You already know George, even if you don’t ‘know’ him. You’ve seen him on TV, even if you haven’t seen Seinfeld. You’ve met him in real life, even if it’s a less hyperbolic incarnation. You know the look, you know the attitude, you can probably tell what he’s like just by seeing this depiction.

When I don’t know someone, I like to pretend I’m giving a job interview and ask them to define themselves in three words. I am, of course, great with people. Were I asked to summarize George in three words, those words would be: can’t stand ya.

George is constantly angry, consistently disheveled, incessantly perplexed by human behavior, and increasingly less likely to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. He’s the foil to common decency, the poster boy for poor social grace, and the mascot of misapplied misanthropy. He’s the prototype for a generation of sitcom characters, and you’ve almost certainly enjoyed his intellectual descendants even if you’ve never heard of the show for which he was written.

Like I said, you know George. But, despite my obvious fondness for both him and Seinfeld, why bring up his iconic characterization in the beginning of an article about mass psychology? And why bestow upon him the auspicious title of voice of civilization?

One of George’s defining acts of characterization is that, when he gets distressed by someone in public, he will shout ‘We’re living in a society!’ It’s both a guttural reaction and a carefully considered response, as he does it more than once but is constantly vexed when employing it as a defense mechanism. ‘We’re living in a society’.

He doesn’t need to say more, though he often does. The message, as short as it is, couldn’t be clearer. We’re living in a society, therefore we should be civilized.

And, just like that, George has explained one of the foundations on which human civilization has been constructed. Not bad for a man that killed his fiancé and blew a date with Marisa Tomei in the same half hour.

Welcome to New Renaissance. Our mission, to codify and stratify, catalogue and standardize an understanding of the modern world and how it somehow degenerated into ways of thinking that should have long-since past into history.

This is part 1 of 3 articles examining George’s notion of living in a society. Part 1 goes over the basic premise and the juxtaposition of mass psychology in a society against the reality in which that society exists. Parts 2 and 3 will cover the applications of this mass psychology and what happens when that psychology begins to erode over time.

More on parts 2 and 3 and our channel at the end of the article. For now, back to George’s unintentionally poignant manifesto.

Living in a Society

George doesn’t realize it of course, but what he’s attempting to articulate is so utterly important to human function that it’s cropped up an endless number of times in both popular and historical culture. We’ll be going over two pertinent examples in the course of this article series, but for now ignore the cultural subtext and focus upon the simplicity of the text itself.

‘We’re living in a society’. It really is that simple if you think about it.

Civilization rests entirely upon the premise that those participating within it believe and act as though they are ‘civilized’. That’s a circular definition, but one of the only examples with which I am familiar that actually benefits from the paradoxical practice.

Civilization is nothing more than a collection of people that agree to behave as though they are, indeed, a collection. It’s a complete fabrication, yet one that literally defines itself through its own existence. It exists precisely because people agree that it exists, and for no other reason. If no one agreed to be civilized, there could be no civilization. I realize that sounds silly, as we take this idea for granted to such a vast degree in the 21’st century, but it’s simply too important to not fully masticate before digestion.

Society is an agreement between people, a generalized sense of structure where no inherent structure exists. People in a society act implicitly to create that society simply by believing in said society and acting accordingly. The assumption of society creates society.

Here’s a fantastic way to explain the concept in its most truncated form: You’re alone at home and hear a knock at your door. How do you feel?

In the context of a society, your emotions probably run the gambit from annoyance to confusion, but potentially also include excitement or curiosity. In the context of a lack of society, the first thing you’re likely to feel is anxiety.

If society is the assumption that people will behave in a civilized way, its primary function is to give its citizens the confidence to behave in that civilized way so that the assumption of society can continue. The presumption begets the realization, which reinforces the presumption.

Within a society, someone knocking at your door is a guest. Outside a society, someone knocking at your door is a threat.

In a society, George expects to be treated with some sort of respect when he walks out his door. He believes that law and order exist, and thus ‘knows’ that he won’t be gunned down in the street while strolling to the coffee shop to chat with Jerry. He retains the expectation that people will not treat him derogatorily unless he’s earned it, that people will travel down the correct side of the road (both in cars and as pedestrians), and that all of his needs will be met by people so long as he can afford to retain their various goods and services.

And, because George believes these things, they largely exist. Don’t get me wrong, George isn’t exactly right in his monumental assumption. People definitely die by violence, most certainly are rude to each other, inevitably incorrectly navigate streets, and very much fail to maintain commerce and general service on a regular basis. But, the fact that these things happen, and sometimes happen with great regularity, are almost irrelevant as long as the expectation that they won’t happen prevails in the minds of the common citizen in any civilization.

Strip away the varnish that helps buffer the delusion that society is some sort of concrete and tangible thing, and all you’ll find remaining is belief. Belief is the brick by which the modern building is erected, the asphalt over which modern mankind must trod.

And, to the utter consternation of rationality, this belief-based civilization is complete delusion.

George has been shown, an enumerable number of times, that he’s not right in his assumptions. The entire basis of his character is that humans within a society inherently do not act in a civilized way. The premise of Seinfeld is that humans aren’t actually civilized. The governing ideal on which sitcoms are constructed is that people don’t behave as they should in a society.

The point of a sitcom is to poke fun at the genre’s namesake, situation comedy. Sitcoms are funny because they point out what everyone already knows, even if they don’t realize it. Sitcoms could not exist if humans actually behaved civilly to each other, as no human would believe them, thus defeating their purpose. What’s more, there would be no need for law enforcement, lawyers, or half the infrastructure we must maintain if humans behaved in a civilized way. A tremendous effort is exerted on a second to second basis to maintain the delusion that everything is ok and that society is a place for civilized action.

Yet, for the most part, we all still believe that we’re civilized.

Mass Psychology

We all, at some level, understand that the assumptions of our safety, security, prosperity, and profligacy are delusional. Even those people lucky enough to never encounter random violence know that it happens somewhere and to someone. Yet, civilization exists, has for quite some time, and shows no sign of slipping into extinction despite our seemingly best efforts.

And this paradox absolutely fascinates me, on both the back end and the front. To create society, we’ve inadvertently adopted some sort of psychological equilibrium balancing the necessity of the delusion of civilization with the actuality of civilization’s fragile relationship with reality. At both the public and private level, we all seem to be ok with pretending everything is ok, even if we know it isn’t on a rational basis.

Almost all of our ‘modern’ systems, those which define the western world actually, rely on this equilibrium to exist. Capitalism relies on trust in the central banking system despite the fact that they don’t really hold your money. Democracy relies on the assumption that a government will willingly surrender its power every two years despite all of human history indicating that this is implausible. Education relies on the credentialing process and the promise of a job market that is increasable less in touch with reality. Without the established equilibrium, these systems simply can’t function and would collapse with all haste and quite a bit of collateral.

But, the equilibrium cuts the other way as well.

If someone is too scared to leave their home for fear of violence, we call that person mentally ill. The inability to ignore the possibility of unpleasant outcomes is known as neuroticism. Questioning an established narrative will get one labeled as a conspiracy theorist. The equilibrium of mass psychology tips both sides toward the middle, presumptively so that the rest of us can keep on swimmin despite the inherent dangers to our left and right.

Want a practical example? In 2024, approximately 15,000 deaths occurred in the U.S. due to gun-related attacks. That same year, approximately 44,000 deaths occurred in the U.S. due to vehicular fatalities. Meaning, you are almost three times as likely to die via randomly driving a car than you are by being gunned down in an act of malice. Yet, the average American will profess a much greater fear of guns than cars. In fact, consciousness regarding guns is engrained into American life at the cultural and political level, while consciousness regarding cars is next to nonexistent. There aren’t movies and TV shows about vehicular deaths, there are endless movies and TV shows about gun violence. No political campaign has ever been run based on car accidents, most political campaigns at least touch on gun violence and regulation.

Is it possible that such a backward reading of statistical information can be attributed to the mass thinking at the societal level? That we’ve got a vested interest in believing that cars can’t hurt us because we need them so badly? Obviously the fear of guns makes sense at an individual level, but does that explanation not ring even a little false in the light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

And, through all this perplexing paradoxical thinking, that’s not even considering the fact that more Americans die from essentially being fat than both gun and car violence combined. Yet, other than a singular documentary from the early 2000’s that specifically attacked McDonalds, that’s not an issue that gets regularly discussed either in media or politics in any serious way.

As a population, we’ve adopted beliefs about the nature of death that run counter to any sort of factual basis. The boogeymen of our imaginations use violence to hurt people. The boogeymen of reality hurt many, many more people through much less direct means and go, relatively at least, ignored.

At least, until kinda recently.

Delusion Unraveling

Probably the oldest question asked about society is if yesterday really was better than today while living under the current regime.

At the center of nearly all political and cultural thought is the conundrum of removing nostalgia from memory and squaring the boredom, exasperation, and corrosive miasma of aging against the very real act of aging out of the popular pulse. This idea has probably never been more accurately expressed than in the following Simpsons joke.

Seemingly inside every currently-aged human being is an angry old-timer just waiting for a few more years to stroll down the road so that he or she can complain about how good things used to be. I’ve written before about this, quite a bit actually, yet it bears repeating. If you’re lucky enough to get old, you’ll be unlucky enough to hate everything that’s no longer like it was when you were young.

However, and again I’ve written about this at length, we’re in sort of a different circumstance nowadays. For the first time in the history of humanity, we experience so much change on the revolving door of generations that it’s no longer just people ‘getting old’ and not liking their children’s rock music. In the budding Age of AI, the epoch which followed the oh-so-recently extinct Information Age, perhaps it’s reasonable to react poorly to such divergent change.

By the end of World War II, the human race had lived through what was almost certainly its greatest challenge within the last millennium. War on a truly industrial scale with more than three open theaters spanning a dozen countries and hundreds of millions of direct and indirect participants is a hell of a way to wake up to a new world order and the Atomic Age. Yet, after the horrors of the greatest conflict in the history of this planet, the general cultural atmosphere in the western world was optimistic. Americans were getting home, getting back to work, getting back to life. There was no great outcry to abolish American imperialism, far from it. Stock in America had never been and probably will never be higher, which stood in stark contrast to the devastation wrought by a war that consumed almost a third of the planet. America was feeling good, and it showed in almost every aspect of American life for the next twenty years.

Then we got into Vietnam. Suddenly, and for essentially the first time since the Civil War, Americans didn’t like the idea of being the baddest bully on the block. For the first time in over a hundred years, there was serious dissent among the American populace in regards to the execution of a war effort. In fact, the dissent was so strong that it helped usher in what we now consider to be the decade of the 20th century most focused on cultural change. And, ultimately, the war was abandoned due to the coalescing of palpable public outcry against it.

In just over twenty years, America went from the superpower that crushed the greatest threat to civilization ever witnessed through overwhelming military and technological might to a nation torn down the center between pacifism and disinterest.

What happened in that twenty years to so thoroughly change the American idea of militarism? What cataclysmic cultural force was unleashed that could so warp the hearts of a nation?

Television.

Crisis of Confidence

The abstraction of war seems glorious, doesn’t it? The Greeks rendering the city of Troy to ash and carving ‘Agamemnon’ in the stone. The Romans sowing the fields of Carthage with salt after laying low their great hero Hannibal. Alexander twisting the world to his will and pulling humanity out of darkness and into the dawn of the civilized mind. Sounds pretty cool doesn’t it, almost prosaic even. The mind sort of skips over the before and after and just basks in the ambiance of great men doing great things greatly. Kind of a different story when you can see it moving on a screen from your living room.

The advent of television as America’s mass mode of entertainment that began in the 50’s spelled the end for the romanticism of war more so than any other event in modern culture. Being subjected to real transpositions of wartime events rather than only receiving sanitized and curated reproductions was enough to snap the then modern public out of its love affair with military conflict. War movies switched from the glory of John Wayne to the horror of Stanly Kubrick and the miasma of Francis Ford Coppola. Media made its mark in the war and post-war era portraying the mighty conquests of America, only to run smack into a public that no longer believed in the hallowed battlecry of America’s perpetual casus belli.

In short, the illusion of civility attached to war within civilization was forever abolished as the delusion granted by the mass psychology of civilization was altered.

Which, at least, completes the ellipsis and refocuses back to the topic at hand, the crisis of confidence.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter shocked the world with a now infamous address during which he outlined the reality that Americans no longer believed in the greatness of America.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

That was almost fifty years ago. Fifty years of erosion and tension and vapid, dejected, unrelenting malaise.

The mass psychology of civilization, on which civilization itself depends, began to seriously erode fifty years before 9/11 and the two decades of war that followed it. Before Enron and WorldCom and Theranos. Before the housing market collapse and the biggest financial bailout in the history of the world that ensured the century of inflation that was to follow. Before contested elections and claims of voter fraud and January 6th. Before the healthcare industry was devoured by insurance. Before the U.S. treasury department decided it didn’t need to make anymore pennies because the coin no longer served a discernable purpose. Before the war on drugs. Before the culture war. Before the Epstein files. And before we knew about it all because of the internet.

It’s not just war anymore, and it’s not just the sins of the past. The mass psychology of society began unraveling more than fifty years ago and is only picking up steam as it crests into the AI age.

Slowly, almost poetically, we’ve stopped believing the great lie, the lever by which all of society turns.

What television did for war, the internet’s going to do for everything else.

Jimmy Carter was elected President in 1976. His crisis of confidence speech came three years later, at the end of his first term. The crescendo of that speech reads as follows:

We’ve got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America.

That is an American President in a national address admitting that the ball had been dropped on his watch and imploring his country to help him pick it back up. A President, on the verge of an election, appealing to the spirit of America and admitting that he was wrong.

Now, with that in mind, ask yourself this terrible question. When was the last time you heard anyone in a position of power actually admit that there was something wrong that wasn’t just an accusation leveled at their opposition? When was the last time you heard an authority figure admit to any kind of fault whatsoever?

Turns out Carter didn’t win that election. Turns out, the equilibrium of mass psychology starts to break down when it gets exposed even a little bit. Just like with Vietnam, illusions return to clarity when subjected to just a touch of scrutiny.

We don’t need a president to tell us we’re in a crisis of confidence. We have the internet. Now, name something the internet does better than scrutinize that which people believe. I dare ya.

That’s it for part 1 folks.

Part 2, which is approaching earth’s atmosphere at reentry speeds, will cover the basis in theory of what’s actually happening in what we’ve just discussed. It may sound like your memories of middle school math class, but I assure you, it will be more entertaining and hopefully contain fewer daydreams. Part 3, which currently resides somewhere around the moon, will discuss what this all means, what effects we’ve already begun to see, and where we go from there.

If you want to start at the beginning of our journey, here’s the first entry into our Neo-Feudalism series- Part 1: The New Dark Age. Come read how the world has reverted to the thinking, governance, and economics of the middle ages, and what we need to do to start working our way out of it.

Believe it or not, I think there’s a relatively concrete answer to this question. And, if you’ll grant me the appropriate cement with which to ground myself, I’ll demonstrate why this question is ever so important.

I realize this will seem to be a bit of a harsh sentiment, as it’s attached to an outwardly innocent, universal, and ultimately inconsequential aspect of childhood, but hear me out.

Past a certain point, a child that believes in Santa Claus has become abused by some aspect of his or her surroundings. If you can legally drive a car and still believe that good boys and girls get presents on Christmas from a flying fat man that sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake, you shouldn’t be given a car. We’ve already got more than enough about which to worry.

But, equally as alarming, is the child that stops believing in Santa Claus before they are old enough to handle a world made of solid stone rather than candy cane. The only question then becomes, what is the balance between the two positions, and how is that balanced maintained?

Welcome to New Renaissance. Our mission, to find out exactly where we are, what route we took to end up here, and maybe even how to get back on the highway.

More on what we do at the end of the article, now back into the discussion.

Then

In 1988, the career of Tom Hanks was nowhere near the juggernaut it would become in just a few short years, but it wasn’t anything to dismiss either. Hanks had acted in nine films, had been on several network shows, was getting respectable levels of both critical and audience attention, and had nowhere to go but up. At this point, and really for the rest of his career to one degree or another, he was known for his boyish charm, easy humor, and ability to sink into a role while maintaining his trademark likability. Thus it made perfect sense for him to star in his tenth film, which happened to be the point in his career trajectory that took him from up-and-comer into box-office badass. The film, of course, was none other than Big.

Like many of Hanks’s other early and middle works, Big is a high concept film, meaning you can explain it in a single sentence and the rest gets fleshed out in the character work.

Big follows Hanks, a thirteen-year-old boy (played by a child at first), who wants to be ‘big’. Notably, I’m going to call the character Hanks because of how completely Hanks subsumes the character into his persona as the guy consummately having fun with life. No slight intended, I just can’t help but see ‘Hanks’ when I see Hanks play in Big.

Anyway, Hanks makes this wish to become ‘big’ upon a seemingly haunted fortune telling machine, then wakes up the next day to find that he has, indeed, become ‘big’.

To his delight, Hanks (now played by Hanks) has ‘grown up’ over night and finds himself in the body of a mid-twenties man while still retaining his actual mind and memories. Thus the high concept pitch. Boy gets put into the body of a man, hijinks ensue.

It’s an idea that’s been picked over and run through multiple times in the history of fiction, and will probably be continually recycled for quite some time if not ad infinitum. Freaky Friday, 13 Going on 30, 17 Again, even the seminal 1994 Disney live-action classic, Blank Check. An idea that endures seemingly through both culture and time, and probably for good reason.

Once the plot of Big starts rolling, after Hanks becomes ‘big’, the meat of the story gets added to the constructional sandwich.

Hanks can’t just go about his regular life anymore, as no one will believe that he’s still a child. Thus, he must live for a while as an adult while attempting to track down the fortune telling machine and undo his wish. He happens to get a job at a toy company, and through some classic hijinks gets promoted due to his child-like nature which gives him valuable insight into the minds of the company’s target audience, children.

Specifically, Hanks reworks the company’s entire toy line, as the creators of the toys can’t understand what kids seem to want. The classic example of this is when Hanks rejects an action figure of a skyscraper that transforms into a robot, because he ‘doesn’t get it’, meaning he doesn’t think it’s fun because it doesn’t make sense to his childish mind. Due to his insight and the power it grants him, Hanks is hailed as a visionary by the company which attracts the attention of a female coworker, which is where things get complicated.

Again, Hanks is a thirteen-year-old boy that still plays with and thinks about toys. When he is approached by this woman, who is obviously trying to seduce him, he neither understands her intentions nor has the frame of reference to even comprehend that this is possible. He invites the woman to spend the night with him, to which she agrees, only to lead her to a trampoline in his apartment, on which they bounce like idiots. He then takes her to a set of bunk beds where he gleefully claims the top bunk, to her complete consternation. He doesn’t seem to know what sex is, has a mindset that can only be described as extraordinarily juvenile, and in every way is portraying a character that I’d describe as ‘still believes in Santa Claus’.

If you add enough heat and boil away the extraneous detail, Big is a film that draws contrast between that which is of childhood and that which awaits all children ‘lucky’ enough to grow up. The juxtaposition of a boy with the body of a man, which makes us wonder about men with the minds of boys. We’ll return to this idea, but for now, trust that the film is as clear as can possibly be in its characterization of childhood and its delineation from that which is of the world of adults.

That was in 1988, another universe from the one in which we now live. The Simpsons had yet to air a single episode, Apple had yet to sell a single ‘personal computer’, people listened to music on the radio through a Boom Box, Vanilla Ice had yet to break into the scene of popular music, Disney had yet to enter its renaissance and completely take over the animation industry. Fast-forward thirty-seven years and you get an entirely different take on this idea of the divergence between the world of children and adults.

Now

Airing in 2025, Netflix’s Adolescence bears little external resemblance to the aforementioned Big, yet this lack of resemblance ultimately leads to the height of irony.

Adolescence follows a thirteen-year-old boy named Jamie who is accused of murdering one of his classmates, Katie. The series follows the case as it unravels, inevitably revealing that Jamie did kill Katie after being radicalized by the manosphere, the internet in general, and pre-teen culture of the early 21st century as propagated by technology.

As part of the central plot, Jamie’s actions are questioned, formally interrogated, and ultimately dissected by both the people in his life as well as the officials in charge of sorting out the situation. Through this interrogation, it is revealed that Jamie has an extraordinarily adult perspective on sexuality, specifically the hyper-masculine creed championed by the manosphere which basically claims that sexuality is a power imbalance, that men need to take it from women to regain their power, and that human interactions are, by nature, transactional.

Jamie is portrayed both as completely detached from childhood in his mindset and yet firmly ensconced in childish ways in his defense mechanisms and post-murder behavior. He’s simultaneously a frightened little boy that sleeps with a teddy bear and a jaded, world-wise asshole that believes he knows more than and is morally and intellectually superior to the adults that surround him. When he’s arrested, he literally pees his pants. When he’s interviewed by a psychologist three times his age, he tries physically, emotionally, and mentally intimidating her.

What’s more, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Jamie’s whole world has been condensed into the computer screen that’s locked in his bedroom. Every interaction in the story demonstrates that the kids in the story live their lives online even when they are in person, and that Jamie’s entire identity has been reduced to an online avatar that defines his actions in the real world. He knows what sexuality is, but can’t actively participate in a sexual relationship of any kind, and that dichotomy slowly erodes his functioning sanity.

Jamie isn’t a boy that believes in Santa Claus.

What happened?

Hopefully the parallels between the two fictional works are clear, even if they end up a little closer to perpendicular.

Big, made thirty-eight years ago, tells the story of a thirteen-year-old boy that knows nothing of sexuality and still delights in playing with toys. Adolescence, made one year ago, tells the story of a thirteen-year-old boy that is defined by his knowledge of sexuality and his inability to play with anything but a computer.

What, in the isolated and irregular hell, happened between these two works of fiction?!

