive, rule-following Saturnian energies (Cryer), and his Dionysian brother (Sheen), and I have strong resonance with both figures.2 Also, the show came out in the period before “Me Too” and transsexualism, and it’s simply a man’s fantasy – being rich, having lots of leisure time, caring for family, and enjoying lots of sex with attractive women while being liked and adulated by the public. Watching it and there is no deep message being pushed, it’s meant as light entertainment; of course secular hedonism as an end point to living was merely a historic blip, it could never have lasted (for many reasons), but it can still be enjoyed on its own terms, I think.

The acting is superb throughout, especially Jon Cryer3 as Alan Harper, the Job figure – the weaselly, poor mooch who lives off his brother. Cryer had a long career as a middling but professional4 and humble5 actor and this was his big hit (which he chose to pursue over being a finalist for the role of Gaius Baltar on Battlestar Galactica), and my sense is he knew how hard success was and how it should be treasured (and whose decent autobiography So That Happened I read6 and will provide some quotes from; Sheen also has an autobiography, but I did not feel the urge to read it7). Sheen was cast early but Cryer, who was basically playing himself8, had to fight hard for the role after being labeled a show-killer for having multiple prior failed shows, a story which Cryer recounted.9 At one point both Cryer and Sheen’s lives mirrored their show lives.10 Sheen was paid 3x or more what Cryer was, which upset Cryer as the show matured, and later on he went on to discuss politics publicly in a standard Hollywood “Orange Man Bad” screeching manner, which he continues to do today. Chuck Lorre struck lightning in a bottle with this show, much more so to me than his other hits like Big Bang Theory (mediocre because the premise feels forced and the comedy is shallow), Mike & Molly (boring), or Mom (also boring).

I’m in a bit of an idle mode at the moment mentally and spiritually where I feel like I’ve found out the nature of the world, uncovered the metaphysics that makes most sense to me, contrasted it against the closest thinkers I can find (Jung, Berdyaev, Weil, Kierkegaard, Philip K. Dick, Heinz von Foerster, Hans Eysenck etc.) which has refined my views further, and I’m wondering: what now? Part of me has retreated to a hedonism fantasy – what if I had made lots of money while younger and had a parade of women around, banging myself into oblivion? This show is adjacent to that fantasy, although I would have gotten bored by it even if it had somehow happened – hedonic adaption is a very real thing, and no matter how rich or successful one is one still grows old, health fails, death awaits, with family and friends of one’s youth going long before one does – and those who have had an easy life often have trouble coping when the pain finally does hit. I think I would have very likely hit the hedonism wall, gotten bored, and be right back to where I am now – studying philosophy and metaphysics, contemplating it and then writing it about it in solitude. Another aspect of covering this is that I can’t really turn off my deep dive analytic mode, which is central to my personality; if I don’t have a place to concentrate it, then the energy loops and spins in me which is unpleasant. Better to turn it toward a deepdive of a fun show when there’s nothing pressing than to loop.

The viewership numbers were pretty steady throughout the series, except for a fall during Sheen’s last season (season 8) and the final two seasons with Kutcher (season 11 and 12). I may or may not cover the Ashton Kutcher seasons (9-12), we will see how I feel when I get to it. The problem with Kutcher is that he wants to be seen as a “nice guy” way too much, he is a mushball with soft merchant Mercury energies while also wanting to be seen as “smart” in tech (and, to be fair, he has made strong tech investments in real life) – while at the same time he has a dark side with his longterm friendships both with Danny Masterson and Diddy, both of whom went to prison for dark sexual activities. Sheen as a charming rogue who you know is a rogue is much more fun to watch than the unfunny and strange Kutcher dynamic, but Kutcher did come in and save the show after Sheen flamed out which took courage. The following footnote analyzes their energy makeups in line with my prior psychic stabilizers post.11

Okay, let’s get to the season reviews.

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Season 1 was released in 2003, Sheen and Cryer were both born in 1965 so they’re 38 here – young! They had previously acted in Hot Shots together. Angus T. Jones who played the “half man” is 10.12 Cryer still has his hair, in later seasons it starts to go and they spraypaint it back on (and make fun of that in an episode). This is the introduction season – Alan and Jake move in, the mother Evelyn is introduced (who I was surprised to find out is gay in real life), Sheen is roguish but loveable as a wealthy Malibu playboy with new love interests every episode and the show is finding it’s feet which is okay, but the first season in network shows is rarely very strong. Highest rated episode: Episode 5, 8-8.5/10. Lowest rated episode: E22, 3/10. Season average: 5.18.

Season 2 (2004). This sophomore season is finding its footing, and the season average improves a bit. There are a couple of standout episodes and a bunch of mediocre ones. The show has yet to fully find its groove. The best episodes typically involve Alan and Charlie without the supporting cast – Berta, Evelyn13, Judith14, and especially Rose15 are inferior for different reasons (see the footnotes), although not always. The show works when it stays inside its own realism (male fantasy, fraternal dynamic, consequence-light hookups) and weakens whenever it imports elements from outside that realism (Rose’s stalker logic, the shrew dynamic’s unresolvable power asymmetry, the two-dimensional female authority figures). Highest rated episode: Episode 12 and 23 both with 9/10. Lowest rated episode: episode 9 and 13 both with 3/10. Season average: 5.395.

Season 3 (2005). This season features both Charlie and Alan engaging in multi-episode relationships, Charlie with Mia and Alan with Kandi (after Kandi sleeps with Charlie first). The episodes remain highly erratic in their ratings, with the highest rated episode being Episode 9 with an 8/10 and the lowest being Episode 12 with a 2.5/10 because it was too forced and Cryer overacted. The highest rated episode was lower than the highest ones in prior seasons and the lowest was lower, but the season average still increased. Season average: 5.416. I’m a little surprised and was expecting a steady increase by season 3.

Season 4 (2006). Somewhere in season 3, definitely by the start of season 4, watching began to feel like a chore and not so much fun. I attribute this to the basic idea of the show being fleshed out and explored, so the ratcheting of outlandish behavior has started (see Kandi) to try to keep the show “fresh”. I will keep grinding out the episodes, at least for now, out of lack of a better thing to do, and I still want to find the episode that made me laugh so hard. Highest rated episodes were Episodes 6, 9, and 14 at 8/10, and the lowest was Episode 2 with a 3.5/10. Season average: 5.354, so slightly decreased from Season 3.

Season 5 (2007). This was a truncated season with only 19 episodes as opposed to 24 in a standard season due to the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. Highest rated was E13 with 8/10 and the lowest was E12 with a 2, maybe less – the worst episode of the show so far which was modeled on Misery and featured Rose. Season average: 5.157, which continues to decrease from season 4 and 3. On the bright side, Alan has started slightly displaying some kooky characteristics which Cryer pulls off very well, which will be accentuated in future seasons to keep the show from becoming too stale.

Season 6 (2008). This was the worst season so far, both because the show is running out of ideas and because Charlie’s extended relationship arc with Chelsea is a downer. The actress who plays her is fine and doesn’t bother me, but she is written as a nag – not due to a personality quirk, but simply due to male/female dynamics. This season had the lowest episode of the entire series with a 0, Episode 21, which featured a wildly unrealistic scenario with Rose, a character I don’t like. The highest rated episode was Episode 4 when Charlie hits on Alan’s receptionist, while Alan is very unhappy about it. Jake has much less screen time this season, as does Evelyn, and Rose is almost featured not at all (thankfully). Season average: 4.479, which surprisingly continues its decline from Season 5. I hope it pulls out of this rut next season.

Season 7 (2009). The show rebounds from the prior season but is still treading water; Sheen’s acting is increasingly becoming frazzled due to off-screen drug use. One of the things I will note is that Charlie’s approach to dealing with women on the show (not just this season) – easy willingness to apologize without fully meaning it, checking his ego in doing so – while sometimes pushes too far into obsequiousness, is pretty antithetical to my own approach, which often involves egoistic pushback and angrily stewing with a grudge for awhile. An experiment in adopting Charlie’s approach had surprisingly positive results, although it didn’t come naturally to me. The highest rated episodes of the season were episode 1 and 12 tied at only 7.5/10, and the worst was episode 10 which was a 0 where the writers infantilized Charlie’s character in a clumsy and dumb manner. Season average: 5.045, so better than Season 6, but still worse than other seasons.

Season 8 (2010). Cryer noted in his autobiography how bad Sheen looked this season16 to the point he couldn’t remember his lines.17 The season was poor, and I hated the Rose-focused episodes. The highest rated episode was E13 with a 7.5 or 8/10 because of Alan’s funny jealousy, the worst was E14 due to it being a ridiculous Rose-centric episode. The Season average was 4.1875, the worst of every season, and there were only 16 episodes when a normal season has 24 – a truncated season. I could see the deterioration of Sheen in real time almost, which began in the middle of Season 7 and never recovered, and they increasingly focused on Cryer’s character to try to make up for it. I will note, looking back, that watching this show has likely encouraged me to drink more alcohol (nothing too crazy).

Season 9 (2011). Screw it, I’ll keep watching the goofy Kutcher seasons and see how long I can stomach them – no guarantees. I hadn’t found the hilarious laugh-out-loud episode I’ve been looking for, which I guess must be in the Kutcher batch. It wasn’t clear if the show would continue after Sheen’s departure, but the network had pre-sold a couple more seasons and the money was too good to resist, I guess. Hugh Grant was supposed to be Sheen’s replacement but he backed out at the last second, uncomfortable with the lack of script to review. The biggest problem is that the hedonism fantasy is dead under Kutcher, that only worked under a rogueish but loveable Sheen (maybe it would’ve worked under Grant? not sure) – and Kutcher sucks, dopey voice, desperately wants to be likable and be seen as “smart” – so the continuation of watching this must be different. We will see if Cryer can carry the show on his own with the rest of the original cast, or if he can’t – I don’t know.

The flimsiness of the Alan/Walden connection is readily apparent and the bones aren’t strong enough to hold up the story regardless of the acting; most of the rest of the cast has been downgraded into occasional appearances to make room for new characters like Kutcher’s ex-wife, girlfriend, business partner, etc – I wish they had kept Herb around more, his character is excellent. I know that Cryer and Kutcher got along well, although their onscreen chemistry is mediocre, and Cryer attended Kutcher’s wedding (unlike Cryer and Sheen at the end – Cryer hasn’t spoken to Sheen since the latter’s meltdown). The highest rating episodes of the season were E9 and E22, both excellent episodes (E22 was the one I was looking for), and I gave them 9’s, but they both could have been higher. The worst episode was E12 which gave Kutcher a gorilla for a brother, 0/10. The season average was slightly better than Season 8 at 4.5/10, but good enough to keep watching. Cryer is fully carrying the show by escalating into ever-increasing absurdist situations where he is the butt of the joke; Kutcher isn’t funny at all. Also, the house itself is and has always been its own character and part of the show, and see below how they massacred my boy. This has implications extending to the core differences between the two eras; light hedonism vs. bland technocracy, a small part of a much bigger trend draining the world of color. Here’s Sheen era:

Here’s the “remodeled” Kutcher-era house, drained of life and personality:

Season 10 (2012). The Kutcher-era show premise really wobbles – it’s wildly unrealistic that Walden would keep Alan living there – and there are far too many Walden-focused episodes. The highest rated episode was an Alan-focused episode at only 7/10, episode 22, and the lowest was a Rose-focused episode at 0/10, episode 6. The season average was yet another near low, at 4.217/10. Jake’s character was written out of the show after Jones publicly calling it “filth” due to his Christian beliefs, but he later apologized and will be back for the series finale. I’m still thankful the show continued – it’s worth watching still for Cryer’s performance – although Kutcher sucks. Berta is featured in a bunch of episodes sporadically, while Judith and Rose have mostly been written out of the show.

Season 11 (2013). This is was a strange season; the first half was terrible, political and unfunny, but the second half surprisingly got better and better. The show initially pushes lesbianism, homosexuality, and transsexuality in a very crass and crude way, but then it pivots to a plot involving Alan having an affair with his ex girlfriend while becoming friends with her boyfriend under an assumed name, and this grew on me over time. The second half focuses more on Alan instead of Walden which is a plus. Lowest episodes: E9 and E10 which push transsexualism with 0’s, highest was E17 with Alan dating his ex girlfriend’s boyfriend’s sister with a 9, but the finale was also solid with an 8. Season average: 4.09/10, the lowest season yet, but the first half was a 3.18 average and the second half was a 5, so it picks up substantially.

