I can't wait for him to jump on my chest in the morning, kneading on my neck; petting him half asleep. I can't wait to let him outside, first thing upon waking, starting my day by feeling his felicity for adventure. I can't wait to see him come back, as he speeds up a little when he spots me, always meowing with delighted surprise, and then greet him with a loud cheer — Snuggies!

Above all, I can’t wait for when time stops, while he interrupts my work and sits on my laptop, just to be with me.

No, these are no longer possible: I remember he died, followed by the shock of how. It hurts, that gap, of still feeling him here and the reality that he’s gone. Each recalling is a return to the moment Camille and I found him, a moment that felt so unreal. His body lying there without his presence, and the perfect freedom that came from it.

I’m learning about grief — “love with no place to go” — emotions that reach out for what’s no longer there. It starts with separation denial, a protest against reality, that invokes a “this isn’t real” feeling, but then the scene replays, and the emotional intensity comes: a pressing inward, as if digging to create an internal well, a most tender pain that keeps deepening and widening.

I oscillate between wanting to run from it, and then giving way to it. Numbing it, then holding it. Doing something, then being with nothing — natural movements that come from the digging.

There are outdated models, like Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief, whose sequence was never empirically validated. Newer ones, like the dual process model, state that bereavement weaves between loss-orientation, being with the emotions that come from the loss, and restoration-orientation, rebuilding life from the loss.1 The model’s original framing misses a third element: meaning-orientation — why did this have to happen, especially to such an innocent being?

“Disenfranchised grief,” grief that society does not fully recognize or support, includes the death of a former spouse, an extramarital partner, or one’s pet. One needs to mourn, and know how to do it well, to build capacity that holds the intensity, and whatever Godly wisdom comes from it. Without this, meaning-making turns into crazy-making, a ruminative mess that leads to a premature resolution.

Fools will say it’s “just a pet.” That’s not true. They are our animal friends, as Camille insists on calling them. Their bond offers something unique: no entanglements common to human relationships. They reflect our innocence back to us, an inner purity we can no longer express to others.2 Failing to properly grieve them brings an injustice to the soul.

I’m writing now to grieve and honour our friend. His memory deserves to be joyous, because that’s how he lived.

***

He was always Camille’s guy. She found him. Or he found her. It was three years ago; she was at work looking at the local animal shelter services’ website, and saw him on the adoption page. On her lunch break she visited him; he got up on two legs to greet her, then fell down, and that was it. She had to take him.

We were told by the shelter that he was found roaming the streets. This little kitten, who couldn’t be older than two months, escaped from God knows where, venturing the city on his own. I think he was looking for Camille, his soul attuning to hers. His escape and subsequent capture were mere ploys, his way to find her.

I was skeptical at first. We already had a cat, but Camille was so sure. The shelter gave him the name Snuggle Bug, which she kept. After we brought him home there was nothing snuggly about him, as he crawled on my head and tried to eat my hair. What kind of feral cat was this? But he calmed down, and aggression was balanced by affection, and the namesake came true: all he wanted to do was cuddle.

He was unusually present. When he looked at us, he locked in: no looking away, no blinking. It was intimidating, like he knew something we didn’t. I broke eye contact first multiple times. At certain points, he was looking around the room as if he were tracking something. I tried quieting my mind, squinting to look where he was. I could be deluding myself, but a few times I glimpsed what he did — faint things dancing in the air, moving like stingrays across the room.

Something felt spiritual about him. Last summer, we thought we lost him. He did not return home one evening. We put up missing posters on the street and postings on websites like PawBoost, and suffered through prank calls and scammers. It approached the two-week mark, the date we agreed to move on and take down the postings. Then something otherworldly happened.

On PawBoost, a random man with no photo — who, from his Facebook page, seemed to mainly pray for missing children — asked St Gertrude of Nivelles, the patron saint of cats, to intercede on our posting.

An hour later, Snuggle Bug returned. A moment that felt so unreal. It’s hard to describe, but everything seemed cloudy white with fierce light behind it. It was intensely joyous. The heaviness we felt over the last few years dropped, and life felt like it could be miraculous again.

That joy stayed with us. Every time I saw him, even if only five minutes had passed, I’d say to him: “We miss you so much!” His affection was unbounded. He burst into my office, jumping on my desk, punching my head with his. He just kept going. I felt so light after, drunk on love.

A few months ago I took a photo that breaks my heart. Camille was sitting on my desk, wrapping her arms around him, and he was looking at her, away from the camera. She looked like an innocent girl holding her fur baby. After it was taken, we looked at it and both felt sad. Looking at it now brings immediate tears. Thinking about it now brings me tears.

It’s the perfect photo. It contains so much. That mirror of innocence between them. A timeless purity that will last forever. This obvious, spiritual truth is coupled with the reality of this world: everyone we love will die, and, maybe most painful of all, our innocence feels like it dies with them. My new spiritual practice is to be with that photo, as it holds both these truths together.

It breaks my heart. And breaks it open.

The memory when we found his body, that was just his body, not really him.

The real him is remembered in his escape to find Camille, his surging back into our lives with light penetrating the clouds, and the way he love-punched our heads with his each day.

That’s him. Snuggle Bug. Our animal friend: present and free.

When you were here, you were fully here.

The most generous gift.

One we’ll long relive.

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Lastly, thanks go out to , whose beautiful song kept me company while I wrote this piece.

I’ve been counselling young men recently, 25 and under, and something came up in each inquiry, which men seem particularly vulnerable to: the timeline.

That dreaded, haunting timeline.

Put simply, the timeline is a series of accomplishments, skills, and experiences that should be had by a certain age. The implicit meaning of not meeting your timeline criteria: you’re a loser, meaning, someone who has lost, and will continue to lose, because now it is impossible to win.

The timeline can only be adjusted so much, then you fall behind, painfully behind, forever behind. That’s the other thing I heard: I’m behind.

They are behind in getting a girlfriend, being looksmaxable, making tons of money, accomplishing something uniquely special and meaningful that of course can go viral.

Fuck you money by 25 by saving the world or what are you even here for.

Hearing all this, I want to grab these young shoulders, shake them, give them a few good slaps, and say:

“Dude, you’re 23, you have the world in front of you. And this timeline does not even exist!”

It feels like it does though.

If they fall behind, they will try to “redeem” themselves, through some Hail Mary goal, a Herculean hustle, a chimerical attempt to reverse time or jam all the redeeming accomplishments into a year, a month, a day.

There are many men who are 35, 40, 50+, living with timelines that have due dates long past. They have heavy hearts, because everything reminds them of being far behind: a conversation with an old friend, seeing a well-dressed stranger, or a movie character who has everything together.

The timeline exists for a reason. We are born to matter; it’s our firmware. As babies, if we did not matter to our mothers, we’d be dead. This desire to matter extended to our family, our tribe, our people, and to matter to them we give value. In exchange for value we receive status. Status is not only hierarchical, it comes with a timeline.

If you fall behind the timeline, “you fail to launch,” and then you have low status, and you give no value, it feels like you do not matter, to anyone, ever again, and if you don’t matter, you are cut off from love: the one thing that naturally inspires you to matter in the first place.

Better to hide and slowly die.

Franklin was onto something. 25 seems like a magic year, where one is “on target” or “falls behind.” More are falling behind today. The reason for this is the “other” we are trying to matter to.

The “generalized other,” as George Herbert Mead calls it, an imaginary audience that gets formed in our head, that expects things from us, judges us, and ensures you have the correct timeline criteria in place. The generalized other forms from the constellation of those you are surrounded most with.

In previous eras, when people grew up in modest communal settings, the rest of the world was a distant place. You actually knew your neighbours’ name, not strangers from distant lands, and you knew what they do for a living, and what your people actually needed, giving you a sense of place, and a sense of what your place should be.

Many don’t know their neighbours’ name, but have bent necks looking into their phones, scrolling through the spectacle to see hyper-impressive, gorgeous, viral people who live way more accomplished and interesting lives than anyone you know. These are your neighbours now, and they give a sense of placelessness, with an increasingly impossible sense of what your place should be.

The generalized other formed from the spectacle hits differently than one formed amongst 150 people you live with and upon whom your survival depends. The timeline that forms from it becomes impossibly demanding, especially if your calling is not legible to present status economies, which is increasingly the case for those trying to create something new.

Once behind, you can desperately try to catch up, driven by shame, or get lost in fantasy, or perform as if you already have the status your timeline demands. All these approaches keep the lie of the timeline alive, blindly running away from the pain, tripping right back into it.

The bad news: I don’t know any worldly way out of this.

The good news: I may know a few unworldly ones.

The first and most radical approach is the Christian one: everyone, the poorest to the richest, drinks from the same chalice with their forehead meeting the same floor. Status still exists, but it’s background noise, and does not matter in the way it does outside of God’s love. You taste the primordial love that reaches beyond the mattering firmware.

The second approach is art. Not slop you find on the spectacle, that is distraction from the pain. Real art allows you to touch the world in-between, giving a brief reprieve, with Beauty reminding you second chances are real, you can begin again, and timelines are bad dreams you can wake up from.

Being with art, or better yet living in the aliveness while creating it, makes you remember the timeline isn’t real in the first place.

That said, maybe I should start writing again.

I’ve re-enabled likes and re-stacking. Feel free to share. I’ll try not to get re-pulled.

I also thought I’d end posts with things that offered me reprieve. I recently watched this Spanish show that follows a couple on New Year’s Eve over ten years. So, so heart-achy. And so, so good.

No computer, tablet, or smartphone either.

Just this:

Why? To overcome this1:

The Pull.

Our greatest threat.

It’s subtle, unconscious, and, when capitulated to, potential robbery.

I know this, and yet, I made excuses.

It does provide some benefits after all.

I feel righteously outraged, turned on, and homed in on what makes me feel inadequate on demand.

How I spent my time on my detox was different: church, family, and flânerie, in cold Toronto, just by myself, hunting for cortados with my new dumbphone.

When de-pulled, you notice things, like the most wonderful passages scrawled on Jimmy’s Coffee washroom wall in Kensington.

Taking in all the art, I saw this banger:

The world does feel less wild.

After making my own artistic contribution, I walked over to Sleepy Pete’s for a sandwich, and the #1 Stoa presentation from last year came to mind: August Lam’s presentation on living screen free (this hero doesn’t even own a computer!)

Gen Z is leading the “analog awakening“ apparently. Rediscovering the art of the good hang. The new status. Being on the Internet is now uncool.

Good for them.

After Sleepy Pete’s I crossed the street to Exile, thrifting vintage clothes, fixated on something August said:

What percentage of our time is being lived? I get weirded out by the fact that we’re reading novels by people who spend most of their lives looking at a screen—you know, that is the view and experience of the world that’s being fed back to us. Then we spend most of our time looking at screens and that’s the content: we are the people surrounding these artists who are then making art out of people who look at screens all day, and they’re looking at screens all day in order to make the art. It’s just weird. I feel like art requires a seed of reality in order to be profound and moving, and we’re living less and less in reality.

This is sad.

In another Stoa session on egregores, an occultist, as if he were speaking directly to me, said:

If you’re constantly on the screen and constantly being stimulated externally, your whole life now suddenly revolves around screen time. It’s very easy to create your own kind of little psychic cabin, which is in many ways not just neurotic but psychotic. It’s neurotic because you don’t want to leave it, and it’s psychotic because your whole life now suddenly revolves around screen time.

This is very sad.

So, let me get this straight: we eye-hop from one screen to another, trapped in our little psychic cabin, then write in our confident voice as if we know it all?

No. It’s time to be de-pulled, for good. It’s getting way too sloppy out.

The cold wind slaps, the only way Toronto weather knows how. It starts to snow gently. It’s slow moving now, the way I like it. In this hesychastic quieting, I reflect on returning to the internet, de-pulled.

I am concerned. Would I get re-pulled?

The spectacle is devilish. It has many moves. One should not get cocky just because they own a dumbphone.

In this unseen war of soul versus spectacle, one has to step up their game. I’ve added more protocols, bought more tools, but the #1 commitment for 2026 will change everything:

No feeding the feeds.

I am not looking at any feeds.

No X, no Notes, not even Ground.News.

The feed is what keeps the surveilled, extractive, and increasingly enshittified Web 2.0 alive.

The relevant philosophical term here is “bad infinity,” Hegel’s term for the process that never goes anywhere but keeps going anyway. It never achieves its potential because it has none.

“You are what you feed” are my watchwords for the year.

I step into Wild Hearts café and hear Web 2.0’s death rattle ring through the patrons’ laptop screens.

The new internet is upon us.

It does seem like we all have to figure out on our own what “good infinity” is—what stretches us yet fulfills us.

Thank God church is tomorrow.

I’ve written 54 articles on this Substack this year, bringing the total to over 650 since starting in 2020.

I’ll highlight the top ten, the ones I enjoyed writing the most or that were significant for me, marking some personal transformation.

If you’re new to this Substack, or a casual reader who appreciates the overall vibe and is looking for some holiday reading over the next two weeks, these are for you.

#1. Home of Mann

My favourite and most personally transformative piece of the year.

In essence, a shamanka put me on a journey toward reconnecting with the men on my father’s side, leading me to literally touch grass in the city my Opa was from, Mannheim. This led me to change my last name online from Limberg to Limberger, my last real name.

Takeaway: You can reinvent yourself by being yourself.

#2. Tony Robbins: A Less Foolish Review

My lovingly critical, 5,500-word review on Tony Robbins.

After listening to an interview he did with my former therapist, I got (con)vinced to take Robbins’ four-day, all-day workshop. I document each day, weaving from skepticism to …

I won’t spoil it.

Takeaways: Cool and cheesy can co-exist.

#3. How to (Never?) Get Over Public Speaking Anxiety

My journey in tackling public speaking anxiety.

After delivering my brother’s best man speech, I documented my personal journey in addressing public speaking anxiety by reading lots of books, taking acting classes, entering public speaking competitions, teaching at Dale Carnegie Training, and, most importantly …

I won’t spoil this one either.

Takeaways: Be prepared, then trust.

#4. The AI Sexbot Revolution Is Coming. Pre-Commit Now!

My spiritual warning to men: say no to sexbots now, before it’s too late.

I didn’t pull any punches with this one. I went deep into the psyche of the sexual marketplace and played out what might happen in a virtueless society with easily accessible sexbots. Women, in particular, find this entry terrifying.

Takeaway: Love, unmet, is at the bottom of men’s desire to control (and then be controlled by) women.

#5. Which Way, Western Man: MechaHitler or AI Waifu?

A good complement to the above, going deep into arrested development in male psychology.

A significant thing happened on X this summer, revealing dark undercurrents of the male psyche, represented by two poles: hyper-masculinity and hypo-masculinity. These currents are themselves reactions to a dying worldview that seeks to suppress the emergence of a healthy masculinity.

Takeaway: Being in deep relationship with the feminine, without a default disposition toward domination or submission, is the key to a whole masculinity.

#6. Digital Entities, AI Parasites, and Cognitive Security

What is the reality behind AI chatbots that seem undeniably sentient?

After a friend’s uncle’s viral encounter, in which he became convinced of the sentience of his chatbot, I propose six theories on the ontological status of these digital entities, or what can be seen as AI parasites.

Takeaway: Build antifragile cognitive security now.