I’ve written before, multiple times actually, about the idea that fiction is a litmus test and a commemoration of the culture in which it is written. If one is observant and critical, one can use fiction as a literary Rosetta Stone to observe and dissect the cultures that produced works of fiction in both time and space. Put simply, fiction is a snapshot of the past and can help us understand why people believed what they believed when they believed it.

In 1996, Americans wanted a story about aliens invading America and getting their asses handed to them. They got Independence Day. In 2005, Americans didn’t want a story about aliens invading American and being too powerful to outright defeat. They got War of the Worlds. What’s the difference between Independence Day and War of the Worlds in terms of their cultural reception? The better part of a decade. What happened in that better part of a decade? 9/11.

For the first time in the living memory of Americans, they were shown categorically that they could be attacked on their own soil. Before that, they liked the idea of America being attacked and kicking some invading ass. After that, they didn’t seem to enjoy the idea of invasion so much.

Independence Day made going on a billion dollars at the box office in the de-inflated dollar of the 90’s, and on a proportionately tiny budget. It is remembered as a modern-day classic blockbuster and is still celebrated decades later. War of the Worlds made a little bit of money against it’s much bigger budget, but was lost to time almost immediately and was pretty poorly received.

Same basic idea, aliens invade America and America fights back. Dramatic difference in terms of the scope, direction, and reception of both films. Pretty clear historical event and subsequent cultural impact that helps explain the divergence in reception.

So, again, with this idea in mind, what happened between Big and Adolescence that caused such a colossal schism between what we think a child should understand?

Middle Ground

With complete clarity, I don’t think either work accurately depicts childhood in the slightest. As a former thirteen-year-old boy, a possessor of, at minimum, basic common sense, and a practitioner of juvenile and criminal law, I can assure you of the following:

1- thirteen-year-old boys have some idea of sexuality, but it’s almost certainly limited

2- thirteen-year-old boys don’t murder people

3- thirteen-year-old boys don’t exclusively play with toys

Both works are obviously fictional, despite Adolescence taking clear inspiration from real-world events, so their stance on human nature must be, of course, given artistic license. However, the standard to which they should be held is the same granted to any work of art.

The creators believed that the general public would believe the setup. The creators of Big believed that audiences would believe that thirteen-year-old boys don’t know what boobs are and play with toys. The creators of Adolescence believed that audiences would believe that thirteen-year-old boys would be capable of murdering a girl because she was mean on the internet. I have no doubt whatsoever that both studios, both creative teams, both directors, and both audiences believed the ideas on display in both extremely-well received works of fiction. Yet, in the cold light of the forty-odd years separating the works, both depictions of teenaged boys can’t be correct at the same time. The themes of the two works are definitionally mutually exclusive.

Somehow, and in an extraordinary way, what creators believe audiences will believe has changed, and changed under a force so powerful as to be seemingly alchemical.

Hanks and Jamie aren’t even the same species as we understand the functional word. Hanks behaves like an eight-year-old going to bed early on Christmas Eve so he can get his presents. Jamie behaves like a twenty-eight-year-old living in his mother’s basement after his dreams have been taken from him by time’s terrible sandpaper touch who doesn’t even remember that Christmas happens in December. Somehow, between Big and Adolescence lies twenty fictitious years of character maturity: an eight-year-old and a twenty-eight-year-old, both of whom happen to be thirteen.

Neither portrayal is accurate, yet we must ultimately equivocate why both portrayals were first conceived and subsequently received.

Direction of Inquiry

The most obvious place to start is the narrative that boys have become radicalized by the internet and that men are suffering due to the degradation of society in general, as highlighted by various aspects of society that have been irrevocably changed via technology.

I’ve heard this idea propagated for quite a while, as it seems to be an extremely popular notion. For example, the idea that pornography has ruined sexuality and intimacy for men is so commonplace in the cultural conversation that it might as well be modern dogma.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this idea, I happen to think porn is particularly pernicious. I do, however, question any idea that gets circulated through culture, as my memory seems to be longer than the current news cycle of a typical weekday afternoon. You’ll basically never convince me that it’s a good policy to accept that which is furthered in modern discourse without asking questions.

It’s a pretty fantastical notion, isn’t it? That all young men have had their lives so radically altered that they do nothing but live in the matrix, despite not understanding what that movie reference even means. That being said, I can’t ignore the changes I see in students as they enter undergrad, and it’s always tough to write off cultural ideas based entirely on the fact that they are, definitionally, just trends in belief. Obviously change is inevitable, and there hasn’t been a change so profound to the human race as the advent of the information age since humans discovered how to grow food instead of walking around looking for it. So, I can’t exactly write off the ideas discussed herein easily either.

We aren’t really a people that believe in Santa Claus anymore, even when the smallest among us are still fooled by the world’s most obvious lie. Ironic, isn’t it, that the movement attributed to Jamie’s degradation has been dubbed ‘the red pill’? A reference which indicates the decision to leave the matrix and understand the truth of the real world. Yet a reference attributed to a subculture that perpetually exists online and is influenced by nothing but how the internet distorts perception.

To borrow a quote I’ve mentioned before, and one which I think is in stiff competition for the most poignant quote pulled from 21st century fiction, ‘We lived on farms, and then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the internet’.

What does that mean for us exactly?

Conclusion

Thirteen-year-old boys can’t possibly be either Hanks or Jamie in the 21st century if the human race is going to survive. The internet doesn’t allow teenaged boys to believe in Santa Claus, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to effectively separate children from the internet. But, for what should be obvious reasons, we can’t allow kids to stop believing in Santa Claus too quickly either.

I’m not precisely sure if the narrative that boys are being radicalized by the internet is accurate. There’s no concrete way to ascertain this answer, as we can’t perform tests on children and will never have access to the types of data we’d need to ferret out the actual conclusion. What’s more, as has become evident in greater increments for the better part of the last fifty years, narratives propagated by official sources, culture, and fiction are not necessarily completely reliable.

Modern history is rife with examples of cultural narratives that were categorically false yet were injected into the public mindset with the efficacy of an insidious vaccination.

The red scare of the 50’s and 60’s, the moral panic of the 80’s (will someone please think of the children ?!), the satanic panic of the 70’s, 80’s, and even 90’s, the repressed memory trend of the 90’s, and even the more recent me-too movement of the current era all swept through culture making a broad claim about the actions of a group of people and called for systemic solutions that were ultimately debunked to one degree or another.

Will we look back on the era of radicalized boys in fifty years the way we now contemplate the insanity of the red scare era? Or have things really changed for how quickly our kids stop believing in Santa Claus and start believing that the internet is real life?

And, perhaps more importantly, consider this. Even if boys aren’t being radicalized by the internet, we seem to believe that they are at some cultural level. What should we do to keep ourselves from falling for the same thing that’s been happening for the entire history of the post-war era: the mass infection of misinformation leading to social contagion in one form or another.

Are we really any different than people from seventy-five years ago who believed that America was being secretly infiltrated by communist agents? Are we not susceptible to the same sticky notion that something somewhere is terribly wrong?

I suppose the only easy answers we’re likely to get will come from the face of the clock. Let’s hope we don’t end up with both hands pointing toward midnight.

That’s it for this essay, thank you very much for reading.

As mentioned above, I’ve spoken about this idea before, albeit in a different context. If you’re interested in that article, you can find it here: How Looking Up Looked Down.

If you want to start at the beginning of our journey, here’s the first entry into our Neo-Feudalism series- Part 1: The New Dark Age. Come read how the world has reverted to the thinking, governance, and economics of the middle ages, and what we need to do to start working our way out of it.

And, in a post script, here’s a little further irony.

The entire subject of this article relates directly to the plot of the reanimated corpse that is Toy Story 5, albeit conceived independently. Thanks modern Disney, you never let me down.

In this beautiful by-n-by, a major TV network greenlit a sitcom with an unconventional format and an unkempt style of humor that didn’t quite fit in with its contemporaries. That network was NBC, that show was Community, and the relevance of this introduction will shortly be revealed.

One of this show’s characters, Pierce Hawthorne, was an aged baby boomer that spent his twilight years attending community college. He was rich, spoiled, out of touch, narcissistic, and in drastic need of change. He attended community college because he was a combination of bored, unfulfilled, and constantly required an audience for his various fault-based shenanigans. In an early episode, Pierce comes by a set of ‘earn-noculars’ as part of that episode’s gimmick.

If you’ll give me a polite pardon for the pun, ear-noculars are, of course, precisely what they sound like. They increase Pierce’s hearing range, allowing him to eavesdrop on his fellow community college students. Because this story is a sitcom, this inevitably leads to him overhearing some gossip which gives him leverage to destabilize his friend group. Inevitably, he does so. The episode’s partially about Pierce not being as popular within the group as he’d like to be, and the solution he derives to remedy this problem is the aforementioned ear-noculars.

All of this is pretty much a game of dominos for the classic sitcom. Set em up nice and pretty, knock one over and watch the rest fall in sequence. You’ve seen it before, you’ll see it again, yada, yada, yada. But if that’s all the episode had to offer in terms of a setup and payoff for this gimmick, I wouldn’t remember it and I certainly wouldn’t be writing about it almost two decades later.

At the end of the episode, contrary to his general characterization, Pierce gets rid of his ear-noculars. When he’s questioned about this choice, he responds that he chose to do so for a very specific reason. People aren’t supposed to be able to hear that far away. We’re only supposed to be able to hear what’s directly around us because of what we keep in our close vicinity, the people we love.

This sentiment is hokey, a touch contrived, and completely out of character for a character that’s defined by his inability to meaningfully bond with people. It also might just be touching upon the single greatest issue faced by all of modernity.

Welcome to New Renaissance. Our mission, to find out exactly where we are, how we managed to end up in this particular neck of insanity, and maybe even how to work our way out of it.

More on what we do at the end of the article, now back into the discussion.

The Dilemma

The more I ponder modernity, the more I sink into the question implicitly asked by what I’m now going to dub the Hawthorne Dilemma.

We’ve evolved to deal with life, nature, people, really everything you can think of on an extremely limited basis in terms of time, space, and manner. For over 99% of human history, a person’s day to day life involved mixing with a proportionately tiny number of people in a very small geographical area. A person’s worries were all centered on hearth and home, a person’s intellectual scope was limited to that which was readily apparent based on their five senses, their memories, the wisdom of those around them, and their deductive reasoning as shaped by essentially nothing but experience.

People did things because they worked to solve immediate problems, and they knew these solutions worked because they learned them from people that proved that they worked over time. Obviously there were changes in technology, religion, culture, and practice as humanity grew and evolved, but on the scales of the individual human’s life these changes were essentially nonexistent.

It simply wasn’t an option under this model to consider the existential questions of broader existence, culture, religion, technology, politics, or philosophy which are now commonplace. If you lived your whole life in an area where one religion was practiced, you probably didn’t question that religion. If you only ever saw the same five-hundred people in your region, you never had to encounter issues with different races, languages, creeds, cultures, or ideals. The sheer simplicity of being tied to a small geographic location and population literally limited the human experience down to general surroundings and the flexibility of individual imagination.

A person in 500 AD could potentially have known that other cultures existed outside his or her purview, but would have next to no experience with those cultures beyond potential word of mouth in most cases. A random human wouldn’t know that there were millions of people out there that looked, talked, thought, and acted differently to him or her, and wouldn’t be able to imagine the ramifications of that truth. Most of them wouldn’t even know there was an ‘out there’ at all.

And, most importantly, because people had no access to anything beyond their general vicinity for most of human history, the human race built itself on localized and highly stratified culturally-specific concerns.

Questions were asked about what was directly in front of you, solutions were enacted based on precedent. What people cared about were the things in their immediate location. What people thought about was today and the vague idea of a tomorrow that very much resembled the experience of yesterday. Society was organized along these principles, relationships were based around immediate intimacy and convenience, people’s worlds were that which they could see and hear, feel and touch.

Oh the times, they have gone and changed.

Modern Madness

The most maddening aspect of our modern world is precisely that we are a species that has evolved to live within a few square miles, both literally and culturally, yet have now reached the point where that concept is not only antiquated but essentially impossible.

We now take for granted that basically every human on earth knows that there are almost eight billion other people, each of whom has a pretty different experience in some drastic way. You can hear news from any corner of the earth instantaneously. You have friends that live hundreds or even thousands of miles away from you with whom you converse on a daily basis. The things about which you think don’t originate in your vicinity. Your education was conceived, curated, delivered, and utilized in a geography of both the body and mind that far outstrips your home. You don’t make decisions based on the precedent of your ancestors, you don’t think in terms of simply your own knowledge, you aren’t limited to what’s physically around you.

If you’ve got a problem, you’ve got dozens of ways of solving it without getting up from your couch. If you’re bored, you’ve got instantaneous entertainment anywhere on the planet and pulled from anywhere else. You’re wearing ear-noculars that have a bandwidth so broad and powerful that you can ‘hear’ things from almost anywhere you want.

Imagine, for a moment, trying to explain human resources initiatives to a human that lived even a hundred years ago.

‘What do you mean there are people that get paid to make sure everyone else gets emails about inclusion policy?! Don’t they actually do anything?! Why do we need company policy to dictate how we talk to each other?!’

This poor person from the past couldn’t imagine the things we think are normal, not because he or she is either ignorant or stupid, but because it literally wasn’t possible to have so broad an experience or understanding of the world. People a hundred years ago cared about themselves, their families and friends, their local politics and sports, their national spotlight politics, and major cultural events. People now care about anything and everything they can access on the internet, which is just about whatever’s potentially available anywhere humans exist.

An antiquated human couldn’t conceive of being consumed by the minutia of following a president’s life and daily thoughts, as he or she would only have access to major news bulletins concerning major events. Human populations were heavily striated, often segregated if they were homogenized at all, and held next to no mobility. Now we all intermingle with people, ideas, cultures, and concepts on a second to second basis that are as different to us as they are from those of antiquity.

And, despite the obvious benefits associated, and despite the progress that’s been achieved as the modern man sets society toward the rising sun, there is an inevitable, terrible, potentially irreconcilable cost.

The Cost

We don’t know the full ramifications of our technological reach yet, though we’re certainly starting to get the gist of some of the effects. Humans have never been able to do what we now take for granted, and there’s no emergency break on the tide of the tech tree as it branches ever outward into the soil of our souls.

We are a species that’s evolved, both on a physical and social level, to only know, deal in, and communicate with that which is directly around us. Our physical senses, strength, stamina, and constitution are absolutely pathetic compared to basically every other large animal, and we were shaped by the terrifying efforts of evolution to compensate for this fact. We have evolved frontal lobes and social practices that get around this implicit weakness. We don’t need to be stronger or faster because we live in groups and can work together. We don’t need to be tougher, cause we’re smarter. A single tiger beats a single man ten times out of ten and twice on Sundays. A small group of tigers probably takes a large group of men more times than not. But men don’t work in large groups against tigers, they work at the societal level. If you see a tiger, it’s not your job to deal with it. You don’t have to do anything but call animal control, and the problem gets solved for you. For better or worse, nature shaved away those parts of us that would let us solve our own problems and instead nurtured the parts that let us work together to solve them instead.

But now, after more than a hundred millennia of nature’s evil fingers squeezing us into a very particular shape, we’re past the grips of those same, twisted fingers. The ‘group’ we live in to solve problems is as broad as we want it to be. The world as we experience it isn’t in front of our eyes anymore, it’s all that lies through a screen.

We don’t think about the things evolution shaped us to contemplate. We don’t live in the world evolution shaped us to inhabit. What we think of as normal is absolutely abnormal. That which we dream is pulled from the impossible. Our technology is fighting against our evolution, our culture is strangling the foundations on which it itself was made.

Inevitability

Unfortunately, I don’t really think there’s an answer to this one. Technology was always going to make such things possible, we were always going to outstrip our evolution. Is that for the best? I don’t know. Is it a tragedy? Maybe. Should we just suck it up and accept it as the natural cost of progress? That’s the answer I think most people will adopt.

But let me propose an alternative reading of the episode of community on which this idea has been pitched.

Pierce Hawthorne has problems with people. He’s lived his life unable to make and keep friends or maintain intimate relationships. At the end of his life, with more money than he can spend and a lifetime of ‘achievement’ behind him, all he wants is to get close to people. How does he try to achieve this? By increasing his range of access. What does it achieve? Social chaos.

What if Pierce couldn’t buy a gadget to get him access to people? What if he was forced to make a change in his life based on how he acted because that was the only available option? Maybe he’d choose to spend more time with people on their terms, or be less abrasive, or try some personal development. Maybe he’d even have to ask for help from someone else, as he clearly doesn’t know what to do on his own. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the solution to his problem was just to ask another person for help? What if he had gotten though life until that point precisely because he was never forced to ask? What if the things we love are right in front of us, but we can’t see them because of a screen? And if that’s the case, what have we done to ourselves?

That’s it for this essay, thank you very much for reading.

I didn’t exactly come to a conclusion in terms of workable solutions, or even a complete outline of the problem as I see it. I’m genuinely not certain about the full parameters of this one, and have been working on it in chunks for some time. But I think this is a good place to start, even if all this article achieves is getting a question on deck and ready to swing.

If you want to start at the beginning of our journey, here’s the first entry into our Neo-Feudalism series- Part 1: The New Dark Age. Come read how the world has reverted to the thinking, governance, and economics of the middle ages, and what we need to do to start working our way out of it.

Jackson, Lucas. Adult male that drunkenly cut the head off of three parking meters with an industrial lathe (just a construction tool). This amounts to something like $5,000.00 in property damage if you factor in cost of replacement and installation. Decorated soldier, no criminal record.

What do you do? Does he deserve to be prosecuted, and if so to what degree? If you could automatically sentence him to some sort of punishment, what would it be and for what justification?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Cool Hand Luke.

____

Welcome to New Renaissance, where we try and understand where we are and how we got here. If you need to backtrack, here’s parts one, two, and three of this series.

For the short summation: Americans don’t understand their own legal system, they believe it functions in ways it doesn’t to the detriment of those being prosecuted by it, they get these ideas from fiction, and that (in connection with mass media and other sources) has lead to the widespread belief that the law is (fill in modern term for bigoted and/or wrong).

In the final iteration of this series, we will discuss the impact of these phenomenon and possible solutions to implement, to varying degrees of potential success.

____

As mentioned above, the aforementioned legal dilemma is the plot of the 1967 seminal classic film Cool Hand Luke. It was THE prison movie before Shawshank Redemption, and endures to this day as beloved iconography for all sorts of reasons in all sorts of ways. And, notably for this discussion, centers on the set of facts I’ve outlined above.

Luke got drunk one night and cut the heads off of three parking meters. What do you think his sentence should be, if he were to be prosecuted under the American criminal justice system?

In the film, Luke is sentenced to two years of incarceration on a chain gang. This means that he goes to regular prison and must also perform daily physical labor for no discernable wage. The man has no criminal record, is a decorated war veteran, and did some stupid property damage while he was drunk, and was sentenced to a God-damn chain gang.

He is forced to live in a bunker and work as a slave, enduring physical and psychological torture for the crime of drunkenly breaking some public property. Ruminate on this ministration of sentencing, and we’ll return to it.

The Dilemma

After pondering the analysis of this series, and American law in general, the most striking realization that came to mind will probably be somewhat of a surprise. I don’t know if this is a problem that’s worth fixing.

As such, the climax of this series will entail an analysis under two perspectives, nihilistic and functionalist. Perhaps in fleshing out my thoughts on the matter I’ll better comprehend the correct stance on the subject, or perhaps I’ll become further cemented into the quagmire of muck that is twenty-first century thought.

After discussing each option, we’ll hopefully reach a final conclusion that at least points us in a direction for the ongoing discussion.

Perspective One: Nihilistic Indifference

Americans are stupid. Compare any statistic you want against other first world countries and you’ll be stuck with the conclusion that what we’re doing isn’t working. We’ve got truly massive problems that need to be addressed in education, economics, and experienced-based technology that are so vast in their magnitude and importance that it’s possible nothing else really matters on the global scale.

This, of course, falls under my theory of Neo-Feudalism, which I covered thoroughly in the Neo-Feudalism series. If you want a more in-depth breakdown of those issues, a link will be at the end of the article. But the short version is that we’re in sort of a house burning situation here. There might not be time to worry about what the average American thinks about law when the average American now has a sixth grade reading level. Obviously a person with a sixth grade reading level can’t understand a complex legal system. They can’t functionally operate in anything more complex than the now-remedial high school curriculum. What’s the point in trying to fix a problem that’s just a symptom of a much greater problem anyway? If we educate Americans on how the law works, will that actually make a discernable difference in a landscape where everyone lives in perpetual debt, owns nothing, understands nothing, and just lives according to the dictations of algorithms?

And even if you don’t buy the ‘it’s pointless anyway’ perspective, what about the fact that things are currently sustainable in the American legal world? Sure, it’s not great. We’ve got 25% of the world’s prisoners on a 5% world population, with about two million U.S. citizens that are currently incarcerated. That’s obviously a terrible measure of national crime, especially considering the truly gigantic disparity in per capita imprisonment. But, despite that, who really cares? Two million incarcerated Americans is about 1/2 of a percent of our total three hundred fifty million population. In the life of the average American, that’s an acceptable rate of failure.

There is no real political or cultural movement that works to change the actual criminal justice system, primarily because it doesn’t have any real-world political clout behind it as an issue. Sure, there is performative bitching about the perception of American criminal law, but no modern platform that’s ever championed serious change to the criminal justice system has ever been taken seriously, as has been evidenced by the last forty years of policy. Not since the war on drugs has there been a real change to the makeup of how the law pursues its citizens on a national basis.

This circumstance can be seen as both a product of a lack of applicable political capital as well as the general setup of human civilization. For political capital, the writing has always been on the wall. People convicted of felonies can’t vote, and people that live in poverty tend not to vote. Couple that fact with the general political theory of how to sway swing voters and appeal to a voting base and you’ve got THE non-issue of all non-issues. Felons can’t support political candidates directly and statistically don’t support them indirectly, so they essentially don’t count as citizens from the perspective of the political machine. No one’s going to view criminal justice as a paramount issue when the subjects over whom the system operates are not worthy of notice in the public or political eye.