Season 12 (2014). The show ends just a couple years before Me Too starts (2017), when humor more or less officially died. This is a short season with 16 episodes, when most seasons had 22-24. It’s not a surprise that this was the last season as ratings declined starting in Season 11 because of the policitized woke stuff (lesbianism, transsexualism, homosexuality, gay adoption):

This season was terrible, and there was a long stretch of 0 ratings, which picked up toward the end when they end the gay marriage/adoption plotline and pivoted back to adult relationships. The season average was a horrific 2.28/10, by far the worst of the series, fallen into the depths of Hell, and the highest rated episode was an 8 in the series finale, which was well plotted with a lot of jokes. The show was founded as a guy’s fantasy – Charlie Sheen with his beach house and women, displaying magnanimity to his loser brother – and ended with a gay marriage and mixed race child adoption, with a lesbian niece. I guess that reflects the decline of America too. Season 12 was hard to sit through despite being a short 16 episodes and I must say I’m glad it’s over. Then again, it’s pretty amazing how they stretched this concept about – with an ultimate focus on Alan’s Job role and the house itself – for twelve seasons.

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Conclusion

This ultimately turned out to not just be reviewing a show, but tracking the collapse of a certain kind of unselfconscious masculinity – a world where a man could be a man, where sex was consequence-light, where the worst thing that could happen was being nagged by your ex-wife – and its replacement by something that felt deeply hollow and performative – a moralized soap opera about gay marriage and adoption which itself mirrored the changes in broader society. The pleasure was drained out of it, and it’s a perfect example of the skinsuiting concept: the comedy was intentionally replaced by sociopolitical programming, and I was acutely aware of and uncomfortable with the manipulation. The house – the central symbol – became a hollow shell mirroring this, which is redecorated in a cold, modern style, monochrome, modern, and much worse than the warm Sheen-era Mediterranean style.

Ultimately I’m glad I did this ridiculous 262 episode watch and analysis, as it kept my energies moving as I am in a kind of holding pattern. The exploration of the hedonism fantasy did not result in any profound insights or changes, but I did not expect it to; casual hookups and short-term relationships had been generally denied to me in my formative years, and when formative experiences are denied to a person, they often become “stuck” on that period of their lives. Whether this watch shifts the underlying terrain I’m not sure, but the crucifixion of opposites here involves both holding the hedonic fantasy as an attractive vision while also recognizing that it would almost certainly be unlikely to be sufficient as a carrier for my energies, which requires contemplation, analysis, and synthesis via writing; it certainly wasn’t enough ultimately to contain Sheen’s wild Dionysian energies.

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1

Basically, my definition of “dissident” changed from reaction against the forced egalitarianism permeating the West to following one’s individuation path regardless of societal pressures. This perspective shifted from something reactive to generative. I don’t mean individuation as individualism, egotistically following whatever one decides; rather, we all have a specific path in this life, something we are meant to fulfill if we listen to the deepest inner impulses, and our choice is either to acknowledge and follow that path, at least to an extent, or to suffer increased psychological burdens as this Note describes.

2

I also think of Frank Grimes as a restrictive Saturnian, Job-like figure from the Simpsons, and Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants, especially his juxtaposition with Spongebob and Patrick in the Magic Conch episode.

3

The last name “Cryer” brings to mind the figure of the town crier, a public figure who performs for the masses, and also a “crier”, someone who whines and complains. I often notice resonance between a person’s character and their name, or alternatively, that people adopt names that more suit them; Carlos Estevez went by the stage name “Charlie Sheen” (like his father Martin), where Sheen means “a soft luster on a surface.”

4

p. 59: “Years later, my mother [a famous stage actress] and I were reminiscing about my first taste of professional acting, and she said something that really struck me. She said that while she know from watching me at Stagedoor Manor that I had a talent for performing and making people laugh, and that from seeing me onstage in Torch Song Trilogy she knew I was going to make it, what really gave her the idea that I was cut out for acting as a career was how I dealt with the firing.

“Jon”,” she reminded me, “when they handed you your pink slip, what was wonderful about your reaction was that it was complete anger and outrage. You came home and said, “I could have done it, Mom! They didn’t give me the chance!” rather than, “Oh, poor me, I’m defeated. I’m never going to do this again.” You were a warrior, and I was so very proud of you.”…[I] know that inside me I did discover a resilience and an urge to prove my worth that’s stood me in good stead ever since.”

5

p. 265: “I didn’t care about whether I had the A story or the B story each week. I’ve had both over the years. The quality of what I was doing was always paramount. Besides, having the A story each week is exhausting, because you’re in practically every scene. If I have a well-written secondary story line that gives me something really funny to play, I’m happy. The best material comes out of an organic process, and if you encumber writers with demands like, “give me that character’s funny lines!” or, “Why don’t I have more to do?” then they’re writing from a place of hampered creativity and pressure. I want the writers to go where the funniest stories are, period.”

6

Cryer is mostly known for his Two and a Half Men role, but he only gets to discussing it about 75% or more through the book, focusing on his origins and lesser known roles. He doesn’t discuss his favorite or least favorite episodes or how his character evolved over time except in passing, which I found to be a disappointment. But still, a pretty light and easy read overall.

7

Earlier in my life Sheen’s autobiography would have been far more interesting, but it’s almost two dimensional from my current standpoint: man has too-easy success with work, fame, and women, lets it go to his head, falls into drugs and transsexual whores, his ego swells and blows everything up, and his career is ruined; he looks back at it later with more humility. Cryer is more interesting because he remained professional throughout, did the job, kept his head low, stayed humble, and grinded, not taking things for granted – that’s a more interesting psyche to me currently.

Update: I skimmed Sheen’s book and it accurately reflected my above understanding, and I put it down pretty quickly. What was surprising was that Cryer was mentioned only once in the book and Two and a Half Men was only discussed over a couple pages – I guess it was just a paycheck to him and he was just going through the motions during it.

Update 2: I also skimmed Sheen’s documentary on Netflix and it was pretty much exactly what I expected, including the supporting characters (although Denise Richards was much more masculine than I expected; I expected her abnormal plastic surgery, sad, she used to be beautiful), and I found myself mostly only stopping to watch Cryer’s portions, as he had a lot of wisdom and gravitas in his statements (and he looks pretty good bald with a beard, although older). Sheen didn’t look very good – he had the puffy face and turkey neck and what almost looked like a facelift, dyed hair, he looked pretty artificial, perhaps which might be related either to HIV medication side-effects or the health effects caused by excessive lifelong partying and hedonism. I would also note that in one of Sheen’s post-show drugged out, ego-driven rants he stated he had always thought the show was “beneath” him, which corroborates the takeaway in the above update.

8

p. 266:

As the episodes of Two and a Half Men were piling up, I’d had cause to reexamine my character and come to the conclusion that Alan is mostly me, with brushstrokes provided by some of my friends. His cheapness comes from one pal I won’t name, but he knows who he is.

Again, though, he’s mostly me. Alan is so thwarted in some many aspects of his life that had I been thwarted in similarly, and not been possessed of my special self-delusional sense of destiny, I would probably have become an Alan-like mixture of uptight, judgmental, anxious, and flawed. In a way, Alan reminds me of how things could have gone.

9

p. 243:

What I heard was that to CBS president Les Moonves, I was walking-and-talking eighties-movie-star baggage. Mind you, Sheen had that baggage too, but two holdovers from that decade was apparently too much.

At that first audition, though, I received one more inauspicious sign: Chuck Lorre is the most notoriously generous laughter in the business at auditions, and when I read Alan Harper for him the first time, he didn’t make a peep.

I had been sitting outside the audition room and I could hear other actors taking a swing at the character of Alan and not even remotely connecting with the material. The scene that all us prospective Alans auditioned with as we read opposite a casting agent reciting Charlie’s liens was the one in which Charlie has been on a bender, and Alan is informing him that his wife is divorcing him, and he needs to stay at Charlie’s a few days. What I heard from other auditioners, though, was an Alan frantic, as if he’d already begun losing his mind.

To me, Alan struck me as tightly wound, someone who pushes down feelings. It takes a lot to get him to the eruptive stage. He’s like popcorn – he’s got to sit in hot oil awhile before he explodes, so if he was immediately frantic, that felt wrong. Besides, Alan retains a certain judgmental air toward his lothario brother, Charlie, so he’s not going to let on right away the shame he feels about his marriage being on the skids. In Alan’s mind, Charlie’s the fuckup, not him. Every frenzied line reading I heard through that door felt superficial and wrong, so as I walked into that room – “Hey good to see ya, Chuck! Jim Burrows, man, how are ya?” (It was great to see Jim again; that he was directing this was a good omen) – I was pretty confident that I knew how to hit that comedy the way it needed to be hit.

But I got nothing from Chuck.

When something’s dying, actors have a choice: Lie back a little and hope for the best, go big and amp up the energy, or try to connect in some other way. But as the silence from Chuck’s direction began to feel louder – believe me, that description makes sense when you’re a performer – I opted to stick to my guns. I told myself, Trust your interpretation of this. So I switched off the targeting computer, aimed for the thermal exhaust port, and let my proton torpedoes fly….

Later on, Chuck explained his silence at that first audition. They’d been looking for Alan for weeks, he told me, and when I read he was struck silent by the fact that someone had finally done it right.”

10

p. 252:

As our first season of Two and a Half Men hit its stride, it was becoming clear to me that work was going to be my refuge. I was trudging through a divorce at the same time my character was going through one as well. Quite a few people openly asked me if this was “fun,” because I got to bring all that stuff to the show.

Um, no. Not fun at all. This was not, “Yay, I get to have turmoil in my life and play it at work!” Of course, it brought added depth to scenes Alan had with Jake, but it’s not as if I was thinking, Thank God, the pain is so readily available!

When Charlie heard about what I was going through at home, he very sweetly took me aside one day and said, “Hey, man, I know things are really tough for you, so if you need a place to stay, you can crash at my house.”

I looked at him quizzically and said, ‘Thanks, Charlie, but…how much like the show do you want your life to be?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, smiling ruefully. “Bad idea.”

11

Sheen’s energy signature is Dionysian with a Hermetic overlay: ecstatic, transgressive, pleasure‑driven, but socially adaptive enough to charm and perform. His metabolism is sanguine (social and risk‑seeking behaviors are cheap, hedonic adaptation rapid). His primary stabilizer is esteem/status (needing to be the star, the highest‑paid, the center). His implicit god‑image is secular hedonism with a redemptive hangover – the system should keep delivering, and when it didn’t, he had nothing to catch him. He imploded because his constellation had no internal container – ecstasy without Saturn, cheap rewards that accelerated hedonic adaptation, external stabilizers that failed when status stopped delivering, and a god‑image too weak to metabolize boredom or mortality.

Cryer’s energy signature is Hephaestian (craftsman, the wounded worker, deep, stubborn, productive) with a Saturnian exterior: he grinds, stays professional, endures humiliation, builds a career through discipline rather than charisma. His metabolism is phlegmatic (resilience, low reactivity, ability to absorb pressure without collapsing). His primary stabilizer is control and agency – he stays humble, does the job, trusts that his disciplined effort will steer outcomes. His god‑image is pragmatic mastery: reality rewards those who maintain composure, choose their battles, and don’t let circumstances dictate their fate.

Kutcher’s energy signature is Hermetic with a weak Martian overlay: social mimicry, desire for validation, forced likeability (dopey voice, desperate to be seen as a “nice guy” and a “serious” tech investor). His metabolism is sanguine. His primary stabilizers are esteem (needing recognition) with attachment secondary. His god‑image is secular tech‑progressivism – optimization and being perceived as smart will make life work, a hollow substitute that cannot bear the crucifixion of opposites.