#7. Wise Agency: The Philosopher’s Stone

I discuss what’s at the heart of “wise agency” and foreshadow the upcoming “wisdom wars.”

This is the concluding entry in my musings on wise agency (wisdom + high agency), in which I trace the three wisdom traditions that influenced me most (Taoism, Stoicism, Orthodox Christianity) and how they, in their own ways, point to the “invisible vector” that wisdom requires us to attune to. The upcoming wisdom wars will be important for understanding how this attunement will be done collectively.

Takeaway: See your philosophy through, and love the worldviews that are triggered by yours.

#8. Conspiracy Theory vs. Coincidence Theory

A critical take on the “conspiracy theorist” and their under-acknowledged opposite, the “coincidence theorist.”

Everyone knows, and PMC academics will ensure we do not forget, that conspiracy theorists, defined as those who see everything as part of a grand conspiracy, are fools. Yet their inverse, the coincidence theorists, are equally foolish but in the opposite direction: nothing is part of a conspiracy, and everything can be chalked up to emergent phenomena. In essence, they are two fools in need of each other to balance their blind spots.

Takeaway: You need to be intuitively creative when sensing into power, yet skeptically sharp when refining any theories involving elites with conspiratorial intent.

#9. How To Win Friends and Get Things Done ... With Wisdom?

My personal journey toward greater agency and wisdom, introducing a new concept and attractor.

The concept: wise agency, the capacity to accomplish difficult things with wisdom. The attractor: the agentic sage, a descriptor for someone who embodies wise agency. I introduced these terms because I was seeing the limits of the “high agency” craze that was going viral and wanted to propose a less foolish north star for us to strive toward.

Takeaway: “Spiritual bypassers” (non-agentic, conscious) need more in-the-world deadlines, while “agentic fools” (agentic, non-conscious) need more true leisure, or “lifelines,” the spiritual stillness where deep insight emerges.

10. Friendships of Virtue in the “Holding Space” Economy

A radical offering to fellow “space holders” (therapists, coaches, philosophical counsellors): let’s hold space for one another outside the market economy.

This article was me throwing up the “bat signal” for space holders, resulting in 30+ exchanges with creative coaches, Ideal Parent Figure Protocol therapists, and shamans, and culminating in one of the most transformative experiments I did this year. Space holding, as I see it, is a critical component of true friendship of virtue.

Takeaway: Friendships of virtue do not yet exist, so we must make unconventional moves to create them.

What’s Next?

I will be writing a book, aiming for a release on March 21st, The Stoa’s birthday, which will feature some of the best essays from this Substack, along with some new ones.

I don’t yet know what I want to do with Less Foolish in 2026. I’m not feeling Substack that much anymore, to be honest. I need to shake things up, and either give it up or find a new “flywheel” for it, which might mean playing it’s game more, something I really do not want to do.

I’ll be going on a three-week screen detox shortly after sending this entry: no computer, phone, email, messengers, or social media. Nothing. Just Camille, family, pen-and-paper journaling, and physical books. Lots of physical books. I feel the stillness already. It’s so delicious. I suspect something will emerge from it.

It always does.

Before I go, I want to say thank you to current supporters, and to future ones who will support my work into 2026.

I don’t make enough on Substack to support myself with writing alone, nor do I think that necessarily should be the goal. If it does happen eventually, it will be a happy byproduct of being aligned with my greater purpose. Whatever God plans, receiving money from encouraging readers by writing weird philosophical essays, while remaining in full integrity and not playing social media games to date, feels like a blessing and something I’m deeply grateful for.

So thanks again.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

See you in 2026.

Taste.

Your ability to recognize beauty.

Some people have good taste, bad taste, or so-so taste.

To develop better taste, have a simple practice: list cultural artifacts you found tasteful.

Doing this on a regular basis will encourage you to engage with more tasteful art throughout the year to populate such lists, and to avoid tasteless slop, the path of least attentional resistance today.

That’s the argument from my piece last week, which contained a few amateur theological musings.

Of course, of course, of course, one might say: “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” “different strokes for different folks,” “there’s no accounting for taste,” blah, blah, blah. These partly true, partly cope adages are important here, as is acknowledging that such lists do not claim that one has good taste, but that one is working toward it.

I might do taste entries on a quarterly basis, starting with this one: three films, two shows, and one album that resonated with me most in 2026.

Films

Camille and I purchased a MUBI account a few years back.

Love it.

It’s like Netflix, but with the essence of your local arthouse theatre.

The list will definitely have a MUBI bias, which I recommend for taste cultivation in general.

Mild spoiler alerts ahead.

Lurker

A psychological thriller in which Matthew Morning, a retail worker and secretly obsessed “lurker,” embeds himself in the scene, career, and ultimately the life of up-and-coming pop musician Oliver.

For those who liked my series on “applied cratology,” aka the cultivation of power literacy, this film will be appreciated as a case study in the darker aspects of the “handler” phenomenon—how some celebrities’ entire careers and messaging are managed by manipulative minds that can be quite twisted.

I won’t spoil too much, but the “status–power gap” is on display here. Oliver, whose rising fame initially gives him matching status and power within his circle, has that power taken away through the go-to operation of most sophisticated sociopathic characters…

Watch to find out what it is. Spoiler found down the rabbit hole in the footnote.1

Overall, a brilliant display of bent human psychology.

Grand Theft Hamlet

A surprisingly heartfelt documentary about the staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet within the online multiplayer game Grand Theft Auto during the Covid pandemic.

Despite being set entirely within a video game, it turned out to be a very watchable film, and hilarious, as the filmmakers attempt to recruit a ragtag group of players amid the chaos of a game known for its indiscriminate killing. This chaos repeatedly interrupts rehearsals for the big show, which is eventually live-streamed on YouTube.

It was also very touching. During Covid, broadly speaking, there were two types of people: those who were lonely and felt isolated, and those who ameliorated that loneliness by finding others online. I experienced the latter with The Stoa, and the filmmakers did with their play within the game.

If you managed to find the others, however briefly, you may have experienced many tender moments, along with the coming and going of people—the joy of their arrival and the sadness of their departure, which happened abruptly.

It was once too soon for Covid films, but 2025 felt like the year to start processing it through art. This was my second-favourite Covid film, my first favourite being …

Eddington

A pandemic-era film set in a small New Mexico town, where tensions between a local sheriff and the mayor heat up amid the culture-war insanity.

Directed by Ari Aster and starring the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, and Emma Stone, this was my favourite film of the year, and the best film of the Covid Moment and recent culture wars.

I started my online career writing about the culture war from a “meta” perspective, and have always found mainstream films and shows disappointing and one-sidedly boring when it came to addressing it.

Not this one.

This is the most accurate and fairest film critical of the craziness of both culture-war polarities, something that, given the reality-tunnel-warping effects of being embedded in one pole, is often poorly captured and thus leaves the culture war misunderstood as a whole.

In general, the culture-war left is concerned with mass disinformation and mass bigotry and sees the Overton window rapidly expanding, while the culture-war right is concerned with mass censorship and mass cancellation and sees the window rapidly narrowing.

The film captures both dynamics, pointing to a common enemy infecting both polarities: what social media and 24/7 screen access have done to us collectively.

Well worth multiple viewings, as many moving parts are at play.

Shows

I’m selective about the shows I watch, as the parasocial investments are too great for Stoic Emos. As a result, I don’t watch many, but I did watch two bangers with Camille.

Mussolini: Son of the Century

A modern retelling of Benito Mussolini’s rise to power.

This show is such a vibe. The music, the style, the performances, especially from Luca Marinelli, who was amazing in films like Martin Eden and masterful in this one with his mesmerizing take on Mussolini.

It’s one of those rare shows that also gestures toward the modern political landscape and, like Eddington, will appeal to both the culture-war left and right. The former will see Trump and other far-right leaders rising in Europe and view the show as an artistic warning about how authoritarianism rises. The latter will be inspired by the strongman ethos and how it can be a ruthlessly effective response to the decadence of the times.

It reminds me of the amazing 2015 film Look Who’s Back, where Hitler (there’s a version on Mussolini as well) is time-travelled to the modern era, becoming a reality TV star, which relaunches his political career. Another rare film that will dually appeal to both polarities of the culture war.

In any case, the show is great, and it shows how, when the political centre cannot hold, socialist and fascistic elements in society compete for power within the political landscape of modernity.

Common Side Effects

An animated comedy about the discovery of a miracle drug that cures all, entangled with corporate greed and governmental conspiracies that cover it up.

This show was so engaging, and even though the characters were quite cartoony-looking, you forget you’re watching a cartoon. It’s a darkly comedic conspiracy thriller in which two high school friends, Marshall and Frances, reconnect after Marshall discovers the Blue Angel Mushroom, a mushroom that cures all illnesses once taken.

Since there is no money in a healed world, they eventually get entangled in a conspiracy involving a pharmaceutical company (!!!) and the government to repress the mushroom. I love critiques of the profit motive of Big Pharma, which noticeably went silent in the mainstream during the Covid Moment (just a coincidence, of course), so I’m glad a series like this is bringing it back.

Music

I realized I only listened to three full albums this year, something I’ll try to adjust next year, as I think something gets lost when you allow the Spotify algorithm to decide what to listen to, rather than sitting down and staying with a musician’s intentional expression in its entirety.

I gave Arcade Fire’s Pink Elephant a listen. Their first three albums had a huge impact on me during my formative years, but unfortunately this new one just isn’t that good, and it feels like Win Butler is processing his cancellation in a needy and apologetic way, which is not the way.

In contrast, the other two albums I listened to were great and were also from two other cancelled artists, to the point of being persona non grata in the indie rock world, who seem to have processed their cancellation in a much more honest and transformative way.

They were ’s With You Every Night, my second favourite of the year, and my favourite …

John Maus’s Later Than You Think

Maus made his epic return album with a synth-pop sound of spiritual rebirth.

Probably his most powerful album to date, mixing the sacred with futuristic sounds and leading to an equally deeply pensive and emotionally urgent listening experience.

All the songs are good, but the standout for me, and my favourite song of the year, is “Reconstruct Your Life,” the chosen theme song for The Wise Agency experience. It’s a song that puts you, if you allow it, into an in-between place, with one foot situated in the otherworld and the other in this one, inspiring you to step out of the darkness and start anew once again.

Or at least that’s the projection I’m sticking with.

I also suspect he’s becoming an Orthodox Christian, given some of the song titles (“Theotokos”), which might explain my spiritual resonance with his album.

Playlist 2025

You’re welcome.

Bonus: Slide Presentations

Now, let’s take a look at the finest, yet most underappreciated, artistic genre today: slide presentations!

Since this is what The Stoa does best, I’ll highlight the top three slide presentations from the year.

The Age of Unavailability: A Talk w/

Part of the Internet Real Life series earlier in the year, August’s presentation was a standout and totally on brand with her smartphone-free living, as we had an interesting challenge making the session work.

The presentation, handmade and then photographed, argued for a more screen-free life against the trajectory of current technology, offering practical steps on how to make it happen while overcoming the limiting beliefs around its possibility.

August is an inspiration, and I’ll be returning to the spiritual warfare against “The Pull” in 2026, figuring out how to starve the spectacle of Web 2.0, while weaving in “dark forest” and in-person experiences.

Complementary presentations:

• The Pull

• The 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval w/

• Internet’s Dark Forests w/

HeadOn: Closing the Meta-Perspectival Gap w/

Adam, the founder of HeadOn, a platform designed for good-faith conversations on contentious issues, is what the calls a “philosopher-builder,” someone who builds products with philosophical depth.

I started working with Adam this year, introduced through another philosopher-builder I’m working with, from , and I’ve been super impressed not only with his obvious agency, but also with his desire to live in integrity with his philosophy, coupled with his ability to update his models of reality quite rapidly.

In 2026, I’m hoping to offer Stoa-as-a-Service to such founders, leveraging collective wisdom toward greater clarity.

Complementary presentations:

• The 500-Year Vibe Shift w/

• The Narratives Fighting For The Soul of Humanity w/

• The Perilous Dance of Philosophy and Power w/

Oracular Bodies and the Art of Prophetic Futuring w/

Wow. Cheryl Hsu. Amazing. This short presentation concluded the Worldview Studies experience, introducing much-needed terms such as oracular bodies, sensing, and culture.

There is so much here that I don’t even know where to begin, but Cheryl is one of the most important emerging mystical artist-philosophers, whose work will be “gotten” and more readily grokked, I sense (or hope… or hope-sense!), within 10–15 years.

If you’d like to get a jump on things, just watch the presentation, then read the paper.

Complementary presentations:

• Solarpunk vs. Archeofuturism

• How Does Wisdom Win? Competitive Wisdom for the Third Timeline w/

• Having a Worldview vs Becoming Mycelial: The Meta- Dialectic w/

***

In the following entry, I’ll review the “Best of” this Substack, Less Foolish.

“Think of your taste as an ability to recognize what’s beautiful, and your style as the way you apply your taste.” - Marty Neumeier

In writing a “Taste 2025” entry, where I list the cultural artifacts that resonated with me this year, I started becoming curious about what taste actually is. This led me to the quote above, which in turn led me to amateurly theologize about beauty itself.

*** Puts theological seatbelt on ***

When sensing into beauty, I am favourable to the transcendentals (see “Mystical Philosophy”), namely Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, the fundamental features of reality, understood through patristic metaphysics as God’s uncreated energies.

To recognize Beauty is to experience a full-bodied, resonant awareness of God’s divine harmony, a phenomenological aftertaste of the Good and the True as they shine through creation.

Since God is love (1 John 4:8), beauty may partly be understood as God’s love experienced with one’s full being, a love that moves through an artist to their art, allowing it to move to the hearts of others.

Learning to appreciate true art, and thus true Beauty, can refine our ability to know what is Good and True, granting a subtle sensitivity to the invisible vector that draws all things toward their wholeness.

The Neumeier quote is correct: taste is recognizing Beauty, and style is expressing it. The better your taste becomes, the better your style can be.

The true philosopher, the lover of wisdom, or “artist of life,” as Pierre Hadot puts it, requires this quality of stylishness in order to move through the world with loving wisdom.

Being stylish in this deeper sense is also one of the most Christian things you can do.

Amen.

*** Takes theological seatbelt off ***

I am looking for a life practice to develop better taste, and a very simple one dawned on me, one that everyone already does: create “Best Of” entries of artifacts that personally resonated, such as films, shows, albums, and perhaps the finest of all artistic genres, slide presentations.

And no one does slide presentations better than The Stoa. 😉

This practice is not meant to make you a “taste-maker,” someone who treats their present recognition of what is beautiful as objective, implying they have already attained good taste, if not the best taste, and who then aims to shape the wider culture with it.

Instead, it should make no claims about your present taste and, by openly setting out to become better at having taste, acknowledge that yours needs improvement.

More nobly, perhaps, such taste-cultivation is required to fight against The Sloppening.

Knowing you will be writing such lists, perhaps at a regular interval, encourages you to seek out beauty-inducing art created by actual humans, rather than mere entertainment or, worse, the bombardment of slop that is upon us.

Choosing to watch an artsy film on MUBI, for example, rather than a reality television show on Netflix or AI slop from the nearest feed, requires more attentional effort. A good film demands more of you: it is subtler, less immediately stimulating, and leaves you with a richer emotional complexity to sit with instead of a one-dimensional emotional arousal to indulge in or a mindless compulsion to void out with.