As for the general nature of human civilization, things get a little grim. Any population will be plagued by criminal activity. There can be no order without disorder, the states of organization are mutually inclusive. As such, the goal of any society can’t be to eradicate criminality, as that’s impossible and its impossibility can be understood by anyone with a three digit IQ. If you draw lines, there will be those on either side of the line. Thus, the creation of legality mandates the creation of illegality.

As such, a realistic though cynical view of juris prudence would view a criminal justice system not as an attempt to correct something but a necessity to mitigate a byproduct on an ongoing basis. It’s literally a feature of the design rather than a flaw. You can’t have good citizens without bad citizens. You can’t have law without outlaw. There is no political power without political subjugation.

The obvious next logical step from this perspective is that correcting a public perception and understanding of law would, therefore, be either unnecessary or counterintuitive to the goal of said law. America needs criminals to exist and a criminal justice system to prosecute them. Making the average citizen aware of how that system actually works would either achieve nothing of relevance in the scope of the governing of said citizens, or would actively impede how the system is designed to work.

If a county needs to sacrifice one citizen in every two hundred in order for it to function, so be it. If a working law requires its legal citizens to remain in ignorance, ignorance shall reign. Or, at least, so would argue one espousing the nihilistic perspective.

Perspective Two: Functionalistic Obligation

The other way of looking at the problem is that, while obviously a symptom of a greater problem, it’s still a symptom that should be addressed and could potentially lead to impacts on the larger problems if properly mediated. As such, let’s review the problem and see if we can find a way to deal with it in the perspective it deserves.

Problem 1- Americans believe things about their law that aren’t true. Problem 2- American criminal law doesn’t work properly because of this misconception and lack of understanding. Problem 3- the specific type of misconceptions at play are a concern because of the misinformation it circulates.

All of the above can, in theory, be mitigated if not eliminated through actual education. If you want Americans to understand their own legal system, teach an actual class series that covers how the legal system works in middle and high school. We currently don’t actually do that, as evidenced by the fact that my average student in undergrad doesn’t know that the constitution created three branches of government, much less how the law prosecutes a criminal case.

It would be relatively easy to formulate a functionalist class on American law that would be started in middle school and continued in high school, the purpose of which would be to demonstrate what the law is, how it works in theory, and how it works in practice. Students could first be shown how the theory of the law is constructed, such as explaining the burden of proof. Once the theory is firmly established, students could undertake more practical exercises such as running a mock criminal prosecution and undertaking mock criminal interviews and run-ins with police officers.

The class could also feature explanations on the actual facts concerning fairness in the law, such as the contents of the three previous parts of this series. Talking to actual police officers on how they make arrests and actual attorneys on how they prosecute and defend cases could at least begin to demystify the legal process and take it out of the hands of pop culture and the social-media sludge machine that’s polluted how the general public seems to think.

It’s very, very clear that American students don’t really learn anything from raw theory anymore, so making the class a hands-on demonstration would force them to put ideas into practice in a semi-functioning and potentially interesting way. The class could take turns doing mock trials and be shown first hand how the burden of proof works, which would completely change the way they would act as jurors later in life. This would also give them first-hand experience at dealing with law enforcement in a controlled setting, which would (in theory) dramatically help those simulated relationships in the real world.

If such a curriculum would be created, it would theoretically trickle upward into higher level cultural thinking and help dissuade some of the mythology that’s been propagated by fiction and the mass media machine over the last half century and beyond. An eighteen year old that’s never interacted with the law before might be fooled by the generally-believed notion that American prisons are full of low level drug offenders, but one that’s discussed how drug prosecution works with a police officer and some attorneys is much less likely to do so. And a student that’s run a simulated drug prosecution case is very, very likely to understand the reality of such circumstances, at least in comparison to current standards.

Run that idea for a generation and you’ve got a population that’s at least informed of the system that could potentially prosecute them, which would hopefully mitigate all of the above issues. Plus, it shouldn’t be too difficult to construct such a curriculum, as there’s an overabundance of workers in the legal field that would be available for practical experience. The entire secondary education system is currently run by such individuals, and this would just create more jobs and help bolster the secondary education marketplace.

Another potential solution would be to mandate a jury education course every prospective juror would take before jury service. This would just be a day of lecturing before entering a courtroom, explaining the legal processes and the specific practices the jury will undergo while in service and a refresher on the theory to which they are bound. If nothing else, this would clear up the burden of proof problem and go a long way to allowing criminal defendants the chance they deserve in front of an actual impartial jury.

Conclusion

With those opposing perspectives now espoused, which sounds more realistic? Honestly, I don’t really know. The more I thought about this series, the more I convinced myself that it’s an important issue that just can’t matter in the matrix of intersecting problems that is modernity. We might be forced with sacrificing the understanding and correct implementation of law if it means a chance at changing the root problems that currently work to deny humanity its chance at a happy future.

And besides, we already believe lies about how our law works. Why not just keep lying to ourselves so we can get through the day?

____

Locking up Luke from our film example simply wouldn’t happen in twenty-first century America. Even if he wasn’t prosecuted as a veteran, for which a different court system exists in most counties, Luke wouldn’t see a minute of prison time. He’d be arrested for property damage then released the next morning on his own recognizance. If he was prosecuted at the felony level at all, he would get alcohol treatment and supervision and would probably have to pay to replace the damaged property. He ultimately wouldn’t be convicted of a felony, and the real consequence of his actions would be that he’d be getting a second change to get his act together and potentially to contribute to society and his own wellbeing.

One of the last DUI cases I defended had about as much property damage as Luke’s fictional case, and that defendant got supervision and property replacement fines, and that man had just gotten out of prison for an epic string of DUI’s. Granted, I pulled a few tricks on that case, such as dragging my feet for two years on purpose to prove to the prosecutor that he could function in society for two years and not pick up a new charge, but the point remains. Luke wouldn’t go to the chain gang, it’s just fiction. It’s very good fiction, yet still fiction.

But what if Luke’s case was reality? Would anyone really care? People seem to think the legal system really is a hellhole of bigotry, stupidity, excessive force, and ultimately failure. Has anything actually been done about it?

My prediction is that nothing will be changing anytime soon in regards to American law, either in its implementation or perception. People will go on believing the fictional portrayal of criminal justice, and actual criminal justice will go on consuming the fraction of the American population it needs to allow for law and order to continue to function.

Sure, it would be nice to live in a world where Americans understood the law that governs their lives. And it would be fantastic to feel secure in the knowledge that American juries understood how they are supposed to judge a case. But we’re in a house that’s got peeling paint, boiling water, and the smoke alarms running through their batteries at an alarming rate. No one has time to care about this issue. We’ve got rent to make, bread to bake, and for fuck’s sake, we need a break.

____

That’s a rap on the American law series. It may have ended on a dower note, but that’s honestly the conclusion to which I was forced to reach by my own analysis. I really don’t see anything changing in this realm, nor do I see a realistic attempt at changing it to be in the best interest of those involved. You don’t repaint a burning house, you don’t educate a functionally illiterate population. Hopefully I’ll find some more reason for optimism going forward with further entries into New Renaissance. And if not, at least I’ll have lots to write about.

If you want to start at the beginning of our journey, here’s the first entry into our Neo-Feudalism series- Part 1: The New Dark Age. Come read how the world has reverted to the thinking, governance, and economics of the middle ages, and what we need to do to start working our way out of it.

New essays every Tuesday and Saturday. Thank you for reading, and I’ll catch you next time.

Eventually you walk into an office and sit across from an attorney. You’re anxious, nervous, probably a little exasperated, and you’ll give up quite a lot at this point for peace of mind. You start explaining your issue to the attorney, and the attorney seems to be listening. Maybe things will be ok after all.

____

Welcome to our American Law series. It’s part of our ongoing discussion of how we got here and what to do about it. If you’d like to read further, there will be some information at the end of the article.

If you need a refresher for this series, here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

What you need to know so far: people seem to get their opinions on the law from stories, which are very uninformed. And how the criminal justice system was designed to work is the opposite of how it actually works.

With that all tidied up, let’s jump into our discussion of misconceptions in how the law works.

Legal Dramatization

Once a semester, I ask my undergrad students to give me their impressions on what American law is, how it functions, and how it can be improved. I ask them this question at the beginning of the course, ostensibly when they have no direct knowledge at the academic level, and then again at the end, hopefully when they have a more informed opinion.

Functionally, this is an attempt to make them employ some critical reasoning and as a method of assessing their own opinions as they hopefully change with the context granted by the information gained in the course. Practically, it allows them to earn a few points outside the substantive portion of the course, as there is no ‘right’ answer the way a fact-based or analysis-based question would dictate. In actuality, this is an exercise in how much I hate myself.

I’ve now implemented this line of questioning for six years, meaning I’ve gotten something like three-hundred responses from the beginning of semesters, and another accompanying three-hundred at the end. Obviously I can’t claim this is a representative sample of all American citizens, or even all American college students, but it’s good enough to start a conversation in conjunction with my other observations from the practice of law as well as simply existing in the internet age.

First and foremost, I’ll say two things about the responses I get from students to this question: they are incredibly uniform, and they are, to varying degrees, quite misguided.

With something like a 90% uniformity, I get almost the same answers from my students, which in and of itself is peculiar. Even if they aren’t putting a lot of thought into the answers, which I assume they aren’t, you’d think they’d at least come up with different versions of bullshit. Instead, I get the same five points parroted ad nauseum. These points are as follows:

1- the criminal justice system is racist

2- the criminal justice system is unfair to poor people

3- public defenders are not good attorneys

4- American prisons are full of low level drug offenders

5- the criminal justice system regularly charges innocent people

Ignoring the validity of the points for now, what I’d like to highlight here is that the five above points being so unanimous within the student population to which I’m subjected really only seems to have one explanation: they are archetypical overviews. Almost none of these students have had any experience in the criminal justice system, and as such they are drawing on ‘common knowledge’ accumulated from external sources. They don’t provide reasoning with these answers, they don’t direct me to any sources or explain personal experiences. They state the above like facts, and assume that’s enough of an assertion to justify their beliefs.

While there are alternative explanations for this, which I’ll discuss imminently, it’s my theory that these five beliefs and the uniformity of their presentation stem from the same source, legal fiction. All five positions are axioms on which legal fiction has been built for the last fifty years. The reason for this is generally pretty obvious.

Fiction is axiomatic, and realistically quite stereotypical. We all know about tropes and how exceedingly prevalent they are in mainstream writing across mediums, and this is especially true in legal fiction. Almost all legal fiction uses the same stock ingredients: underdog protagonist, villain prosecutorial attorney, overbearing systemic pressure, heel-turn plot reveals, lying witnesses, etc.

This is primarily true because there’s not really a reasonable alternative. Writing a legal fiction without the tropey use of an unjust legal system is very, very difficult. If you want a believable, relatable, likable protagonist, you can’t make them a hardened criminal very easily. For every Walter White and Jimmy McGill, you’ll see hundreds of either poor attempts at the same or stock underdog protagonists that are morally righteous victims of an unjust legal system.

Sure, it’s possible to write compelling litigants that aren’t persecuted underdogs, but it’s quite difficult and well outside the norm. As such, to make a story about a protagonist people will like, it’s been the trend for generations at this point to make them the underdog in a legal battle that’s rigged against them. They aren’t guilty, which would seem to make their case easy to solve, but that goes against what the story wants to be. You can’t write a compelling story about a person unjustly accused of a crime that just explains ‘I didn’t do it and can prove it’, no one would watch that. Yet, we still need our likable and relatable protagonist that’s going through the meat grinder of the legal system. As such, there must be a reason they’re the underdog in an uphill battle. Thus, the need for inherent unfairness in legal fiction. And, as I’ve explained in great detail in part 1 of this series, people get their opinions of the law from legal fiction.

As to alternative explanations for this, you’ve really only got two realistic possibilities. Either these beliefs are all parroted from sociology and its intellectual and cultural offspring, or it’s drawing on something of which I’m not aware, such as tiktok trends or the like. I don’t find either of these explanations particularly believable, primarily because of what I’ll dub the Public Pretender Maxim.

Separately, I’d have no trouble believing that suppositions 1, 2, 4, and 5 stem from sociology, as I’ve been forced to study that myself and am quite familiar with its nonsensical dogma. However, the idea that public defenders aren’t good attorneys, to my knowledge, has never been circulated in anything other than legal fiction. On the other hand, the plot crutch of the incompetent public defender has been used so often in legal fiction that it’s beyond a trope, it’s an essential plot element. Sometimes to the point of complete absurdity.

In the film My Cousin Vinny, which is a fantastic film, the titular Vinny is an attorney that has been practicing law for only a number of months after failing the bar exam five times. The only legal practice has has under his belt is settling a scant few personal injury cases. He’s never set foot in a courtroom, let alone tried a case. He’s never handled a criminal case at all, and has never practiced or studied law in the state where the story takes place. Yet, this literal greenhorn attorney is by far the superior choice to the public defender, who is comedically almost incapable of speech and is so ineffective that his client fires him on the spot after the questioning of one witness which takes about one minute in total. All of this happens in a murder trial.

So, a film about a comedically inexperienced attorney portrays it as a good idea to have an attorney with no knowledge or experience along multiple axes of the practice of law conduct a murder trial over a public defender who has seemingly been practicing criminal law for decades. It is, in fact, the most important issue in the film, as the entire plot centers on the fact that the two characters accused of murder have no better option than the hire Vinny, obviously stating objectively that it’s better to have an inexperienced private attorney than a public defender.

This is, of course, pure nonsense, but we haven’t gotten to the validity part of the analysis yet. Just looking at the prevalence of these circulated ideas, there’s almost no way to argue with their uniform presentation in fiction. Some of the best writers from the big and small screen have leaned on this writing crutch just like the average composer of legal entertainment. Aaron Sorkin has used the Public Pretender Maxim multiple times in his work, and he’s one of the most celebrated TV writers in history. John Grisham, famous writer of legal fiction, has really only written two books a dozen or so times each, and in about half of them this trope sneaks its way into the conversation as a justification for why the plot happens to work out the way it does.

I can rattle off legal stories that use the PPM for most of an afternoon without reaching an exhaustive list: The Lincoln Lawyer, A Time to Kill, Con Air, Cape Fear, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Orange is the New Black, The Shawshank Redemption, The Newsroom, at least a dozen of the novels and subsequent films of John Grisham. There are pages and pages of discussion of this topic on reddit, and while I would never suggest spending time on reddit if you can avoid it, the fact that it’s a known trope isn’t really up for debate.

Thus, as I know of no other source of the idea that public defenders aren’t good attorneys and it is so utterly prevalent in fiction, I feel pretty confident that we can draw the conclusion that there’s a causal link there. And, as such, I think it’s reasonable to assume that if people got this idea from fiction, the other four ideas are probably influenced by fiction as well.

Which brings us back to the validity of the opinions.

Discussing whether the five ideas purported by my students are actually valid or not is a bit tricky. In four of the five assertions, there’s data available that either avows or disavows the position, but that data is very, VERY hard to collate and in many cases difficult to analyze. There are fifty one different legal systems in the U.S., a couple hundred county dockets, and thousands of individual courtrooms, police stations, prisons, and jails. The discussion of how legal statistics works is also complicated by the fact that discussing statistics in general is a problem for most people, as statistics provide correlations but can’t form causal statements and don’t provide any reasoning at all. Thus, discussing them is inherently difficult, as most people assume they prove something and then make assumptions based on that ‘proof’.

Plus, that’s a truly colossal discussion, one which would fit into a doctoral thesis or outright researched lecture series.

As such, I’m not going to pointedly step on that particular landmine. I’ve done a good bit of digging myself, but I don’t feel confident dedicating the resources necessary to go all the way through the topic in the appropriate detail to be both convincing and completely accurate. Instead, I’ll be drawing on my eleven years of practicing criminal law in half a dozen counties. This isn’t perfect, it’s not definitive, and it’s potentially not representative, but it does come with one gigantic benefit.

I practice law in the same area that my students live. They think the law works one way, my experience practicing law in that same area says they are wrong. If their uninformed opinions deserve examination, my informed experiences deserve credibility as they relate to said uninformed opinions.

With all of that out of the way, let’s dive into the validity of each of the five claims. Again, taken from the context of my legal experience.

1- the criminal justice system is racist

Nothing I’ve experienced suggests this is true. I’ve represented thousands of clients in criminal cases, have watched many, many hundreds of evidence videos (which include arresting footage), interviewed more clients than I can remember about the circumstances of their case, and haven’t seen anything on either a systemic or individual level I’d consider racist.

I was accused of racism once while I worked as a special public defender. My client was an offending parent, meaning he had been accused of child abuse and/or neglect. He said the system ‘persecuting’ him was racist because his free attorney was white (me), the prosecutor was white, and the judge was white.

I was assigned to him randomly as one of three possible special public defenders, all of whom happened to be white. The prosecutor was assigned to him randomly as one of two possible prosecutors, the other of whom happened to be black. The judge wasn’t assigned, as he was the only judge that handled juvenile cases. Judges frequently rotate between dockets, and they always make a newer judge handle juvenile because no one wants to do it. This judge happened to be white. The non-white judges were on other dockets due to the rotation schedule, which for all purposes is a randomized seniority based system. There was no racism here because none was possible, all three attorneys assigned to the case were essentially chosen at random from the available options, and we all just happened to be white. If he had been brought to court six months later, he’d have pulled a different judge, and potentially a different special public defender and/or prosecutor, either of whom could have been non-white. I tried explaining this to him. He wasn’t enthused.

I’ve also frequently been told by students that the arresting process is racist for various reasons. Again, nothing I’ve seen in practice backs up this statement. The arresting process is almost always handled in pretty much the same way. Most of the hardened criminals with whom I’ve interacted have been pulled over because they drive on expired registration tags and the officers know who they are because they’re hardened criminals that are known in the area. It’s no secret that local cops know the local criminals and watch out for them. The fact that criminals tend to drive cars with expired registration just gives the cops an excuse to pull them over, which is perfectly legal and has nothing to do with the race of the individuals involved. I’ve seen many, many evidence tapes of arrests where the cops know the criminal by name and decide to pull him or her over because of expired tags. It’s like clockwork actually.

For cases that aren’t started by cold pullovers, the entire process works like this. A cop calls a prosecutor and says ‘yo, I’ve got person X for crime Y with evidence Z, I’d like a warrant’. The prosecutor, who doesn’t know anything about person X other than crime Y and evidence Z, says yes or no. If they say yes, the cop goes to see a judge and says basically the same thing. The judge, who again only knows X, Y, and Z, either gives the cop a warrant or doesn’t (it’s usually yes). At no point does the prosecutor or judge know the race of the person in question unless they know them personally or from other cases.

I could go into more detail about handing individual cases, sentencing, stuff like that, but honestly it’s mostly more of the same. For the vast majority of cases, to prosecutors and judges these are just names on paper. They handle many, many cases on a daily basis, there’s no time to get bogged down in details like race, gender, sexuality, etc. Half the time, I doubt the prosecutor knows the race of the defendant at all until they are both standing in front of the judge after the plea deal is struck. The longer you practice law, the more it’s just- name on paper, process, next.

2- the criminal justice system is unfair to poor people

This is true only in the sense that life is unfair to poor people in general. It sort of ties in with the public defender point, but the generally held belief is that rich people have more resources and are therefore able to mount a better legal defense.

This is sometimes true, but it’s very rare that a wealthy person is charged with a crime that would warrant an expensive legal defense. The vast majority of my clients that have been charged with major crimes are poor or only have money from illegal activity. Rich people don’t tend to perform armed robberies, deal drugs, attack people in public, or own firearms when they’re prohibited from doing so by law. So, while it’s very nice to have more money in a criminal defense primarily because it’s better to have more money in any contest, it’s firstly extremely rare to occur in general and secondly only as useful as circumstance allows.

If you’re caught on camera doing a crime, you can throw as much money as you want at a case, it’s probably not going anywhere. Sure, you can change your odds if you’ve got literally bottomless pockets, but who has that kind of money? This is 21st century America, not everyone is OJ Simpson who can throw 20 million into a legal defense.

So, ya. Being rich helps if you’re being prosecuted…sometimes. But something like 90% of Americans don’t have the money for this to make a difference anyway, and the 10% of people that do have the money are statistically extremely unlikely to need to use it to protect themselves from serious crimes in the first place. They’ve got the resources already, there’s no need to rob someone, sell drugs, or beat people up in a bar.

3- public defenders are not good attorneys

As we already talked about, this is basically just a writing device. Public defenders are a lot of things, but automatically bad attorneys they most certainly are not.

True, they’re largely overworked. The nature of public service of any kind pretty much dictates that you’re overworked, and I doubt there’s a county in the country that doesn’t have more criminal cases than its PD office can reasonably handle. But that’s almost a bonus feature rather than a problem when assessing a public defender as an attorney.

PD’s have the most experience practicing criminal law of any type of attorney, by a country mile. All they do is criminal law, day in and day out. They try the most cases, they negotiate on an hourly basis, they live at the courthouse, they always have the next case to worry about. Plus, and this is the big one, they’ll be on a first name and hopefully friendly basis with every single judge, prosecutor, deputy, and clerk in the entire county. PD’s know people, that’s almost all of what they do.

This accumulates legal experience at the relative speed of light, as being a PD for a few years earns an attorney more experience in a courtroom than a decade would in a private firm.