12

Jones later became a religious Christian, fat and bald with scraggly facial hair, and publicly denounced the show as sinful, which caused a controversy at the time. He’s an excellent and natural actor, he makes it look effortless and he always looks like he’s having so much fun on the show. I don’t cover him much at all in these reviews because I don’t feel like there’s a compelling hook – he’s mostly losing his innocence slowly as Charlie’s character inherently corrupts him with booze, gambling, and women, while torn between a weak and neurotic father and a nasty shrew mother.

13

Evelyn’s two-dimensionality is her bitchiness deployed consistently and predictably, which produces diminishing returns. The episode where Jake disrupts that (E23 of season 3) – where the chaos comes from an unexpected direction and Evelyn is on the receiving end rather than delivering – breaks the pattern and produces genuine comic release. The same structural principle explains why the best episodes tend to exclude most of the supporting cast: Charlie and Alan’s dynamic has genuine depth and variability; the female supporting characters are mostly written as single-note obstacles.

14

The Judith critique has two components. The first is aesthetic: the shrewish-ex-wife archetype is structurally asymmetric in a way that’s hard to make funny. Comedy requires some form of release – the tension builds and then breaks in a direction that produces relief or recognition. The shrew dynamic doesn’t release cleanly because the power asymmetry is real and unresolvable within the show’s universe. Alan can’t win, can’t leave, can’t retaliate, and the audience knows it. That’s not comic tension; it’s just tension. The second component is constitutional and personal, where dealing with shrews in my own life makes seeing them on television feel sour.

15

The Rose critique is aesthetic and structural: the character violates the show’s internal realism. Two and a Half Men works because its fantasy is grounded in recognizable male psychology – the beach house, the money, the casual hookups, the fraternal dynamic. Rose introduces a supernatural-stalker element that the show’s realism can’t absorb. She belongs in a different genre. Every scene with her is a tonal rupture, not a comic escalation, and it’s a craft failure. Thankfully she is downgraded from main cast to reoccurring cast after season 2. With that said, I do understand the need for a “chaos” character in a sitcom, someone who shakes things up, whether that is Michael Richards in Seinfeld, Lisa Kudrow in Friends, David Spade in Rules of Engagement, Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother, etc. Rose just doesn’t work here.

16

p. 284:

Charlie didn’t look so good as we started our eighth season in the fall of 2010 – gaunt, pale, sallow, even sweaty occasionally. He started talking to himself. But most of all he just looked thinner, in a not-good way. Watching the new episodes at home, Lisa [Alan’s wife] could tell how terrible he looked, and said as much.

Even his teeth looked bad. They looked like they were going to fall out of his mouth.

His timing started to go off, too. The pauses were now a little too short. He was rushing lines. He was still remembering them, at least, but there was now an incrementally more manic energy that threw his rhythm off by microseconds. These might not have been perceptible differences to the vast majority of viewers, but to me they felt substantial. Charlie just wasn’t hitting the jokes the way he used to. It was as if his psyche had been sped up.

17

p. 294:

Things didn’t start smoothly once the show began. We did a scene with the two of us sitting on a couch, and Charlie screwed up every line. He could not remember anything he was supposed to say. It was hard to comprehend what I was seeing, because Charlie had always prided himself on getting it done on show night. It was like watching HAL go haywire in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mark Samuels, our assistant director, who is the soul of diplomacy and quiet competence, said to Charlie, “Do you need a minute?”…

Charlie paused, then said, “Wait a minute; just give me a second.”

Somebody handed him the pages, and as he went over them, the rest of us were extraordinarily uncomfortable. The audience was here, after all. And then a rather astonishing thing happened. On take two, Charlie completely nailed it. Every beat. Every line. When he absolutely had to focus, he did. It was a strange and impressive thing to behold.

Instead of sticking around for the [drug intervention with executives after], however, Charlie chose to walk out, still in full makeup, get in his car, and have his driver take him home…That was also the last episode of Two and a Half Men Charlie would ever shoot.

This essay argues that the oscillation running through Ecclesiastes – praised by some as literary paradox, dismissed by others as unresolved pessimism – is the phenomenological record of someone performing the crucifixion of opposites under a god-image that contains evil without the vocabulary to name what it contains. Qohelet is stranded between a polytheistic solution no longer available within the monotheistic tradition he was writing inside, and an individuation vocabulary not yet invented, which is why the text can only oscillate rather than resolve.

Welcome back. This is a post about Ecclesiastes, which is my favorite book of either the Old Testament or New Testament, including runner-up Job, another Old Testament “wisdom literature” which I have covered previously in relation to Jung’s mind-expanding book (pre-Abraxian shift) and more in a recent Note.

Before getting to Ecclesiastes, what I appreciate about Job is how it focuses on extreme injustice done to an innocent man with God’s approval, highlighting the nature of a God containing both good and evil. “He murders both the pure and the wicked… he laughs at the anguish of the innocent… who does it, if not he?” (9:22–24) Jung’s contribution in Answer to Job was to tie this to an evolving God image, where God grows his limited consciousness (because consciousness arises from subject/object differentiation which are otherwise united in the Godhood) through his interactions with humanity. To Jung, this both provides a theodicy – evil exists perhaps because God is to some degree unconscious – and provides dignity and meaning to humanity because it provides a cosmic role for our suffering. The book was written quickly after his near-fatal heart attack and under intense compulsion from his Self, and it served as a bridge for Jung between the privatio boni (God as all good, grafted onto Christianity by Augustine through a genealogy extending from Neoplatonism) and Abraxas (God as containing evil, articulated in his Liber Novus and which he backed away from as too psychologically destabilizing). My work by and large begins with accepting the horrifying conception of God-as-totality and following its implications.

Jung never covered Ecclesiastes in depth, which I find to be curious given the phenomenological weight it gives to the crucifixion of opposites (an expression Jung only mentions once or twice, discussed here). The individuation process so central to his work involves consciously holding the opposites without ego-resolution until a provisional answer arises as intuition, and holding the opposites is often quite painful. Furthermore, the alchemical process leading to the union of the opposites – the coincidentia oppositorum – which so interested Jung, to the point he created a detailed genealogy (extending from the ancient gnostics through the medieval alchemists to modern psychology) relies fundamentally on pairs of opposites as well. Yet he doesn’t focus on Ecclesiastes and neither do prominent Jungians from what I can tell – not Edinger, not Hillman, not Stein, not von Franz, etc. Why not?

My provisional answer is that Ecclesiastes’ focus on the crucifixion of opposites is non-redemptive and doesn’t have a narrative story to offer, unlike in Job. Jung could take the Job story and offer a redemptive story of the evolution of the God image through mankind’s suffering, offering readers hope, but in Ecclesiastes one holds the opposites, suffers, and there is no redemptive payoff. For someone focused on growing his practice and on meaning-making, something like Ecclesiastes could threaten his psychology practice by destabilizing patients and negatively affect the movement he was trying to build. In other words, Jung perhaps needed a redemptive narrative to offer patients, analysts, and other followers, while Ecclesiastes does not provide that. Furthermore, Ecclesiastes reads to me as primarily coherence-stabilized (observing reality and asking what results from that wherever it leads), so perhaps Jung – who I see as primarily status/esteem and meaning stabilized – had difficulty metabolizing the work. Still, I think his failure to discuss it was a mistake, because it is so powerful and so illuminating about the central concept of the opposites.1

The interpretive claim I intend to present here is that the oscillation in Ecclesiastes that has puzzled commentators from the rabbinic debates at Jamnia to Bartholomew’s careful modern analysis is not primarily a rhetorical device, not a symptom of unresolved pessimism, not a dialectic moving toward resolution; rather, it is the phenomenological record of someone performing the crucifixion of opposites under a god-image that contains evil but lacks the vocabulary to name what it contains. Each time Ecclesiastes/Qohelet (the “teacher”) finds a provisional foothold (wisdom is better than folly, enjoyment is a gift, companionship has value) he immediately tests it against the structural reality he has observed and finds it insufficient. Not false – the foothold is real – but it cannot hold the weight of a condition that admits no permanent resolution. The text is what the crucifixion of opposites feels like, documented somewhere between 400 and 250 BCE, and from this perspective available interpretive frameworks (orthodox Jewish, Christian, secular academic) misread it by requiring the oscillation to resolve in a redemptive direction it never takes. The Orthodox Jewish reader needs it to end in “fear God and keep the commandments.” The Christian reader needs it to end in Christ’s fulfillment. The secular pessimist reader needs it to be a cry of despair. The academic structuralist catalogs its polar opposites without asking what generates them. None of these readings sit still in the oscillation itself. The Abraxian framework does, because it has a name for the structural condition Qohelet is navigating without being able to name.

Prior frameworks for reading Ecclesiastes have produced sophisticated analyses of its formal features – Michael Fox’s work on contradiction, Loader’s structural catalog of polar opposites, Bartholomew’s observation that the juxtaposition of opposites leaves interpretive space for the reader.2 These are genuine contributions, but none of them supply an account of what generates the oscillation rather than merely describing its formal features. Describing the oscillation as paradox, as tension, as the “riddle of Qohelet,” names the phenomenon without explaining it. The Abraxian framework argues that the oscillation is generated by inhabiting a god-image that contains both good and evil without resolution, under a regulatory architecture that requires structural integrity rather than consolation, producing a phenomenological record that keeps returning to the same opposites because the opposites are the permanent structure of reality rather than a temporary problem awaiting solution. This is the framework that the text appears to be groping toward and yet does not quite reach because the vocabulary for naming the crucifixion of opposites as a structural condition did not exist in 300 BCE, was not available through the Yahwist tradition he was operating within, and would not be named for another two millennia.

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A Brief History

Ecclesiastes is one of the “wisdom books” of the Old Testament attributed to King Solomon, although the modern scholarly consensus is that Solomon did not write it3, that it was attributed to him to give the text weight and power, primarily on the basis of Persian loanwords included in the text like pardes (garden) and pitgam (sentence), where there was no influence of Persia in the region until ~400 years post-Solomon’s rule. It was included in the formal Old Testament corpus with a significant amount of controversy. The book is quite pessimistic in many places, despairing at the injustice of the world, that rulers often are weak and fail at their role, that the wicked prosper and the innocent suffer, and its many contradictions and apparent clashes with other scriptures like Proverbs made it a problematic candidate for inclusion as a sacred text. It is also psychologically destabilizing by being quite antinomian in places; if God’s justice is often absent and if everything on this plane is “vanity” – ephemeral, built on a false conception that actions last forever and that one will be redeemed – then why should one follow kings, rulers, leaders? And it is also non-redemptive with a cyclical, not a linear view of history where the same things happen over and over again.4 The rabbinic debates at Jamnia (around 90 CE) and in the Talmud (b. Shabbat 30b) show genuine uncertainty about whether Ecclesiastes “defiles the hands” – the technical criterion for canonical inclusion – with the school of Shammai opposing inclusion and the school of Hillel accepting it. What the Talmudic discussions show is concern about the book’s apparent contradictions (Ecclesiastes 8:15 recommending enjoyment versus 2:2 calling laughter madness) and its heterodox teaching, with various attempts to harmonize the contradictions through allegorical reading.5 The allegorical solution offered where “eating and drinking” means study of Torah, “vanity” refers to excessive worldly attachment, etc., became dominant by the fourth century CE among both Jewish and Christian interpreters and effectively neutralized the text’s radicalism by reading it as a conventional religious text in unusual dress.6

It’s not clear why Jewish leaders included the text in the corpus – other works attributed to Solomon were not included – but from what I can surmise, it is a combination of the alleged Solomon authorship7, a “steelmanning” of the Orthodox perspective by offering engagement with the painful realities of life and possible Hellenic influence in a contained manner, and appending the work with a conclusion (likely by a subsequent author) with a neat summary about “fearing God” and obeying the commandments (which reminds me of institutional oversight reports in Washington D.C. which reveal tremendous corruption within the institutions, but then stick on a summary and conclusion that contradict the actual findings).