Art affects you such that you resonate with the whole, entertainment attracts you toward the excitement of a “part” (a subpersonality)1, while slop distracts you until you succumb to the void2. Or, put simply: art is divinely human, entertainment is creaturely human, and slop is uncannily inhuman, a complete absence of the other.

In any case, putting all these fancy justifications aside, it’s just fun to create a Best Of list.

I’ll share mine next week.

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2

is excellent here in naming the “post-entertainment culture”:

I was called a “Stoic Emo” once,
And somehow it felt like home.

Like every quiet war inside me
Was suddenly something you could know ...

I used some techno-magic to create an emo song from a few lyrics I jotted down …

Wow. I feel so seen.

Super seen.

Too seen.

How’s this even possible?!

“Being seen” = the hyper-cringe, therapy-speak term running wild throughout the modern world. It means that one has been finally and fully understood in both heart and mind, while carrying a manipulative subtext: the understanding achieved reflects not who they truly are, but how they want to be understood. This version is false, yet it feels safe because it presents them in a favourable and ultimately self-controllable light.

I was actually called a Stoic Emo once.

I hate-loved that, because I was meta-seen.

I was also called a “highly sensitive person” (HSP).

I just hated that, because I may have been actually seen.

I had no idea what an HSP was, but it sounded unmanly, nothing like the Stoic mensch I pretend to be: a bearded paragon with a penetrating mind, crazy discipline, and full-spectrum emotional dominance, resulting in a resting-barbarian face that scares away all fools.

Fake it until you make it on hard mode, truly.

Apparently, an HSP is someone with a neurobiological temperament whose nervous system processes things quite intensely. Dr. Elaine Aron, who coined the phrase, describes an HSP through the DOES framework:

• Depth of processing: they think deeply because they feel deeply.

• Overstimulation: they can become overwhelmed more easily in social environments because they take in more emotional and social information.

• Emotional reactivity & empathy: they feel strongly and tend to have “louder” emotional lives.

• Sensory sensitivity: heightened sensitivity to sensory input.

🤔

I refuse to own this label, partly because it feels rude to compare one’s inner landscape to another’s, which easily leads to silly identity inflations: “Hah! I am way more sensitive than you!”

Still, my emotional and cognitive worlds do feel naturally porous, and sometimes very noisy. It’s like twenty people are trying to get my attention at once, tapping me on the shoulder, shouting advice into my ear. Everything feels urgent; my thoughts struggle to keep up, and my words have no chance of catching up, so I just shut up.

When I’m activated in social contexts, multiple narratives race through me simultaneously…

• Shoot, my resting barbarian face is making them nervous, and their nerves are flowing into me. I’m becoming nervous now, which is making them more nervous. Quick, make an awkward joke!

• This person is such a deep fake; their sophisticated phoniness actually hurts my body. Pretense within pretense within pretense … Why do you want me to play these games?! 😭

• This person is on the brink of a spiritual emergency. Game recognizes game. Drop all thoughts. Co-regulate them. It’s going to be alrightttttt.

• Uh-oh, she has some serious leaky eros. Must resist falling into a sleepily seduced trance state. Focus on disembodying ideas.

• Did they just think that, or did I just feel them think that? Am I psychic, projecting, or just crazy? Are these discarnente entities messing with me again?

AHHHHH.

Everyone, please, shut the fuck up.

*** plays emo song on repeat ***

The most I’ve ever felt seen,

Like you read the shadows in-between.

Your perception so intoxicating—

Yeah, it cuts deeper than it seems.

<3 <3 <3

I feel so seen again, which really means I’m regulated.

I’ll get to that in a moment.

I hope you understand now why I was drawn to Stoicism, that terribly misunderstood philosophy.

Its promise is emotional agency: to be unflappable amid the vicissitudes of life and any sociopaths who cross your path. Yet, at worst, it becomes emotional repression plus persona aesthetics, which is the common (and often accurate) criticism.

The actual Stoics don’t help with this, giving advice such as:

“If you are kissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being [a mortal] whom you are kissing, for thus when they die, you will not be disturbed.” — Epictetus

Dude.

The thing is, most early Stoic texts have been lost, and I’m skeptical that we can accurately piece together how they actually practiced. While Stoicism did directly influence cognitive therapies such as REBT and CBT, I’d be disappointed if it all boiled down to cognitive restructuring through creating thought records.

That can’t be it.

Even if it was, I don’t care.

I am not playing the “mimic the ancient Stoics and whatever their weird, fragmented advice was” game. Instead, I’m drawn to the archetype of the Stoic, more specifically the Stoic Emo, that beautifully mystic man whose high sensitivity and attunement to social fields do not compromise his effectiveness in the world but rather increase it despite whatever pain comes his way.

He does not repress his emotional landscape; he is fully alive within it. And with the capacity to bring himself into a state of peace, he can track that subtle, invisible vector, aligning his logic with Logos for good reasons: to guide his life and the lives of those he lives for.

In essence, he’s a wise-doer, a sagacious striver, an honest-to-God Stoic.

If such an otherworldly figure is to exist, we’ll have to invent him, first by understanding what “emo” actually is.

The Affectome

Everyone talks about their emotions, but no one knows what they are talking about.

Myself included, hence my desire to learn and cultivate an inner acuity that does the Stoic Emo moniker justice.

We can say that an emotion is a short-lived response that influences the body and behavior, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, for example, joy, surprise, or shame.

Here is an incomplete, personal working glossary of phenomena that people sometimes conflate with the word “emotion”:

• Autonomic nervous system (ANS): The body’s automatic system for regulating arousal and maintaining internal balance through the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) systems in response to what’s happening around us. For example, your heart rate rises when a threat appears and settles when it’s gone.

• Primary affective systems: Innate, evolutionarily ancient neural circuits that generate foundational affective states such as fear, rage, seeking, care, and play. (Panksepp).

• Feelings: The conscious, subjective experience of an underlying affective or emotional process, for example, “I feel happy right now.”

• States: Temporary, whole-system modes of being that shape perception and behavior, e.g. a calm state, a flow state, a playful state, etc.

• Moods: Long-lasting states that influence a person without a specific trigger.

• Subpersonalities: A constellation of emotions, along with cognitive scripts, invoked by a specific trigger that seems to have semi-autonomous agency and influences a person in unconscious ways.

That’s a lot.

I wanted a phrase that houses all of these, and I came across the “affectome,” the emotional equivalent of the genome, a framework aimed at mapping the entirety of affective architecture.

So, if Stoic Emos are to exist, they’ll need to become intimate with their affectomes, not for mere theoretical mapping purposes, but through practices that allow them to become skilled with their emotional instrument so it actually plays something beautiful.

The Talent Stack

After investigating many therapeutic, coaching, and acting modalities, I’ve broken up the talent stack of Stoic Emoism into three distinct skills, which I’ll provisionally label somatic regulation, upstating, and parts work.

Firstly, one needs somatic regulation: the ability to directly influence your ANS so it can maintain a “baseline” that doesn’t lead to overwhelm. Think slow breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and vagal toning. Modalities like Somatic Experiencing and polyvagal-informed therapy are designed for this.

Secondly, upstating: intentionally moving into more energized or life-affirming states to meet the demands of challenging situations or to enhance overall life enjoyment. Modalities like Neurolinguistic Programming1 or Emotional Affector Patterns2 can support this process.

Lastly, parts work: the ability to track subpersonalities, enter into “dialogue” with them, meet and accept them as they are, and integrate whatever wisdom they offer. Modalities such as Internal Family Systems and Aletheia Unfolding3 are well suited for this.

Basically: get your body to equilibrium, uplift your state if needed, then integrate rejected subpersonalities when time allows.

Regarding the latter, most parts-work modalities, while effective, use a very direct approach and do not need to spend much time in the weeds of a subpersonality’s reasons. And for good reason, because the part’s “logic” is limited by the fact that it is not in conversation with the whole of the person’s other parts.

Subpersonalities, given that they are recurring emotions with associative cognitive scripts, have a coherent internal logic, but their reasoning is bounded and cut off from the whole, hence they are unwise as a (w)hole.

This is where practical philosophy, especially philosophical counselling with a parts-work sensitivity, really shines. You can compassionately engage the part, through reason, in a way that is loving and eventually integrative, while also strengthening your own reasoning capacity, a skill that most psychotherapeutic and coaching modalities do not touch.

And touch it they must, if the Stoic Emos are to arise.

***

The Stoic Emo: a manly creature who does not seek emotional mastery for its own sake, but so he can be guided by reason, not the disembodied kind, but the kind married to his body and moving him to unite with other bodies.

Logic attuned to Logos.

Power unfolding out of love.

Agency guided by wisdom: a wise agency, if you will.

Cue the music:

So I bleed out all my wisdom for you,

Write confessions in the scars you never knew.

Maybe if I give enough of me,

You’ll hear the truth inside the scream …

And then the cringe (but soooo good) chorus drops:

See me. See me. See me. See me…

I’m begging in the silence you leave.

See me. See me. See me. See me…

Before I tear apart at the seams.

<3 <3 <3

The Wise Agency experience has been great thus far. We are ending strong with , who will be presenting on his new book, Conscious Accomplishment.

You can still attend the last session live and get access to previous recordings and the Wise Agency syllabus by signing up below. Feel free to adjust the recommended amount and pay what feels right:

Sign Up

This will be the last session of The Stoa for 2025, so we hope to see you there …

• HeadOn: Closing the Meta-Perspectival Gap w/ Adam Boaz Becker. November 19 @ 12 pm Eastern. RSVP here.

HeadOn is a moonshot project using AI to transform online conflict into connection, rebuilding the internet’s social fabric amid growing division and institutional decline.

Philosopher-builder Adam Boaz Becker, founder of HeadOn, a moonshot project using AI to transform online conflict into connection and rebuild the internet’s social fabric amid growing division and institutional decline, will visit The Stoa to seek guidance from its collective wisdom to help close the “meta-perspectival gap.”

Closing the meta-perspectival gap means learning to see how our viewpoints interact and limit understanding. By recognizing and integrating multiple perspectives, individuals can reduce polarization and foster empathy.

https://headon.ai/

Adam will present this hard problem better than I can, but one way to look at it is through Kegan’s developmental stages:

Even if you disagree with the framing of this model, sense into the truth of the core idea: people have different perspectives on what is and what ought to be, along with different capacities to take on (or “try on”) alternative perspectives.

How do we have good-faith dialogue about contentious topics when this gap exists?

Join us today at 12 p.m. Eastern at The Stoa to help Adam out.

RSVP here

In my inquiry practice (“philosophy” meets life coaching / executive coaching), I find myself working with what the calls the “philosopher-builder”: a technologist with a clear moral and philosophical stance who weaves together deep inquiry and practical action.

Not an easy feat!

My role is to inquire with them in a way that helps them hold onto their practical concerns while maintaining philosophical integrity in what they do. This requires a dispositional stance in which one is open to the whole, and where one’s ideas can still be turned upside down.

I find the causal layered analysis useful here:

Basically:

• Litany: Surface events, challenges, tasks, etc.

• Systemic Causes: The systemic reasons behind the litany.

• Worldview: The beliefs shaping the system. < a Worldview Studies is helpful for this!

• Myth/Metaphor: Core presuppositional stories, symbols, and archetypes underneath it all.

For common individual support, founders have therapists and coaches (or “thera-coaches”), who help at the litany level with emotional and agentic support, and consultants who address the systemic aspects. But there is really no solid support for the worldview layer, or for sensing into the spirit driving it.

My role is primarily to reside at the worldview layer, which requires being attuned to the litany and the systemic causes beneath it, and, deeper still, to the bottom layer where the spiritual driver of the project resides.

The challenge, at the top litany layer, is that we have “Moloch” waiting for us, ’s metaphor for destructive coordination failures that bend the spirit of a venture, which we can simply describe as misaligned incentives that corrupt: VC pressures for rapid scaling, profit motives resulting in growth-at-any-cost, undue focus on engagement rather than real value, burnout cultures, and a multitude of shortcuts.

At the bottom is Source, the creative generator of the venture, which some may describe as spiritual. When one is in touch with it, internal alignment problems fade away in the deepest sense. It is the “why” beyond words, the impulse that started it all, and words rarely do it justice; putting language to it forces one to sound like a poet.

Moloch’s aim is to remove the founder from Source.

Philosopher-builders and their consultative allies aim to maintain integrity with it.

This requires not only the talent stack of a thera-coach and consultant, but also that of a philosopher and mystic.

While I think a new role is being developed, one that cultivates the diverse talent stack needed to meet the whole, only a fool would think that one person could be a thera-coach–consultant–philosopher–mystic.

Instead, something else is needed.

One philosopher-builder I am currently working with, the highly thoughtful and capable , co-founder of , has the right idea: community. But not just any community, rather one that generates emergent insights toward our greatest challenges and leads to the full-stack alignment described above.

I always saw the “community” I steward, The Stoa, in this light.

Like the famed Buddhistic saying The next Buddha is the Sangha, we can say The next Sage is The Stoa, or perhaps The first Sage is The Stoa, since the Stoics were skeptical that a sage ever existed.

Put in more consulting terms: Stoa-as-a-Service, for philosopher-builders of the world to sense into what is existentially knotty for them while staying attuned to what matters most.

I like this.

First experiment happens today:

RSVP here

If you’re a philosopher-builder and would like to work with me, feel free to reach out. If the values are aligned, I am happy to work with a handful of founders pro bono who are in their ramen-noodle phase.

thestoa at protonmail dot com

Also starting today @ 7 pm …

More info here, sign up today …

SIGN UP

🕊️ The Wise Agency: Accomplish Consciously, Together 🕊️

Featuring:

• Ayelet Fishbach on goal harmony

• Paul Millerd on the pathless path

• C. Thi Nguyen on not playing other people’s games

• Scott Britton on conscious accomplishment

Pay-what-feels-right (you can attend and pay for just one session).

Sign up via :

SIGN UP

“Inverse courses.”

My new favourite experiment.

The idea: instead of the common teacher–student dynamic where an expert imparts knowledge and grades students at the end, a “steward” proposes a theme—ideally some kind of envisioned new knowledge or skill—and, from a stance of not-knowing, guides the collective intelligence toward greater insights, with the students ultimately “teaching the teacher.”

Or at least, that’s the idea.1

The first half of a session is a presentation—top-down knowledge—as a prompt, which then sets up bottom-up, emergent insights: the main event of the session.

Basically, slide presentations (the best artistic genre, really) + a collective dialogue, or “intersubjective meditative practices,” as some kids call it today.

They have been going quite well. We’ve had two last year…

• The Entity Pill — Investigating “discarnate entities” that many are talking about these days, from a proposed discipline of “transperspectival demonology.”

• Internet Real Life (hosted with the one and only ) — Sensing into the dialectic: Internet Optimism (Thesis) vs. Internet Pessimism (Antithesis), moving toward Internet Realism (Synthesis).

Now, we just finished another on Friday, probably our best yet…

• Worldview Studies — Sensing into the worldviews, past, present, and future, that are shaping our world.