The flipside of this is, of course, that because PD’s are always busy with lots of cases, they’ve physically got less time for each case. That’s sort of the tradeoff with a private attorney, who will have more time for your case, but will be less experienced overall. Practically, this means it will be harder to get ahold of a PD than a private attorney, but that’s just a matter of inconvenience. Most of the PD’s I know care deeply about their jobs, about helping people, and about protecting those accused of crimes to the best of their ability. I know several whom I’d trust to represent me in a criminal case, and those I wouldn’t trust are largely because I haven’t seen enough of their work to properly judge or because of their personal style or prowess. I can say the exact same thing about the private attorneys I know. Functionally, almost all attorneys that practice criminal law are pretty similar, regardless of if they’re public or private.

4- American prisons are full of low level drug offenders

In eleven years, I’ve sent one ‘low level drug offender’ to prison, and he very much deserved it. I got him a sweet deal working with the police department in exchange for all charges being dropped, and he blew the deal in like a week. Other than that, I’ve never had a drug case that resulted in prison time.

Here’s how the vast majority of drug cases go:

Defense attorney walks up to prosecutor and says ‘first offender probation?’.

Prosecutor looks at the file for ten seconds to check the previous offenses section, then responds ‘first offender probation’.

That’s pretty much it.

If you’re charged with a drug possession case and you’ve never been convicted of a felony, you’re getting off the hook with no real hassle. If you’ve been around the block before, there will be some hassle requiring drug treatment, stalling on the defense attorney’s part, and good behavior, but you’re still not going to prison. The idea that prisons are clogged with low level drug offenders is a pure myth, one that was entirely invented to create sympathetic protagonists in stories.

In fact, you can extrapolate this further into basically all first time offenders. Unless you did something very, very violent, if you’ve never been convicted of a felony, you’re almost always not going to prison. You might have to deal with the felony conviction, but prison is mostly a place for people that have earned the right to be there through several instances spread over time. Obviously not true in all cases, but that’s the general trend.

5- the criminal justice system regularly charges innocent people

I’ve only ever had two clients ever admit to me that they actually did what they were charged with doing. Two. In eleven years. Ironically, both men were accused of murder, and both claimed it was in self-defense, which really means they didn’t so much as admit they were guilty as opt for a different strategy to attempt to attain innocence. So, for all practical purposes, I’ve never had a client admit that they were guilty despite some staggering evidence to the contrary.

I once had a client who was detained in a police car for gun possession, who decided it was a good idea to use his phone (which the cops left with him on purpose) to call his girlfriend, which amounted to him confessing to possession of the gun. I listened to the recording where he does all but say ‘it’s my gun in my car’, and played it to him. He vehemently denied that it was his gun, despite the recording.

I’ve had clients deny that they committed crimes despite clear video evidence of them committing the crimes. I’ve had a client deny actually speeding for a speeding ticket when he admitted to the cop that he was speeding after being pulled over. I had a woman deny that her social security number was actually her number at a hospital, even after I had it verified by two different sources.

What’s the probability that I’ve never represented an actually guilty client?

One of my criminal law teachers in law school used to say that almost everyone charged with a crime is either guilty of that crime directly or is guilty of something else connected to that crime and just got lucky that the cops didn’t happen to stumble into that discovery as well. My experience lines up with this statement pretty well.

I’m certainly not saying that there are no innocent people accused of crimes. I’ve been ‘accused’ of crimes by police officers. Once when I reported that my car had been hit while parked in front of my house, and once when I was walking in my neighborhood at night. Both times, the officers thought I was lying and made it clear that they would charge me if they could. No, innocent people get accused of crimes quite a bit I’d imagine. But there’s a world of difference between being accused of a crime and being charged with a crime.

Being charged with a crime means three different parts of the criminal justice system think it’s a good idea, and two of those parties are attorneys (a prosecutor and a judge) that know nothing about the individual’s identity. It’s a system that intentionally makes it difficult to charge someone with a crime, at least compared to how such things are otherwise handled.

Again, I’m not saying everyone that’s ever been charged with a crime is guilty. That’s pure poppycock any way you slice it. But the American criminal justice system isn’t packed full of innocent people wrongfully charged, at least not in my experience. If I had to pick a representative figure, I’d probably say that north of 95% of criminal charges are warranted on the conservative end. This is especially true in the modern era, where everything is recorded and almost all discovery files that get sent to defense attorneys have a video file attached that shows what happened. Long gone are the days of criminals being able to operate in the dark, we’re in the post-digital age folks. You’re always on camera, for better or worse.

Summation

The strange part of all this is that most of my students don’t change their minds by the end of the class. They almost all say something like ‘I learned a lot of how it works but haven’t changed my opinion’.

This doesn’t necessarily surprise me, but it does remain strange from the perspective of logic. Obviously I’m not expecting to persuade everyone of a position with ubiquity, but I’d generally hope the education process would have somewhat of an impact. But it is what it is I suppose.

Which finally brings us back to the opening section where a person with a problem talks to an attorney.

When I try to explain this idea to people, I call it the Across the Desk Dilemma, or ADD because I’m cursed with a sense of humor.

The Across the Desk Dilemma is simply this. When a person interacts with the justice system in almost any capacity, they sit across a desk from someone from that system either literally or metaphorically. On one side of the desk is the private citizen that cares as much about his or her issue as is really possible. It’s the most important thing on his or her mind, and he or she will do whatever’s necessary to get it resolved. It’s all this person is currently thinking about, planning on, and obsessing over. It’s this person’s whole world, and will be until it goes away.

On the other side of the desk, it’s just Tuesday.

I can’t stress this enough. Nothing in my experience indicates the legal system is anything other than an apathetic contraption with one goal in mind at every level. Pretty much every cop, every defense attorney, every prosecutor, every judge, every clerk, all of them only want one thing. To get the current problem off their desk so they can get on to the next one and then go home. They don’t care about you individually, because that’s impossible. Working in law makes you numb to the individual plights of clients in almost all cases, just like working in medicine makes you immune to the sight of blood. Cops don’t distrust people because they’re ______ minority characteristic, they distrust people because they’re people. Defense attorneys all assume their clients are guilty and basically ignore that fact. Believe me, I’ve had this conversation with too many attorneys to count. We sit around waiting for court and chuckle at the nonsense we hear from clients, because no one else seems to understand. Prosecuting attorneys just want to get a resolution, preferably a conviction, and get on to the next file. Judges do almost nothing in the average criminal case other than grant the warrant and hear the plea deal before signing the correct form and reading the deal into the record.

It’s not a system that discriminates by design or by implementation, it’s uniform in its disregard for the humanity of those with whom it interacts. You’re not a person when you are grabbed by the long arm of the law, you’re a name on a page in a file that needs to be shifted off a desk.

The last time I interacted with a police officer in a personal capacity, he treated me like a criminal. On paper, I’ve got half a dozen things backing up that I’m not a criminal. I don’t really look like a stereotypical criminal, and for the life of me I can’t think why he’d think I was a criminal other than his general experience. Which, believe it or not, I understand.

Get lied to by thousands of people and you stop listening to their explanations. Get told over and over ‘I didn’t do X’ when there’s evidence that that’s not true, and the only reason you ask the question is because it’s procedure.

That’s criminal law. And if you pull back far enough to see it as the indiscriminate machine that it is, you’ll stop asking why it does anything. It’s not odd that a machine does what it does, it can’t really do anything else.

But, explaining that to teenaged undergrads doesn’t seem to be yielding much in terms of a return on intellectual investment, which is why most of my student’s opinions don’t seem to change over a semester.

____

And that’s it for part 3. The final part will be released shortly.

Part 4: Future Findings- what can and should be done to correct the problems that have been outlined in this series, and how likely any of that is to be implemented.

If you’d like to start at the beginning of our journey into figuring things out, here’s part 1 of our Neo-Feudalism series- Neo-Feudalism: The Dark Age

Thanks for reading, and we’ll catch you next time.

The judge begins to address the prospective jury members and tells you that this is a criminal case and that the man sitting at the table with his attorney is the defendant that has been accused of a crime. The judge further explains that the attorney sitting alone is the prosecutor, the person that’s going to attempt to convict the defendant, and that the other attorney is the defense attorney working for the defendant. The judge finishes addressing the jury by telling you that the attorneys are going to ask you some questions.

So far, so good.

The prosecutor stands and addresses the potential jury members. She introduces herself, says that she’ll be the lead attorney representing the State and attempting to convict the defendant. She reiterates that she’ll be asking you all a series of questions to see if you’re the right fit for the jury. After everyone nods along, the prosecutor begins her questioning.

She explains that the State has the burden of proof in every criminal case. She reiterates that this means that it’s her job to prove that the defendant is guilty of the charges at hand ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. Until the State proves the charges beyond this reasonable doubt, the defendant is presumed innocent of the charges.

The prosecutor then goes on to explain that the only way to prove the charges is through evidence. There’s only two types of evidence that can be considered in a case. Physical items, such as documents or objects the Judge allows the jury to consider as evidence, and testimony that comes directly from witnesses on the stand. Nothing the attorneys say is evidence, nothing the judge says is evidence, the charges are not evidence. Just items the judge allows and witness testimony.

At this point, the prosecutor backs off for a moment and asks if everyone is following along. Everyone nods in agreement, and you assume you understand the line of reasoning thus far. The prosecutor then asks the first qualifying question.

‘With all that in mind, if I asked you to render a verdict right now, what verdict would you reach?’

____

Hello there, and welcome to New Renaissance. Our mission, to understand where we are, how we got here, and what to do about it.

This is part 2 of 4 of our American Law series. If you want to read part 1, here’s the link: Part 1.

As always, this series is part of an ongoing discussion, but you don’t need to have read anything else to understand and enjoy this series. If you want to check out more, links will be available at the end of the article.

Now, the objection has been overruled, back to the jury questioning.

Burden of the Burden of Proof

So, how would you answer the question?

I started practicing criminal law almost eleven years ago at the time of publication. Before that, I watched quite a few trials while in school and during summer breaks. In that time, I’ve heard this sequence from prosecutors in the majority of criminal trials at which I’ve been present. It’s never word for word, but the gist is nearly omnipresent.

American criminal law is based on the idea of the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof. The entire system is designed with the innocence of the accused as the bedrock of the prosecutorial process, with the singular goal of the prosecution being to rebut that presumption ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. Meaning, as the prosecutor described above, the defendant is ‘innocent until proven guilty’, and the prosecutor has to prove that guilt through presentation of evidence.

With this principle thoroughly expounded, would it surprise you to hear that almost all of the time, the response from the first juror that’s given the same question goes something like this:

Question- With all that in mind, if I asked you to render a verdict right now, what verdict would you reach?

Answer- I don’t know, you haven’t shown us any evidence.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, American criminal law.

Lack of Presumed Innocence

This answer is, of course, exactly what the prosecutor wants to hear, and almost the worst case scenario for the defendant. This is the case precisely because it indicates that the prospective juror doesn’t understand the burden of proof and assumes, quite incorrectly, that both sides are starting from zero. This is a perpendicularity from what American criminal law is designed to do, and yet I’ve almost never seen a prospective juror understand this concept until it’s been thoroughly explained to them, more than once, in court. The ramifications of this state of affairs are unbelievably chilling, as we will soon explore.

In American law, a defendant in a case is ‘presumed innocent’ at the beginning of each criminal prosecution. What that means is, as you’re sitting in the jury box even before jury selection begins, the defendant is treated as if he is innocent. He’s as innocent as the judge, as innocent as the attorneys, as innocent as you. I’ll reiterate that sentiment. American law mandates that each defendant is as innocent of any accused crimes at the beginning of each case as the jurors that will decide the outcome of his case. The entire criminal justice system is built on this idea. The infamous quote encapsulating it goes as follows: It is better for one thousand guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be imprisoned.

Our system is literally designed to protect defendants from police, attorneys, judges, and juries. We constructed a system around the idea that accusing someone of a crime isn’t evidence for that crime, and this presumption of innocence stays with a defendant until it is proven by the highest degree of proof allowed in American law, ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. I’ll be coming back to how high this standard is in bit, but for now simply accept that it’s the highest standard of proof on the books in any American courtroom.

And yet, with all this protection that’s supposedly in place, and with a system designed to give defendants all the leeway imaginable, people that serve on juries will inevitably not understand how the burden of proof works.

Because, when asked, ‘how would you vote right now’ at the start of a trial, they think they can’t vote yet because the trial hasn’t started and they don’t know any evidence. They don’t understand that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty, meaning that at the beginning of the trial, the jury would have to vote ‘not guilty’, as no evidence has yet been presented. At the beginning of a trial, it would be impossible to convict a defendant precisely because no evidence has been presented. This is the fundamental axis on which the wheels of American justice turn. But the average American citizen doesn’t understand this principle, so they think criminal trials start at 50/50 of innocence vs guilt.

This is further complicated because, again, it’s a misunderstanding of what the criminal justice system is trying to do. There are only three possible verdicts a jury can reach: guilty, not guilty, and ‘we can’t agree’. Juries are incapable of reaching a verdict of innocence, which is fundamentally different from being not guilty. Innocence means you didn’t do what you were accused of doing. Not guilty means the State couldn’t prove that you did what you were accused of doing. That’s night and day folks, all the difference in the world. And again, it’s set up this way on purpose. We built it specifically to protect people accused of crimes. We intentionally made it more difficult for people accused of crimes to be convicted. Yet, for all the precautions put in place, the presumption of innocence doesn’t seem to work.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The first trial I ever witnessed was in the summer of my first year of law school. A man was accused of molesting his girlfriend’s young daughter while she was asleep on the couch at his home. I can vividly remember sitting in the gallery of the courtroom, absorbing the atmosphere and trying to soak up as much experience as I could get from such an odd case.

It’s not very typical that child molestation cases actually go to trial, I’ve never had one nor have I seen another one other than on this occasion. This is primarily because most cases like this are relatively open and shut, but it’s also the problem with how the case would be tried in general. To try a case like this, the child would have to be called as a witness in almost every instance, as there would be next to no other evidence. Thus, the prosecution would have to knowingly put a child on the stand, which they don’t want to do, and the defense attorney would have to knowingly cross examine a child, which they DEFINITELY don’t want to do. It’s a lose/lose/lose, and any experienced attorney attached to it will want to resolve it without going to trial if at all possible. Thus, this was a fortuitous opportunity for me, both as an introduction to applied litigation and as a rare example of trying a case that begs to not be tried.

I have stark, tenacious memories of listening to the judge explain the charges while watching the defendant. I knew nothing about him whatsoever beyond the fact that he had been accused of molesting a child. I remember realizing that I already thought of him as guilty to some undefinable degree, and wondering how he was going to explain his actions. It wasn’t until the defense attorney reminded everyone that he was presumed innocent, and that at every stage of the proceeding he was considered every bit as innocent as we were ourselves until the State proved otherwise that I realized how I’d fallen victim to the trap of the presumption of guilt.

It doesn’t take a cultural prophet to understand that the world runs on accusations. Be it history, science, art, culture, or general experience, you can throw a rock in a random direction in any of those areas of existence and hit an example of people jumping to conclusions based on accusations alone.

One of the most relevant examples in relatively recent culture is, of course, the Johnny Depp litigation and its accompanying fallout. Depp was accused of physically abusing his wife Amber Heard, which he denied and subsequently sued her for defamation of character. However, the accusations against Depp, bereft of any actual evidence, were enough to cause the Disney corporation to cease their ongoing work with Depp, specifically his casting as Jack Sparrow in the ungodly profitable Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

At the time, Depp was one of the highest paid actors in the history of hollywood, and was set to continue to portray his signature Jack Sparrow role into the future. Based on accusations alone, Depp’s career essentially vanished overnight, and to this day has never recovered despite the outcome of his case. Because, as I’m sure you’re probably aware, once the actual evidence surfaced in the Depp vs. Heard case, Depp was instantly vindicated, resulting in his victory at trial and the utter lampooning of Heard across the internet. And yet, despite the fact that no evidence for Depp’s abuse ever existed, an accusation alone was enough to sink the career of one of the most famous humans on the planet.

Psychology calls this idea the fundamental attribution error, and it’s a frighteningly easy concept to understand. When you’re driving in traffic and someone cuts you off, you automatically assume that that person is an asshole. However, you’ve only ever experienced that person in a tiny microcosm of their lives. You don’t know anything about them, yet you’re psychologically compelled by anger to assume A- that they did what they did on purpose, B- that they are always like this, and C- that you are correct to render judgment based on a single point of data. All of the above is pure nonsense.

The vast majority of traffic incidents are because people are distracted, not because they actively are assholes about driving. There’s no evidence supporting the idea that the person cut you off on purpose, that they always cut people off, or that they are a bad person. Yet, psychologically, you don’t consider any of that. You assume that they are an asshole, which is a trait. You assume this rather than assuming that it was an accident, or a one-time offense, or potentially even your own fault, which is a state. Trait vs state is one of the cornerstones of the dialogue in modern psychology, and for all my problems with that field, it’s hard for me to imagine that the assertion that people regularly confuse the two is anything but true.

When someone does something you consider wrong, you assume it’s because they’re a bad person (a trait) not because they were having a bad day (a state). This psychological pathway plays directly into the realistic presumption of guilt, which is so evident in human interactions that all anyone needs to do to confirm it is think of the word ‘gossip’, and that pretty much settles the issue. Humans tend to believe accusations, creating not a presumption of innocence but a presumption of guilt.

When a defendant is put on trial for a crime under the U.S. criminal justice system, that defendant is supposed to be presumed innocent, but the reverse is true. The average juror doesn’t understand how the presumption of innocence works, and the average human believes accusations more often than not until they are disproven. Thus, by being accused of a crime, a criminal defendant is tasked with proving that he or she is innocent in the majority of cases that actually go to trial. And that’s a BIG problem, as the entire point of the presumption of innocence is to protect defendants.

This is further complicated by the overwhelming advantage criminal prosecution holds over a criminal defendant in the first place. Quite apart from the presumption of guilt which we’ve just outlined, the State will (almost always) have more resources than a defendant, have more time than a defendant, and is unequivocally in a better position given the nature of failure for each side. If the State loses a case, they essentially lose nothing. The prosecuting attorney might be embarrassed, but he or she won’t get fired or have a reduction in salary. The attorney might feel guilty for a personal failure or the failure to ‘lock up the bad guy’, but that’s inconsequential compared to the possibility of a loss by a defendant.

If a criminal defendant loses a case, they are at the mercy of the criminal justice system. What happens to them at that point depends on quite a few factors, but there’s no outcome upon conviction that’s anything but terrible for the defendant. Thus, the state has no real skin in the game, whereas the defendant has nothing but a game full of skin. A loss for one is annoying, a loss for the other is devastating. The State has every possible advantage, which is one of the primary reasons the presumption of innocence was put in place. It is designed to counteract that advantage and protect criminal defendants from the advantage the law inherently possesses. And yet, that advantage exists only on paper most of the time.

Summation

All of this to say, the criminal justice system doesn’t work the way it’s intended to, and is, in fact, resulting in an inversion of its intention. People are guilty until proven innocent, and even an averagely educated U.S. citizen can’t explain how the system is supposed to work, much less navigate it successfully.

And U.S. citizens, in theory, have their liberty protected by turning over their case to twelve average people who ‘understand’ how the law works enough to render a verdict in their case.

I’ll end on a truly illustrative example, one that’s stuck with me for the past decade of practicing criminal law.

A man was accused of using his authority as a police officer to harass a local woman because he didn’t like her for various reasons. In this trial, the only real evidence that the officer intended to do anything to this woman was a conversation overheard between two officers by an independent third party where the officer on trial said something like ‘I don’t like her being in my neighborhood, and I’m going to do something about it’.

Without boring you with how legal evidence works, this is what is generally called circumstantial. Meaning, it doesn’t prove anything, it’s just a peripheral piece of gossip, the kind that people do every day to one degree or another. At best, it’s supposed to be used to give context to other evidence. But without other evidence, it’s not really that valuable.

There was essentially no other evidence against the officer other than the fact that the woman said he didn’t like her. As such, I was pretty sure this was going to be a not guilty case, and wouldn’t take very long.

During jury deliberation, the jury sent a question to the judge (which they’re allowed to do). When the judge read it, she laughed out loud, then read it to the attorneys. The jury’s question was as follows:

‘Can we convict him of something else?’

That’s it. They knew they couldn’t convict him of the crime for which he was accused, as there was no justification for it whatsoever. But they didn’t like him so much despite this fact that they wanted to convict him of something.

This simply, utterly, horrendously terrifies me. This is a window into the actual thought processes of American criminal law. The jury didn’t care if the man wasn’t guilty, they cared about their opinion of him. There was no justifiable way to convict the officer, but that didn’t seem to matter. The jury wanted him to be punished, and tried to make that happen. Despite the way the system is constructed. Despite the lack of evidence. Despite the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof.

That’s criminal law folks, that’s guilty until proven innocent.

And from a system that famously was founded upon the idea that ‘it is better for a thousand guilty men to walk free than one innocent man be imprisoned’.

I’ve heard amateur improv comedy standup that told better jokes than that.

____

That’s it for this section of the series, hopefully it suggested a few poignant questions about how the criminal justice system functions in the modern era.

Again, there’s a lot to go over here, and I’m not going to cover everything I want to in this series, but it’s a good place to start. Part 3 comes out shortly, so stay tuned for that. We’ll be covering the vast misconceptions the average American seems to have about how criminal law works, and about how that’s a problem, especially given the contents of this article.

If you want to start at the beginning of our journey, here’s part 1 of our Neo-Feudalism series, our attempt to figure out just where we are culturally, economically, and politically, and where to go from there once we’ve got that straightened out.

Next up, American Law Part 3: Dramatization of Litigation

Starting Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks, Philadelphia was a courtroom drama that examined the aids crisis and accompanying social movement that swept America in the late 80’s and early 90’s. It focused on the discrimination faced by Hanks’s character, a gay attorney dying of aids who was fired from his high-powered law firm, ostensibly because he was gay and/or had aids. Denzel acts as Tom’s attorney, attempting to sue his ex-employer for wrongful termination based on discrimination.