As Meir Zlotowitz states in Koheles: ArtScroll Tanach Series, xli- xlii: “The Sages sought to hide the book of Koheles because its statements [apparently] contradict one another. Why didn’t they conceal it? Because it commences with words of Torah and it concludes with words of Torah.” And: “In spite of the fact that Koheles was part of the Sacred Writings, it was feared that it could be a dangerous book because, to the unlearned, it seemed to contain contradictions. The Midrash goes even further than does the Talmud – according to the Midrash, it was feared that unlearned people might even make heretical interpretations of parts of Koheles. Therefore there was an opinion among the Sages that perhaps Koheles, sacred though it was, should be concealed lest it cause mistaken or heretical ideas….The conclusion concerning Koheles was that it should not be concealed because its opening and its conclusion show beyond a doubt that it is a book filled with fear of God and the spirit of Torah.” The Jewish scholar Rashbam, as recounted in The Commentary of R. Samuel Ben Meier Rashbam on Qoheleth, p. 34, “was the first to realize that the book of Qoheleth is set within a framework, consisting of the book’s first two verses and the last seven. According to him these verses were written by “those who edited it (the book)”.”

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Pairs of Opposites

The book is structured as an exploration of whether any of the opposite polarities of life are sufficient to hold the crucifixion of opposites; from inside the crucifixion he explores wealth, power, sex, building, hoping to find something, anything, that survives a skeptical, questioning approach down to first principles. Scholars point to Qoheleth’s use of a poetic device called a merism, which uses polar opposites to encompass everything in between, thereby expressing totality – the most famous example is the poem in Ecclesiastes 3, which lists fourteen pairs of opposites (a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot, etc). Here are some of the primary pairs articulated throughout:

The Existential and Theological Opposites

1. Life and Death. The most fundamental pair. Qoheleth returns to it obsessively: both the wise and the foolish die; both the righteous and the wicked share the same fate. “For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity.” (3:19)
2. Meaning and Meaninglessness (Vanity). The entire book is structured around this oscillation. Qoheleth declares everything “vanity of vanities” (1:2), yet he still seeks meaning in work, wisdom, and pleasure. He never resolves this tension.
3. Wisdom and Folly. Qoheleth praises wisdom as better than folly (2:13-14), yet he also acknowledges that the same fate awaits both (2:15-16), and that “much wisdom is much vexation” (1:18). Wisdom is valuable and insufficient.
4. Joy and Sorrow. He counsels enjoyment of life’s pleasures (3:12-13, 5:18-20), yet the entire book is saturated with sorrow and the “unhappy business that God has given to the sons of men” (1:13).
5. God’s Inscrutability and Human Agency. God is sovereign, yet humans are told to work and enjoy their portion. God’s ways are unknowable, yet humans are to “fear God and keep his commandments” (12:13). The tension is never resolved.
6. Justice and Injustice. Qoheleth observes that “the righteous get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked get what the righteous deserve” (8:14). He acknowledges a kind of cosmic justice (11:9, 12:14), yet he also sees that “there is no man who has power over the day of death” (8:8). Justice is promised and absent.

The Social and Ethical Opposites

7. Wealth and Poverty. He acknowledges that wealth is a blessing (5:19), yet he also sees that the rich suffer from sleeplessness and the weariness of acquiring (2:23), and that the poor may be better off in some ways (4:13). Money is good and worthless.
8. Toil and Rest. Work is a gift (3:13), yet it is also “vexation” and “striving after wind” (2:22). The laborer may enjoy his portion, yet his days are full of pain (2:23).
9. The Powerful and the Oppressed. He observes oppression (4:1), yet he also counsels submission to the king (8:2-5). Power is corrupt and necessary.
10. The Individual and the Collective. He acknowledges that “two are better than one” (4:9-12), yet he also warns against the “vanity” of amassing followers and popularity (4:15-16). Solitude is both valuable and dangerous.

The Temporal and Natural Opposites

11. Time and Eternity. “He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (3:11). Humans inhabit time but sense something beyond it – a permanent tension.
12. Order and Chaos. There is “a time for every matter under heaven” (3:1-8), yet life is also unpredictable, full of “chance” (9:11). The world is ordered and chaotic.
13. The Seasons and the Mundane. The famous passage (3:1-8) juxtaposes birth and death, planting and uprooting, killing and healing, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, casting away stones and gathering them, embracing and refraining, seeking and losing, keeping and throwing away, tearing and mending, silence and speech, love and hate, war and peace. These are not resolved into a higher synthesis; they simply are.

The Psychological and Personal Opposites

14. Joy and Sorrow. Qoheleth advises: “In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other” (7:14). Both are from God, and there is no redemption from either.
15. Hope and Despair. There are moments of hope – ”I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful” (3:12) – yet the overall tone is despair. He never reconciles the two.
16. Desire and Satisfaction. He describes the endless cycle of desire: “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” (1:8). Yet he also advises eating and drinking and enjoying one’s portion (3:13). Desire is a treadmill; enjoyment is a gift.
17. The Fear of God and the Inaccessibility of God. Qoheleth tells us to fear God (5:7), yet he also says God is unknowable (3:11, 8:17). The fear is not an intellectual grasp of God; it’s a response to the overwhelming mystery.

The Structural Opposites

18. The Body and the Spirit. In the final chapter, Qoheleth describes the “silver cord” being snapped, the “golden bowl” being broken (12:6), and the dust returning to the earth as the spirit returns to God. Body and spirit are distinguished but connected in death.
19. Memory and Oblivion. Qoheleth repeatedly warns that “the former things are not remembered, nor will they be remembered by those who come after” (1:11). Yet he writes a book to be read, hoping to preserve some memory. He writes against oblivion even as he acknowledges its inevitability.
20. The Living and the Dead. He famously observes: “A living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing” (9:4-5). Life is superior to death, yet death is the end of all. This is not resolved – the living have hope, the dead have peace.

The author holds these tensions and oscillates between them without offloading them onto a redemptive framework. He doesn’t say “suffering is temporary,” “justice will prevail,” or “meaning will be restored.” He says this is how life is – joy and sorrow, wisdom and folly, toil and rest, birth and death – and we must simply live within it. The oscillation – wisdom is better than folly, but the wise man dies like the fool; there is nothing better than eating and drinking, but this too is vanity; God has made everything appropriate in its time, but man cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end – is not rhetorical inconsistency or a dialectic toward resolution. It’s phenomenological reporting from inside the crucifixion, oscillating because no stable position exists.

And from that oscillation he keeps asking whether any pole can bear existence. He tries wisdom, pleasure, labor, wealth, political power, reputation, and each one fails as a final organizing principle. Each time Qohelet finds a foothold (wisdom is valuable, enjoyment is good, labor has its place) he immediately tests it against reality and finds it insufficient. Not false, but insufficient; vanity as in hebel – breath, vapor, something real but impossible to hold permanently. The privatio boni reader cannot see this because its framework demands that the oscillation be resolved, where either Qohelet is finally saying “fear God and keep the commandments” as the real takeaway via the tacked-on epilogue, or the pessimism is being deployed as a foil to be overcome by theological resolution. This was my core problem with Craig G. Bartholomew’s scholarly and well-written Christian-based exegesis of the text, which is a good translation and which I recommend, because he does not phenomenologically feel the oscillation himself – to me it is a feeling first, intellectualized after, not the other way around.8 Russell Meek of the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has a short and easy to read evangelical take where he does feel the pain of living, but he largely misses the point of the text.9 This is not intended as an appeal to feeling as its own justification – my approach asks whether somatic recognition and the framework’s predictive and interpretive accuracy over time confirm each other, not whether either one alone is pleasant to sit with. Bartholomew uses a Protestant-deontological approach to try to find the “truth” of the text so that he goes to Heaven when he dies, which is not my approach and, I think, not Ecclesiastes’ either; a point, to be fair, that Bartholomew recognizes.10 My reading sits in uncertainty without resolution, because the Abraxian framework has a name for what sitting still in the unresolved oscillation actually is: the crucifixion of opposites held internally, not offloaded and not resolved.

Other analytical attempts are worse than Bartholomew’s: Meir Zlotowitz’s Koheles: ArtScroll Tanach Series intensely offloads the crucifixion of opposites onto a redemptive holiness of the Torah (occasionally in almost comically over the top ways11), much as all the rabbinical sources he quotes do as well. As he explains, p. 92, “The meaning, as explained by Rashi, is that eventually God judges all, and although judgment appears delayed, everyone’s time comes eventually, for there is a time for everything – even for retribution – and judgment will assuredly come.” Bartholomew at least understands the oscillation – to Zlotowitz, the oscillation are simply doubts that ultimately resolve in favor of the Torah, although there are occasional unintended hints to the contrary.12 And R. Samuel Ben Meier (“Rashbam”, an exalted Jewish scholar)’s exegesis written in the 12th century, as translated by Sara Japhet and Robert B. Salters, is even worse: he not only collapses ambiguity into firm choices13 (like translating a phrase into “covered wagons” instead of “many concubines”, the latter which both makes more sense as the author purports to be a powerful King and is the scholarly consensus) but he collapses the opposites employed by inserting quotations -without basis to refer to heterodox perspectives which Qohelet attacks from an orthodox viewpoint! p. 54: “Common to all of the above sections is a certain linguistic or literary factor which led Rashbam to posit the existence of a quotation.” This is a disastrous misread.

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Conclusion

Ecclesiastes is the earliest articulation I know of of the crucifixion of opposites from a lived phenomenological perspective, the permanent, unresolved tension of being alive. The text, with its tragic wisdom and its God of totality, is a remnant of an older, non-redemptive consciousness along with Heraclitus and Greek tragedy, something from an earlier where mankind was more in touch with the tragedy of life and before the redemptive framework was introduced to bear the crucifixion of opposites; it is a voice from before the “solidification” of the world (Guenon’s conception) into a dualistic, redemptive framework, which is why it resonates so strongly with my project. Polytheism, for all its inaccuracy as cosmology, was in one respect structurally closer to lived reality than the privatio boni that would later govern the Western world: it did not require suppressing the evil pole of life. Ecclesiastes stands after that distribution has collapsed into a single, answerable god, but before any theology exists that can hold what polytheism had merely divided.14 What Qohelet lacks is both the language for totality and the differentiated relationship to one’s own contradictory energies that a much later psychology would call individuation, which did not yet exist for him as an available vocabulary. He is stranded between a solution no longer available within his own tradition – though very much alive in the world around him, in Hellenistic and Near Eastern religion he would have had direct contact with – and one not yet invented, which is why the text can only oscillate.

Qoheleth, to my reading, was writing from a similar structural position as my own: finite, limited, bearing the crucifixion of opposites without redemption, oriented toward structural integrity rather than social reward, status, meaning, or control.15 Given this, the author of Ecclesiastes was possibly a marginalized teacher or sage working on the fringes of the institutional religious establishment, gifted with insight but ignored during his lifetime because his perspective was too disturbing, too antinomian, too lacking in consolation, resonant with a small group who recognized the value of his perspective, who preserved his writings and posthumously “adopted” by the tradition through the redemptive ending and the attribution to Solomon. This may be projection, of course, seeing my reflection in Ecclesiastes; I am ignored by the mainstream (few followers, no fame, no institutional support), my work is too destabilizing for most people, too focused on the opposites, too non-redemptive, and my work contains antinomian implications (the critique of authority, the relativization of power), and I resonate with a small group, like the coherence-regulated, schizotypy-leaning figures who recognize themselves in this work. Regardless, from my perspective I see the author of Ecclesiastes as containing ancient resonance to my work in thought and possibly in constitutional type, social position, and relationship to the tradition. I make no claim that my work will have any particular resonance, either in the short term or longterm and which would otherwise be inflationary (and against how my work has been received thus far), but I thought it was important to comment on why I found it resonant regardless.

Ultimately, Ecclesiastes is a systematic elimination of false stabilizers. He’s running repeated experiments: Will work stabilize me? No. Will pleasure stabilize me? No. Will wisdom stabilize me? Better than folly, but no. Will wealth stabilize me? No. Will political success stabilize me? No. The surviving position is much thinner: Receive your portion, recognize your limits, fear God, and continue living despite the absence of comprehensive resolution. This surviving position has a name in the text itself: heleq, “portion” or “lot,” repeated at 2:10, 3:22, 5:18, and 9:9. Traditional readings split it into either hedonism (eat and drink because nothing matters) or resignation (eat and drink because there is nothing else). But heleq carries no promise that the portion accumulates into anything and no assurance that following it resolves the oscillation; it is simply the one foothold still standing once wisdom, wealth, legacy, and pleasure pursued as ends have each been tested and found insufficient. This is not a different claim from the wisdom-folly or joy-sorrow oscillations documented above, it is what remains after every other candidate for a stable position has burned off.