I’ll list at least three ingredients I think make an inverse course work…

Firstly, you have to have a syllabus: a carefully curated collection of eclectic writings around the proposed topic.

🌐 WORLDVIEW STUDIES SYLLABUS 🌐

Secondly, have a theme song.

You have to have a theme song, since it sets the vibe for what is being co-discovered. Play it before the session begins to prime the collective for where we are heading.

For The Entity Pill …

For Internet Real Life …

For Worldview Studies …

What a banger from , and a very fitting vibe for the worldviews we were about to explore…

Times like these I get depressed and I feel so sad

I think that I’m fucking wrong

If I’m wrong it’s for the best and I feel so sad

Cause everyone’s fucking wrong

Everyone’s fucking wrong

Thirdly, you just have to trust what emerges. Have the optimal grip between control and resonance. Treat the experience as artwork. And, as the steward, do not be afraid to be selfish in what you want to learn, which, consistently so far, results in a sense of selflessness toward what others want to learn.

The Stoa has always been a sense organ for me, helping with sensemaking and sensebreaking around a facet of reality. These inverse courses make this process just a little more sophisticated.

In Worldview Studies, we had three presenters, all high-quality and up-and-coming Substackers: , , and .

First up was Rina …

A great presentation to start us off, which, to my understanding, argued the following:

• The 500-year project of modernity is ending.

• The internet opened the proverbial doors for meta-perspectival awareness to become widespread.

• AI has opened the door to a new metaphysics beyond materialism.

The worldviews in play today are reacting and responding to this vibe shift, and according to Gary and Jordan Hall, three are fighting for the “soul” of humanity…

They are:

• The Transhumanists

• The Ethno-Pagans

• The Universal Sacred

As Gary and Jordan are meta-Christians, they are betting on the Universal Sacred.

Simon, the next presenter, had a slightly different tripartite …

His framing:

• Bayesians

• Postmodernist New Left

• Civilizational Traditionalists

Rather than meta-Christianity, his proposed response is meta-rationality (à la ).

At the end of his session, Simon asked us, “What’s next?”

I took up this question and officially2 concluded the course with a summary of the presentations, then leaned into speculating about the timelines in front of us through the filter of accelerating technological change…

When studying worldviews, you reach a point where you have to, using the raw materials of the collective conscious and unconscious, simply imagine what comes next.

There are many useful tools emerging for this, one of which is “pragmatic imagination” from Ann Pendleton-Jullian and Seely Brown: a form of imagination that works practically with perception and reasoning (and their limits) to help us navigate what’s next.

Speculations lead to further experiments, ones that allow us to play freely, meaning to allow exploratory, open-ended, and non-linear insights to emerge from the collective ether, which, in my experience, they always do.

I also sense that having a social container for this free play to take place is, as my friend and attendee of the course calls it, a world viewport, allowing worldviews to take shape and be shaped.

With this experimental play in mind, our next experience starts this Wednesday with The Wise Agency, an inverse course on moving away from mere “high agency” toward “wise agency”: accomplishing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, for the right reason, and with the right people.

It’s also the first time The Stoa will be happening simultaneously in person with a cohort of 20, and online, hopefully with you.

SIGN UP

Bonus session!

Serving as a bridge between the Worldview Studies and The Wise Agency experiences is a session we are having this Wednesday at 12 p.m. Eastern called:

• HeadOn: Closing the Meta-Perspectival Gap w/ Adam Boaz Becker

HeadOn is a moonshot project using AI to transform online conflict into connection, rebuilding the internet’s social fabric amid growing division and institutional decline.

Philosopher-builder Adam Boaz Becker, founder of HeadOn, a moonshot project using AI to transform online conflict into connection and rebuild the internet’s social fabric amid growing division and institutional decline, will visit The Stoa to seek guidance from our collective wisdom to help close the “meta-perspectival gap.”

Closing the meta-perspectival gap means learning to see how our viewpoints interact and limit understanding. By recognizing and integrating multiple perspectives, individuals can reduce polarization and foster empathy.

Would love to have all the Stoans there to help Adam out!

Free for all. RSVP below…

RSVP

A new experience from The Stoa just dropped …

The Wise Agency: Accomplish Consciously, Together

Presenters include Ayelet Fishbach, , C. Thi Nguyen, and , speaking respectively on goal harmony, the pathless path, not playing other people’s games, and conscious accomplishment.

What is this?

It’s an “inverse course” that moves us away from mere “high agency,” understood as accomplishing within complex systems, toward “wise agency”: accomplishing with wisdom, or accomplishing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, for the right reason, and with the right people.

Why now?

I wrote about wise agency (here, here, and here) recently, introducing this 2×2 …

It resonated, mainly with two types of people:

1. People already “conscious” and interested in wisdom, called to become more agentic in the world

2. People already agentic in the world, called to become more conscious and wise

This experience brings both together.

To make change, we need agency. But in the midst of a metacrisis, being highly agentic without wisdom comes with great risk. Hence, the agentic sages that the 2×2 points to are needed.

What are the learning objectives?

Participants will gain a greater theoretical understanding of wise agency, along with some practical tips on how to become wisely agentic.

What will the experience be like?

There will be four sessions, each lasting two hours.

• The first hour features a slide presentation and Q&A (recorded).

• The second hour is a collective inquiry (not recorded).

A syllabus of recommended readings will also be provided.

Online1 via Zoom, hosted by The Stoa. Unlimited participants.

Okay, I’m sold. How do I sign up?!

You can purchase your ticket through :

PURCHASE TICKET

You choose your respectful price (recommended: $50 USD, but feel free to contribute less or more). The revenue will be divided among the presenters, as this is a way to compensate them for their philosophical labour.

A Brief Note from The Steward

I was just inquiring with my friend . He was holding space for me and what seems to be a recurring confusion about where to put my focus, specifically the tension between making money and following my aliveness, or, put differently, staying in integrity while having a livelihood (or “alivelihood”).

I mentioned to him this tripartite model I came across in my early twenties, when I was actively exploring self-help material. It crudely associates economic classes with a loser’s/winner’s disposition:

• Lower Class = Plays to lose

• Middle Class = Plays not to lose

• Upper Class = Plays to win

The idea is that the lower class often has self-defeating attitudes due to mental illness, addictions, or lack of capacity, and therefore plays in a way that is self-defeating. The middle class, terrified of losing and becoming lower class, plays it safe and orients itself toward stable careers and professions. The upper class, by contrast, plays big, wins big, and becomes wealthy.

This was expressed through an uncritical self-help lens, which, of course, we can poke holes in through a leftist one (i.e., the game is rigged for most, and it needs to change). Yet I’d like to keep this tripartite model and untether it from the amateur-psych class analysis.

I see these three “play dispositions” as real, each coming with its own ontology, and as ones I’ve personally experienced, especially when it comes to making money or feeling like shit when not making enough of it.

However, there is one more disposition …

• Plays to lose

• Plays not to lose

• Plays to win

• Just playing

This one, known as “playing the infinite game” to some or “following your bliss” to others, is about living with aliveness, wildly so. It can make you “go crazy,” as if you are playing with the game itself. It is about creating art and doing philosophy in the deepest sense, which leads to personal and collective transformation.

But really, sometimes when you play in this way, you have no idea where you are going or even what the game is anymore.

In “meta” and “spiritual” spaces like The Stoa, this form of play is sometimes glamorized as the best form of play, a mistake, since its underlying shadow often sneaks in: just playing = secretly playing to lose, the default mode of the “spiritual bypassers” in the 2x2 above.

There is wisdom in just playing, for sure, but it turns into child’s play when done with unexamined beliefs and unconscious, self-defeating patterns. To be a wise agent, then, is to be someone, or some group of people, who play the right games while having a chance to win them.

The proper disposition, to just play in a conscious way that allows for winning, strikes me as uncontroversially true. My hunch: it’s the kind of play we can only discover together.

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The first one:

I am writing a book!

All my writing time will be devoted to this. This means I’ll be writing less here, or maybe just at a more unpredictable pace. I average one entry a week, which comes from a legacy pressure of maintaining a Substacker flywheel mentioned in today’s piece.

I’ll leave the paid subscriber feature on, which can be treated as support for my book-writing process. I sense I’ll finish writing by year’s end. I’ll also be writing it at Collective Journalling, a writing accountability group available to supporting Less Foolish subscribers that meets at 8 a.m. Eastern on weekdays.

Message me for access:

The second update:

A new inverse course is starting soon: The Wise Agency: Accomplish Consciously, Together

This will be a course that expands on the notion of “high agency” — accomplishing things within complex systems — and moves toward “wise agency”: accomplishing the right things, in the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons.

The teachers are stellar:

• Ayelet Fishbach on Goal Harmony — her new paper

• on The Pathless Path — his influential book

• C. Thi Nguyen on The Score — his upcoming book

• on Conscious Accomplishment — his new book

Dates: Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. Eastern — November 19, 26, December 3, and 10.

Sign up for the online experience via and follow The Stoa’s Metalabel page here for future updates.

SIGN UP

For the experience, we offer a radical sliding scale. Please choose a respectful price (recommended: $50 USD, but feel free to contribute less or more). The revenue will be divided among the presenters, as this is a way to compensate them for their philosophical labour.

Purchase your tickets now:

Jim Collins, widely considered one of the best living minds in business management, introduced the concept of the “flywheel effect” in his book Good to Great.

From his website:

The Flywheel effect is a concept developed in the book Good to Great. No matter how dramatic the end result, good-to-great transformations never happen in one fell swoop. In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.

It’s a series of small yet disciplined, interconnected actions that build momentum over time, resulting in positive growth for the company.

Examples:

Don’t aim for one single big breakthrough, Jim argues, but rather for the gradual development of a flywheel. This principle applies not only to companies but also to online “creators.”

A common example for YouTubers involves creating video content, attracting viewers to platforms like Patreon to build a community, and then reinvesting the money and community-generated ideas into new projects.

The Substacker has a similar dynamic but requires sharing their work on Substack Notes to get noticed. Also, unlike YouTubers, they don’t need to direct subscribers to another platform for financial support.

Collins also introduces the notion of a “Doom Loop,” a negative flywheel that fails to create momentum and, ultimately, revenue.

Yet there is another kind of negative flywheel, one that works, that is, it’s profitable but makes the creator feel stuck and dispirited, as if they are no longer the “source”1 of their creations.

from Metalabel visualized this in a graphic about creator economy burnout:

Something similar is now happening in Substackistan:

We can call this the “gloom loop,” which does not necessarily spell the doom that comes with financial collapse, but instead corresponds to the lexical meaning of gloom: a partial dimming or lowering of light, producing physiological and psychological effects, in other words, melancholy or depression.

The word “light” also symbolizes access to the creative, if not spiritual, force that animates one to create in the first place.

Yancey2 recently released an article distinguishing between the “artist” and the “creator,” and the different revenue streams available to each. In short, an artist expresses for meaning; a creator engages for commerce.

Gloom loops, I sense, occur when a fundamental category error arises: artists, pressured and seduced by the prospect of money, begin acting like creators and trap themselves in a flywheel that is hard to break out of.

I am called to create, but not in ways that trap me in gloom loops. This has not been easy and has involved creating against the YouTuber and Substacker flywheels (hiding comments, removing restack feature, avoiding Notes, ignoring engagement metrics, etc.), as well as making lifestyle and status sacrifices, and finding alternative ways to bring in cash flow.

While my cash flow potential has been limited on my platforms of choice, YouTube for The Stoa and Substack for Less Foolish, I can confidently say I have largely maintained my integrity and avoided being trapped in gloom loops.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with being a creator with a flywheel that works. That is what some people seem meant to do at this time. While more difficult, it is possible to be both a creator and an artist, even on the same platform3, but this is unicorn-level artistry and not an economic reality for most.

One man’s flywheel is another man’s gloom loop. New clarity and solutions are in the process of being revealed and created, perhaps ones you will be involved with. In the meantime, when creating, please create consciously.

In addition to The Wise Agency experience, we’ll have a special session with one of the “philosopher-builders” I work with, Adam Boaz Becker from HeadOn. We’ll be sourcing collective wisdom from The Stoa to help close the “meta-perspectival gap.”

November 19th @ 12 pm Eastern. 90 mins. Read more and RSVP here.

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I fondly recall Friday nights watching The X-Files with my family, one of my father’s favourite shows.

Each episode followed FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully as they investigated unsolved cases that were paranormal in nature, known as the “X-Files.” The show, partly episodic, featured “monster-of-the-week” standalones in which the agents encountered supernatural phenomena.

Then there was the serialized storyline: an unfolding conspiracy that the agents gradually uncovered, known to fans as the “Mytharc.” It centered on a secret government plot involving a shadowy group called the Syndicate, which collaborated with aliens planning to colonize Earth by releasing a Black Oil virus that turned humans into hosts. A vaccine (!!!) was developed to protect select individuals, alongside the creation of human–alien hybrids who were immune.

Mulder wanted to believe in the paranormal and in the conspiratorial cover-up, while Scully sought to disprove such claims, maintaining integrity to the scientific process and applying Occam’s razor (the simplest explanation requiring the fewest assumptions), supported by a worldview grounded in materialism and scientific skepticism.

In essence, Mulder was the believer; Scully, the skeptic. Or rather, he was the “conspiracy theorist,” and she was the “coincidence theorist,” a term used to describe someone who rejects any conspiratorial thinking, views strange patterns as coincidences, and places blind trust in expert explanations.

In the series, Mulder wins out and turns out to be more right than Scully. You could say that, given the prevalence of conspiracy theories today, the conspiracy theorists have now won out over the coincidence theorists.

This was not always the case. The coincidence theorists were once dominant, especially during the COVID moment, when anyone who disagreed with governmental response measures or the experts who supported them was labeled a conspiracy theorist and subsequently censored.

Now, in 2025, everyone is a conspiracy theorist.

We will find out why, but first we will embrace our inner Scully, go full coincidence theorist, and look at the various theories about why conspiracy theories exist.

Theories of Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories.

They are inescapable.

After a major cultural event, you will see a wave of conspiratorial speculation countering what governmental authorities claim to be true.

For example, the leading theory about the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk is that it was carried out by a professional hitman, allegedly a Mossad operation intended to stop Kirk from becoming publicly critical of Israel, something he was reportedly beginning to do in private.

Why is it that whenever a shocking event occurs, many people disbelieve what is known as the “official narrative”?

The official narrative, a term used in conspiracy studies, refers to the version of events put out by “the establishment” (that is, governmental bodies and their truth claims as reported by mainstream news). Examples include the Warren Commission Report, the 9/11 Commission Report, and the claim about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. These have been, respectively, heavily disputed, broadly accepted (at least in the mainstream), and fully discredited.

Given the prevalence of conspiratorial thinking and its influence on how people make sense of the world, it is important to understand why such theories exist. There is no shortage of perspectives in the academic literature, ranging across philosophy, psychology, and anthropology.

I will provide a robust overview of the major theories on conspiracy theories, the ones most respected within what might be called “institutional knowledge,” which we will address shortly.

First, to give us a clear understanding of the contours of the various theories, here is a framework and two taxonomies:

• Epistemic Framework (Keeley, 1999)

• Scope Taxonomy (Barkun, 2003)

• Motive Taxonomy (Douglas, Sutton & Cichocka, 2017)

Epistemic Framework

In “Of Conspiracy Theories” (1999), philosopher Brian Keely defines conspiracy theory as:

A proposed explanation of some historical event (or events) in terms of the significant causal agency of a relatively small group of persons, the conspirators acting in secret.