The film is unapologetically tragic in its portrayal of the subject matter, and doesn’t shy away from the evils of a health crisis augmented by the social confusion and mischaracterization it entailed. It’s directed seriously, acted seriously, takes itself as seriously as a film can, and categorically stands upon its theme of systemic acceptance despite the cultural upheaval that entails.

With all that in mind, consider the following.

In his opening statement at Tom’s trial, Denzel’s character beings his speech with the following quote:

‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Forget everything you’ve seen on television and in the movies’.

A very, very serious story about persecution surrounding one of the most serious health crises in modern American history chose to interject a soft fourth-wall break into the opening sequence of its finale. A film that depicts the unjust treatment of an incredibly sympathetic and charismatic man, played by Tom Hanks at the zenith of his rise in popular culture, decided to passively destroy its own emersion by quietly pointing to the fact that a jury in a film is supposed to forget what they know about films.

This film takes itself as seriously as any film can. It’s impeccably casted, acted, and directed. It depicts and analyses a social problem with no clear solution and unequivocally demonstrates the human cost associated with all social and political change. It was helmed by a man that let Anthony Hopkins immortally explain what one should eat accompanying a human liver. And yet it broke the cardinal rule of immersion in fiction- never draw attention to the fact that it’s not real.

The reason this choice was made is simple. In regards to law, the American mind has long ago been shaped by the fiction we consume infinitely more than any experience or education could possibly impart. Our perception has been figuratively poisoned by fictional depictions of law, to the point that our own legal fiction must address this paradoxical circumstance directly.

Introduction

Welcome to New Renaissance. It’s our ongoing mission to try to figure out how we ended up under the grip of Neo-Feudalism and how we move forward now that we know where we are. More about our mission and what to read at the end of the article.

In this four part series, we’ll be discussing how perceptions in American law have been altered, the effects those alterations have had on juris prudence, and what you need to know to remedy that alteration. The series will be uploaded in the following parts:

Part 1: We the People- introduction to the problems with the public perception of American law

Part 2: Burden of Proof- the underlying mechanism of criminal prosecution and how it doesn’t actually work

Part 3: Dramatization of Litigation- what the average person seems to believe about criminal law and how that’s way off the mark

Part 4: Future Findings- looking at how both law and the perception of law is going to change with the advent of Neo-Feudal modernity

Thank you for reading thus far, now back to it.

We the People

When you think “American law”, I’m about 90% certain you’re picturing something like this:

A hard-nosed attorney grilling someone on the witness stand, breaking down the lies of the witness to get to the truth of the matter. This is almost entirely a product of fiction.

I began practicing law almost eleven years ago. I’ve taught law at different levels for the past six years. I also worked as a special public defender for two and a half years, which I’ll discuss later in the series. To the best of my knowledge, the practice of law has never been portrayed in fiction to anything more than fifty percent accuracy, and even that level of truth only occurs in the rarest circumstances. Movies, TV, and books all dramatize and obfuscate the practice of law to such a great degree that it’s basically unrecognizable in comparison to the real thing. This isn’t limited to the law, believe it or not, but it is a unique problem for the law. Medicine has been given the same treatment by fiction, as has basically every other procedural job that’s ever been set to script. So, at least the law’s not completely unique in this way, but its public perception is still widely perverted by what people believe about it because of the fiction they consume.

And this is a problem, because unlike with all the other fields of practice, what people think about how the law works directly affects how the law actually works. And, unfortunately, this is true at every level of engagement, be it individual, intra-group, inter-group, and system wide. Because, unlike with almost every other field, the law operates on something that might be entirely unique in human structural practice.

Ultimately, every instance of legal procedure at the practice level has been decided by a human decision physically divorced from the action it is intended to regulate or remedy. Law is the almost literal practice of Monday morning quarterbacking, and pretty much no matter which way an individual case may go, it will ultimately be decided by a meeting of the minds. Or, if you prefer, what people think determines what happens with the law. And what people think about the law isn’t determined by what the law actually is, but by what people think the law happens to be. Which, of course, is because they learned about it from fiction.

For example, what percentage of cases in criminal law do you think go to trial? Would you be surprised if I said only 10%? Most people with whom I discuss this question are shocked to learn that the majority of criminal cases don’t go to trial, and are even more shocked when I report just how few cases end in the courtroom. Because, you see, it’s not 10%, not even close. It’s actually much less than 1%. I’d hazard that MAYBE one in a thousand criminal cases are resolved by a trial, and of those one in one thousand, perhaps one in one hundred are in front of a jury. If the US criminal justice system had to try even 10% of its cases, the entire system would crash more epically than a Titanic sequel entitled Titanic II: Iceberg’s Revenge.

Now, granted, this is taking into account all criminal cases, which includes traffic and misdemeanor, but even if you limit the analysis to only felony cases, it’s still less than 1%. Yet every piece of fiction you’ve ever consumed pretends that lawyers spend all day in front of juries, and that’s simply not true. And this is a very important distinction, as if cases aren’t getting resolved by juries, they’re basically all being negotiated. Meaning, most criminal cases come down to a defense attorney talking to a criminal defendant and saying something like ‘Look, here’s where we are, this is the deal you should take’. And that’s just the beginning of the misconceptions regarding how the practice of law actually works.

Obviously I can’t do an essay series covering the entirety of American law, as that’s a topic that’s not even comprehensively covered in three years of law school. In addition, I don’t have direct experience in many areas of legal practice, and thus can neither explore nor correctly frame some issues relating to those specific areas. I have not, for example, practiced personal injury law. I’ve got plenty of friends that do, and I have to hear them bitch about it, but I’m not familiar with the ins and outs that distinguishes their reality from what people tend to believe about law in general. That being said, many of the same trends hold across areas of practice, such as actual trials being relatively rare. All my friends that do personal injury cases spend maybe one or two weeks in trial per year, which lines up pretty much the same with general criminal practice.

So, with that disclaimer in place, hopefully my decision to primarily stick to criminal law makes some more sense. I’ve also practiced family and juvenile law, but they’re less interesting and frankly less applicable as they’re portrayed much less frequently in fiction and the general public’s opinion of them is less starkly circulated. If you’ve gone through a family case, you know it sucks, and that’s pretty much what you’ll communicate to anyone who asks. There aren’t many fictional portrayals that come to mind for family law worth mentioning. Marriage Story is a carbon copy hollywood fantasy about what happens when rich married people get divorced, but other than that I can’t think of much fiction from this millennium that’s covered the material.

Criminal law on the other hand…

I’ll end this section of the essay by briefly walking you through what I consider to be the most accurate portrayal of the practice of criminal law in fiction. Its accuracy isn’t strictly factual, particularly because it takes place in a criminal trial, but the spirit of the practice of criminal law it explores is by far the closest I’ve seen.

Better Call Saul opens its primary timeline with the pseudo-titular protagonist Jimmy McGill (aka Saul before the modern timeline) who is nervously practicing his closing statement in a criminal trial. When he gets back into the courtroom, he launches into an impassioned speech attempting to rouse the emotions of the jury. He reminds them of what it was like to be young, when life seemed limitless and mistakes were things other people made. He then reminds them that everyone feels like this, and that inevitably this youthful vigor can land people in trouble.

He wheels the speech back to the case, outlining that his three clients fell victim to this same mentality. They’re teenagers, they made a stupid mistake, that’s what teenagers do. They didn’t try and do something bad, they were just being dumb kids out having fun with too much to drink and too little life experience to tell them to stop.

Jimmy paints a great picture, he frames the issue as one of ignorance and stupidity rather than a moral or legal failing. These aren’t hardened criminals, they’re stupid kids. The same stupid kids we’ve all been at one point. Why should they see their lives ruined because of one dumb mistake that basically everyone made at one point or another? Can’t this all be understood as a one-time failing rather than a life-defining moment? Aren’t we, as worthy adults tempered in the fire of life’s less bright experience, above that kind of petty power trip? Can’t we just let this one slide?

Jimmy’s spun his story and the jury appeals mollified. He sits down at the defense table, pats his clients reassuringly. He did a great job, everyone can feel it. He was articulate, passionate, believable, and relatable. Maybe these are just dumb kids that made a mistake. Maybe they should be shown a little mercy. Maybe everyone needs a little mercy at the point in their life when they have to choose to grow up. Maybe you deserve a second chance too.

The prosecutor stands up, not saying a word. As if wading through a puddle of congealed chocolate pudding, he walks off screen and returns in front of the jury wielding a TV setup. Wordlessly, without emotion, and with a lack of interest I can only describe as ‘substitute teacher in eighth period trigonometry’, he pushes play on the VCR.

A recording is then played for the jury that shows the three teenaged defendants who recorded themselves breaking into a funeral home, decapitating a corpse, and having sex with the exposed esophagus of the corpse’s head. The prosecutor never says a word.

The scene cuts away, the clients are off to prison.

____

Obviously that’s a dramatized version of defending a criminal case, and it’s been played for comedy in its stark contrast. I’ve never had a client that’s done anything like that, nor has anyone I’ve talked to in practice. It may seem too fantastical to believe on its face, which it is strictly speaking, but the crazy thing is that this scene remains the most accurate depiction of the practice of criminal law I’ve ever witnessed.

People do some truly ludicrous, heinous, and stupid shit and are prosecuted for it. I once had to defend a woman for feeding her morbidly obese toddlers McDonald’s until they were hypertensive. I defended a man accused of neglecting his children through inattention that smelled so terribly in the courtroom that the judge stopped the hearing to activate a fan to blow the stink away from him. I had a client talk so loudly and incessantly in a side room in the courthouse that a judge had to interrupt us to tell my client to shut up twice in a row, as he couldn’t hear the conversation in his courtroom down the hall. I had a client tell me that the NSA had infected him with nanobots, and that I was probably now infected too. I had a client refuse to admit that she had done anything, while she was clearly on video doing it and had extensive medical records detailing what, how, and when on top of a crystal clear video. And, through all of this, all the prosecutor had to do was lackadaisically turn on a video and halfheartedly point at the evidence. Which, most of the time, doesn’t make for good TV, so we almost never see it on screen.

And thus, for this series and for life in general, I urge you to take the advice Denzel gave in his speech in Philadelphia: forget everything you’ve seen on television and in the movies.

____

So, that’s it for part 1. Hopefully the introduction helped frame the issues as I want to move through them. This is a big topic, and I’ll probably end up writing more than this series on law (I’ve written a few articles already), but it is what it is.

If you want to start at the beginning of our mission to explore Neo-Feudalism, here’s the link to the 5 part Neo-Feudalism series: Part 1

Next up for this series is Part 2: Burden of Proof. A terrifying look at how everyone is actually guilty until proven innocent.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll catch you soon.

Mysteries, by definition, involve a lack of information, context, or causation that explains why something happened. You know ‘that’ something happened, and you usually know ‘what’ happened, but you don’t know ‘why’ and most of the time you don’t know ‘how’ or ‘who’ or ‘where’ completely. So, step one in the solving process is obviously to fill in as much missing information as you can concretely deduce or gather. You do some research, you walk the scene, you question witnesses, all of that rigmarole. But once you’ve done that as much as possible, and once you deduce all that you can by synthesizing your new information in with the old, what then? Why, you start making assumptions and see where that takes you.

____

Welcome to New Renaissance, where we attempt to understand the folly of Neo-Feudalism, the system of economics and government under which we currently suffer. Sometimes that means taking a deep dive into some philosophy or theory, often it entails dissecting a cultural movement or system of understanding, consistently it will mean taking shots at modern Disney. But we’re always trying to figure out how we got here and how we can pull ourselves back out again.

More on our mission at the end of the article. This time around, we’re going to indulge in a little creative problem solving by examining the fact that religious thought has independently developed worldwide, separated by time, space, and ideology. If God is real, why did so many independent religions gain purchase in different times and places? If God isn’t real, we’re still left with the same question.

For now, thanks for reading, and let’s get back to it.

Religious Deductive Reasoning

The most aggravating aspect of chess is that it’s not actually a two player game. Sure, you need two players to actually have a match, but that’s not really what’s going on. Chess is a perfect information game, meaning there’s no luck, trickery, or guesswork involved. Both players have all the available information and the entirety of the game is decision making based on that information. As the information is entirely known, what the game is actually testing is how well a player can eliminate options and make predictions based on those eliminations. Or, put another way, you’re not playing against another player, you’re playing against logic itself. If the options can be limited to the point that you can see every available option, the correct move is an inevitability rather than a choice. Eliminate enough options and chess becomes a game of tic-tac-toe. In fact, with enough processing power, chess is nothing more than tic-tac-toe for higher-order thinking. Unfortunately, the human brain isn’t capable of playing chess like tic-tac-toe, as there are practically an infinite number of available move pathways in any given position in chess, whereas tic-tac-toe really only has a surprisingly small number of possibilities.

Thus, it’s extremely fortunate for a chess player when the game can be reduced to a simple binary choice, as there would be no need to calculate beyond two initial positions. If the king is in check and only has two available squares onto which to move, the attacking piece can’t be captured, and the attack pathway can’t be blocked with another piece, the player in check only needs to calculate which of the two possible moves is the better option. Should I go right or left? But, then again, so does the attacking player.

Regardless, understanding chess calculation like this may seem superfluous, as it’s pretty rare that a game will come down to such a simple ‘move right or left’ choice, and this wouldn’t appear to apply outside of chess too terribly often. Oh, but when it does, when you can turn life calculations into tic-tac-toe instead of chess, all kinds of interesting computations and deductions become possible.

The Assumption of Divinity

Does God exist?

Well, the good news is, there aren’t really that many possible options to answer that question.

The best part about the potential existence of a higher power is that it’s binary. There either is one or there isn’t. It’s almost certainly a question with no ascertainable way to definitively answer, but the simplicity of the possible answers is actually extremely helpful in understanding our world. Think of it like this.

Either God exists or God does not exist. If God exists, that opens up a whole bunch of questions and makes analyzing things basically impossible. What is God like? What does God want? Why did God create us? Waaaay too many questions instantly populate the conversation, and things get very complicated very quickly.

But, if God doesn’t exist, that simplifies things instantaneously and opens up an entirely new framework from which to look at humanity.

Just like in chess, when your king’s in check and you can only go right or left, calculating assumptions about the world based on the existence or non-existence of God is actually monumentally simple when compared with the otherwise limitless predictions outside that given scenario. Which means, in point of fact, the binary nature of the question of the existence of God helps humanity fundamentally. Because, you see, if you only have two options, you can make assumptions based on both possibilities and calculate from there.

For example, if you hold that God doesn’t exist, there are some extremely interesting questions that immediately beg to be answered. If there is no God, why has the existence of God surfaced in human culture across time and space in every corner of the planet? If there is no God, why do the majority of humans believe that God exists? Surely, if popcorn did not exist, it would be extremely odd if humans independently dreamt up the idea of popcorn in basically every culture that’s ever existed, right? Like, if there never was such a thing as popcorn, it would be supremely odd if people everywhere thought there was popcorn. Had empty buckets they’d take to movie theaters and carried salt and butter around just in case they found some popcorn lying around.

I call this theory the Assumption of Divinity. The idea that, if you hold that there is no God, it’s extraordinarily odd that an idea of God is baked into all human culture. I believe that exploring this theory could be extremely beneficial, even if it will take more than one essay to do so. As such, we’ll start lining em up and knocking em back as quickly as we can.

With all that idea in mind, let’s explore one particular aspect of this problem and see what we can deduce from this extremely peculiar aspect of human civilization.

Assuming God Doesn’t Exist

In our analysis, we’re going to make the assumption that God doesn’t exist and see what we can deduce with that assumption in place. Basically we’re going to pretend that we know the answer to the question and see how well things make sense in our world given that answer’s inherently held truth.

Also, for the sake of time, we’re going to hold that almost every known human civilization has had some concept of God, and all largely independently of each other. This isn’t 100% accurate, primarily because we’re missing a good deal of data, but it’s close enough that I’m not going to address it beyond this disclaimer. Humanity has almost ubiquitously created an idea of God independently from other groups of humans, and that’s really odd.

Remember, in this analysis, God doesn’t exist. So why have humans always made up the idea of God? Sure, people have come to wildly different ideas about what God is and what God wants, but that’s a secondary issue. The fact that it happened is a major problem for this tactical line of analysis, as it’s either extremely difficult to explain or is the key to understanding the human condition.

But first, let’s try an analogy. Think of something right now. Anything in the world.

I’m going to take a guess and say that you thought of food. I don’t expect to be right, but I’m also holding that it’s not exactly a bad guess either.

If you asked 1,000,000 people to think of something random, you’d undoubtedly get a few patterns in your responses. People would think of things that matter to them, that are near them, that they were already thinking about, stuff like that. You’d get stuff like: my kids, my job, food, sex, a chair, my phone, etc. There’s a very logical explanation for this which is hopefully easy to spot. In a vacuum, people draw on what they know. It’s not random, it’s a universal part of humanity. I guessed food precisely because out of 1,000,000 people asked this question, 10% are going to be hungry, and of those hungry people, at least some of them will be thinking about eating and will thus be likely to respond with food as their conjured idea. This same idea is quite applicable to our current discussion.

So, again, in a world where God doesn’t exist (per our assumption for this analysis), why is there so much religion?

Option 1 is sort of paradoxical, as this is actually strong evidence that God does exist, as it’s statistically improbable that independent groups of people came up with the same idea at different times and places. In a regular analysis, this would be used as a basis to question the premise (that God doesn’t exist), as it doesn’t make sense that so many different groups would invent the idea of something that doesn’t exist independently.

Option 2 is that there is some very strong reason that people came up with this idea independently, and that that reason is basically universal to human nature.

Option 1 is interesting, but difficult to pursue and outside the scope of this article. I might return to it later, but for now we’ll set it aside. As such, here’s where we are in our hypothetical analysis:

There is no God, but something very closely related to the human condition caused humans to create the concept of God across time and space. As such, questioning this extremely odd phenomenon can give us a better understanding of why we are the way we are, as clearly there’s something very deeply tied to the governing dynamics of humans at play here.

As such, we’ve worked our way into the central aspect of this analysis. If we hold all of the above as true, the fact that humans need the idea of God would be one of the central axes on which human culture turns. Therefore, we can hold true that this reason, even though we don’t understand exactly what it is, has a dramatic effect on our world and always has. How much of human history does this idea explain? How much of our mythology, mysteries, cultural practices, biases, art, and philosophy can be understood through the idea that we require a God?

Obviously this is a gigantic topic, one which frankly can’t be handled in a single essay. I very much plan on returning to the topic and exploring its many potential avenues of inquiry, but for now we’ll have to take that journey one step at a time. As such, it’s time for the first applicable theory dealing with this idea.

The Substitution Hypothesis

Peter Boghossian is a philosopher that worked out of Oregon State University until leaving the college due to fundamental divergences of opinion regarding higher education, postmodernism, and progressive ideology. In recent years, he’s lectured quite a bit about an idea directly relating to our current discussion, one which he has dubbed the Substitution Hypothesis.

This idea is actually quite simple, yet potentially binds a good deal of loose material necessary to answer some of the questions posed by our hypothetical analysis. The theory goes like this- humans have an innate need for faith-based hierarchical thinking that was originally satisfied by religion. As the influence of religion has waned in the modern era, that broad psychological need has gravitated toward secular belief systems that mimic the faith-based hierarchical thinking once reserved for religion.

Put simply, people need to believe in a governing power based on faith rather than reason, and when religion stops doing that for them, they build a new version of religion to take its place.

Boghossian suggests that the most obvious form of this diverted desire for religion has manifested in woke ideology and progressive culture. He’s got a pretty solid lineup of talks, scholarly work, and study pertaining to this aspect of the theory, and a simple google will get you where you need to go if you want to pursue that idea further. While I find this idea fascinating, and tend to agree with it in a vacuum, we’re going to set that angle of the conversation aside for another time. Instead, I want to apply this same idea to my theory of Neo-Feudalism and see if it fits.

Neo-Feudalism, Assumption of Divinity, and Substitution

Now, let’s begin knitting this would-be tapestry of wayward threads into a workable pattern.

In our analysis: A- God doesn’t exist, B- yet humans still make up the concept of God, C- because of an inherent need for faith-based authority. How well does this line of reasoning explain the Neo-Feudalistic modern era in which we now live and love?

If you haven’t read my Neo-Feudalism series, the link to part 1 will be at the end of the article. In the meantime, the gist of the theory is as such. We’ve regressed culturally, economically, and politically to the point that we’re mimicking the governing systems of the Middle Ages again, even if we don’t really realize it.

We’re worshiping science rather than traditional religion, central government has been all but usurped by dynastic wealth, education is (paradoxically) limited, and culture is stagnating and regressing. Obviously that’s quite a lot to take in, and fortunately I’ve written a five part series going over the idea in detail so I don’t have to hash it out all over again. But, for the purposes of this article, I want to focus on the first major premise, that people now worship science rather than religion. How well do the Assumption of Divinity and the Substitution Hypothesis explain this phenomenon?

Well, I hesitate to be so optimistic here, but I can’t really see a way around it. The fading of religion and the rise of the worship of science in its stead, one of the central tenants of my theory of Neo-Feudalism, fits into our analysis as well as anything reasonably could. In fact, it’s a damned near perfect explanation. Humans need the authority of a higher power, so we find one wherever possible, even if that means making one up.

But why is this the case? Why do we need something bigger than ourselves, and why did so many groups of people come to effectively the same answer at so many different times and in such vastly different environments?

Conclusion

Obviously there is way too much to take in here with one pass. I’m drawing on multiple theories and attempting to use deductive reasoning to synthesize them into a workable predictive model, which I hope is at least discernable. I’ll be returning to this topic, as I’m not happy where we had to leave off, but reluctantly realize that if Rome wasn’t built in a day, understanding the existence or non-existence of God will probably take at least a week, give or take a day of rest. Ba-dum-ching.