With that said, Qohelet’s god-image is not quite Abraxian totality – it’s a god-image that contains evil without being fully theorized as totality, which is why from this reading the oscillation never fully resolves even into the cold comfort of coherence that my own position reaches. Qohelet performs the crucifixion of opposites under a god-image that is partially but not fully adequate to what he is experiencing. He gets close to the Abraxian position repeatedly and then pulls back – not into the privatio boni (he never installs cosmic justice as a consolation) but into the carpe diem provisional handholds that are his only available response to a structural condition he can name but not fully articulate.

It has been very helpful to have found a predecessor in an anonymous ancient teacher whose name is uncertain and whose work almost didn’t survive. Qohelet did not have the vocabulary of Abraxas, but he had the somatic experience of totality. In an era where the redemptive egregores are finally rupturing, his words increasingly call for being wrestled with again under a reemerging God image of totality.

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1

I will note that Schopenhauer did cover the work in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), where he quotes Ecclesiastes directly and approvingly – particularly the “vanity of vanities” theme – as corroboration of his own pessimism about the will-to-live, while Nietzsche, despite his own attacks on the privatio boni, was too invested in the will-to-power and the revaluation of values to sit still in Ecclesiastes’ oscillation.

2

Per Bartholomew, Ecclesiastes, p. 81: “The opposing perspectives are deliberately juxtaposed so that gaps are opened in the reading, and the book is precisely about who to resolve the tension between these contradictory juxtapositions. The juxtaposing of contradictory perspectives producing gaps is part of the very fabric of Ecclesiastes. This has never been consciously studied by commentators, although of course they work with the phenomenon all the time. Those who see Qohelet as ultimately positive tend to smooth over the gaps, whereas those who recognize the gaps tend to see Qohelet as a pessimist with the carpe diem passages as hedonistic resignations or as additions.”

And p. 93: “Commentators remain polarized as to whether Ecclesiastes is fundamentally positive, affirming joy, or basically pessimistic. The majority incline to the latter view. in my view scholars continually fall into the trap of leveling Qohelet toward his hebel pole, or toward his carpe diem – affirmation-of-joy pole. This is to ignore the literary juxtaposition of contradictory views that is central to the gook and the life-death tension it embodies. Qohelet’s autonomous epistemology, depending on observation, experience, and reason alone, leads him continually to the hebel conclusion, where is juxtaposed again and again with his carpe diem confessions of the goodness of life. The book is about the struggle to live with and resolve the agnoized tension between these two poles.”

3

I tried reading Irish Anglican clergyman Charles Henry Hamilton Wright’s 1883 exploration of the history and authorship of the book of Koheleth where he reluctantly agrees that Solomon did not write it, but it was extremely pedantic and written in a drawn out, dry and boring style, and I gave up after about 120 pages.

4

p. 117: “This poem expresses, on the basis of observation, a cyclical view of history, in contrast to the OT’s cyclical and linear view. In the poem observation of the repetitiveness of nature leads to finding an analogical repetitiveness in history…Observation is central to Qohelet’s epistemology, and if on the basis of observation one concludes that history is endlessly repetitive, then it is indeed hard to see the value of labor and of life.”

5

p. 18: “The origin of this particular dispute is uncertain, but it centered on Ecclesiastes’ secular character, the great difficulty of harmonizing its contradictions (the Talmud mentions the conflicts between Eccles. 7:3 and 2:2 and between 8:15 and 2:2. See Beckwith…where he points out that the rabbis were experts at scriptural harmonization, and thus their problems with Ecclesiastes meant that they found its contradictions especially difficult to harmonize), and the passages with supposed heretical tendencies, such as 1:3 and 11:9.”

6

See Meir Zlotowitz states in Koheles: ArtScroll Tanach Series, p. 118: “Note the Midrash: All the eating and drinking mentioned in this Book refers to Torah and good deeds. The most clear proof is 8:15. Do, then, food and drink accompany man to the grave? What does accompany him? Torah and good deeds. “And enjoy pleasure” i.e. indulge in Torah study and be satisfied with his lot (Rashi).”

7

A useful contrast is Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), written roughly a century after Qohelet and excluded from the Jewish and most Protestant canons despite being doctrinally safer, not harder to harmonize. Where Qohelet oscillates without resolving, Sirach reasserts retributive order confidently, at points explicitly warning against Qohelet-style doubt (5:4). It uses a device close to Ecclesiastes 3’s merism – pairing opposites, good against evil, life against death – but resolves the tension rather than holding it open: the pairing exists, on Sirach’s reading, so the righteous have a foil against which to be measured. (Translations vary in register here – some render it as smoothly parallel to Qohelet’s poem, others more literally as “good against evil, life against death, the sinner against the just” – but the content is the same regardless of translation.) The same rhetorical device, the same genre, roughly the same era, and the opposite conclusion. That Sirach was excluded while Ecclesiastes was retained ironically and strangely appears to owe less to either book’s content than to authorship: Sirach’s author was known and comparatively recent, disqualifying it under criteria that let Ecclesiastes in only because its unresolved, destabilizing oscillation – easily readable as heretical and undermining of authority – could be attributed to Solomon.

8

I mentioned in passing in prior posts the death of a friend of mind, who phenomenologically felt the philosophical pessimism of the world – we bonded over this, and I don’t have any other real life friends who felt the pain of the world on this level. Perhaps this is why I miss him. But regardless, the feeling comes before the intellectual articulation or it doesn’t, but if it doesn’t it’s a different project than what I’m doing.

9

Meek lost his wonderful grandmother who raised him to cancer when he was young, and his father abandoned his family; he later dealt with drug and alcohol abuse issues. He resonated with Ecclesiastes because he thought its message was that in a world of unfairness which is turned upside down, one should appreciate God’s gifts and fear him. It acknowledges the pain of the world but provides this course of action regardless. This is the orthodox message of the appended-on ending, yes, but he does the standard Protestant take of treating the text as holy and trying to derive God-given meaning from the words themselves, tying it to Genesis and word-interpretation and the like, while reaffirming God as all-good and evil arising from mankind’s original sin. The point of the text, though, is the oscillation between poles as an intrinsic part of existence, and he totally misses this (perhaps because Protestants by and large deny the unconscious from which these poles arise from).

10

Bartholomew, p. 380: “What we do know is that Qohelet found himself confronted in an unavoidable way with the utter enigma of life. From a Jungian perspective, Qohelet had two choices: he could repress the experience because of its pain and capacity to wound him deeply, or he could enter the experience, surrender to it, not knowing precisely where it would take him. This is not so much a philosophy of despairvas it is an acceptance that says, “I can no longer live my life as I have before. I have to enter this terrifying realm of uncertainty and see where it leads, because all the things that brought me meaning are now in question.” Qohelet chooses the latter option, but it is not the easy one; rather, it is a journey of deep suffering that pervades every part of his being.”

11

Zlotowitz, p. 140: “Rashi explains that one must grasp both good and ‘evil’ – i.e. if a prophet tells you to do something which appears to be evil, you must have confidence and obey him.” As discussed previously, the crucifixion of opposites is a fundamental part of being alive, and the three basic responses are (1) offloading it to authority/institutions, (2) antinomian predation, or (3) the individuation process, holding the crucifixion within. Zlotowitz and the establishment rabbinical tradition are solidly within #1.

12

Zlotowitz, quoting Rabbi Yaakov Kiffel’s elaboration on a teaching attributed to Rabbi Meir, p. 137-138: “Rabbi Meir said: When God created something on this world, he created its opposite extreme. He created mountains and valleys, oceans and rivers. This concept can be extended to all of creation which is replete with opposite extremes. The size of the universe with its stars, galaxies, and outer cosmos, is virtually infinite; we also find that the minuteness of atoms and their component particles are beyond imagination. The orbits of stars and planets are similar to the orbits of electrons around the nuclei of atoms. Most matter is charged with opposite electrical charges, positive and negative. Magnetism has opposite poles. There is matter that exists for millenia and particles whose existence lasts the barest fraction of a second. Science does not yet know the extremes of hot and cold. There are holy and profane, male and female, light and darkness, giver and receiver, influencer and influenced – all examples of the parallel nature of creation.

13

p. 61: “The understanding of the literal meaning as…is the origin of one of the leading characteristics of Rashbam’s commentaries, i.e. that a text has only one, single meaning. This principle is applied with absolute consistency throughout the commentary on Qoheleth. A word, a phrase, a verse – when found in a given context – can have one and only one interpretation. Thus the practice which is so common in Jewish exegetical tradition, including medieval commentators, of suggesting several possibilities for interpreting a given text, is completely absent from Rashbam’s works.”

14

The polytheistic pantheon functioned structurally as a set of containers: a war god, a fertility god, a chaos figure and an order figure, each permitted to embody one pole of an opposition without the pressure of reconciling it with the others. This is not a claim that polytheism was cosmologically correct – an ultimate ground existing outside spacetime, on the premise inherited here from Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic monism (Plotinus’s One, Ein Sof), would be infinite, and infinitude entails unity rather than the plurality of finite, competing agents polytheism posits. But the error was in the multiplication of the ground, not in the content it was made to hold: a pantheon that lets one god be terrible and another be kind is, at the level of lived experience, a more honest map of a world that contains both than a single god from whom the terrible has been surgically removed and reassigned to a rival cosmic principle. What polytheism externalized as competing deities is structurally the same differentiation that a later individuation psychology (via Hillman) and as the formal Abraxian logic would relocate inside the psyche as energy currents to be related to without identification rather than projected outward or discharged – the gods are reborn, not necessarily as literal beings, but as differentiated positions within a single psyche that has absorbed what was once distributed among many. Qohelet has access to neither version. The external containers have already been foreclosed by the collapse to one god, and the internal containers (the individuation technology that would let him consciously differentiate and relate to what he is carrying rather than either projecting it outward or being crushed by it undifferentiated) do not yet exist as an available concept. He is not merely testing containers and finding them wanting; he is stranded in the gap between an old solution that has closed and a new one not yet invented, which is why the book can only oscillate rather than resolve.

15

My interpretation of his energy profile has tentative parallels to my own – i.e. Saturnian exterior, Dionysian interior, with Hermes as mediator, melancholic primary humor with choleric overlay, low sanguine, stabilized by coherence and with a God image approaching Abraxas.

1. Saturnian exterior: The voice of the book is sober, measured, world-weary, cautious. He observes limits, warns against excess, counsels restraint. The famous “time for everything” poem (3:1-8) is Saturnian in its structure -everything has its season, its boundary, its limit. He is the Teacher, the Qoheleth, a figure of authority and gravity. Dionysian interior:Beneath the sober exterior, there is a wildness. The book oscillates between despair and ecstatic enjoyment -”eat, drink, and be merry” (8:15) sounds Dionysian. He sees the world’s chaos, its injustice, its absurdity, and his response is not to deny it but to register it fully. The frustration with injustice (4:1-3, 8:14) has a Dionysian rage beneath the Saturnian resignation.Hermes as mediator: The book itself is the mediation. Qoheleth writes. He observes, reflects, and writes it down. The writing is the synthesis – the “I saw,” “I considered,” “I said in my heart” that structures the entire book. He is not acting out the Dionysian chaos or imposing Saturnian order; he is writing through it.
2. Humors Primarily melancholic with choleric overlays, low sanguine. Qoheleth is melancholic – the book is saturated with the “vanity of vanities” refrain. He processes life’s contradictions with deep interiority, not through action or social engagement. His world-weariness is melancholic; he has seen everything and found it wanting. The choleric overlay shows in his sharp judgments. He does not merely observe; he judges. The critique of the king (4:13-16), the condemnation of oppression (5:8-9), the warnings against folly (10:1-20), these have a choleric edge, a willingness to say “this is wrong.” The low sanguine is evident in his avoidance of social performance, his solitude, and his repeated emphasis on the limits of human connection (4:7-8, 4:9-12). He is not a social being; he is a solitary observer. He processes energy through introspection, not social performance.
3. Primary Stabilizer: Coherence Coherence and truth-consistency. This is the most obvious match. Qoheleth is relentlessly, obsessively committed to structural honesty. He refuses to suppress contradiction. He observes: Wisdom is better than folly, yet both share the same fate (2:13-16). The righteous suffer, the wicked prosper (8:14). There is a time for everything, yet you cannot control which time you are in (3:1-8). God is inscrutable, yet you are to fear Him (3:11, 5:7, 12:13). He does not resolve these contradictions. He does not offer a synthesis, he presents them as the structure of reality and refuses to pretend otherwise. This is the coherence-regulated response to the world: truth-consistency at all costs, even if it means bearing unbearable tension. Conclusion: Qoheleth is coherence-primary. His regulatory system requires structural integrity. He cannot suppress what the body registers as contradictory.
4. God-Image: Abraxas The horrifying unity of good and evil, totality. Qoheleth’s God is Elohim, not Yahweh – the cosmic God, not the covenantal God (a pattern likely also explained by Wisdom-genre convention rather than deliberate theological signaling, but suggestive here regardless). This is the God of totality: He is all-powerful (3:11, 8:17). He is inscrutable (3:11, 7:14, 8:17, 11:5). He is the source of both joy (3:12-13) and sorrow (7:13-14). He is sovereign over life and death (8:8). Qoheleth never suggests that God is all-good in the privatio boni sense. He never appeals to the covenant or to divine justice as a cosmic guarantee. The tacked-on ending (12:13-14) is a later attempt to force a redemptive reading, but the book itself is structurally non-redemptive.