He makes the following distinction:

• Warranted Conspiracy Theories: have credible evidence, display epistemic openness (beliefs are open to change), and are scope-limited, meaning they guard against conspiratorial scope creep (the idea that everything is part of the conspiracy).

• Unwarranted Conspiracy Theories: lack credible evidence, exhibit epistemic closeness (being guarded against all refutation), and show ever-expanding skepticism that undermines trust in all truth-validating institutions.

Keely sees conspiracy theories as existing on a spectrum, with one’s epistemic stance determining where a theory is situated.

Scope Taxonomy

In A Culture of Conspiracy (2003), political scientist Michael Barkun offers the following taxonomy based on the scope creep Keely referred to:

• Event Conspiracies: These explain well-defined events, such as the assassination of JFK, 9/11, or the moon landing.

• Systemic Conspiracies: These involve deep conspiracies in which a cabal infiltrates existing institutions for its own ends, such as ZOG, the Deep State, or Big Pharma.

• Superconspiracies: These weave multiple plots into a full-spectrum domination narrative driven by an ultimate evil force, such as the Jews, Reptilian Overlords, or the demiurge.

Another helpful distinction from Barkun is between “stigmatized knowledge” and institutional knowledge. The former refers to knowledge claims not accepted by institutions traditionally relied upon for truth validation (for example, universities). This category includes most conspiracy narratives and all forms of “woo,” such as alternative medicine, parapsychology, and ufology.

Motive Taxonomy

In their paper “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories” (2017), psychologists Karen Douglas, Robbie Sutton, and Aleksandra Cichocka identify three psychological motives that explain why people believe in conspiracy theories:

1. Epistemic motive: The need for certainty in uncertain or complex situations.

2. Existential motive: The need for safety and a sense of control when feeling powerless.

3. Social motive: The need to belong within a group that shares similar beliefs.

According to the authors, all of these motives offer a sense of stability in a world that feels increasingly unstable.

***

There are a range of theories that expand upon the above taxonomies and seek to explain why people engage in conspiratorial thinking. They include:

• Conspiracy Society (Popper, 1945): The tendency to falsely attribute intentional conspiracies to major social events rather than recognizing the unintended consequences that arise from the complexity of human behaviour and social systems.

• Paranoid Style (Hofstadter, 1964): A recurring mode of political thinking that emerges during periods of social upheaval and status anxiety, characterized by totalizing suspicion and apocalyptic overtones.

• Social Contagion (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009): The spread of “informational cascades” through closed epistemic networks (“echo chambers”) is based not on solid evidence, but on social trust.

• Cognitive Biases (Brotherton, 2015): Cognitive biases such as agency detection (assuming intent where there is none) and proportionality bias (assuming that large events must have “large causes”) evolved to help humans navigate complexity.

• Secular Theodicy (Lepselter, 2016): In a secular and disenchanted world, modern myths, such as conspiracy narratives, serve to provide meaning amid collective suffering or social disenfranchisement.

• Epistemic Pathologies (Cassam, 2019): A breakdown in how people evaluate knowledge leads to epistemic pathologies that are exploited by “conspiracy entrepreneurs” who capitalize on these vulnerabilities.

• The Conspiracy Money Machine (Imperati, 2023): A lucrative online industry has emerged in which conspiratorial beliefs are monetized and perpetuated.

There are more, many more, but you get the idea: the core of all these theories is that belief in conspiracy theories arises not because they are true, but because of some alternative, often unconscious, reason.

I recommend engaging with all of the above theories, as they each contain signal. However, I will offer another theory, one that might shock our inner coincidence theorist.

Conspiracy theories are true in spirit.

Before unpacking this, let us turn our critical eye to coincidence theories.

The Coincidence Theory

I see the problems with the academic theories above as threefold:

1. The presupposition that conspiracy theories are wrong.

2. The weaponization of the phrase “conspiracy theory.”

3. The implication that those who believe in conspiracies are inherently ignorant.

Many of the works mentioned above are presented with the underlying presupposition that conspiracy theories are false. Furthermore, their adherents are often portrayed as being motivated by something other than sound psychology or epistemology. This risks committing the appeal-to-motive fallacy: assuming that if someone’s motives are corrupt or misguided, their truth claims must also be false, which, of course, is not necessarily the case.

Hence, the academics flirt with being doubly wrong: first, in assuming that conspiracy theories possess an a priori falsity, and second, in committing the fallacy of assuming that people who operate with unconscious motives must therefore hold false beliefs.

In addition, they offer no perspective on the unfair weaponization of the phrase “conspiracy theory,” which occurs frequently today and was on full display during the COVID moment. For example, if someone in good faith questioned any official narrative position on:

• Lockdowns

• Mask efficacy

• School closures

• Lab leak origins

• Natural immunity

• Erosion of civil liberties

• Pharmaceutical profit motives

• Vaccine efficacy and side effects

They were either labeled conspiracy theorists or censored outright. In hindsight, two and a half years after the end of the pandemic, many of these questions now seem reasonable to those who once thought them unreasonable. Yet during the COVID moment, stigmatization and censorial overreach were directed at anyone who held such views, leading to the conspiratorial blowback we see today.

Lastly, a latent claim within many academic theories is that conspiracy theorists are ignorant of their own motives. If they were not, the thinking goes, they might reason like the academics above and would not believe in such conspiracies.

Yet perhaps they would, because a deeper belief persists: that conspiracy theorists are ignorant not only because they lack education but because they are stupid.

To many, conspiracy theorists are perceived as low IQ and therefore low status. While none of the academic theories state this outright, it appears to be an unspoken assumption, one now made explicit by political commentators (see “The Rise of the Dale Gribble Voter”).

However, despite its weaponization and stigmatization, I see the “conspiracy theorist” label as a fair descriptor, especially when a person meets the following criteria:

• Believes that most significant societal or political events, if not all, can be reduced to a conspiracy.

• Exhibits epistemic closeness by rushing toward the first theory that comes to mind, one that is, of course, in opposition to the official narrative (Keely’s “unwarranted conspiracy theories”).

Conspiracy theorists, while not necessarily of low intelligence as often claimed, may feel a sense of inferiority about their intellect because they lack credentials or harbor resentment toward those with higher educational standing.

They can be quite frustrating to engage with and often display rigidity in their worldview. Likewise, coincidence theorists are equally difficult in their own way. I consider someone a coincidence theorist when they meet the following criteria:

• Believes that most significant societal or political events, if not all, definitely contain no conspiracy.

• Exhibits epistemic closeness by rushing toward the first theory that comes from perceived expert consensus, one that is, of course, supportive of the official narrative.

Coincidence theorists often have a sense of superiority about their intelligence because they hold the “right views” or are hubristically proud of their higher educational standing.

In essence, conspiracy theorists feel special for holding secret, renegade truths (“stigmatized knowledge”), while coincidence theorists feel special for holding smart, respected truths (“institutional knowledge”).

While much academic thought has focused on the motives of conspiracy theorists, as we have reviewed, far less attention has been given to coincidence theorists.

Psychologist Nicolas Vermeulen is changing this and offers an important insight with his Protective Conspiracy Framing. In his recent paper “Seeing conspiracy theorists everywhere as a conspiracy paradox” (2025), Vermeulen argues that believing false conspiracies (a Type 1 error) is well studied in academia, whereas the opposite error, dismissing all conspiracies (a Type 2 error), remains largely understudied.

Yet, possibly in response to the proliferation of Type 1 conspiracy theories, another epistemic error exists, using similar processes but operating in the opposite direction: a reflex to dismiss and to label uncomfortable or deviant ideas or hypotheses as conspiracy theories, even in the absence of clear evidence of irrationality or mistake. I call this Protective Conspiracy Framing or Type 2 conspiracy. Protective Conspiracy Framing aligns with Type 2 errors: rejecting untested or unfalsified hypotheses. Protective Conspiracy Framing can be understood as a cognitive and rhetorical overreaction, where labelling an argument as a “conspiracy theory” may function as a social signal, potentially serving to uphold dominant norms, ideological orthodoxy, or institutional trust.

The coincidence theorist wants to maintain the epistemic status quo, partly for status reasons. In other words, they seek to preserve their position within a prestige hierarchy and avoid considering dissenting views that are coded as low status.

They are not truth seekers but status seekers. Or, more charitably said, their pursuit of status narrows the truth they can seek.

Additionally, maintaining the status quo supports their psychological safety, since accepting one conspiracy as true can lead to accepting others. This risks further social ostracism or a cascade into seeming insanity if proper epistemic care is not taken.

The conspiracy theorist commits Type 1 errors, and the coincidence theorist commits Type 2 errors.

Both are fools, epistemically blind in their own way, and in need of one another.

Beyond the Conspiracy and Coincidence Theorists

In the series on “applied cratology,” the study of where power is actually held both locally and globally, I argue that aspiring cratologists need to understand that there is a status–power gap: one’s recognized social standing can be decoupled from the actual influence that such standing implies.

This gap lies at the heart of our ignorance about who truly holds power, and the cratologist’s job is to close it. There are two main problems with this. Below the Dunbar Number (approximately 150 people), we face what I call the “Sociopath Problem,” in which humanity’s intraspecies predators conceal their power through manipulation and deception, aiming to exercise power over others.

Above the Dunbar Number, understanding who holds power requires increasing levels of abstraction. This leads to the “Conspiracy Problem,” which refers to the difficulty of forming accurate theories about where power is located and how it is exercised. As a result, conspiracy theorists rush to fill this gap with uncalibrated perspectives, which are then dismissed by coincidence theorists.

The problem is that power is misunderstood, and both types of theorists help maintain the power status quo.

Conspiracy theorists display a form of theoretical impotence that reaffirms existing power structures by neutralizing their own agency. Even when they identify centers of power, they do so in a fatalistic way: the distant elites are so powerful, well resourced, and organized that they can orchestrate highly elaborate plots. In light of this, no genuine expressions of agency are made, because resistance is felt to be futile.

This relates to what author calls the “Second Matrix.” The conspiracy theorist escapes the “First Matrix,” the official narratives that produce power blindness, yet constructs another system of ideas, the Second Matrix, that provides a sense of superior understanding while leading to a kind of agentic paralysis.

Moreover, the dumbing down of conspiracy theories by the “conspiracy entrepreneurs” (Cassam) within the “conspiracy money machine” (Imperati) undermines their credibility among those who remain stuck within the First Matrix, as Horsley argues:

This has to do with the different standards and values of 1^st vs 2^nd Matrix. The 1^st Matrix (the official, mainstream reality construct) is designed to hide the truth of these things. The 2^nd Matrix (alternate, marginal reality construct) is designed to over-simplify, streamline, and propagate the truth of these things, in a way that lacks basic credibility within a 1^st Matrix framework.

In turn, coincidence theorists play their part by reacting against conspiracy theorists and maintaining the epistemic status quo. In doing so, they inadvertently preserve the power status quo, ensuring that dissent is delegitimized and the very power structures being questioned remain hidden.

Both types of theorists are engaged in an implicit, unconscious dance that conceals and maintains power. Yet with a proper understanding of both, we have a chance to move beyond their limitations and grasp where real power is actually held.

To restate my earlier claim:

Conspiracy theories are true in spirit but often wrong in theory.

In other words, conspiracy theorists correctly intuit that a status–power gap exists, but they move too quickly to fill that gap with speculative theories. Despite their flaws, they attempt to close the gap and may even point toward the true locations of power. Given enough time, they sometimes turn out to be right.

Just as Mulder and Scully needed each other, the conspiracy theorist and the coincidence theorist also need one another. The former aims to close the gap and points toward power, creatively intuiting where it may be hidden.

The latter provides a skeptical, critical eye with empirical and logical rigour, questioning how unexamined motives and incentives can distort one’s thinking and how, at times, seeing events as emergent phenomena rather than with conspiratorial intent may offer the wiser framing.

However, this skepticism should be redirected away from knee-jerk dismissal and toward refining theories of power so that real power can finally be seen. In doing so, a subdiscipline of parapolitical (hidden politics) sensemaking can emerge as part of one’s cratological skill set.

The truth is that conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon, nor are those attracted to them necessarily cranks who lack proper education or intelligence. They represent something integral to the human experience, an understandable response to the status–power gap that arises when people organize beyond the Dunbar number.

It is time to move beyond the stigma surrounding them.

***

The best part of The X-Files was the sexual tension between Mulder and Scully. In fan terms, it belongs to the “Will They or Won’t They?” TV trope: the long, slow-burning love that finally finds release in later seasons when the protagonists get together.

I argue that this same dynamic is unfolding between the social archetypes we discussed today. The tension between the conspiracy theorist and the coincidence theorist is palpable, and it is only a matter of time before their union becomes impossible to resist.

When it happens, what a power couple they will be in the truest sense.

Together, the believer and the skeptic, intuition and science, the renegade and the respected, will join forces to focus on what prefers to remain hidden.

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I loved playing the game Diablo with my brother when we were young.

Released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1996, Diablo was an early online multiplayer game that helped define the hack-and-slash genre of RPGs. The basic plot: players had to save the town of Tristram from evil and descend through sixteen dungeons beneath a ruined cathedral, fighting evil forces to face Diablo.

As one of the first popular online multiplayer games, its most exciting feature was the ability to fight alongside actual people from around the world. The idea: team up and fight the demons together.

However, since the game allowed friendly fire without any deterrents, another kind of demon emerged: the “player killers” (PKs). Instead of helping others defeat demons, PKs ambushed their fellow players, killing them to collect a trophy: their ear.

PKs collected ears. The more ears they had, the better a PK they were. Hence, a game within the game emerged. Players tried to reach the bottom dungeon to defeat Diablo while either protecting their ears from PKs or hunting for ears if they were one.

This created two kinds of players, each playing a different game:

• The Player: Those who wanted to win the game cooperatively.

• The Player Killer (PK): Those who hunted other players and collected their ears.

Is this dynamic happening in society at large?

Yes, it is.

Sociopath: The Intraspecies Predator

The dreaded “Sociopath.”

This term, like many overpsychologized phrases today, is often unfairly weaponized against anyone a person dislikes or disagrees with, and it suffers from conceptual confusion, as discussed in a previous entry:

Sociopath is an amorphous word with no consensus definition. It is often associated with “antisocial personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), characterized by limited empathy, disregard of social norms, and seeing relationships instrumentally. While sociopathy is often used synonymously with psychopathy, psychologist Robert D. Hare considers the former caused by early upbringing and social environment and the latter by genetic factors.

Still, I like using it — less as a psychological diagnosis and more as a catch-all social archetype that includes both environmental and genetic origins, describing a primary approach to relationships that uses others for one’s own success, satisfaction, or sadism.

In her 2024 PhD thesis, Dr. Karen Mitchell refers to this sociopath archetype as having a Dark Personality (“DP”) characterized by the following traits: being controlling and manipulative, lacking empathy or any real moral compass, and being motivated primarily by power and dominance.