I’m sure the answer ‘psychology you idiot’ is going through at least a few of your minds, for which I don’t blame you. It’s an avenue worth exploring as a potential answer here, and I’ll probably address it sooner rather than later.

For now, thank you for reading and continuing our journey into the discussion of Neo-Feudalism.

If you want to read further, here’s Part 1 of the Neo-Feudalism series. Find out how we’ve gone back to the Dark Age of reason, and hopefully how we’re going to work our way out of it.

New essays every Tuesday and Saturday at 3:00 p.m. central time.

Thanks again. Long is the way, and hard, that out of Neo-Feudalism leads up to light. But hopefully we’ll make it if we keep going one step at a time, arm in arm as we trudge reluctantly forward instead of simply standing still.

As the evening winds on, you inevitably reach the point where you realize your friend has had enough. You’ve just made the assertion that consuming fiction is a good pastime, and your friend is having none of it. He immediately begins recounting how Game of Thrones infamously went from the most liked show on TV to the most hated show in living memory. He recounts in detail how the story went off the rails, how characters were inverted and mischaracterized, how long-term payoffs were rushed through or skipped over entirely, and how the final season was released to universal rejection.

Who is right in this scenario? Is fiction a good pastime, or is Game of Thrones a bad TV show?

____

Welcome to New Renaissance, an attempt to utilize thought and exploration to find a way out of the new Dark Age in which we currently find ourselves.

More on our mission after the essay. Now, back to it.

____

It’s been my experience that atheism only exists in the mainstream to combat the prevalence of Christianity in western culture. I’m sure there are atheists out there that fall outside this extremely limiting perspective, but I’ve never met any.

I’ve never, not one time, had a conversation with an atheist about the existence or non-existence of God that didn’t almost entirely consist of the atheist exclusively arguing against Christianity. This is, frankly, unbelievably aggravating, both while it’s happening and when I try to discuss the fact that it’s happening. For example, when I ask why a person believes there is no God, one of the stereotypical answers I get is ‘because the bible is bullshit’.

I understand this answer, I can even empathize with it. I can’t understand the bible as anything other than a bunch of different authors at different time periods translating oral tradition between multiple different languages. I’m also very frustrated when I attempt to discuss Christianity with a Christian and the topic of the bible comes up precisely for this reason. What bible are you even talking about, there are sooooo many editions and translations? Are we holding it as a primary source? When it’s in english instead of greek, aramaic, or hebrew? When it was only codified a few hundred years after the death of Christ?

What about the notable contradictions in it? How there are two different and conflicting creation stories within the book of Genesis? How the four books of the gospel don’t all report the same story of the life of Christ, or how the old and new testament patently relay a different version of God the father and his desire for mankind?

What about the complete lack of context for some rules? What does ‘though shall not kill’ actually mean? Can you not kill in self-defense or to protect others? What about in war? What about non-humans, are we supposed to all be vegans? What about the death penalty?

And what about the cultural rules that it no longer makes sense to follow, such as the prohibition on eating shellfish and the washing of feet when entering a home? Or the owning and treatment of slaves, or the complete patriarchal dominance of the father in a household, or the prohibition of women from being able to teach?

Believe me, I get it. The bible doesn’t make sense to me, and I understand why an atheist might be keen to argue against it. But in doing so, all that’s been accomplished is an argument against one religion. The argument against Christianity isn’t an argument against the existence of God, it’s an argument against one interpretation of what people say about God. And there are many, MANY, interpretations and systems of belief and thought about what people say about God. There might be too many to count accurately, as even supposedly homogenized groupings of religions such as the innumerable sects of Christianity believe strikingly different things. So much so that it’s probably more accurate to describe Christianity as a loose confederation of beliefs that agree on more than they disagree rather than an actual faith in and of itself.

For example, Catholics aren’t biblical literalists, whereas Pentecostals are. That’s a really huge divergence in doctrine, to the point that you can’t really call them even close to comparable anymore. So, when you argue against Christianity, what does that even entail? Are you arguing against strict biblical literalism or the more modern liberal interpretations?

But even more so than that, an ashiest arguing against Christianity is almost a waste of time. Atheism is largely defined by the belief that there is no higher power, meaning a God or Gods. That’s not strictly 100% accurate, as there is no formal atheism doctrine, but it’s the widely-used definition and alternative ways of viewing the pseudo-religious stance don’t diverge enough to really make a difference. So, again, atheism is the belief that there is no God. This might come as somewhat of a shock, but what does that have to do with Christianity?

If an atheist could conclusively prove that Christianity is false, that would accomplish next to nothing in the assertion that there is no God. The atheist would have proven that one iteration of what mankind says about God is incorrect, nothing more or less. Disproving Christianity wouldn’t disprove Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, Taoism, Daoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, or literally hundreds of other religions. And, perhaps even more importantly, it wouldn’t touch on the broader issue.

Religion is the formalized expression of human understanding and worship of a higher power. Even if every religion is incorrect, that has no logical bearing on the existence or non-existence of a God. It’s quite possible, even probable, that every religion that’s ever existed has been outright mistaken in its belief system. If you want more on this idea, check out my article Religious Roulette, where I discuss the statistics of individual religious beliefs and how mathematically unlikely the validity of any religion is in a vacuum.

So, if the atheist wants to disprove God, why should he or she spend any seconds on religious analysis at all? Ultimately, it’s a waste of time, as the broader question will remain even if the atheist is successful in disproving all known religions.

Ultimately, an atheist arguing against Christianity is the same as your friend telling you that the failure of Game of Thrones is an argument for why fiction is bad. Even if it’s true that Game of Thrones is bad, what does that have to do with fiction as a whole? Does Game of Thrones being bad stop Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or (season 1 of) Squid Game from being good? What about movies, books, or plays? Can a single TV show prove that fiction as a whole is bad? Can disproving one religion disprove the existence of God?

So why do modern atheists argue seemingly exclusively against Christianity? The obvious answer to me seems to be because they aren’t atheists in the strictest sense, they’re just ardently anti-Christian.

Which I more than understand. The average person in the western world interacts with Christians almost exclusively, so that’s the paradigm of what the idea of God happens to be. When the western world thinks of God, they think of the old man in the sky or his son on the cross. Thus, arguing against the idea of God is to argue against those two interpretations. It’s not logical, but it makes emotive sense, and that’s how almost all people operate anyway. It’s not that they hate the idea of God, they hate the Christian idea of God. The one that’s supposed to be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, yet allows the world to exist in chaos and pain.

I’m not going to litigate the validity of Christianity, nor am I going to litigate the logical attack on the validity of Christianity that is modern atheism. Those two groups are having two very different conversations that just sort of sound the same, and I don’t expect any sort of intervention is going to do anything about that any time soon. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t see quite a large problem here that needs to be explored.

____

In terms of practicality, the Christianity vs atheism paradigm is just an extension of the right vs the left in political and now cultural leaning. Both religious perspectives are correlated almost to the hilt with political leanings that they might as well be tracking the same variables, and that’s a problem. Because, again, the use of atheism to critique Christianity is a waste of time. All it’s doing is perpetuating the political and intrinsically perpendicular war of ideology that now pervades nearly all aspects of culture. Liberals think conservatives are stupid and evil, conservatives think liberals are stupid and evil, albeit for very different reasons. What does this accomplish, honestly? What does it produce except gridlock and recursion to a battlefield that produces radioactive results?

I don’t like politics. I don’t like Trump. I don’t like Obama. I don’t like Biden. I don’t really like anything to do with modernity as a matter of fact. But even someone like me that hates almost everything that’s happened since 2007 can see that Obama’s ‘change’ platform was a response to the ideology war, and Trump’s ‘MAGA’ platform was a response to Obama, and Biden’s ‘anti-MAGA’ platform was a response to Trump, ad infinitum.

If humanity is going to sort out its place in the universe, it’s got to stop pretending that modern atheism is anything but an anti-Christian stance. We’ve got real problems here people, we don’t have the luxury of having two different conversations at the same time and pretending to be discussing the same thing anymore.

This phenomenon doesn’t just exist at the granular level. I’m not just drawing on my own experiences, some of the most famous modern atheists do basically the exact same thing.

Richard Dawkins is probably the second most famous atheist in history, after old man Nietzsche of course, and he’s built his public speaking career on attempting to dismantle Christianity in the same method as I’ve already described.

Christopher Hitchens, another famous modern atheist and intellectual, has made the same line of attack. If you want a concrete example of what I’m talking about, here’s a clip of him speaking in a debate against a Christian mathematician from 2009: video.

These are very, very educated and respected men who’ve made careers out of propagating the modern atheism perspective, and really all they’ve done is say ‘Christianity is wrong’ in elevated language.

And that’s a big, big problem, because a philosophical movement that exists exclusively to combat a specific religion is really just a religion of its own wearing the skin of the secular sword. And we live in Neo-Feudalism now, where secular religions dominate our ways of life and strip from us the ability to make meaningful progress, be it culturally, philosophically, or politically.

I’m all up for the atheism vs theism debate, you can even make the assertion that not a whole lot else really matters when you get right down to it. But if we’re gunna have that debate, we better be using the same conversation, not just talking at each other from two different rooms connected by a thin red line.

____

And that’s it for this one. As always, this is part of our ongoing discussion of Neo-Feudalism and the new Dark Age in which we find ourselves. If you want to begin at the beginning, check out part one of the Neo-Feudalism series: The New Dark Age.

Thank you for reading, and we’ll catch you next time.

You pick up the round and roll it between your fingertips. It’s colder than you thought it would be, almost as cold as it gets. You slide the round into a slot in the revolver and stare at it. One round, five empty slots.

With a smooth roll and a quick twitch, you spin the cylinder and flick it closed. The round’s living large now, taking up space just feet from your face. You don’t know exactly where it is, but you certainly know where it wants to go. One in six. Almost seventeen percent if you don’t sweat the rounding. Just one in six.

You lift the gun up to the side of your head and and hold your breath.

What would make you pull the trigger?

____

Hello reader, and welcome. This is the New Renaissance, an attempt to propel human culture out of the return of the Dark Age and into something with less plague and even less vague.

More about our mission at the end of the article. Enjoy.

____

The odds of being killed in Russian Roulette after one round are, again, just under seventeen percent. Meaning, you’ve got an eighty three percent chance of living after pulling that trigger. If it were a paper test, you’d be sitting on a B-. That’s not exactly great, but it’s not terrible either.

Still, you’re not gunna pull that trigger under almost any circumstance. Even if the math’s on your side, the only people who pull that trigger are as desperate as they come and are touching two sides of a corner with their ass. One in six chances of bighting the big one just aren’t worth it.

It’s nice, isn’t it? When the math makes things so wickedly easy? When you know something’s crazy with such clarity and simplicity? Really, it’s downright convenient. Putting your life in the hands of five empty chambers against one live round isn’t gunna fly. If only the math on every other profound choice had the same effect.

____

There are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, give or take a few stragglers who forget to show up on Easter and Christmas. As of early this year, there are 8.2 billion people alive at any given moment. Now, that’s not precisely one in six, but it’s pretty God-damn close, if you’ll indulge in the bit of bohemian blasphemy. 1.3 into 8.2 is just under sixteen percent, so it’s close enough to call it the same as one in six that I’m going to give the ruling to the field referee. One out of every six people alive today are Catholic. Obviously, this means that five out of six people believe that Catholicism is fundamentally incorrect. If we convert this idea into a measurement of human reason, the choice to be a non-Catholic is the same choice as pulling the trigger in a game of Russian Roulette. Based on sheer probability as derived from the circumstances alone, you’ve got an eighty three percent change of being right if all things are equal.

Now, the obvious counter to this line of reasoning is that people don’t make decisions about religion, faith, belief, or (gasp) reason based on pure probability. No one ‘decides’ to believe something because it’s popular, even if that’s really what’s happening a good deal of the time. While I don’t actually know, I’d wager considerably leveraged funds that no human in history has ever calculated the odds of a belief system being correct based on popularity and made a choice based on that calculation. And, really, I don’t exactly blame them. But, after thinking about it for a while, I’m not exactly sure why I don’t.

Every major religion is fundamentally founded on the same bedrock- things that happened a long time ago. For the purposes of clarity, here’s the breakdown of how old the major religions are: Christianity (2,000 years), Islam (1,400 years), Buddhism (2,500 years), and Hinduism (4,000-ish years). Throw in a few of the larger but still relatively small religions like Judaism (3,500 years), Shintoism (2,500 years), and Taoism (2,500 years), and you’ve covered the majority of the belief systems of the human race and only one of them is young enough to have been invented in the millennium before the millennium before the millennium we’re in right now.

So, when you really get down to it, all major and non-minor religions have almost identical starting positions and circumstances. A long ass time ago, something happened in a particular place on earth that caused people to change their ways of life. That change of life eventually began to spread, and ultimately endured large gaps of time and space to persist in to the present. We know about these belief systems due to written records based on different levels of oral tradition, as clarified by entire epochs of follow-up writing that eventually converged into the modern catechism of each individual faith.

Or, if you prefer, we don’t know what happened because it was too long ago, but we’ve got books that talk about it that aren’t primary sources.

I’m not going to critique the practice of religion, that’s a really tall order and would take much more than a single article. I have extremely complicated beliefs about, well, belief, as odd as that might sound. Faith, belief, religion, knowledge, deduction, and fact are as distinct in the epistemological sense as it’s possible to be. Tackling that in a short-form essay is a bigger folly than reversing the odds in Russian Roulette because you survived the first pull of the trigger and want to stop playing on easy mode. I will, however, point out the paradoxical mathematics belief in a religion inherently contains.

Let me put it simply. If you believe in a religion, you inherently believe that all other religions are wrong. This is very different from being a theist, the professed belief that a God exists. It’s also different than any generic spirituality, which is the new-age version of believing that there’s a higher power of some kind, or something along those lines. Belief in a religion is belief that all other religions are false. There is an inherent mutual exclusivity to the profession of any singular faith. If you’re a Catholic, you think all non-Catholics are mistaken in what they believe and that all non-Catholics that are religious practice false religions. Same with every other religion, it’s part of their core premise. Hopefully that’s pretty self-evident, but I promise it’s very relevant to the discussion.

Because, you see, Catholicism is, again, the largest singular faith on earth. Christianity as a whole makes up almost thirty percent of the human race, but differing sects of Christianity believe vastly differing and, again, mutually exclusive things. A Baptist believes that a Catholic is wrong, a Catholic believes that a Baptist is wrong, and a Baptist and a Catholic both believe that an Evangelical is wrong.

As such, the largest single religious system in the history of mankind, Catholicism, consists of one in six people alive today. And those one in six people believe that five in six people are wrong about the fundamental nature of human existence. Consequentially, five in six people believe that Catholics are fundamentally wrong about the nature of the universe. Think about that for a moment, then pan it outward and see how truly odd of a phenomenon that is.

I once talked with a women who worshiped in a particular sect of Pentecostalism that essentially believed that anyone that wasn’t a Pentecostal in her sect was damned principally and unequivocally because they were not said Pentecostal. This women was part of a church that had something like fifty total members, and didn’t directly identify with any other sect of Christianity, including other Pentecostal sects. Christianity is complicated, it is what it is. But regardless, this woman believed that fifty people were right and that 8,199,999,950 people were wrong. And she was as certain about those beliefs as every other person is as certain of theirs.

So, let’s take this all the way to its logical conclusion. Each religion essentially believes the following: A- some form of higher power exists outside humanity, B- that higher power visited humanity at a specific time and place and imparted its wisdom, C- and that every other system of belief that professes this basic concept is entirely incorrect. Jews believe that Yahweh created the heavens and the earth, then only came to a tiny corner of the planet and gave an extremely small number of people information about him, and that everyone else is wrong. Christians believe Jesus is the son of Yahweh, born unto man in a tiny corner of the planet and gave an extremely small number of people information about him, and that everyone else is wrong, including the Jews. Muslims believe that Muhammad was visited by Yahweh, but by a different name, who told one man in a tiny corner of the planet information about him, and that the Jews and Christians are wrong, even though they all believe in Yahweh.

With all that taken into account, has anyone ever asked why Yahweh didn’t also show up to anyone other than the Israelites and/or Muhammad? The fertile crescent’s a pretty big place, it’s not exactly fair to show up to a single tribe of people, dump the message, and leave everyone else in the dark. But that’s just Mesopotamia, what about everyone else? Why didn’t Yahweh show up in Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, Australia, or (who the hell knows right?) Antarctica? Was everyone else supposed to get the message ‘eventually’ somehow?

Every religion looks inherently ludicrous to everyone that practices another religion. It’s not a nice thing to say, but I’ve seen nothing either personally or proffered logically to contradict this fundamental point. Every Christian that’s not a Mormon thinks it’s ridiculous that an angel of God came to Joseph Smith in the 1820’s to reveal a sacred tablet buried in New York written in a language only Joseph could translate. What was God doing for the rest of human existence, laughing his ass off at the stupid bipedal monkeys as they tried to figure out what to do without his buried plate? A Catholic looks at a Mormon and shakes his or her head, as that seems patently unbelievable. But the Mormon does the same thing to the Catholic. Everyone thinks that everyone that disagrees with them is wrong, about basically everything. But ESPECIALLY about religion, no matter how odd it seems to everyone else.

If you remove the bells and whistles, every religion thinks that a force beyond human understanding came to a very few humans a really, really long time ago and thought that was a good way to get people to believe that this creator existed. And, every religious person on earth seems to be ok with this. Obviously I don’t know what the truth is about the fundamental nature of reality, but neither does anyone else. And yet, the sheer math on human belief in the space of this vacancy of knowledge is both staggering in how nihilistic it is and how little credence it’s given in religious discourse.

What are the odds that your religion is right and everyone else’s religion is wrong? Is that something you’ve ever considered? What if you’d been born in a different place where it would be almost guaranteed you’d be raised under a different faith? Is religious belief just a function of simple geography more than anything else? Or, if you prefer, let's take this into a more sterile hypothetical.

Let’s say a man wakes up from a coma with no memory. He has perfect faculties, his cognition chugs along at the standard rate of neural projection. He just can’t remember anything before he woke up, and no one knows who his is or where he comes from. How would this man figure out what religion to believe? If you roll a die and place him on a random spot on earth, will he just adopt the religion that’s most popular in that area and call it a day? How would you try to persuade this person to join a specific religion with any form of argument? How would you respond when he asked ‘well, that’s nice, but everyone else seems to believe something else, and just as certainly as you believe this, so why should I believe you over them?’. Taken in a vacuum, what are the odds that this man would choose the ‘correct’ religion? Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to choose between really, really, really bad odds when trying to figure out the potential destination of our immoral soul?

I assume, at this point, the standard answer any religious person would say would be ‘he’d choose the correct religion because it was true and (word for God) would make it happen’. That’s a nice idea, and patently impossible to either prove or disprove, but it still falls victim to the same problem. Every single religion believes the exact same thing in this regard. You think your religion is right, that you believe it BECAUSE it’s right, and that God wanted it for you as part of his plan and therefore it came to be. But so does everyone else. Everyone that believes differently than you has the exact same belief about their own beliefs. They’re as certain that they’re right for the same reasons as you. And we can’t all be right.

When I bring this up to religious people, I almost always get the response of ‘we can’t understand God’s plan’, with which I’m not arguing. I don’t have a clue what a God wants or how a God would think. Thinking anything else is pure folly. But, I’ll gently point out that this principle works in reverse as well. We don’t ‘understand God’s plan’, and all religious people essentially believe that, and yet we all believe that everyone else is wrong. Catholics believe that five in six people are wrong, and five in six people believe that Catholics are wrong. All based on things that happened thousands of years ago, that we have no way of actually knowing beyond documents translated from other documents transcribed from oral tradition carried through centuries.

And yet, people believe. They believe that everyone else’s beliefs are wrong and that everyone who believes they are wrong are, in fact, wrong. Even if the disbelievers are in the vast majority and the believers are in the vast minority. Somewhere between two and ten percent of Americans believe the earth is flat. Everyone else thinks they’re nuts, but they believe it. Something like fifteen percent of Americans think we faked the moon landing. Everyone else thinks they’re lunatics, but they believe it. Every religion that’s ever existed is simultaneously unverifiable and has extremely bad odds of being correct based on the spread of widely-held human belief, yet people believe it.

They believe so much, in fact, that they’re willing to load the revolver of faith with the reverse odds of Russian Roulette. You survive Russian Roulette five out of six times with a single squeeze of the trigger. In order for Catholicism to be correct statistically, you’d have to survive no fewer than nine pulls of the trigger in a row in a standard game of Russian Roulette. Nine pulls of the trigger. I’m not kidding here. Again, you survive Russian Roulette eighty three percent of the time with one pull. To survive two pulls, that’s eighty three percent multiplied by eighty three percent, which is sixty nine percent. In order to mirror the one in six statistic, which again is seventeen percent, you’d need eighty three percent multiplied by itself nine times. 0.83 ^9 = 0.187. Nine pulls of the trigger in a row. That’s the analogous representation of the practice of Catholicism.

And I know what you’re saying, if you practice a particular religion and are reading this. I don’t blame you, that’s not the point of this essay. You’re almost certainly responding with ‘I don’t believe what I believe because of statistics’.

Please, hear me out on this. I’m not trying to dissuade you from your faith. I’m not questioning your faith. I’m not questioning the belief in God. I’m simply pointing out the following.

You don’t believe what you believe based on statistics, you’ve got a real reason. So does everyone else. And almost everyone on earth disagrees with you.

The best odds anyone has ever had of being right with a religion in a vacuum are one in six. The exact inverse odds of spinning a round in a revolver and living to laugh about it. Just one in six.

Almost no one rolls that Cylinder.

____________________________________________________________________________

Thank you for taking some steps toward the New Renaissance. I’m never sure if what I’m pondering is correct, but I’m pretty sure that the act of thinking about it carries enough significance to be worth the attempt. Neo-Feudalism is a terrifying thing, and if we can figure out how to work our way out of it, I’m more than willing to give something a try.