He also appears to me as as schizotypy-leaning (moderated by the coherence stabilizer), although this parallel is also meant lightly. Schizotypal features: Sense of alienation from ordinary meaning (”vanity of vanities” is a radical deconstruction of cultural meaning). Intense metaphysical engagement (the God-image, the problem of evil, the meaning of life). Solitary cognition (he observes, reflects, judges, not acts in community). High sensitivity to contradiction (he cannot tolerate the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is). This combination of schizotypal features + coherence regulation produces a specific pattern: intense, solitary, systematic cognition oriented toward structural truth, with low reward from social performance, low tolerance for contradiction, and high capacity for bearing existential bleakness as long as the structural frame holds.

“War is the father and king of all.” – Heraclitus

The testis produces hundreds of millions of spermatozoa in a single ejaculation, of which, if expelled during coitus, the overwhelming majority die within the vaginal and cervical environment within hours, destroyed by acidity, by the immune response of the female body treating them as foreign matter, by simple failure of motility, before a single one reaches the fallopian tube. Of those that reach the tube, most swim in the wrong direction or arrive too late or too early relative to ovulation. Of the few that reach the egg, only one (if that) fuses with it, and the moment it does, the egg’s membrane changes chemically to block every other cell from entering, sealing the fate of the rest, which disperse and dissolve.

The fertilized cell divides. As it divides it begins to differentiate, and differentiation proceeds by selective destruction: cells that are overproduced in the forming neural tube are killed by programmed internal collapse so that the tube closes correctly; the webbing between what will become fingers is present in early development and is then eliminated, cell by cell, so that the fingers separate; the tail structure present in the early human embryo regresses and its cells die and are reabsorbed; roughly half of the neurons generated in the developing brain are eliminated before birth, pruned because the connections they might have made are not the connections the organism will use. None of this is malfunction, this is what forming a body consists of.

A large fraction of these fertilized eggs never progress to term. Many fail to implant at all and are shed, unnoticed, with the next menstrual cycle. Others implant and are lost weeks later, chromosomally incompatible with continued division, expelled by the same body that received them. Others survive to a birth that endangers the child, the mother, or both, through processes – hemorrhage, cord compression, prolonged obstruction – that predate any medical intervention capable of addressing them and that killed mothers and infants in large numbers for the entire span of human existence prior to the last century.

The infant that survives birth is sustained by the transfer of nutrients extracted by the mother’s body from other organisms: plants uprooted from soil, mid-cycle in their own growth, or animals slaughtered by exsanguination, a process which in an animal with an intact nervous system produces a measurable and audible response to pain for some duration before death. The child, as it grows, will itself consume other organisms directly – plants harvested before they complete their own reproductive cycle, animals bred, confined, and killed at a schedule set by the consuming species rather than by the natural lifespan of the consumed one – at a volume that, aggregated across a population of billions, reduces the number of wild species and the total population of individual organisms within those species that the earth is able to sustain.

Every cell in the child’s body will die and be replaced on its own schedule throughout the child’s life: skin cells within weeks, the lining of the gut within days, red blood cells within months, until by most estimates the great majority of the cells composing the body have been replaced multiple times over a normal lifespan, none of it experienced, none of it consented to, all of it required for continued function. Every day, the immune system identifies and destroys cells within the body itself: cells infected by viruses, cells that have accumulated mutations, and cells judged incompatible with continued function. The continued existence of the organism therefore depends not merely upon preservation, but upon continual internal elimination. A cell that refuses the programmed death required of the organism ceases to participate in differentiation and instead becomes malignant. Continued life of the organism therefore depends not upon the universal preservation of every cell, but upon the correct death of particular cells. Across generations, every lineage continues only because some organisms reproduce while countless others do not. Whatever account one gives of the mechanisms involved, no lineage persists through the preservation of every individual. Continuity itself is inseparable from selection.

The child’s body is not solely its own. Bacterial and viral cells inhabiting its gut, skin, and other surfaces outnumber the child’s own cells, and these populations are born, compete, starve, and are killed by the immune system continuously, at a rate exceeding anything occurring among the child’s own cells – yet the child cannot digest food, synthesize certain vitamins, or develop a properly functioning immune system without them. The boundary between self and other, at this scale, does not hold. What persists as ‘the child’ is itself a sustained population-level die-off occurring across species lines within a single body.

The child, in turn, differentiates by choice as well as by biology: this friend and not that one, this belief and not that one, this trade and not that one, this mate and not another, each choice foreclosing the branch not taken, and forecloses further by aging into a body whose own cells begin to fail at differentiation correctly, accumulating errors that either kill the organism through malfunction or are caught and killed by the immune system before they can, a process that itself eventually slows and permits what it once prevented.

At a scale larger than any individual life, the fossil record documents multiple prior extinctions in which the large majority of species then living, predator and prey and neither, were eliminated – not by any moral failure of any organism involved, not by war or sin or the misuse of will, but by asteroid impact, atmospheric change, and the ordinary turnover of geological time, indifferent to whatever consciousness, however limited, any of the eliminated organisms possessed.

At every scale examined – the cell, the organism, the species, the ecosystem, the planet across geological time – the process observed is the same process: differentiation proceeding by selection, selection proceeding by the death or foreclosure of what is not selected, and continuation of any given form purchased at the direct expense of some other form that does not continue.

Beyond any single planet’s history, every star eventually exhausts the hydrogen that sustains its fusion. Depending on its mass, it swells, collapses, or detonates, and in doing so it sterilizes or destroys whatever orbited it – any planet, and anything living on that planet, regardless of what had developed there, however far, in whatever direction, or for however long. This is not a rare catastrophe befalling one unlucky system, it is the ordinary, universal endpoint awaiting every star, including the one this planet orbits, which will in time expand and end whatever remains here, having done so to uncounted other systems already, unwitnessed, before this one existed at all.

At the furthest scale physics currently describes, the universe itself is expanding at a rate that carries galaxies apart faster than light can cross the growing distance between them, a process that ends, by current models, in a state in which no further energy differential exists anywhere to sustain motion, structure, or change of any kind – a uniform, cooling stillness in which nothing further happens, ever again, to anyone or anything.

The question, therefore, is not whether destruction exists. That is empirically obvious. The question is whether destruction is accidental to reality or constitutive of it. Given this as the actual, observable operation of the world at every scale, from the sperm cell to the extinction event to the death of stars to the eventual stillness awaiting the universe itself – the ancient image of the Ouroboros rendered in biology, ecology, and cosmology alike – how does one account for it under the image of a single, all-good God, who is said to have made it, to preside over it, and to love equally everything within it? One must either conclude that the world was not created by an omnipotent God, that such a God lacks complete power over creation, that creation itself genuinely includes destruction within the divine act, or that the observable structure of reality is radically misleading about its own nature. These possibilities are not equally compatible with every God-image.

If love is a property of the divine, it must be a love that includes the death of sperm cells and embryos as part of the mechanism, the predation of organisms as part of the process, and the eventual heat death of the universe as the endpoint. This is not a love that the human tradition has ever described as ‘love’ in any recognizable sense – it is the love of a process that consumes its own creations, at every scale, without exception. This is not a new observation. The Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Greek tragedians all wrestled with the same problem: the world is not organized around justice or love. The Christian privatio boni was a late, forced solution to a problem that the tradition itself had already articulated. A defender of the privatio boni may reply that these processes belong not to creation itself but to the Fall, yet this merely relocates the question. If creation was capable of becoming a reality whose observable structure operates through continual selection and foreclosure, then that possibility already belonged to the created order itself.

Under this description, ‘good’ cannot mean ‘that which is preserved’ and ‘evil’ cannot mean ‘that which is destroyed’ because preservation and destruction are the same process, differentiated only by scale and perspective. The sperm cell that dies is not evil; the egg that selects one is not good. The embryo that fails is not punished; the one that survives is not rewarded. The star that explodes is not destroyed; its elements are dispersed to form new systems. The process itself distinguishes only between persistence and non-persistence, it does not distinguish justice from injustice, innocence from guilt, virtue from vice. Those distinctions arise only when conscious beings evaluate what has occurred. Value is not written into the process itself; it is a judgment made by consciousness within the process – which may be the only thing the process could not generate on its own, and the only reason any of this was ever witnessed rather than merely occurring. This is what the God-image of totality actually looks like: a process that produces and destroys without preference, that selects and forecloses without judgment, that creates through destruction and destroys through creation. The privatio boni is a refusal to look at this directly. The Abraxian position is the choice to look at it without flinching, and to bear the weight of what is seen. This is not an argument for despair, it is an argument against false consolation. The universe is not organized to provide comfort, and the attempt to force it into a redemptive framework is an act of psychic narrowing against the overwhelming weight of evidence.

At every scale examined – the cell, the organism, the species, the ecosystem, the planet, the star, the universe – the process observed is the same process: differentiation proceeding by selection, selection proceeding by the death or foreclosure of what is not selected, and continuation of any given form purchased at the direct expense of some other form that does not continue. This is what existence consists of. The God-image that can accommodate this reality is not the all-good Father who loves everything equally and will someday redeem it all, it is the God of totality, who contains both creation and destruction, selection and foreclosure, life and death, as the same process, without preference, without judgment, without redemption, and without end.

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This analysis argues that the DSA’s rise – driven by demographic shifts, economic concentration, and the failure of the Western redemptive egregore – is not an organic grassroots movement but the next iteration of controlled opposition. The DSA is permitted and amplified by the apex because it offers a redemptive container for popular resentment while remaining structurally incapable of threatening the apex itself. Its policies will follow the COVID template: concentrating wealth at the top, distributing a fraction to the lower classes, and eviscerating the upper-middle class.

Welcome back. This is a politics and culture level post about the upcoming rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which currently has a nominal presence nationwide (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in the House, Bernie Sanders in the Senate, Mamdani as NYC mayor with an expanding presence, plus various city council seats, using taxpayer funds illicitly to boost their efforts). In 2025, there are over 250 DSA members in office with 90% elected after 2019, and others are poised: Chris Rabb won the Philadelphia primary for Congress and Melat Kiros won a Colorado Congressional primary, Janeese Lewis George is the DSA front-runner to become mayor of D.C., and Nithya Raman is one of the finalists to become mayor of Los Angeles (after massive vote-by-mail fraud, even though she had already publicly and tearfully acknowledged defeat), while portions of $177 million of taxpayer funds are being redirected to DSA causes, including to elect a DSA city attorney, a strategy being effectively in various races nationwide.