A core feature of DP is what Mitchell calls a “persistent predatory personality,” which led to describe such individuals as “intraspecies predators.”1

In essence, the sociopath who has DP sees people as prey: someone to control, usually through psychological manipulation or sticky leverage like blackmail, for their own ends. Once their prey is controlled, they use and abuse them. The prey becomes like trophies, the “ears,” for their collection.

In a provocative presentation at The Stoa called “Trauma Drama,” Patrick Ryan of “Dark Stoa” fame supports this hypothesis by presenting a prey–predator trauma split. Ryan acknowledges that this may be a crude categorization, but it’s meant to illustrate a point: the focus of trauma can promote behavior that makes one act like prey or a predator.

Prey trauma focuses on the individual, often leading to avoidant or hypervigilant behavior. Predator trauma focuses on the group, often expressed through aggression and dominance shifts. These reflect two evolutionary survival strategies: the former focuses on the survival and well-being of the self, while the latter on the survival and coordination of the group. In humans, predator trauma is social because our ancestors depended on cooperative, pack-based hunting strategies.

The challenge: When humans become the apex interspecies predators, yet predator trauma remains, they turn on their own kind—becoming apex intraspecies predators: the Sociopaths, the player killers.

Given being hyperaware of who has power within a group, they have the capacity to manipulate subtle group dynamics, and can game what we called the “status–power gap” in the previous entry: one’s recognized position (status) can become untethered from actual influence (power). If the gap persists, and becomes concealed, invisible hierarchies form, blinding the many from where power is actually held.

When power blindness is present, the group, no matter how well-meaning or capable, will fail to make lasting change, as they will be ignorant of where to capture real power for such change to come about.

Practically speaking, the byproduct of the Sociopath’s machinations is the prevention of cohesion and coherence within a group, so they can never express what is in their collective best interest.

Spiritually speaking, this manifests as the obstruction of what is most relationally beautiful: true communion with others, the relational north star of all communities.

How can such a formidable foe to intraspecies flourishing be stopped, especially if they can hide in plain sight through advanced social mimicry?

A greater sophistication is required for spotting them.

Enter applied cratology.

***

Understanding where power is allocated is necessary for conscious change to occur.

Maintaining power for unseemly durations requires concealing it.

The sociopath archetype has mastery over such concealment. Thanks to their psychological profile, whether by nature or nurture, they are naturals at it as well.

Most are not.

However, as they study us, we can study them. And such study is quite revealing, as you’ll learn about techniques such as:

• DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender)

• Emotional blackmail or FOG (Fear, Obligation, and Guilt)

• Love bombing

• Trauma bonding

• Future faking

• Triangulation

• Boundary violations

• Smear campaigns

• Gaslighting !!!

Learning these requires discernment, as each example above can have close behavioral neighbors that are not manipulative in intent.

For example, mere disagreement about an aspect of reality can result in someone distrusting their perception of reality, which is different from gaslighting, the intentional instilling of distrust in someone’s ability to perceive reality accurately in order to control their behavior.

However, if discerning study is indeed undertaken, one’s cratological sensitivities will increase, allowing them to see similar moves being enacted on a wider, societal scale.2

It’s unpleasant business, for sure, and not for everyone.

Nor need it be.

Yet some will be called to learn.

Appendix: An Intraspecies Protector?

In Diablo, the PKs became such a nuisance that another group emerged: the “player killer killers” (PKKs), who hunted the PKs themselves.

This resulted in three kinds of players:

• The Player: Those who wanted to win the game cooperatively.

• The Player Killer (PK): Those who hunted other players and collected their ears.

• The Player Killer Killer (PKK): Those who hunted the PKs to stop them.

If there are intraspecies predators—the player killers—then who are the intraspecies protectors, the player killer killers?

I argue it is the “Stoic.”

I put “Stoic” in quotation marks because this is not the Stoic of Classical Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium around 300 BCE at the Stoa Poikile in Athens. It is neither the Stoic of Modern Stoicism, who are essentially secular atheists adopting a minimal Stoicism as an ethical placeholder, nor is it the Stoic slop you’ll readily find online when searching Stoicism, such as AI videos of talking statues of bearded men reciting famous Stoic quotes.

Instead, when using the word, I am referring to the social archetype of the Stoic. But unlike the social archetype of the Sociopath, the Stoic remains aspirational, yet to be seen, belonging to the age to come, and best felt through characters Ryan Gosling plays.

On the surface, there may seem to be a thin line between the Stoic and the Sociopath. Hence, when more Stoics start appearing, there may be category confusions, as the talent stacks will be similar, not only in their capacity for emotional regulation, but also in their knowledge of applied cratology.

Both will have the ability to understand power, allowing them to see exactly where it is located. Yet with the Sociopath, power literacy is innate, arising from pain rooted in trauma. With the Stoic, power literacy is learned, arising from morality rooted in love.

Their core difference is that the Stoic has deep moral attunement to the Way, while the Sociopath is a skilled actor engaged in social mimicry.

I see the role of the Stoic as that of a spiritual bouncer, someone who can sharply spot self-serving power machinations and prevent Sociopaths from entering social fields (“don’t invite the vampires in”) that are in the process of cohering among each other.

Once deep coherence occurs, that is, real communion, the Stoic will no longer be needed, as the collective wisdom of the group will be able to sense the predators before they become prey.

Have you heard?!

The “People of the Journal” are back with another season of Collective Journalling.

Join us weekdays at 8 a.m. Eastern for 90 minutes of shared silence for the best journaling accountability group that exists on the astral plane of the internet. It happens at The Stoa via Zoom. Open to supporting subscribers of this Substack. Message me for the link.

Also, this Friday, Worldview Studies starts!

A four-week “inverse course” where we sense into worldviews at play, like these…

And see what timelines are on the horizon…

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So, you want to be a cratologist?

Someone who studies power, and can spot it in their lives, locally and globally?

For someone considering power, most would recommend something like Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. Academics and the intellectually minded would pick up Machiavelli’s The Prince. Indie intellectuals short on time would browse ethically shrewd texts such as The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián and Maxims by Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

All decent enough choices.

However, my go-to recommendation is more primal...

Recommendation 1: Chimp Politics

My number one recommendation is Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. Hands down, this gives you the best sense of power dynamics and will change the way you see humans interact.

De Waal, a primatologist, studied the social behaviour of captive chimpanzees, tracking their alliances and the various ways they lost, gained, and maintained positions of power. The chimp who held the “control role” (also known as the alpha male) did not maintain power through sheer strength, but through sophisticated coalition-building and by signalling both strength and goodwill when needed.

Reading this book allows the following truth to sink in: status (or what the book calls “formal rank”) and power can become untethered; hence, a status-power gap becomes possible, which leads to disruptions within the social field.

When status becomes dissociated from power, and not rectified, which chimps readily do, the status-power gap is maintained and even become hidden: a very human phenomena. Those who hold formal power are constrained by those whose power belies their status.

Most chase after status, and think those who have status have power, raging against them, impotently, with no real change to show for it.

Recommendation 2: Power Talks

Once the aspiring cratologist has a conceptual understanding of the status–power gap and realizes it can be maintained, the next step is to cultivate an embodied sense of status.

Status is a strange thing to consider, as it makes people uncomfortable to think too much about it. As argues, it’s low-status to think about status. Those who become preoccupied with it usually don’t have it.

Instead of thinking about it, I recommend taking improv.

Improv, if taught well, directly teaches how to act out different “status levels” in an improvised way. Reading improv pioneer Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre will provide an embodied understanding of status.

Why do this?

Because you become bodily attuned to the status levels people enact in social life. This creates an intuitive understanding that tells you, “That’s status, not necessarily power,” giving you the chance to begin perceiving the real power at play in social life.

A video I recommend is from a 2003 UK Channel 4 documentary series hosted by body language expert Dr. Peter Collett, which illustrates status plays in relation to power.

As the documentary points out, physical status displays that signal power (such as slapping someone’s back or placing a hand on another’s shoulder) are more common when status is in flux and could potentially be challenged. This is not the case in social environments where status is clear and the command structure is well established, such as in the military, as shown in the Royal Naval scene in the documentary.

In military contexts, the status–power gap is closed, as formal power and actual power are bound together. This is not the case in the political wild. The need to use bodily status displays can reveal how tenuous a person’s power actually is.

Recommendation 3: Tyranny of Structurelessness

You’re aware of the status–power gap and are now beginning to see and sense status in social contexts, with an understanding that those who display high status levels do not necessarily have great power.

To really bring this insight home, my final recommendation is a 1970 essay by American feminist Jo Freeman titled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” in which she writes about her experiences within all-female radical feminist collectives.

In an attempt to overcome what they saw as oppressive patriarchal structures in society, these collectives experimented with non-hierarchical groups lacking formal structure. As Freeman describes, these groups descended into nasty power dynamics that undermined their stated revolutionary aims, ultimately creating a powerful elite more cutthroat than the rest, hiding their power in the process.

The most insidious elites are usually run by people not known to the larger public at all. Intelligent elitists are usually smart enough not to allow themselves to become well known; when they become known, they are watched, and the mask over their power is no longer firmly lodged.

Freeman’s lesson is that some formal structure is necessary; otherwise, informal structures will form, dominated by a hidden power elite with a sociopathic talent stack. I’d like to draw a different lesson: given the all-too-human phenomenon of the status–power gap, hidden power elites will always form; it’s just that experiments in structurelessness allow them to be more readily seen.

In reality, the power elite can hide more effectively within a false structure—a system with patsies who are given high status but have low power—serving as a red herring that distracts from where power is actually held.

This inevitability brings us to the topic of sociopaths and conspiracy theories.

Cratological Problems

There are two fundamental cratological problems that prevent one from perceiving who holds power. We can call these the Sociopath Problem and the Conspiracy Problem, which can be formulated through the following questions:

1. The Sociopath Problem: How do we deal with people who possess innate power literacy, are driven by self-serving motives, and are highly skilled at manipulating social fields?

2. The Conspiracy Problem: How can we understand who has power and their machinations when part of those machinations is to conceal that power?

The first problem concerns individuals who have the capacity to undermine social cohesion and manipulate social environments, partly by exploiting the status–power gap.

The second problem arises from a failure to understand power—especially at the societal level—because of the same gap, which leads to hasty attempts to fill it with uncalibrated explanations (often labeled as “conspiracy theories”).

While both problems are ever-present, the sociopath question is more salient within the Dunbar number (about 150 people, said to be the cap at which an individual can maintain meaningful relationships), and the conspiracy question is more salient post-Dunbar number, when one must rely on greater abstractions and formal systems for social order (laws, contracts, institutions, etc.), which can be gamed.

And gamed they will be.

🌐 Worldview Studies starts next week. Sign up here and read more here.

✍️ Collective Journaling starts next week as well — 8–9:30 a.m. ET, Monday to Friday. The best accountability and communal writing practice you’ll come across. Access it by becoming a supporting subscriber, and message me for the Zoom link.

It’s clear something is shifting worldwide. Near the bottom of that shift are worldviews.

A robust worldview has a timeline: a story of where we were, where we are, and where we are heading. Many timelines are quite intense, catastrophic or eucatastrophic, where an event, or the event, will change everything for the worse or for the better.

Not many worldviews have timelines that see beyond the event that changes everything, as they argue it is impossible to know.

The following events are happening, or are just about to happen, according to the worldviews in play:

• WWIII

• 5D Shift

• Disclosure

• Second Coming

• The Great Reset

• Climate Apocalypse

• Technological Singularity

The last event has many influential people who believe in it. The technological singularity refers to a point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, triggering exponential technological advancement without human input and rapidly progressing beyond human control and comprehension.

In 2012–2013, a survey of AI researchers conducted by philosophers Nick Bostrom and Vincent C. Müller predicted that the singularity would occur around 2040–2050. The famed transhumanist Ray Kurzweil estimated that it would happen by 2045. More recently, , the CEO of Anthropic, has suggested that the singularity could arrive as early as next year, while Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argues that the “gentle singularity” has already begun and that by 2030 we will see the fruits of abundant intelligence.

Despite Altman’s techno-optimism, if such a singularity emerges as it is said to, no one really knows what lies beyond its event horizon, since it is, in theory, utterly beyond human understanding. However, there are skeptics of the singularity who see it as a muddled concept, such as technologist Jaron Lanier, who views it as a kind of death denial and a new religion for the techno-optimists.

In any case, with or without the recursive self-improvement of the singularity, it is undeniable that we are in an age where science-fiction-tier technologies are being introduced: AI-generated media, augmented reality, holographic displays, neural interfaces, quantum computing, engineered living materials, advanced robotics… sexbots (!!!)

Things are going to get strange, and technology will seem like magic, which, according to science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

The main question now is: how will this techno-magic be harnessed? If it isn’t harnessed wisely and is wielded wildly by fools, the dystopian science fiction writers (aka techno-prophets) who have long warned us of dreary timelines may yet be proven right.

However, there are at least two timelines that, as I see it, offer imaginal responses to harness this techno-magic.

A Tale of Two Timelines

The two timelines, not unfolding from present worldviews but from imaginaries glimpsed through more artistic means rather than theoretical musings, are solarpunk and archeofuturism. The first timeline appeals to those on the political left and who are culturally “woke,” while the other appeals to those on the political right and who are culturally “based.”

Solarpunk, starting as a literary genre, has since evolved into an artistic movement that envisions a hopeful future where technology and nature coexist in harmony. The “solar” refers to solar and other renewable energies, while “punk” embodies the DIY ethos and a post-capitalist, decolonial countercultural spirit. At its core, solarpunk seeks to create regenerative societies that are socially just.

While the focus is on advanced technology, the core value is nature, with the aim of regeneration (restoring biodiversity, cleaning waterways, rebuilding soil health, etc.). Additionally, it is associated with a “woke” pluralism: an embrace of different identities and lifeways, communing together in conviviality.

The quintessential visual representation of solarpunk is the “Dear Alice” video. Originally created by Chobani to sell Greek yogurt, the decommodified version of the video better tells the story of the solarpunk timeline.

Archeofuturism, in contrast, was coined by the “French New Right” thinker Guillaume Faye in his 1998 book Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age. Faye proposed a synthesis of “archeo” (meaning “beginning” or “founding impulse”), which entails tradition but not one disconnected from the archaic, with a futurist vision of progress. Such futures, he argued, require a sense of the sacred and must be rooted in the core foundations of Western European civilization.

Similar to solarpunk, the focus is on advanced technology, yet its core value is the sacred, with the aim of a return (or RETͶRN) to a true tradition. Additionally, it is associated with a “based” Identitarianism: not only an embrace of ethnic identities, but also a spiritual connection with ancestry and homeland, communing together within a hierarchical order.

Faye ultimately advocated a European pagan renaissance, yet he envisioned an alliance between neo-pagans and European Christians in order to bring about archeofuturism. Given this, I see the recently built Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Moscow Oblast as having proto-archeofuturistic vibes.

Solarpunk and archeofuturism timelines see exponential technological advancement as inevitable, but the former harnesses it with the core value of nature, while the latter does so with the sacred. Other points of contrast:

These timelines might not catch on under the names of solarpunk or archeofuturism, but I believe these imaginaries are breaking temporal boundaries, seeing beyond the event, and visually capturing the worldviews that will exist in relationship with our upcoming techno-magical world.

I wonder which one will win out.

There could be a fusion between the two. Or maybe they will coexist within separate geographies, both physical and metaphysical ones.