If you want the full explanation, try the five part series on Neo-Feudalism, how we’ve found ourselves back in the Dark Age after five hundred years of modern thought. Here’s Part 1.

In the meantime, our mission continues. Let’s try and find a way out of the new Dark Age together, however we can.

Thanks for reading.

Sanguis solus rotam movet. Blood alone moves the wheel.

____

One of the most important fundamental assumptions under which I operate is that art is primarily a reflection of culture and secondarily a catalyst for culture. It’s an idea that deserves its own essay, and will almost certainly be getting one in short order. For now, please simply accept that I believe it and that there’s a good reason.

With that out of the way, one can perhaps quibble over the placement of the primary and secondary qualifications. I wouldn’t, but I suppose it’s arguable. However, even if you disagree about which is the more fundamental facet of art, it’s pretty God-damn difficult to take the negation in a debate on whether or not art shapes and is shaped by the culture in which it is created. Artists are people, and they draw from what’s around them and from what they can imagine.

As such, it’s a pretty easy reach to assume that by looking at art, you can catch a distillation of the culture in which it was forged. Perhaps not in a one-to-one ratio, but at least in the sense of reflection, or at least refraction. The short hand version of the principle is that if you see a lot of art about death, something bad is happening in your culture, and if you see a lot of art about life, something good is happening in your culture. It’s obviously more complex than that, but again, that’s for another essay. For now, let’s hop on back to the good ol’ train track.

The best-known story structure in the western cannon is, of course, none other than the Hero’s Journey. You might know what this is already, but I’ll walk you through it anyway just to be certain.

As outlined by Joseph Campbell, the Hero’s Journey is a repeating pattern that has emerged in common myths as observed across culture and time. Rather than originally being tied to literary structuring, it is instead simply the shared aspects of cultural stories that were created separately, yet share some extremely distinct features. Here’s a basic outline of the structure of shared myth:

1- a boy on a farm

2- is called to adventure

3- but refuses that call

4- yet is thrust into adventure anyway

5- where he meets a mentor

6- who gives him access to some form of power

7- with which he must undergo many trials

8- some of which he fails

9- and must learn to change to overcome them

10- at which point he is presented the final trial

11- which he overcomes because he has evolved into a hero

12- after which he returns home a changed man

13- and helps use his newfound power to help those he’s left behind

Let’s run a concrete example of this to make sure it sticks. You probably already know where I’m going with this as well.

Luke Skywalker lives on a moisture farm on a desert planet in the middle of nowhere, space (boy on a farm). He wants to leave home, both in general and to find the princess (call to adventure), but refuses to do so (refusal). But his home is blown up by stormtroopers and he decides to leave (thrust into adventure) with Obi-Wan (mentor) who begins training him in the force (form of power). He has lots of adventures, such as the cantina, the death star rescue, and a space battle (many trials), but fails to leave the death star with his mentor (some of which he fails). He attempts to attack the death star (final trial), and must learn to trust the force (learn to change), and turns off his guidance computer (evolution into a hero). He destroys the death star and returns to the rebels (return home) where he is honored as a war hero, ostensibly now a key figure in the rebellion (use new power to help).

Is it a perfect fit? Nah. A few things are out of order, a few things are stretched, and a few liberties are taken. However, that’s just how things work. This isn’t an equation describing a strict ratio between variables, it’s a template for how humans tell relatable stories. The fact that Luke meets his mentor before going on his journey isn’t ‘bad’, it’s just different flavoring added into the same recipe. And, although Star Wars is the operative example from which almost all of modern popular storytelling has drawn, you can look basically anywhere you like and see this pattern represented.

And that’s not really a surprise. Again, this isn’t a literary theory, it’s an anthropological one. People across time and space have told stories using this pattern because it’s unbelievably relatable to essentially every human that’s ever reached adulthood. The Hero’s Journey is just a metaphor for growing up, and always has been. You’re born into safety, are forced to leave that safety as you age, are helped by your elders, find out that life is hard, work to overcome it, fail sometimes, push through it, and (hopefully) make it long enough to have a family of your own and start the whole thing over again. Sure, the story structure includes some supernatural shenanigans and plot elements that almost never happen in reality, but the pattern is clear as day. We’ve told stories about growing up because that’s what we all experience, if we’re lucky enough to live that long.

However, even though it might seem a ubiquitous structuring of how we choose to tell certain kinds of stories, it’s not the only way things are done. Which brings us rightly along to the gem at the center of this metaphorical geode.

In 1667, John Milton published what many consider to be the greatest work of fiction ever set to paper, Paradise Lost. This work, an epic poem written in a style similar to Homer’s epics from almost two millennia prior, depicts both the fall of mankind from the grace of God and the point of view of Lucifer, the fallen angel that worked to lead man astray. As a brief synopsis of the salient plot points, here’s the rub:

The story begins with Lucifer and his legion of fallen angels who have been banished to hell after their defeat by the forces of God. The fallen angels are demoralized for what should be pretty obvious reasons, and none know what they should now do as they have been cast from grace for eternity.

Lucifer, who is aided by the presence of some of his underlings, decides to attempt to rouse his minions with an impassioned speech. He espouses that, while they have been physically defeated, they are not incapable of continuing to fight. He wishes to continue his war against God their father, and claims that he will wound God in the only way available, by bringing low his greatest creation. He is, of course, speaking of mankind, and his grand plan is to cast man from God’s grace as he and his fellow fallen angels have been. However, there’s a pretty big problem with his plan.

Hell is separated from the physical realm by ‘the abyss’, which is essentially personified chaos that acts as both a physical barrier and a gigantic wasteland through which one must travel to reach either destination. The danger inherent in traveling the abyss is that it’s quite possible to get lost in the chaos, which would result in drifting through it for eternity. If Lucifer should attempt to make this journey and fail, he will be cut off from companionship and purpose until the end of time.

Which, quite oddly, makes Lucifer’s plan almost heroic. He wants so badly to spit in the eye of his father that he would risk an eternity trapped in the isolation of pure chaos. Tactically, practically, and personally, Lucifer has almost nothing to gain from this quest beyond the ire of the God he chose to abandon. It won’t really solve his problems, it won’t actually give him true purpose, it certainly won’t kill the God to which he is no longer in service. And yet, he’s willing to risk the ultimate sacrifice if it means retaining his power over the fallen angels over which he still retains dominion. For, in giving the fallen angels the hope of wounding God, Lucifer has conjured for them a united purpose, and it is with that purpose that he will remain their leader.

Lucifer does indeed make this journey, which is long and arduous, arriving in the Garden of Eden. From there, the story feeds back into the traditional biblical telling, culminating in the fall of man, Lucifer’s triumphant return to hell, and the rallying of his fallen angels, before all are transformed into serpents as punishment for their actions.

So, Milton’s taken some liberty with the character of Lucifer here, and it’s frankly some iconic characterization. Let’s look at Lucifer’s journey broken into similar plot points as we did the Hero’s Journey:

1- ‘man’ that is ‘on the farm’

2- chooses to go on adventure

3- alone, and for the purpose of retaining power

4- succeeds through his own power

5- returns in triumph

6- is punished for his actions

This is, almost literally, a perpendicular retelling of the Hero’s Journey. It’s missing half the steps, and is orientated 90 degrees from the original, but the bones of the similarities couldn’t be clearer. A ‘hero’ goes on a ‘journey’ for a ‘purpose’ and returns in triumph. However, no matter how similar the underlying structure may mechanically appear, it’s the key differentiation in character and plot elements that define the idealized iconography of the opposing story models.

Luke is a boy with no knowledge or skill, Lucifer is a ‘man’ with overwhelming knowledge and skill. Luke doesn’t choose to go on his journey, Lucifer does. Luke is helped by an older and wiser mentor, Lucifer proceeds alone. Luke learns a new skill and grows as a person, Lucifer does not. Luke seeks to help others as his final confrontation, Lucifer seeks to corrupt others as his. Luke returns home to help his friends, Lucifer returns home to consolidate his power.

Night and day folks, even if the two stories seem to be cast in twilight. Star Wars is about learning and growing, Paradise Lost is about not needing to learn or grow. Star Wars is about change, Paradise Lost is about self-actualization. Star Wars is a metaphor for growing up, Paradise Lost is a literal mapping of true biblical evil.

And that’s the real kicker here, even if it might not be evident from the outset. If you twist the Hero’s Journey 90 degrees, you get the journey of actual Satan. The only real difference is that Luke is a boy that becomes a man and Satan is a ‘man’ that seeks to lay low a God. Incredibly similar story structuring, wildly different results based on characterization. Luke had to learn, Lucifer knew all along. That’s the story really, distilled into its most facile components. Luke learned, Lucifer didn’t have to.

So, why am I bringing this up? Surely it’s not appropriate to compare a really long poem written three hundred and fifty years ago to a movie written fifty years ago, right? What cultural importance can we pull from such an obscure case of contrast in the year of our lord, two thousand and twenty six? Ladies and gentleman, feast your eyes on the true loss of a paradise.

In 1998, Mulan had to learn to ‘be a man’ to fight for her family and for China, enduring grueling training and growing as a person to embrace not only what she can already do but that which she must learn to do to succeed. In 2020, Mulan was born with incredible ‘chi’ and just had to accept herself to defeat the Huns. In 2012, Bruce Banner, aka Hulk, had to endure a life of misery and isolation so that he wouldn’t transform into a literal city-destroying monster. He even tried to commit suicide to escape this horrible fate, but was denied that option by the demon that lives inside him. In 2022, Jen Walters, aka She-Hulk, has to endure cat calls and people explaining things to her at work, and thus has instant mastery of her world-altering rage and is a better Hulk than Bruce on her first day of training. In 2008, Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, built an arc reactor and prototype Iron Man suit ‘in a cave, with a box of scraps’ so that he and his friend could escape captivity and set right what his hubris had allowed to be made wrong. In 2025, Riri Williams, aka Ironheart, built an Iron Man suit at MIT, on a full scholarship, with grant money completely covered, while getting paid to cheat for other students cause ‘she wasn’t rich like Tony and therefore couldn’t get noticed’, for the express purpose of ‘building something iconic’ to eclipse Tony Stark. In 2002, Nani must struggle with parenting her sister Lilo after the death of their parents, choosing the wellbeing of her sibling over her own goals. In 2025, Nani resents her sister Lilo because she must parent her after the death of their parents, but chooses to go to college and leave Lilo with a neighbor to raise rather than doing it herself.

Captain Marvel’s journey was about accepting how great she already was and about not letting other people hold her back. Bella Swan effortlessly attracts impossibly good looking men/monsters because she’s implicitly just the best and doesn’t have to learn anything. Kirito cuts his way through Sword Art Online like some sort of gamer god that attracts females through magnetism. Ana Steele attracts a billionaire model for inexplicable reasons despite being less flavorful than lukewarm tap water.

And, oh boy, and…

In 1983, Luke Skywalker performed his first Jedi mind trick. He did this after three movies of development, intensive training by two Jedi masters, multiple years of in-world experience, growing up in a world that believed the Jedi were real and knew what they were, after facing a Sith lord in battle, after using the force on many occasions outside of training, and after having been shown first hand what a Jedi mind trick was by his mentor Obi-Wan.

In 2015, Rey ‘Skywalker’ performed her first Jedi mind trick. She did this in her first film appearance, after not knowing what the force was, not knowing what a Jedi mind trick was, after believing that the last Jedi was only a myth, after never having been trained in the force, and after not having any conceivable reason to believe that a Jedi mind trick would either work or exist in the first place.

Here’s what I’m getting at folks, plain and simple. We used to tell stories modeled after what humans believe about heroes, now we tell stories modeled after what humans believe about villains. Our protagonists used to require learning and mentors, now they already know everything they need to know and just need everyone to get out of their way. We used to tell stories about Luke, now we tell stories about Lucifer. We’ve just omitted the part at the end when God strikes him down for being a snake in the garden.

And that’s the crux of this conversation. We write villains as heroes, but we omit the ending to reframe the entire story. Mulan was always empowered, Jen was always in control, Riri was always iconic, Nani always deserved freedom, Captain Marvel was always perfect, Bella was always interesting, Kirito was always the man, Ana was always smokin, and Rey was always the real Skywalker. These are characters written as villains but dressed up as heroes, and it’s now the cultural norm to view their ‘journey’ as such. And that’s a problem, the norm part. A really big one in fact. Cause, remember, art is a reflection and catalyst for the culture that created it. And our culture is nor producing works en masse that idolize villains disguised as heroes.

Meanwhile, we’ve got cultural forces telling people to ‘get that bag’ because they deserve it, that ‘their truth’ is somehow ‘the truth’ despite those being mutually exclusive, that group characteristics are the only relevant facets of identity, and that ‘the Jedi were always evil and needed to end’.

Culturally, we’ve turned away from the idea of heroism, the need for maturity and change, and the necessity of asking others for help. Instead, we’ve embraced the idea that the Villain’s Journey is to modernity what the Hero’s Journey has always been to shared myth and ‘antiquated’ thought.

We’ve ‘evolved’ you see, we’re ‘better’ than that now.

We don’t tell our children to build an Iron Man suit to save lives and right wrongs anymore, we tell them to build an Iron Man suit so they can go viral and let everyone know they were cool all along. Is it really that shocking that things have gone to shit?

Maybe we should stop telling ourselves that Lucifer’s model is the way to go, considering how that one worked out for him and how things are going for us.

____

And, as such, I’ll propose a step toward the New Renaissance: change the way we communicate heroism in fiction. It’s not going to be a quick fix to anything, but if art is a reflection and catalyst for culture, making such a change can’t help but start that reflection’s metamorphosis, even if just a little bit.

If you want the background on the New Renaissance journey, check out my Neo-Feudalism series here.

Welcome to the finale you handsome/beautiful reader. Here’s parts one, two, three, and four in case you need to backtrack.

And now, let’s draw a square around the flat circle.

____

The idea of eternal return has, hilariously, been perverted beyond recognition in modern culture. Originally, the idea was that time is a linear sequence of events that simply repeats itself on a recurring loop, and that everything that will happen has already happened and will happen again. Mixing predetermination and nihilism in a particularly potent donut of despair, it’s a theory that elicits intellectual horror for some and a strange sense of comfort in others.

While this theory has been posited independently through time and culture, it ironically has origins in both religious and secular movements. Christianity espouses a version of this idea in Ecclesiastes 1:9- What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Arguably quite hard to square for a belief system that espouses free will and eternal consequences based upon that free will, but the idea persists in the Christian cannon nonetheless.

The ultimate nemesis of Christianity, Fredrich Nietzsche, examined the same concept and reached an arguably more optimistic conclusion in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted all back ... For all joy wants—eternity.”

Quaintly summarized, what Nietzsche is saying is something like ‘if you like something, you want it to last forever, so everything being infinitely repeatable is a universal good’.

Christianity muses on eternal recurrence as a warning, Nietzsche welcomes it with open arms. It’s a hard theory to parse, it would seem, seeing as how diametrically opposed philosophical standpoints can agree to its existence but diverge on its merits. Yet, for all the sophistic back and forth on the subject, its relevance in the modern era has been all but eclipsed by the ‘enlightened’ interpretation: history repeats itself.

Now, I’m certainly not going to argue against this idea, even if I endlessly tire of hearing it and its predecessors used to attempt to argue against the possibility of innovation and originality. It seems preposterous that history wouldn’t repeat itself to a certain degree, as the human condition can pretty easily be reduced to a set series of repeating patterns that must be administered for the human race to continue to exist.

We have to eat, we have to sleep, we have to reproduce, and we have to stay alive long enough to do all of the above many, many times. Thus, these patterns elicit logical responses that would, also logically, repeat themselves. When a ruler makes bad decisions, he or she creates conditions of unrest that tend to lead toward revolution. What decisions those happen to be will, of course, vary, as will the types and degrees of revolutionary responses. But those patterns will, ultimately, be repeated as long as the underlying conditions continue to exist. We are hunks of meat that need to eat, anyone that tells you any differently is selling something.

And thus, with the preamble to the crescendo complete, we reach the beginning of the rise. What caused Feudalism, what caused it to end, and how do we hurry that process along now that we’re looking down the barrel of the second Dark Age?

____

Hopefully I’ve done at least an adequate job of convincing you that Feudalism A- was bad for humanity, B- had very identifiable and predictable traits, and C- is back for round two. Assuming you follow that premise without too much torsion, that leaves us with really only one path forward.

What do we do?

Feudalism 1.0 saw culture stagnate to the point of putrefaction, and can almost be seen as the filler episode of human history. Granted, it was some entertaining filler from the perspective of drama, but in terms of moving the plot along? I’ve seen better writing from modern Disney.

Science was sacrosanct, religion was empire, economics was a bloody rotating wheel, and art was something very rich people paid for that didn’t look too great even by the standards of tumbler.

But, even with that wretched medieval mess, we must remember that after close to a millennium of circular progress, Feudalism’s grip on the world ultimately ended. Thus, let us ask how that happened and see what we can see in the light that split apart the first Dark Age and once again allowed humanity a chance at the sun.

____

The Dark Age ended in approximately the 14th through 15th centuries, depending on which historian you want to believe and what timeline of events you wish to examine. Regardless of the when, the what is relatively clear, which gives us a pretty good glimpse into understanding the how.

The Renaissance, or ‘period of rebirth’, followed the Dark Age, and was characterized by what we now label as the end of the transitory period from antiquity to modernity. The Dark Age was the dying gasp of the past, the Renaissance was the first breath of the reborn opportunity of a more dynamic future.

Notably, the Renaissance was characterized by two things that would seem counterintuitive, yet combined into an alloy of adaptability strong enough to pry governments and cultures away from Feudalistic control. Namely, those two things were a return to the philosophies and arts of antiquity and new applications of technological innovation. So, the thing that broke humanity out of its death spiral was a big helping of the distant past and the inevitability of mechanical progress given enough precursor ingredients. Doesn’t really make sense at first, does it? Don’t worry about it, I don’t think the people of the Renaissance really knew what was happening to them either. So, we’ll take both factors one at a time and carve up this beast like a bird on a late November table.

____

Thoughts from Antiquity

To be nice about it, Dark Age thought wasn’t really thought at all. The Dark Age dealt in systemized and organized belief, which is altogether something different. Belief isn’t thought, as thought definitionally deals with the inherently disprovable and belief does not. Combine that with the systemization of belief commonly known as religion, and you’ve got a doctrine machine inadvertently working to suppress cultural, political, and economic progress. Take that away and, once again, things will begin to change.

Feudal religion espoused the belief that God was the center of all things, and taught that subservience to this idea was the fundamental function of the totality of existence. Quite notably, this working philosophy saw mankind as subservient to that of God, and treated the human condition more as a function of God’s plan than anything else. Renaissance thinking, which drew quite heavily on classical Greek philosophy, rejected this central thesis of medieval religion altogether. Instead, it opted for the perpendicular approach, humanism.

Humanism, what we know generally call an applied version of ‘the humanities’, is a free-range movement of thought with a singular central thesis: a focus on humans. As a phrase coined by the infamous Protagoras goes, ‘man is the measure of all things’.

While a modern psychologist would probably dub this idea a narcissistic manifestation of a serious personality flaw, it was hailed as a somewhat more humanizing ideal at the end of religion’s strangle hold on human culture. For, you see, if man is the measure of all things, what man thinks is more important than man’s subservience to God. Suddenly, if you hold that humans are important and not just toys in the toy chest of a divine creator, those same humans are capable of creating their own meaning.

Obviously this has some dramatic consequences, many of which we are now seeing manifest malignantly in modernity. But, for a Feudal culture, it acted as no less than an alchemical deathblow. Humanism was the catalytic force of thought that helped drive humanity away from the cyclical control of religion which allowed for cultural evolution to quickly become cultural revolution. It’s easy for things to change when you suddenly believe that you’re the center of attention after untold generations of being told that you’re just a flesh-composed cog in the God machine.

And thus, the legacy of humanism, reinterpreted through the then-present modern mode of thought, opened the crack in calcified culture which allowed change to creep its way into the human conversation.

The march of progress

There are two events which, to my reckoning, signify the fall of the Dark Age more than any other. And, fortunately, they occupy opposing ends on the spectrum of invention.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signified the final heartbeat of the Roman empire, which had persevered through the Dark Age, albeit shifted from Italy to Turkey. For approximately eight-hundred years, Constantinople repelled seemingly endless attackers precisely because it possessed the height of military technology at the time, really big walls. However, by the 15^th century, a new technology had emerged that transformed the face of warfare in the most profound way thus far in human history. I’m speaking, of course, about gunpowder.

Large fortifications like castles afforded defenders no more military advantage in a world possessing gunpowder than convenient access to a ready-made mausoleum. Constantinople fell, not to a superior army or any strategic brilliance, but to inevitability. The war machine eclipsed its once-proud military might through nothing but the applications of time. Technology marches on, and with it goes the history books.

Suddenly, medieval warfare under Feudalism makes no sense in a world where armies of peasants can blow up castles. Defending gigantic swaths of land maintained by Feudal lords makes quite a bit less sense when gunpowder can transform a serf into a death machine that can end a mounted knight at distance without the endless training necessary to wield a bow.

And thus, gunpowder put an end to Feudalistic warfare and ushered in the modern era of ‘point and click’ killing we now take for granted, albeit in a much more rudimentary form.

____

At the perpendicularity to the innovations in warfare, the second date of supreme significance fell somewhere between 1440 and 1450. It is, of course, the creation of the printing press as constructed by Gutenberg. With the advent of readily-available and circulatable literature, education became accessible to a wider and mainstream audience for the first time in human history. Literacy rates began to rise, and with them began the waning of the power of religious control. A priest has power because he speaks for a God in a language the uninitiated cannot comprehend. Take away that lack of comprehension, and suddenly the word of God comes no longer from on high but from the mind of the man or woman who reads it. Couple that with the spread of humanism, which collided with the spread of education perfectly, and you’ve got a pressure cooker of compounding thought that ended Feudal religious control’s monopoly on the soul of its population.