The premise of this post – which is early as a prediction, given the DSA’s almost total lack of national presence at this time – is that the DSA’s rise is not organic but will likely be the next iteration of controlled opposition, selected and amplified by upper elites because it offers the population a redemptive narrative (class/race-based smash and grab) while leaving the apex of power untouched. Their purpose – as cyberneticist Stafford Beer argued, the purpose of a thing is what it does – is to distribute 90% of what is smash and grabbed1 to political and administrative class allies, the remaining 10% to the lower class, while leaving the area controlled a smoking ruin while blaming the victims for the area’s decline. This is roughly equivalent to “race communism” – identity-based expropriation, where demographic composition is leveraged to justify the kinetic liquidation of mid-tier capital.2 They are building locally before focusing on a national level, and this prediction is on a decades-level and not the next election cycle – per City Journal, “Rather than supporting candidates at the national level, the organization increasingly focuses on small, local elections. Races for city councils, state assemblies, and state senates often get scarce media attention but represent real opportunities for power that the DSA is increasingly seizing.” In other words, the DSA will absorb the kinetic energy of popular resentment, redistribute a small fraction of it, provide a larger fraction to allies, and leave the actual apex of capital entirely undisturbed. Just as the world today looks radically different than only a decade ago – the rise and fall of right-wing populism into a skinsuited monstrosity, the wealth gap increasing massively, the intentional restructuring of the Middle East, etc., the world a decade from now is likely to be far darker than what can be imagined in the present.

To understand why the DSA’s rise is structurally overdetermined, one may look at it through the framework of the failing Western egregore. In previous essays, I established that the highest-layer egregore of the West has been fundamentally redemptive – first via Christianity (the privatio boni), and later via its secular mutations (liberalism, progressivism, communism, the arc of history bending toward justice). These redemptive egregores functioned as collective cybernetic regulators, offering meaning, belonging, and a narrative of ultimate resolution. But as the material evidence of their failure has accumulated, these egregores have entered a rupture phase. The stabilizers of the population are failing.

The system, however, cannot tolerate a population that is entirely unregulated (and neither can most of the people themselves). It requires a new container to absorb the crucifixion of opposites. Enter the DSA. Its rise is structurally overdetermined by demographic shifts (increasingly black, brown, and far-left youth), economic concentration (the largest wealth gap in history), elite management of the noetic commons (alternatives have been systematically shut down), and worldwide declining energy return on energy invested (EROEI), which produces chaos and radicalization. But the DSA is not a socialist movement in a meaningful material sense; it is a redemptive egregore, a collective regulatory architecture emerging from shared attention toward a common symbolic object. It offers narrative meaning (”we are the truth-tellers fighting the oligarchy”), status (“let’s take what’s ours”), and esteem (”we are the brave ones”) to a cohort whose existing stabilizers (based on society and history as continued progress) have collapsed. But because it is a managed, apex-approved egregore, its regulatory architecture is intentionally capped. The DSA’s policies will not reduce the gap between the apex and the bottom; they will dramatically increase the gap between the apex and classes below them (much as occurred during COVID, for example3). This is the structural function of controlled opposition: to channel popular resentment into policies that eviscerate the more independently minded, business-owning upper-middle and upper class wealth ($2M–$1B+ net worth) while leaving the upper elites ($100B+) untouched, all in managed furtherance of the upper elite longterm plan toward the digital panopticon, neoliberal feudalism and Greater Israel, articulated in this prior three-part series.

The controlled opposition thesis is not new – Mullins, Preparata, and others have described the mechanism in conventional political terms. What the egregore framework adds is a causal account of why the mechanism works so reliably: it works because the population is not passively manipulated into accepting a new container, it desperately generates the demand for one. When the Western redemptive egregore enters rupture phase – when the privatio boni promise (suffering is temporary, the arc bends toward justice, alignment with the Good is possible) fails to match lived experience – the psychic energy previously metabolized by that container becomes kinetically available. The apex does not create this energy, it captures and directs it. The DSA is a real expression of real resentment. What makes it controlled opposition is not that the resentment is fake but that the proposed solution is architecturally capped, designed to absorb the energy without redirecting it toward the actual apex of the system generating the resentment. Understanding this distinction matters because it explains why the DSA will feel authentic to its participants even as it performs its structural function. The energy is genuine while the container is managed.

The policies that would actually decentralize power and restore local metabolic autonomy – evicting tens of millions of illegals, strong antitrust action against megacorps, disbanding the Federal Reserve, ending fractional reserve banking, rural development – are structurally impossible because they would threaten the apex directly.4 Therefore, the DSA is permitted, even encouraged, to grow. It is likely to be the next iteration of the pattern: a movement allowed to rise under observation, acting as a pressure valve for the meaning-regulated and esteem-regulated, ensuring that the actual levers of cybernetic control remain firmly in the hands of the apex, which will be ultimately absorbed, skinsuited, or destroyed depending on its utility to the apex network.

Lets walk through the confluence of factors driving the DSA’s rise, the structural reasons its policies will fail to deliver what they promise, and what this reveals about the nature of elite control in the neoliberal feudal era.

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Factors Affecting the DSA’s Rise

1. The American youth are increasingly black, brown, and far-leftist.By 2050, non-Hispanic White children are projected to comprise only 42% of the population age 5-17. The U.S., in other words, is rapidly becoming a “majority-minority nation” (an Orwellian expression), where the white youth is declining not just as a percentage but in absolute numbers.A recent national telephone and online survey found that 53% of likely U.S. voters 18-39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election. Another recent Cato and YouGov survey shows that 62% of American adults under 30 hold a favorable view of socialism, with 34% showing favorable sentiments toward communism. This marks a steep climb from past polls, where a 2019 Gallup survey found only 52% of 18–34-year-olds had a favorable view of socialism. The shift is sharper among younger cohorts, a trend confirmed in multiple studies.
2. This increased radicalization is due to a number of factors, including educational institutions that frame Western history primarily through narratives of oppression, immigration policies that have dramatically reshaped the demographic composition of the country (~20 million illegals let in under Biden administration alone, with relatively few deported under Trump), and cultural narratives that discourage family formation and traditional identity, collapsing birth rates. The effect is a generation that feels rootless, resentful, and open to radical redistributionist solutions. While socialism itself is not racially coded – Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden have worker-led economies and strong safety nets – its use within the U.S. is anti-white encoded, encouraging group dynamics which the blogger Spandrell termed bioleninism and which he discussed in this 2018 post. This is why a 2022 Pew poll found socialism was viewed favorably by 52% of Black, 49% of Asian, and 41% of Hispanic respondents, compared to just 31% of white respondents.
3. The rich/poor gap is the greatest it has ever been, tied in large part to unlimited monetary printing, with unstated but strong actual inflation at likely 10-20% per year, which fuels impulses toward smash and grab socialism – if you’re boxed out of careers, wealth building and home ownership, who cares if the system burns down? According to NPR, young Americans worry about inflation, housing costs, and economic stagnation, factors driving them toward options that promise security. At the same time, the loyalty of the boomer generation to the establishment is firm because of artificially inflated home values and locked in low interest rates, social security, Medicair and Medicaid, which are scheduled to run out of funds as they die.
4. The stock market, despite being the highest of all time, is increasingly concentrated in only a small number of companies. If the bubble pops, boomers will demand whatever steps are necessary to re-inflate the bubble, as they live on the consumption derived from that bubble. They will demand action regardless of longterm consequences. A collapsing stock market will benefit the party out of power, i.e. Democrats. The bubble inflation/deflation strategy has been used in the 1929 crash to expand government and set the stage for World War 25, and in Japan to entrench a privately controlled central bank.
5. Alternative solutions have been intentionally shut down by the elites. The “far right” perspective – Trump 2016, the alt right – has been intentionally shut down by the elites (Charlottesville, 1/6), and Trump 2.0 – heavily corrupt (with $1.4 billion in 2025 bribes via crypto alone and massive insider trading, with 3,600 stock trades in the first 3 months of 2026 alone), establishment-oriented and Zionist – is deeply unpopular, where Trump, despite a stock market at the highest of all time, has close to the lowest popularity of any time of his presidency.6 The media focus on his corruption is also intentional to further depress the right-wing base. The establishment right (Bush) had blown through its credibility, and the establishment left (Obama, Biden, Kamala) has as well; alternatives such as the open internet via Wikileaks were shut down with Julian Assange thrown into prison. Other observable patterns of network manipulation include the Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, and even Facebook were allowed to grow under observation, then undermined, skin-suited, destroyed or absorbed once their utility was exhausted, but this is a long-running pattern from both the left and the right (Huey Long, JFK, Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, etc.). We will return to this point, but the upper elites guide society by weakening and shutting down disapproved alternatives to the path that they want a society or country to go down, and they’ve left no other path open other than race communism – the right is entirely dispirited. (This, too, perhaps explains the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who had enough brand strength and increasing independence to potentially initiate a civic nationalist, non-racial anti-Zionist movement – an alternative path forcibly shut down.)
6. We can see inklings of the upper elite shift of funding and support toward the DSA based on Soros funding $40 million to Mamdani (also see here), the large funding differential in favor the DSA figure over the establishment figure in the Maine Senate election (despite Platner’s many controversies), based on intense Reddit bot astroturfing in favor of the DSA, etc. Follow the money; as Eustace Mullins pointed out, the upper elites control all public sides of an issue (the disapproved are banned from the public space and their funding totally cut off, like Andrew Anglin and Owen Benjamin, discussed in this three-part series, and so-called anti-establishment organizations are secretly controlled7), and they dictate who wins by increasing or decreasing funding.8 A savvy friend made this point in a more informal context.9 I would also note that the combination of nationwide vote-by-mail (which just received the stamp of approval by the Supreme Court) and ballot harvesting, which is easy to commit fraud via multiple vectors, along with extremely sophisticated information control on the internet via bot use, artificial intelligence, algorithmic sorting and narrative amplification or suppression via censorship intensely tips the scales in elite-approved directions.Alex Soros, son of billionaire megadonor George Soros, congratulates Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on his New York City election victory.
7. Energy return on energy invested (EROEI) for oil and natural gas, which runs the modern world, continues its decline, while other natural resources continue toward exhaustion. EROEI used to be 100:1 and is quickly declining to 10:1. As EROEI declines, quality of life declines, which encourages chaos and radicalization. The Honest Sorcerer regularly covers declining EROEI problems, as does Grundvilk.
8. The DSA’s specific ideological flavor serves a secondary, eschatological function for the apex network. In a previous series, I argued that multi-generational upper elites require a binding glue – a highest-order regulatory architecture – to maintain cohesion across decades. The framework that has passed the selection pressure for this specific apex network is one possessing three structural features: non-redemptive theology (power does not need to justify itself via outcomes), infinite interpretive flexibility (any action can be reframed as necessary), and ontological hierarchy (exploitable lower tiers without moral contradiction). This framework carries a specific eschatological checklist: the ingathering of the diaspora, the establishment of Greater Israel, and the rebuilding of the Third Temple. If the apex network is guided by the eschatological stabilizer described in the prior series, then the DSA’s specific function becomes legible as an operational input for that stabilizer. The DSA’s “race communism” and manufactured, ratcheting10 anti-semitism would therefore be seen as efficient effectuators for this checklist. Controlled anti-semitism, deniable as organic and grassroots, provides the precise kinetic pressure required to drive the diaspora back to the centralized hub, while the DSA’s anti-Israel posture provides the required political cover and plausible deniability for the apex network executing the expansion. This is not asserted as proven fact but as a structural corollary that follows from the premises of the earlier analysis.

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Analysis

As mentioned in #5, the upper elites guide society by weakening and shutting down disapproved alternatives to the path that they want a society or country to go down, and the only available path they’ve left open is a redistributionist one that channels resentment into policies that eviscerate the upper-middle class while leaving the apex untouched. This path is coded as racial justice, but its structural function is the same.