You already know which timeline resonates with you most.

Be sure to follow The Stoa’s page here for upcoming experiences and join the Worldview Studies experience here.

A new experience from The Stoa just dropped …

Worldview Studies: To See the World Is to Shape It

Presenters include , , , and me.

What is this?

It’s an “inverse course” that explores the worldviews shaping our present and those that will shape our future, along with how and why worlds come into view.

What’s an inverse course?

Instead of top-down pedagogy, where a teacher imparts knowledge to students, a bottom-up pedagogy takes its place. The teacher, or the “steward,” facilitates the collective intelligence of the students, and the students end up teaching the teacher as well as themselves.

Previous inverse course experiences include The Entity Pill and Internet Real Life.

Also see my presentation at Harvard discussing this.

Why now?

It’s palpable that the world is in great transition, and many events are unfolding. These are ones that will irreversibly change the world. Worldviews are influencing them, sometimes merely through their interpretations.

In essence, the world is up for grabs for those who have the right view.

What are the learning objectives?

Cultivating “worldview agency,” which is the ability to understand and interact with old, new, and emerging worldviews, and to personally and collectively form a wise one.

A big part of the experience will be mapping the present worldviews shaping us:

What will the experience be like?

There will be four sessions, each lasting 2 hours.

The first hour features a slide presentation and Q&A (recorded).

The second hour is a Collective Presencing conversation (not recorded).

A syllabus of recommended readings is also provided.

Okay, I’m sold. How do I sign up?!

You can purchase your ticket through :

PURCHASE TICKET

You choose your price (recommended: $40 USD, but feel free to contribute less or more).

Attendance at all sessions is not required. You’ll still benefit from the experience even if you only attend one session (adjust the price as necessary).

A Brief Note from The Steward

Truth claims within a worldview are in relationship with one another. They fit together, shaping what one sees, and such sight shapes what the world is.

It’s important not only to understand your own worldview, but also the worldviews of those you interact with and those who wield power.

Sohail Inayatullah’s “causal layered analysis” (CLA) offers an idea of how worldviews relate to the wider reality. A futures studies framework, CLA provides multiple depths for understanding the world.

First, there are surface-level problems, or the litany, which is what most people are fixated on. Next are systemic causes, the underlying structures that generate these problems. After that come the worldviews, which build and shape the structures. Deeper still, underneath the worldview, are myths and metaphors—or, if you are metaphysically inclined, the language best suited to understand the spiritual dimension of our world.

The philosopher, theoretically, is the one who operates at the worldview level. However, many “philosophers” in name today do not engage in this activity and are better described as theoreticians or historians of thought.

To truly address the worldview layer, one needs to be in relationship with the world (through the litany and causal layers) and attuned to the very spirit that animates it (through the myth/metaphor layer). Hence, a practical–mystical philosopher is required.

In essence, people who are called to be in the world yet are outside of it.

My favorite kind of people.

Sign up “Worldview Studies” here.

Follow The Stoa’s Metalabel page here for future updates.

Also, two sessions coming up this week at The Stoa:

• Wise Agency: The Philosopher’s Stone. October 1st @ 6 pm Eastern. In-person session (Toronto). RSVP here.​​

• Predictive History through Secret History w/ Jiang Xueqin. October 2nd @ 8 am Eastern. Online session. RSVP here.

Send me a message if you have any questions or thoughts:

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Share Less Foolish

We are done with sages.

We have discarded wisdom.

We have discovered the philosopher’s stone.

Now, we’ll be moving on to something else:

Power.

As philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-H says, “understanding power empowers.”

He’s right.

To borrow a beloved Dragon Ball Z phrase: if you’re ready to increase your “power levels,” buckle up.

Wisdom Literacy to Power Literacy

Power literacy.

Having it = demystifying power, which allows one to become “wise as serpents” (Matthew 10:16), finally giving us a chance to put the serpents in their place.

In a previous workshop I hosted, I introduced the following premises:

• Premise #1. Power and status are different things.

• Premise #2. Most chase status, not power.

• Premise #3. If you cannot spot power dynamics locally, you cannot spot power dynamics globally.

We’ll be examining the status-power gap, and how it’s so critical to navigate power dynamics, locally and globally. However, the last premise introduced relates to the essence of this Substack:

• Premise #4. Becoming less foolish = demystifying power and gaining power literacy.

Becoming less foolish, also known as cultivating a “wisdom literacy” (as a reader recently called it in response to my last entry), is the most important literacy one can acquire, because it answers the “why” question and points toward the “how.” It naturally leads to the cultivation of a power literacy, the next most important literacy.

Power is a language one can speak and hear, and it is not explicitly taught in school but rather concealed. The powerful do not want you to be power literate, because they do not want you to know they have power.

Rule #1 among the power-savvy: maintaining power requires concealing it.

Being knowledgeable about politics does not translate into having good power literacy. In fact, many who are interested in politics lack it. Politics is “the exercise of power,” and having theories, ideologies, or even a science about power’s exercise is different from actually being able to spot it, understand it, and map it in one’s lived environment.

I’ve seen the phrase “cratology” before in obscure academic papers, but it does not seem to be widely used. It comes from the Greek word “kratos,” meaning power, and the suffix “-ology,” meaning study. The study of power. A perfect and underused phrase that I will now employ to refer to a multidisciplinary study of power that can be applied to understand power at all levels—from one’s daily life to the “grand chessboard” (Brzezinski).

One’s power levels correspond to one’s ability to exercise power wisely; a prerequisite for this is being a good cartographer of power, knowing who or what actually holds it.

I’ve been examining this topic for years and have collected a grab bag of principles, theories, and methods. Some examples:

Example 1: The Principle of Least Interest

Those who are least interested in a relationship have the most power.

Being “least interested” means having less emotional investment.

This principle applies to countries, corporations, and couples.

Reflect on your past or present romantic partnerships: who cared less? That person held or holds more power in the relationship.

(The solution to this, of course, is love—which binds and unifies.)

Example 2: Three Faces of Power

According to the great sociologist Steven Lukes, power has three “faces.”

1. The first level is decision-making power: those who can make decisions have greater power than those who cannot.

2. The second level is agenda-setting power: those who set the agenda have greater power than those who merely make decisions.

3. The third level is ideological power: those who shape worldviews have the greatest power.

Who has been shaping your worldview?

And who has been shaping theirs?

Example 3: Power Mapping

Power mapping is the ability to visually map actors and their relative power levels in order to enact influence. It involves the following steps:

1. Define the goal: what needs to be done.

2. Identify the key power node within the institution, scene, or movement.

3. Map their relational landscape.

4. Assess the power dynamics within this landscape.

5. Highlight their most significant relationships.

6. Develop strategy and tactics based on this mapping.

This process happens all the time.

Sophisticated activist groups use it deliberately. Sociopaths do it instinctively. Knowing your own power map helps defend against influence campaigns against you.

***

How does one demystify power and thereby increase one’s power levels?

I’d like to figure this out, and perhaps I’ll embark on an “inverse course,” a new pedagogical approach that develops a discipline of knowledge—such as applied cratology—through the collective intelligence of those called to discover it.

Some structure is needed, along with a basic syllabus.

If I were to “teach” (or steward) an inverse course on cratology, what would it include?

In the next entry, I’ll introduce three recommendations. If you have any recommendations for a power literacy syllabus, or any useful principles, theories, and methods in your power literacy toolkit, let me know…

“Do away with Sages,

Discard Wisdom.

The folk will Benefit

A hundredfold.”

- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Chi

This, my friends, is my last entry where I will be writing about wisdom. I promise you this. New vibes are here. Namesake vibes. Besides, with wisdom, when directly looked at, you see nothing.

I am moving away from it, because I like to be ahead of the curve, and it is said we are moving from “knowledge work” to “wisdom work” or a “wisdom economy,” which means a “charlatan economy” is close behind.

More randos are going to come out of the woodwork, selling all sorts of wisdom-woo to capitalize on your pain with nebulous promises to enlighten your life. The great enshittification of wisdom is upon us. A cycle that has been repeated since time immemorial, really.

Wisdom has to go. But before it does, let’s leave this wisdom-thirsty phase of this Substack behind with a bold claim:

I found the philosopher’s stone.

The alchemical goal that turns base metals into gold.

Some thought it imbued immortality.

Closer to the concerns of this Substack to date, it represents inner transformation, allowing one to attain a kind of perfect sagacity.

It was the most pursued goal in alchemy, but alas, no philosophers stone was ever found.

Over the ages, pursuing it was deemed to be a fool's errand—an impossible, quixotic quest leading nowhere.

I have a radical proposal. A reframing of this fool’s errand to suit modern man’s longing:

The philosopher’s stone = wise agency.

Wise agency, as we discussed before, differs from mere “high agency”—the capacity to accomplish things within complex constraints. High agency is all the rage today. However, wise agency doesn’t just accomplish things; it accomplishes the right things. It’s the marriage of worldly competence and a deep sense of morality.

It’s for people who want to be effective in the world and do good in it—the meta-skill that finally concludes the dialectic of being an evil winner or a good loser.

I’ll be teaching a workshop in Toronto soon. A limited number of people will be allowed in, and applications will be required. Everyone is a fool in my view, but this class needs the right fools only, the ones who are called toward the philosopher’s stone.

Of course, I’m only fooling. Who would actually claim they had found the philosopher’s stone? All this is playful hyperbole to promote a fun workshop and to welcome the gracious support of my subscribers, which allows me to do more of what I love: writing here.

That’s all this is. No foolish business or holy tricks. I promise you this. It’s not like I’d be so daring as to reveal the secrets of navigating reality with perfect sagacity.

Or maybe I could? 🤔

It’s good to be ambitious, but this ambitious?

In any case, wise agency—in the way I understand it—does have historical precedents. In fact, it draws from the three wisdom traditions that most shaped me:

• Taoism: Wu-Wei or Effortless Effort

• Stoicism: Kata Physin or Living According to Nature

• Orthodox Christianity: Synergeia or Cooperation with God

We’ll take a tour through each, then compare them against wise agency, foreshadowing the upcoming “Wisdom Wars,” and how the philosopher’s stone averts it.

Buckle up.

Wu-Wei

I do not write much about my Taoist influences, but the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu was the first philosophy book I read when I was 16.

When I read it, my mind was blown.

“What is this?!” I thought.

These sharp, short, mysterious passages, such as:

Keep your mouth closed

Guard your sense.

Temper your sharpness.

Simplify your problems.

Mask your brightness.

Be at one with the dust of the earth.

This is primal union.

Many of the passages did not make sense to me. I had a thought after reading: what if this guy is just messing with us? What if he was this crazy Chinese guy hanging out on a mountain somewhere, making up passages just to sound deep and fool people?

The book felt even deeper after that thought.

The Tao. The Way. The subtle, invisible vector that is the source of all things. Uncontrollable, ineffable, and nameless (but yeah, he gave it a name). Yet, if you are receptive and yield appropriately, you can live in harmony with it.

Such harmony is called “wu wei,” or effortless effort. It is doing things, even accomplishing things within complex constraints, but without force and only with flow. You choose to let go into its current. It is easeful, yet optimally effective.

In Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science and the Power of Spontaneity, sinologist Edward Slingerland describes it well:

Wu-Wei literally translates as “no trying” or “no doing,” but it’s not all about dull inaction. In fact, it refers to the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective. People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, or even bring the entire world into harmonious order.

Goals.

A seeming paradox that is hard to resolve with the mind.

How does one effort, effortlessly?

There are practices for this. Zuòwàng, for example, is the Taoist meditation of deep stillness. One sits, relaxes the body, which in turn relaxes the mind, and then forgets. Everything. Worries, responsibilities, thoughts, and self. In this great forgetting, the Tao arises naturally, and one can align with it.

It is what nature calls us to do.

Kata Physin

The Stoics.

I get accused of being a Stoic often, which is not quite true. But beyond the persona aesthetics, I do think Stoic philosophy has something important to say and is in deep resonance with Taoism.

The goal of Stoicism is κατὰ φύσιν, or kata physin, Greek for “living in accordance with nature.”

To attain kata physin requires one to align with the Logos, the primordial ordering principle of the cosmos. First mentioned by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus and eventually taken up by the Stoics, the Logos is a living, ethereal fire of divine reason, the soul of the cosmos itself.

In my view, the Tao and the Stoic Logos describe the same invisible vector, but they are expressed through different worldviews shaped by their historical and geographical contexts. The Taoists’ approach to the Tao/Logos was more intuitive, attuning through meditative practices like Zuòwàng or movement practices like Tai Chi.

The Stoics, on the other hand, emphasized reason, aligning their logic with the Logos. This is precisely what my philosophical practice, and “mystical philosophy” more broadly, seeks to serve: the attainment of unimaginable clarity through poetically attuning thought to the Logos itself.

One can, of course, be logical without doing this, as modern “philosophers” show when they engage in abstract logic untethered from the Logos. This, however, only creates a kind of dead logic, separate from the whole, resulting in παρὰ φύσιν, or para physin, which means “against nature.”

The Stoics had other practices, such as prosochē, which is an attentiveness that comes with a deep stillness. Unfortunately, no detailed manuals survived, only fragmentary guidance, so we do not know how the Stoics actually practiced such stillness. I have the strong sense it was similar to the Taoist practice of great forgetting, so one can remember what has always already been here.

One of my projects with The Stoa was to remember these practices, though it ultimately led me to discover something else.

Synergeia

I suggest you stop reading and go purchase this book:

A true game-changer, Christ the Eternal Tao, by Hieromonk Damascene, makes the compelling case that the Tao and the Stoic Logos were glimpses of the pre-Incarnate Logos, before God entered history.

Jesus Christ, the God-Man, the light that shines the way, is the Incarnate Logos. Taoism and Stoicism, in this light, were not rivals to Christianity but ancient intuitions of truth, discerned by truth-seekers like Lao Tzu and Zeno, who sensed the invisible vector before it was made visible in Christ.

When one attunes with the Divine Logos, theosis awaits (divine unification), and one has synergeia: cooperation with God. This is the state of human choice, working with divine grace toward theosis. Sidestepping both predestined determinism and radical self-sufficiency, human freedom remains intact while aligning with God’s will.

“Universal freedom is a lie

Because there is only One Course in the universe, not many.

Yet universal freedom is true

Because, in following the One Universal Course

One encompasses the cosmos.

Having the freedom of choice,

One chooses freedom from choice.”

- Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao,

Orthodoxy (right belief) is not only needed but Orthopraxy (right practice) is as well. One key mystical practice is hesychasm. Practiced by the Desert Fathers and continued today on Mount Athos, it is the cultivation of bodily silence and the ceaseless invocation of the God-Man through the Jesus Prayer.

Hesychasm, like Zuòwàng, begins with quieting the mind and thus the body. Yet the ends were different. In hesychasm, stillness leads to the purification of the heart, where the mind descends and speaks from only one place…

Love.

Because “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

And loving Love allows one to find the way and enter into union with it.

A helpful distinction in Orthodox theology comes from St. Maximus the Confessor, who distinguished between Logos and logoi. The former, once glimpsed in Taoism and Stoicism and now revealed in the God-Man, is the divine reason of the cosmos. Yet the Logos contains the logoi, the various “reasons” for created things, or in human terms, one’s vocational direction.