This brings to mind Lenin’s comments on Pyotr Stolypin, who I covered in the past, where he discussed the notion of societal developmental paths. After Stolypin – who was pursuing highly successful agricultural reforms benefitting Russia’s middle class – was assassinated, Lenin in the Paris newspaper “Social-Democrat” on 31 October 1911 wrote “Stolypin and the Revolution”, calling for the “mortification of the uber-lyncher”, saying: ″Stolypin tried to pour new wine into old bottles, to reshape the old autocracy into a bourgeois monarchy; and the failure of Stolypin’s policy is the failure of tsarism on this last, the last conceivable, road for tsarism.” He reiterated this in 1912 comments: “This ‘reform’, of course, gave dying serfdom a new lease of life…The “new lease of life” given by Stolypin to the old order and old feudal agriculture lies in the fact that another valve was opened, the last that could still be opened without expropriating all the landed estates.” Guido Preparata noted in his amazing Conjuring Hitler, discussed here, how the British and global capitalism intentionally worked to bring the Bolsheviks to power – financing the White opposition until undermining it – and to bring Hitler to power by undermining alternatives. This is, indeed, one of the primary functions of intelligence work – control all sides, undermine the disfavored sides, and clear the path for the favored side to play its role. The ongoing Ukraine/Russia war today can be seen as a slow-moving vehicle to move Russia toward fragmentation/disintegration by shutting down alternatives, a process which is far advanced.

The parallel to the DSA is structural rather than ideological. Stolypin’s land reform represented the last available path that could have preserved the existing order while addressing genuine peasant resentment, and it was closed by assassination before it could succeed. The DSA represents the last available path that the apex is willing to permit for absorbing working-class resentment, and it is permitted precisely because it cannot succeed in the one way that would matter: it cannot close the wealth gap between the apex and everyone below it because doing so would require dismantling the fractional reserve banking system, the regulatory capture apparatus, and the asset-inflation mechanism that the apex’s position depends on. It is Stolypin’s reform in reverse: not the last road that could save the old order, but the last road that can be offered without threatening the new one.

Meanwhile, the upper elites own the mass media apparatus that manipulates the noetic commons, determining where and how the public’s attention is directed. The public’s interest in Jeffrey Epstein has waned. The media has been instructed not to cover the aggressive expansion of Israel into Lebanon, or to discuss the Gaza ethnic cleanse. It was instructed not to cover the 20 million illegals funneled into the United States during Biden’s puppet regime, or the national vote-by-mail apparatus constructed during the fraud of COVID. The noetic commons is managed not primarily through censorship of disapproved content, though that occurs, but through differential amplification: approved narratives receive algorithmic promotion, funding, institutional validation, and media repetition; disapproved narratives are not banned but starved of the attention infrastructure that would allow them to form stable egregores of their own. The DSA is increasingly benefiting from this differential amplification while its opponents on both the genuine left and the genuine right do not. The masses will accept any and all of the circular media amplification lies because underneath it all lies the horrors of the Void, and people will do anything in their power to avoid thinking about it, no matter if the sound and fury is detrimental to one’s interests.11

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Conclusion

Those who have great wealth and mobility will be able to avoid the consequences of increasing DSA race communism. For example, on California’s ballot for 2026 is a “billionaire tax” retroactive to January 1, yet Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page shifted their assets out of the state, while Brin cut his New York losses for six cents on the dollar (while among the most wealthy individuals in the world, they do not come close to upper elite Rothschild and co. wealth, discussed by esc here, whose power does not require shifting wealth around in this manner, it is embedded in the structure of the financial network itself). Gavin Newsom whined that such policies needed to be implemented on a national level or it would result in continued wealth fleeing the state, which is true, but these same ultra-wealthy individuals will flee the country before allowing their wealth to be taxed (although they will park their wealth in tax-free states like Florida in the meantime).

The falsifiable predictions embedded in this analysis and necessary for my recursive prediction model are specific. Over the next decade DSA candidates will continue winning local and then state-level offices, funded by a coalition that includes nominally anti-establishment money. Their policies where implemented will follow the COVID template – dramatically concentrating wealth at the apex while appearing to target it, with administrative class intermediaries capturing the majority of redistributed resources. The wealth gap between the apex ($100B+) and the upper-middle and upper classes ($2M-$1B) will increase under DSA governance, not decrease. The apex will not be meaningfully taxed, regulated, or threatened by any DSA policy in any jurisdiction where the DSA achieves power. If these predictions fail – if DSA governance produces genuine wealth redistribution that closes the gap between the apex and everyone below it – the controlled opposition thesis is wrong and will be updated accordingly.

Furthermore, as a structural correlate of this alignment, DSA governance will implicitly or explicitly facilitate the conditions required by the apex network’s eschatological stabilizer: DSA-led municipalities will be at the forefront of dismantling local security and social cohesion in ways that accelerate diaspora Jewish out-migration toward the centralized hub, while DSA foreign policy postures will be weaponized to provide political cover for the expansion of Greater Israel, even as DSA grassroots rhetoric professes opposition to it.

This analysis does not imply that DSA voters or participants are stupid, evil, or uniquely manipulated. The resentment driving DSA support is accurate as a diagnosis – the wealth gap is real, the system is predatory, the existing alternatives have failed or been closed. The framework explains why this accurate diagnosis is being channeled into a solution architecturally incapable of addressing it, and why that channeling serves the interests of the apex being diagnosed. The participants are not wrong about the problem, they are being offered a solution that preserves the problem while providing the psychological satisfaction of resistance. This is the standard function of controlled opposition in any historical period, and it requires participants who are genuinely aggrieved, not manufactured ones.

The uncomfortable implication of the egregore framework applied here is that there is no clean exit from this dynamic at the collective level. The population requires a container for the crucifixion of opposites, and when one container fails another will be provided or spontaneously generated. The DSA will either be absorbed into the system – as Occupy Wall Street was, as the Tea Party was, as the alt-right was – or it will be permitted to implement enough policy to further undermine the upper middle and upper class (but not the apex) before being replaced by the next managed alternative (if it ever morphs to threatening the apex it will be destroyed, much as Stalin was assassinated for increasingly asserting disapproved authority). The apex does not need to win every political battle, it only needs to ensure that no political formation capable of threatening it is permitted to reach sufficient scale and coherence before being redirected, undermined, or absorbed; advances in artificial intelligence have dramatically increased the upper elites’ ability to undermine threats and advance their agenda by increasing the variety of information they can assess (Ashby’s law). That is not a counsel of despair, it is a structural description of how the system maintains itself, and accurate description is the precondition for any response more useful than the managed ones on offer. Meanwhile, the Rothschild neoliberal feudalism noose continues to tighten worldwide, and in Canada leaders can now force dissidents off the internet permanently without a warrant or oversight at whim.

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1

Per City Journal: “Electing more DSA candidates to office would translate into easier and broader implementation of similar policies pushed by the group: even higher taxes on top earners (an already disastrous experiment in California), expanded environmental regulations that may come at the expense of blue-collar employment, reduced funding for policing, the expansion of sanctuary policies, and further efforts at decarceration. It would also likely include additional “affordable housing” measures that risk constraining supply and increasing overall market costs. In effect, without meaningful checks, these policies could compound and place significant strain on the city’s fiscal and economic stability, while also contributing to a broader cultural shift that cultivates contempt for capitalism and American exceptionalism—positions associated with the DSA.”

2

In every major civilizational transition, the ruling elite has weaponized the society’s most sensitive internal fracture as the vehicle for redistributive control. In Rome, the fracture was class and material deprivation; Christianity provided a spiritual hierarchy that inverted earthly status – the poor in spirit inherit the kingdom, the rich man passes through the eye of the needle – while the material order remained largely intact. In the Russian Empire, the fracture was class and economic serfdom; communism promised the abolition of class hierarchy while installing a new administrative class that was more extractive than the old. In the contemporary West, the fracture is race – the historical guilt of colonialism and slavery, the demographic churn of mass immigration, the educational narrative of systemic oppression – and the DSA represents the political vehicle that promises to resolve this fracture through redistribution while leaving the actual apex of wealth untouched. Each iteration presents itself as liberation while performing the same structural function: absorbing popular resentment, extracting resources from the middle tiers, and centralizing power at the apex under a new legitimating narrative. The label is inflammatory, but the pattern is historical.

3

Small and mid sized business were forcibly shut down while multinational organizations continued to operate; $13 trillion dollars was printed with the vast majority of it funneled to the ultra-rich.

4

The three features are explained in detail in Part 1. The key distinction is that this is a structural argument about selection pressure, not an ethnic argument about Jewish control. Elites of any background seeking maximum legitimation efficiency would converge on this framework.

5

“Paul Warburg arranged the 1929 stock market crash; first he advised all member banks to get out of the stock market or sell it short on March 9, 1929, then on October 24 the Federal Reserve Bank suddenly increased the rediscount rate to 6%, thousands of orders hit the exchange to sell “at market”, and six days later the Federal Reserve Bank ordered the contraction of brokers’ loans in the amount of $2.3 million, the combination of which caused the crash. Congressman Louis T. McFadden stated “It was a carefully contrived occurrence. The international [central] bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all.””

6

As argued previously, my working assumption is that there is and was a backroom deal made in early 2024; all of Trump’s criminal and civil trials magically disappeared after Ron Desantis flamed out in his presidential run, and after his victory he immediately gutted enforcement agencies and engaged in a multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency graft, pay-for-play presidential pardons, and massive, billions of dollars worth of insider stock market trading. He also reached a “deal” with the IRS where the IRS never audit his actions in the future. In return for this intense criminal bribery he agreed to destroy the right-wing populist movement and further the Greater Israel project.

7

I think of Breitbart.com, controlled by Steve Bannon during the 2016 election, who turned out to be deeply embedded within the Jeffrey Epstein nexus; or consider the John Birsch society, seen as radically anti-establishment during the Vietnam War, where its co-founder Revilo P. Oliver bitterly complained that its head Robert Welch reported to Zionist handlers, while Welch’s apparently non-controlled successor Larry McDonald was blown out of the sky by the Soviets, I assume under the orders of the upper elites.

8

Mullins wrote that the central bank owners

adopted the Hegelian dialectic, the dialectic of materialism, which regards the World as Power, and the World as Reality. It denies all other powers and all other realities. It functions on the principle of thesis, antithesis and a synthesis…Thus the World Order organizes and finances Jewish groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Jewish groups; it organizes Communist groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Communist groups. It is not necessary for the Order to throw these groups against each other; they seek each other out like heat-seeking missiles and try to destroy each other. By controlling the size and resources of each group, the World Order can always predetermine the outcome. In this technique, members of the World Order are often identified with one side or the other. John Foster Dulles arranged financing for Hitler, but he was never a Nazi. David Rockefeller may be cheered in Moscow, but he is not a Communist…a distinguishing trait of a member of the World Order, although it may not be admitted, is that he does not believe in anything but the World Order. Another distinguishing trait is his absolute contempt for anyone who actually believes in the tenets of Communism, Zionism, Christianity, or any national, religious or fraternal group…If you are a sincere Christian, Zionist or Moslem, the World Order regards you as a moron unworthy of respect. You can and will be used, but you will never be respected.

9

He wrote: “Globohomo has two main camps, the “left” open borders types and the “right” comically Zionist types. The right is having its turn with Trump, a gigantic corrupt Zionist puppet. Next turn will be the left open borders crowd. They already had four years of totally open borders under Biden, illegals all waved in like a third base coach and provided tons of free benefits, extreme overcrowding in cities, I think many people have already forgotten. So when they get to go again they’re going to take the anti white rhetoric to unseen new extreme heights, and go to increase the size and power of government regarding confiscation of private property. The best way to make this look legitimate to the masses is through this narrative that traditional Democrats are losing power to the “progressives” and this is being fueled grassroots from disaffected young people tired of the old corrupt democrat establishment. So globohomo is pouring resources to prop up these “progressives” aka DSA types all over the country.”

10

The forced sale of TikTok was not meant to entirely purge anti-semitism from the platform, but rather to give increased control to the upper elites who could decide how fast or slow to ratchet it for their purposes. The same applies to the universities forced into line with $100 million of “pro bono” legal aid provided by top law firms to pressure them.

11

As argued here, I do not believe I am special or better than the masses for offloading the crucifixion of opposites and being distracted by sound and fury. The reason for this is that the offloading frees up massive psychic space to focus on living life and other activities; holding the crucifixion of opposites internally is massively energy intensive and I wouldn’t be doing it if the psychosomatic buildup in my body didn’t require me to, based on threshold dynamics.