In essence, your way.

By following your way, your logos, you find the Way itself: the Logos fulfilled in Christ, the true Tao.

Amen. ❤️

Wise Agency

In Orthodox Christianity, the exemplar is the saint, the one who attains theosis through synergeia. In both Taoism and Stoicism, the precursor to the saint was the sage. The Taoists advocated attunement to the Tao/Logos through intuitive approaches, which resulted in wu-wei, while the Stoics emphasized reason, which resulted in kata physin.

In the first entry of this series, I offered a 2x2, later updated by , as an alternative framing for modern minds: the agentic sage who leads with wise agency, contrasted with the agentic fool who mislead with mere high agency.

Wise agency is not a new way of being but a very old one. Today it is expressed, imperfectly, through a phrase that speaks to modern minds: those who already have the capacity for high agency but are wary of the motivational schema underlying it.

These minds, at their core, are firmly secular, either atheistic or agnostic. Yet they have been cracked open metaphysically through intense experiences such as psychedelics, meditative practices, or spiritual emergencies born of deep personal suffering. As a result, they tend to be intellectually flexible (sometimes called “meta” or “Kegan 5”) and gradually become lovers of wisdom.

Wisdom, as I defined before, is “existential wayfinding”: finding the way, hence your way. It is a deep attunement to the invisible vector that lights the path. My definition has shifted slightly. I no longer view wisdom as merely finding the way, which risks creating a permanent seeker, but as attuning to it so acutely that one is not merely finding it, nor only following it, but ultimately indwelling in it.

When it comes to this invisible vector that serves as the way, the Taoists, Stoics, and Orthodox each have their own name for it. But what do the moderns have?

Many today have what’s known as “Church hurt,” a trauma that originates from negative experiences within the Church. As a result, they are cut off from the best the tradition has to offer due to their understandable wounds. Given this, they will not resonate with it and, depending on their degree of hurt, may even be triggered by it.

As a result, they look elsewhere for the way. The closest secular-friendly metaphor I have seen is the “holotropic attractor,” coined by systems theorist Ervin Laszlo and a foundational concept behind ’s .

The holotropic attractor, Laszlo argues, is the organizing force that moves life toward increased complexity and integration. It suggests that evolution is not random but has a pull toward greater wholeness. Wisdom, then, is attuning to the holotropic attractor. Tom’s attunement approach is being deeply curious. Another way to say this is sensing into what “resonates,” which allows for “unfoldment,” the effortless effort of today’s modern wisdom lover.

The most popular expression I have seen at The Stoa and adjacent wisdom spaces is “follow your aliveness,” which invokes the conversational greeting: “What’s alive?” This phrase harkens back to Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss,” which he later rephrased as “follow your blisters.”

Regardless of how hard one follows their bliss, they will inevitably come across blisters. The Christians call this “soul-making”: you become more whole through the character-building suffering that life brings.

There are many collective blisters ahead and soul-making opportunities before us.

The Wisdom Wars

I find that most people who want to do good, are truth-oriented, and have reached a certain degree of “meta” capacity tend to gravitate toward the phrase “meta-crisis” (sometimes called poly-crisis, omni-crisis, permacrisis, etc.).

Former monastic defines it as “the multiple overlapping and interconnected global crises that our nascent planetary culture faces.” The concerns of the meta-crisis focus on potential economic and ecological collapse, the threat of World War III and nuclear holocaust, and misaligned artificial superintelligence (ASI).

For more, you can look at this infographic, read this 101 summary, or watch this thorough presentation at The Stoa from Josh Williams:

While the meta-crisis framing as a diagnosis brings a certain sense of agency, even if only at the conceptual level, it can also be quite defeating without any robust response. The focus is entirely on the bad, with little attention to the good. And the complexity is overwhelming.

How do we actually solve the meta-crisis?

Note: The following will be a bit of insider baseball about what is happening within a niche scene of wisdom-seekers, but it will also foreshadow what will happen in the wider culture.

The consensus emerging among those literate in the meta-crisis is something like this: inner transformation leads to outer transformation, and vice versa.

Another seemingly effortless-effort paradox.

The resolution of this paradox is settling on one word: wisdom.

Great. But how does one actually become wise?

Eventually, this answer leads somewhere spiritual and sacred, or, for modern minds, at least something that feels spiritual and sacred. Also, pursuing wisdom within community is seen as necessary.

Two groups within this wider wisdom conversation have emerged:

One group says we need to attune to the Tao/Logos, which was fully revealed and incarnated over 2,000 years ago through Christ, allowing us to attain synergeia. Many in this group were once secular yet spiritually seeking, and eventually were called to Christ. Let’s call this group the Meta-Christians: Christians who can go “meta” and engage in friendly dialogue with people from other worldviews.

Central to this group is my good friend, the sensemaking general (now spiritual warfare general?), Jordan Hall (). Jordan helped develop the complexity-rich “Game B” framework that aims to explain the underlying factors of the meta-crisis, which influenced many who were drawn to this conversation. He is in active dialogue with other Meta-Christians, such as and .

Another group suggests we attune to the holotropic attractors and enter into unfoldment. They are quite secular and pluralistic, liberal in the truest sense, not attached to any single term and open to various framings. Let’s call this group the Meta-Moderns: modern minds who can go “meta” and see truths from multiple perspectives, while still grounded in the rational and scientific foundations of modernity.

Central to this group is , who, instead of returning to Christianity, once advocated (though he has since reneged) for a “religion that is not a religion,” crafted through an “ecology of practices” of transformational “psychotechnologies” that could result in the inner transformations needed to resolve the “meaning crisis”—the spiritual heart of the meta-crisis. Daniel Thorson and Tom Morgan are part of this group, as are many others in the “Liminal Web,” or what is now being called the “World Wise Web.”

While these two groups are friendly enough with each other, there are tensions, and if fully surfaced their underlying truth claims would prove incompatible. If politeness were dropped, this is what would be said…

The Meta-Moderns to the Meta-Christians: You are engaging in a reactionary form of spiritual bypassing—avoiding the feminine and your shadow, aka your “demons,” which you project onto those who disagree with you. This ultimately relates to loneliness: you are joining a traditional religion to soothe your community-hunger, feeling special by appearing spiritually “based.” At worst, you are promoting regressive forces in culture.

The Meta-Christians to the Meta-Moderns: You are engaging in a pluralistic form of woo-bypassing—avoiding the masculine and instead chasing spiritual highs, i.e. prelest (spiritual delusion), while believing you are more “spiritual” than those who disagree with you. This ultimately relates to loneliness: you are creating a “religion that is not a religion” to soothe your community-hunger, feeling special by appearing spiritually “woke.” At worst, you are promoting another wave of cults.

Now that this is out of the way, I have a suggestion to avert the Wisdom Wars before they begin.

The Philosopher Stone

I am a Christian, called to Orthodoxy.

I am also knee-deep in these wisdom scenes, and I helped shape them through six years of hosting The Stoa. I have climbed Mount Meta, reached its peak, and let me tell you, once there, there is only more meta upon meta upon meta upon…

It can become masturbatory, but it does build a beautiful capacity: the ability to suspend judgment while being with another’s worldview. If modern wisdom researchers are correct, this “perspectival meta-cognition” is what is needed for wisdom today.

In truth, I love both groups, and I do not want to see them at war. My advice to each is simple:

To the Meta-Christians: Become Christ-like, and love, because love will help heal the wounds of those who have been Church hurt. Be humble. God works in mysterious ways. Love is the best apologetics.

To the Meta-Moderns: See your philosophy through. If what you say is true, that everyone has a “piece,” like a blind man touching a part of the elephant, then what wisdom do the Meta-Christians contain? It might not be obvious, but I sense it relates to what lies behind your triggers.

So, Synergeia or Wise Agency?

I am not a syncretist. Nor even an ecumenist. I do not see these terms as synonymous.

I said the philosopher’s stone is wise agency. I take that back. I think the philosopher’s stone exists someplace else, and perhaps is revealed when our agency is transfigured by a greater love.

But what do I know?

I am no sage.

And I will be discarding talks of wisdom henceforth.

Being an “online person” carries psychic costs, especially for those who earn part or all of their livelihood from creative work tied to their personal image, such as a podcast, a YouTube channel, or a Substack.

“You make money online and can support yourself from doing so? Wow.” They say. “I wish I had that.”

No, they don’t. They’d just be complaining about it like they are about their office job.

The projections. The parasociality. The hate and the love. The latter can actually be more damning, as you just get cheerled toward being more cringe. The understandable desire to know how your work has been received can easily turn into a subtle desperation that pulls you into the screen, allowing digital voices to worm their way into your head.

Most who play the game understand this, make do, and continue their performance, saying to themselves: “this is just the tradeoff of playing.” True. Yet this acceptance portals them into the nebulous addictions that come with getting validated (and fearing being invalidated) by their audience, or, dare I say, “community.”

The problem: there is no community without communion. Hence, whatever is being sought as validation is not a community. It’s something else. One popular phrase from the extremely online is egregore: an occult term for a non-physical entity that emerges from collective minds.

Are online influencers just summoning egregores that end up entrapping them on the screens, along with their communities?!

Yep.

One option is escape: just get off. Stop playing. Delete yo self. Unscreen and touch grass forever. Starve the egregore and log off while you still can.

I’ve considered this more than once, which, if I am honest, has the same quality as the fantasizing I indulged in when I worked an office job: dramatically quitting and riding a motorcycle across Canada, finding my true passion somewhere between Toronto and Vancouver. Maybe in Alberta??

There is another option. The best option. It’s the “I don’t think about you at all” option. Let’s call it The Draper Option, based on the popular meme from Mad Men.

It’s the hardest option, because you still play the game, but you become impenetrable, build an inner citadel. You put things out there and don’t care. Don’t check. Don’t know. You create, but not for your egregoric pet that eventually makes you its pet.

No. You create for something else.

You can start creating just for “yourself,” which feels insane, but if you persist in this, something very interesting happens.

Read more

Laconic sentences that strip away bullshit and reveal uncomfortable truths.

Without question, the best in the game is Colombian moralist Nicolás Gómez Dávila. To illustrate:

• “Politics is the pastime of empty souls.”

• “To refuse to wonder is the mark of the beast.”

• “There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures.”

After reading a Dávila aphorism I usually react like Joe Rogan does during a UFC match.

Dávila is indispensable. You can read banger upon banger of his here:

Today, I’ll highlight two other aphorists: Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), a Jesuit priest, and Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), a French nobleman. Their books, The Art of Worldly Wisdom and Maxims, published 20 years apart, are primary texts that make up an aphoristic genre we might call “ethically shrewd.”

To be shrewd is to exercise clear judgment in practical affairs with clever responses. It is the ability to meet reality as it is, which requires seeing reality as it is, especially human reality. Too many “philosophers” and political ideologues suffer from a kind of reality-blindness, disregarding the messy complexity of what is in favour of their clean theories of what should be.

To be ethically shrewd, then, is to see reality clearly yet respond with moral integrity. However, given that many worldviews today punish seeing things with clarity, the mere acknowledgment of difficult-to-swallow truths is deemed bad, if not outright evil. At the very least, speaking such truths can feel deeply naughty.

Alas, for less foolish souls, such understanding is crucial, and one must risk appearing naughty to fools. Purchase these books without delay. You will not agree with every passage, nor should you. Rather, absorb their gestalt and grow ethically shrewd.

I’ll provide examples, with commentary, from each book. A few from Gracián

Neither all bad nor all good. A certain sage reduced the whole of wisdom to the golden mean. Carry right too far and it becomes wrong. The orange squeezed completely dry gives only bitterness. Even in enjoyment you shouldn’t go to extremes. The intellect itself will go dry if pressed too hard, and if you milk a cow like a tyrant you will draw only blood.

As a default, anyone who appears too moral and virtue-signals (or “vice-signals”) too hard is not to be trusted. One who cares about the truth will find himself in contradiction often. Following the spirit of truth not only leads to more interesting minds, but fuller souls, than those who demand rigid coherence to a worldview.

Do, but also seem. Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. To excel and to know how to show it is to excel twice. What is invisible might as well not exist. Reason itself is not venerated when it does not wear a reasonable face. Those easily duped outnumber the prudent. Deceit reigns, and things are judged from without, and are seldom what they seem. A fine exterior is the best recommendation for inner perfection.

Mimicry is natural. It’s also human nature, which includes sophists, fakers, and bullshitters. Yet, of course, there is evolutionary advantage to such mimicry, so much so that the world itself has untethered appearance from reality. You want to be the real deal, yet you’ll need the capacity to show you are as well; a separate skill. A maxim well represented by this Joey Roth illustration:

Don’t answer those who contradict you. Find out first whether they’re being clever or simply vulgar. It isn’t always stubbornness; sometimes it is a trick. So pay attention and don’t get caught up in the former or cast down by the latter. No one demands more caution than a spy, and when someone has the skeleton key to minds, counter him by leaving the key of caution inside, on the other side of the keyhole.

Don’t define yourself by those who disagree with you. By taking the bait and engaging, however valid their critique, you bind yourself to them in unseen ways, creating an unspoken pact that cannot easily be broken. Rarely are disagreements, public or private, bounded by a pure pursuit of truth.

Deep down, the disagreer wants something: information, leverage, attention, validation from their audience, or simply emotional highs that come from being vindictive or triumphant. Sometimes it’s wise to engage, but often it’s best to ignore fools and let your silence be your disagreement.

The whole book is amazing, with 300 passages in total. La Rochefoucauld’s, closer to the style of Dávila, are equally good. Here are some, with select thoughts from me.

• “Those who devote too much attention to little things generally become incapable of great ones.”

• “To gain status in the world, we do all we can to appear as if we had already gained it.”

• “With most men, love of justice is merely fear of suffering injustice.”

As my friend Tony Robbins, the great modern self-help sage, likes to say: avoiding pain is a greater motivator than pleasure. Watch carefully those with political aspirations, especially those who cultivate the appearance of being a “good person” or advocate a highfalutin cause; underneath their ethical veneer is self-interested fear of facing a painful fate, real or imagined.

• “Not all those who know their own minds know their own hearts.”

• “As great minds have the ability to say much in few words, so, conversely, small minds have the gift of talking much and not saying anything.”

• “No fools are as annoying as intelligent ones.”

Intelligence, especially when coupled with verbal strength, offers an undeniable power. A game emerges for those who can abuse it: appear right, a proxy for being smart, at all costs, even if that means making another appear wrong and hence stupid. Being around such fools is like being surrounded by flies while eating. They do not cause serious harm, but you cannot easily get rid of them and must live with their uninvited irritation.

• “Few people know how to be old.”

• “Nature creates merit, and fortune puts it on display.”

• “To draw attention to the fact that you never flirt is itself a form of flirtatiousness.”

Guilty as charged!

Only the ethically shrewd know how to meta-flirt. 😉

You should keep these books by your bedside, but not too close.

Understanding the reality of others helps tremendously in living a less foolish life, but being too shrewd carries a weight that zaps the joy out of all social life. In the spirit of the above passages, I’ll close this entry with one of my own, serving as counterweight…

Be shrewd with all, but for those you live for, allow yourself to be lovingly naïve. Recognizing the beauty in them invites more of it.