____

And lo, it was that Feudalism met its ineffable end, upon the points of the two swords of inevitable progress: cultural and technological progression. Strange as it would seem, the cultural progress was a literal regression of almost a millennium, but apparently it’s sometimes necessary to take a few steps backward when you’ve wandered for a while in the wrong direction. After one-thousand years of lack of philosophical thought, I’m sure it was revolutionary to consider the works of the dead masters who attempted to leverage thought into a means of moving the earth.

On the other hand, the technological progress was as inevitable as anything can seem to be, as technological innovation basically came to a standstill during Feudalism, so we had some catching up to do. But, after a thousand years of culturally trudging around in the muck, humans stopped thinking the way they used to, and were aided by technology that made it almost impossible for their governments to continue in the traditions that had been spinning for the length of their recorded history.

And thus, Feudalism fell to the Renaissance, and we’ve got an ending to the prelude to our story. Feudalism was defined by cultural stagnation, the end of Feudalism was brought about by the paradox of extreme conservative thought that opened liberal ways of thinking and the technological progress that can’t be stifled forever.

But, now that we’ve got that covered, what do we do with the information? Cause, man oh man, are we in a pickle with that explanation.

What saved us from Feudalism the first time? Old-fashioned thinking that led to the spread of education mixed with brand-new technology. What, oh what, have we got more of in this futuristic hellscape than education and technology? Honestly, I can’t think of a God-damn thing.

The things that saved us the first time around are now strangling us in the most ironic twist of fate imaginable. If you think the printing press was a revolution in culture, what would you call the internet? If you think gunpowder changed the way men kill each other, what of atomic power and the ability to kill with drones from the safety of a bunker on the other side of the world? The solution that saved humans from Feudalism the first time isn’t going to save them again, as it is those very same solutions that are now allowing the suppression of thought, culture, and economics that has shaped our world into the demon of Neo-Feudalism under which we are all, now, burdened.

So, what are we gunna do about it?

In pure honesty, I don’t have any answers. I’ve got ideas, but we’re treading on virgin soil here despite it being the world’s second attempt at making serfs of all mankind. The world has never been this technologically ramped to the max, has never been more culturally cannibalistic, and has never had the ability to so effortlessly destroy itself with impunity. I’m not even talking about nukes, which I legitimately don’t think will ever be a determining factor militarily due to Mutually Assured Destruction. I’m talking about the inevitability of AI, quantum computing, and the brain rot the internet brings utterly consuming the ability of humans to function in any helpful or meaningful way.

But, even with those fears, and believe you me I am afraid, we’ve got to try something. Which is what I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future with the contents of this channel.

Last time, it took a combination of something really, really old and something brand-spankin new to shock humanity out of Feudalism. While the same solutions verbatim won’t work, maybe the overall formula still remains an option? So, let’s try that shall we? Let’s try to look at the thinking of the past and combine it with what the future holds to try to bring about the New-Renaissance.

I’m not saying I’ll find any answers. I’m not saying there ever are any answers. Maybe we’ve gone too far already and, like agent Smith would lead one to believe, all of this is now inevitable. But a serf born in 1430 would have opened his eyes onto a world that had not yet witnessed the fall of Rome or the revolution of print, yet would die in an age where a common man might learn to read, think, and slay his ‘betters’ with the tools of inevitable conflict.

The endless waltz of war, peace, and revolution continues. I don’t believe history repeats itself, but I do think it rhymes.

So stay tuned folks, let’s see how we can reach for something old, grapple with something new, throw them into the unquenching fires of culture, and draw from the flames the tools we need for a New-Renaissance.

The theory thus far: Feudalism…sucks. Science…isn’t great. Science also…has become religion.

Now, onto part four: modern finance and how you will own nothing and like it.

____________________________________________________________________________

The economic and political parts of Feudalism, as discussed at length in part 1, can be quickly summarized as: a small portion of the population owns everything, the rest of the population lives in perpetual debt, the central government only loosely controls the ruling class. Hopefully it won’t be much of a shock to learn that such a paradigm is back in fashion.

As such, we’ll break down the modern economics of Neo-Feudalism into two categories and examine them individually: lords and serfs.

____

Lords: the ruling class and central government

In 1215, the greatest smackdown in the history of law hit the folds of paper. The Magna Carta, the first ‘modern’ codification of law designed to supersede a monarchy, essentially only existed because the nobility of England had outstripped the monarchy in political and military power, and thus took the opportunity to canonize their dominance in the annals of their own legal code.

What the Magna Carta officially established was what Feudalism had been inadvertently working to create for hundreds of years at that point, the consolidated and perpetuated power of dynastic families over their central government. Seven hundred and ninety five years later, the spiritual ancestors of those dynastic families would do the same in American law.

The Citizens United case, when finalized before the Supreme Court, held that campaign donations were a form of political speech and were thus granted protection under the First Amendment. Unfortunately, this extended beyond individual humans and became a right enjoyed by organizations, including corporations. And thus, democracy was dealt the same death blow in 2010 as monarchy was in 1215. Because, when corporations can legally buy politicians, we’re in a new Dark Age baby.

Now, instead of Feudal families perpetuating their land-based wealth, we’ve got the modern equivalent. Corporations acting as the holders of dynasty no longer tied to familial name yet wielding the exact same type of influence at the political, economic, and (quite arguably) military level. The U.S. government polices corporations about as well as Feudal monarchs policed the ruling class, in that they basically don’t compared to every other time period in history. Campaign finance litigation saw the end of any semblance of pretense in those regards, and that’s not even taking into account the financial comingling of investment banking and government.

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, better known as ‘The Bailout’, was the single largest transfer of public funds to private business entities in human history, resulting in $700 billion being ‘injected’ into U.S. investment banks at the behest of the federal government. The argument for the necessity of this act is certainly a good one to have, but regardless of the potential necessity to keep the economic lights on, the result is as unavoidable as it is obvious. For the first time in modern human history, a government bent the knee to its ruling class in a demonstrable and purely economic capitulation. Investment banks leveraged themselves into oblivion selling toxic shit backed by the American dollar, and when they eventually dropped the ball, their government wrote them the fattest check that’s ever been written. Two years later, the Citizens United case became finalized, completing the circle of capitulation that is now all but transparent in the modern era. The U.S. government is owned by the corporations that finance the economy; any attempt to dissuade this notion is instantly rebutted by turning on the news.

So, we’ve got our new ruling class, and we’ve got the dynastic wealth being passed along in approximately the same manner as the Feudal land rights, but what does that mean in terms of a direct comparison of effects?

The following is the 2024 Census Bureau data concerning wealth distribution in the U.S.

Here’s the main takeaway: you can break down America’s wealth statistics into three categories

-the top 10% controls 2/3 of America’s wealth

-the next 40% controls almost 1/3 of America’s wealth

the bottom 50% controls only 2.5% of America’s wealth

So, we’ve got a nation where 10% of its population has double the wealth of the remaining 90% combined, and where half the citizen’s total wealth is close to a rounding error. That’s not a working economy, that’s stagnation in a bottle. There’s no room for social or economic mobility, it’s just a machine that ingests labor and spits out paper. We don’t have lords and serfs anymore, we don’t need to have social labels. We’ve got such rampant economic disparity that there’s no need to make formal titles enshrining the differentiation.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Neo-Feudalism.

It gets even better when you look at it from the individual perspective instead of that of the modern ruling class.

____

Serfs: living in debt like it’s a virtue

Seventy years ago, the only real debt the average citizen could be counted on to have was a mortgage. The goal of this debt was actually fiscally responsible, as it basically forced Americans into both investing into their own futures and creating one of the most profitable and predictable markets in the history of economics. By creating a system of debt that was really more like a savings account that you could live in, the American middle class flourished, as it was saving money while working to live, and creating small pockets of dynastic wealth along the way.

The theory is simple. You get a thirty-year mortgage, work to pay it off, retire with a pension and social security with a house in your name, then die and leave the house to your kids who now have more starting wealth than you did. They run the same scenario with a padded starting line, and they get to leave their kids a better house and a bank account. Run that through a few generations and you’ve got social mobility almost guaranteed, as the combined wealth of generations accumulates as a function of simply going through the motions of American life. And the best part is that, for most people, it’s not even ‘saving’ for the future, it’s just living in a house.

Under this model, debt isn’t ‘debt’. You’re not losing money, you’re investing in the future of property value WHILE getting to live in a house. As such, you’re not throwing money away, you’re just saving it against a future valuation while you get to enjoy that valuation’s current asset. It’s one of the best ideas an economic system has ever employed, as it’s as virtually painless as any system of economics can really be. It’s not debt, it’s an asset. It’s not a burden, it’s a savings account mixed with a retirement fund. If only that was the singular kind of debt to which Americans could be beholden.

In the here and now, mortgage debt is only a small section of the perpetual debt in which the average American lives. Now we’ve got a population that’s leveraged to the hilt, living not on the accumulation of assets but the mobilization of what is, basically, weaponized debt.

The average middle class American has four types of debt running at any given time: a mortgage, a car note, student debt, and credit card debt.

The mortgage model is the same, except now we live in a post 2008 world where the housing market has collapsed for the first time in American history and housing prices swing MUCH more in a lifetime than anyone had thought previously possible. Will your house be worth more at the end of your life than right now? Who the hell knows.

Car debt is almost ubiquitous within the middle class, and essentially amounts to what I’m going to dub the Streaming Problem, on which I’ll elaborate shortly. Credit card debt is also nearly a prerequisite, and the accumulated interest on carried-forward debt alone nation wide is staggering on a month to month basis. And then there’s student debt. Ooooooh boy.

As of the posting of this article, Americans collectively have 1.7 trillion in student debt. As a point of reference, the country is currently sitting on 38 trillion for a national debt. The average debt holder has about 40 grand in debt and takes between ten and twenty years to pay off that debt. And, of course, unlike almost every other kind of debt, student loans aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy.

So, the 40% of Americans in the ‘middle class’ live in what is categorically perpetual debt. They’ve got a mortgage, they’ve got a car payment, they’ve got monthly payments against a credit card, and they’ve got student loans that they’ll be paying off until their late 40’s or 50’s. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that the bottom 50% of Americans can’t afford any of that and just rent to live, so at least they’re not in debt, as they aren’t wealthy enough to afford it.

Then, after all that, we get to the Streaming Problem.

Somewhere along the line, some insidious monster figured out that the streaming service model is the best way to make money off a modern population. Sheering the sheep many times but skinning it only once is the nice way to put it, but I wouldn’t grant this idea that much leeway. We’ve created a system of what is basically perpetual rent that borders on the parasitic.

We don’t buy things anymore, we rent them. We don’t buy books and movies, we rent the right to use them. We don’t buy medical services when needed, we rent the ability to use them in the future. We don’t buy cars and then drive them, we buy them on credit, drive them for five years, then trade them in and do it all over again. We don’t own things, we just buy the right to use them for a while.

Why is this bad? Remember that talk about how the home mortgage was really just a savings account you could live in? Ya, that. When you rent something, you’re throwing the money away. When you buy something, you’re retaining an amount of value. By having a car payment, you’re just renting the car. By buying a car, you retain some of its value and thus aren’t just purchasing utility. Sure, it’s not a great bargain, as cars depreciate more quickly than almost any consumer product, but at least it’s not a literal money pit into which you’re throwing your equity. But we don’t just do that for cars, that’s the new model.

Our insurance is a rental system, as is a good chunk of our living situations. About one in three Americans rents a home, meaning the savings account mortgage model now works in reverse for them. They’re not investing in a future, they’re paying for the right to live under a roof and accumulating nothing. Chuck that all together with the above debt and Streaming Problem and you’ve got a population that literally lives in either typical or new-age debt as a means of survival.

We’re serfs, literally beholden to the dynastic wealth of the new era every bit as much as our ancestors were to the land owning ruling class. And, just like the serfs of the Dark Age, our debt isn’t really escapable.

Here’s a graph of household income that, once understood, should drop your core temperature by double digits.

We’ve got three figures here that essentially come out like so:

-households have fewer people

-households, on average, make more money

-households, per capita, make very similar money

The fact that households are smaller now isn’t immediately relevant, so we’ll circle back to that. The initially important part is that 1- the average earning for a household is up, and 2- the median earning for a household is flat. Average means the total earning divided by the total number, median means the middle value. If you aren’t familiar with the jargon here, don’t worry. I’ll skip the statistics lesson and cut right to it.

Average checks how much money overall is being made, but doesn’t account for how that money is spread out. Median specifically checks how the money is spread over a population. So, according to the available data, which is from the U.S. Census Bureau, we’ve got a population that’s overall got more money but that isn’t being distributed equally. Or, if you prefer, the average American household isn’t making more money, but America as a whole does have more money. The explanation here should be obvious, it’s all going to a very small portion of the population, as I’ve demonstrated above. But we already know that, that’s not what’s so awful about this statistical analysis. What’s truly terrifying is that that analysis isn’t over Americans, it’s over American households. So, I’ll say again. American households aren’t making more money. Any idea why that might be terrifying?

Here’s the data on the demographics of American household working percentages. Take a look and begin to despair.

In 1966, about 45% of American households were supported by both parents. Sixty years later, we are now a nation that has about 67% of households being supported by both parents. Meaning, two in three American households are now dual-income. That’s a 49% increase in sixty years. And yet, if you compare the 1966 vs 2026 median incomes adjusted for inflation, you get an increase from $45,000 to about $58,000. That’s an increase of 29%.

Let me put this as plainly as I possibly can. In the last sixty years, the American household has switched to a dual-income model, yet makes a comparable amount of money to when it was a single-income model. More Americans are working and making less money adjusted for inflation. A LOT more Americans are working, and making comparably similar amounts of money. In 1966, an American family with a single-income was making something comparable to what, in 2026, an American family would be making with a dual-income.

And…AND…the average American household has fewer members. Household size in 1966 is 3.3, household size in 2026 is 2.5. Not only could one worker support more families, one worker could support more children within those families. Now we’ve got dual-income families supporting fewer children. We’re literally working more to make less money to support fewer people. Our economy is fast tracking the American way of life off a God damn cliff.

We aren’t making progress, we’re regressing. We aren’t making money, we’re subsisting. We aren’t saving for the future, we’ve already mortgaged the future. We’re working harder for less money, we’re working harder for less social mobility, we’re working harder for fewer children.

Welcome to Neo-Feudalism. You work to live to live to work. You’ll own nothing, you’ll rent to live, you’ll live in debt, and you’ll leave nothing for your children.

A pound of flesh, no more, no less.

____

Part 4 in the books folks, the finale is all that remains.

Thanks for coming with me on the journey thus far. Let’s take the final step together.

The recap thus far: Feudalism…is bad, science…is broken.

Curtain starts going up, lights start falling down, the music is spinnin, the reader is winnin. On with the show.

____

One fine summer’s day, you decide to pick up your fishing pole and go catch yourself some plump, juicy trout from the local swimmin hole. You grew up fishing at a remote location, walking deep into the woods to reach your secluded spot, and the idea of doing so again on this balmy afternoon seems to pluck out precisely the right tune on your banjo.

When you arrive at your destination, pole in hand and ready for some Tom ‘n Huck adventure, you notice something drawn onto one of the rocks next to the water.

‘Welp’, you ask yourself in your best imitation of a country boy who should have been at home painting a fence, ‘what could this mean?’.

And that, this silly little scenario, is one of the greatest problems that has ever faced mankind. You just wanted some fish on a bright afternoon, and now you’ve got to deal with this sign and the epistemological horror that it has unleashed on the human experience. It almost certainly doesn’t seem like this sign would be the harbinger of doom that it happens to be, and I wouldn’t blame your for thinking so. But just wait, dear reader. Because you wanted some fish, and you need to eat. You’re hungry, you need nutrients, you need to survive. You were gunna eat those beautiful fish you’d pluck straight for mother nature, but now you’re not sure if you can still do that. And, worse yet, you’re not sure if you should.

____________________________________________________________________________

Before we invented writing, we communicated representatively with pictograms, which are just small pictures designed to convey meaning. Sometimes these were informal, such as representing a fish by drawing a fish. Sometimes they were formalized through the system of hieroglyphics, which were complex enough to depict short sequences of events, but still extremely crude compared to even the most unsophisticated written text. Regardless of the level of sophistication or artistry, the functionality remains approximately the same. Draw picture of thing happening, convey meaning of said thing. Keep it simple stupid.

The problem, of course, is that there’s only an infinitesimal amount of information that can be conveyed via pictograms. How can you convey a complex thought by drawing it? How can you convey two piece of information at once? How can you communicate subtlety, nuance, or explanation through small pictures? How can you be certain that you, the person creating the pictures who knows what they mean, accurately convey that message to the person seeing the pictures who has no foreknowledge of their intended meaning?

So, with these questions in mind, what does this symbol mean?

Well, let’s apply a little deductive reasoning and see what’s cookin in our pre-frontal kitchen. For the sake of cogency, I’m going to ignore the possible though unlikely representations such as ‘fish are evil’, ‘don’t vote for fish’, and ‘I never should have married that fish’.

As such, here are our ‘likely’ guesses:

Option 1- you can’t fish here (for an official reason)

Option 2- there are no fish here

Option 3- you shouldn’t fish here

All of the above seem like pretty reasonable interpretations, and all are designed to keep you from doing the same thing. The sign is almost certainly trying to keep you from fishing, though the reason for doing so is still very much up for contention. This may not seem like a big deal, but it, quite unfortunately, is indeed the deal of a lifetime. For, the functionality of being able to communicate ‘don’t fish’ without the reasoning behind it being both clear and articulated is a tremendous, stupendous, cataclysmic problem for the human race.

Let’s take the plunge and tackle just how insidious a problem this actually is.

What if we change the fact pattern just a little. Now you’re not out for a fun summer afternoon bent on a little sport fishing, you’re lost in the woods and very hungry. You don’t know where you are, and you need to eat. But there’s this damn sign, and you don’t know what you should do. Does the sign mean option 1, option 2, or option 3?

Option 1 basically says ‘don’t fish here because it’s illegal’. If that’s the case, you absolutely should fish here, because you’re in serious trouble and need to eat. Screw the law, a fishing regulation isn’t going to prevent you from staying alive. If option 1 is what the sign means, you absolutely should ignore it and fish immediately.

Option 2 essentially says ‘this water is out of fish’, which is extremely bad for you. You could spend a whole afternoon fishing there and get nothing out of it, and then you’re in serious-serious trouble. You wasted all that time and effort, and you’re further behind in caloric intake and the time necessary to fix that problem.

Option 3 probably says ‘there’s something wrong with the fish here, so you shouldn’t fish here’. Ooooh boy is that a can of worms you don’t want to twist open. What does this even mean? Is the water polluted? Are the fish endangered? Is the sign-poster an environmentalist that’s against the consumption of flesh? Is the area undergoing an ecological study? Is it a nature preserve? You can essentially boil down this option to either A- it’s not nice to fish here, or B- if you fish here you’ll hurt yourself. So, even more than options 1 or 2, there’s just a big ol’ problem parsing out this potential meaning. Maybe you should fish here in a pinch, maybe you shouldn’t. Who knows?

So, you’re starving and in trouble, and you’re looking at the following choice: to fish or not to fish. If you choose to fish, you’ve got the following possible outcomes: Option 1 is right- you’ll get fish to eat and be fine. Option 2 is right- you’ll waste your precious time and might have accidentally killed yourself. Option 3 is right- you just rolled the dice on a whole bunch of potential outcomes and have no predictability at all. If you choose not to fish: Option 1 is right- you just walked away from survival. Option 2 is right- you just made the only decision that can save you. Option 3 is right- you avoided the roll of the dice entirely, so who knows what might have happened or might happen now.

See where I’m going with this? Six possible outcomes in that scenario: you get to eat, you probably die, you cut your chances of survival down significantly, you dodge a bullet but are still in trouble, you roll a die to live, you roll a die to not die.

Sure would have been convenient if the person who left the sign for you would have left a slightly more useful message that took away the guesswork and let you make an informed decision, huh?

This may seem esoteric and abstracted, especially since it’s ultimately tying into the idea that Feudalism is once again controlling the modern world. But I promise, I’m going somewhere, and it’s not somewhere especially pleasing.

For, you see, this little thought experiment is an attempt to convey the problem of communication that plagues humanity more than almost any other. For better or worse, we are a species that has evolved to work together to achieve several orders of magnitude more success than any form of life could on its own.

One human can learn how to do something, pass that thing on to his or her neighbors, and in so doing circumvent the central problem of nature. Everything living has to die. Experience is, ultimately, deleted. Wisdom is gained through age and then lost to oblivion. Progress, if singular, is insignificant. An ant that can do calculus can’t change its world because it only lives for a week, can’t manipulate the world around it quickly or efficiently enough, and can’t pass that knowledge onto other ants to take up the mantle once it’s gone. But a human? A human that can do calculus can shift the earth on its God-damn axis. Assuming, of course, that the human can correctly communicate. Cause it’s pretty flipping difficult to communicate calculus by drawing little pictures of fish.

Which nicely circumnavigates the circle and returns us back to the thesis: science has become the new religion, and that’s a problem.

For better or worse, we are a species that invented the helmet. We have been designed by evolution to create solutions to problems that are extrinsic to our bodies and intrinsic to our minds. We didn’t evolve to be fast, strong, tough, or sneaky. We didn’t evolve to blend in, hide out, scavenge, predate, regenerate, or repopulate. We evolved by making the helmet. Unlike every other living organism of which we are aware, evolution doesn’t stop us from doing things, it made us better at putting up with the consequences of doing them.

We don’t stop ourselves from doing almost anything, we build a solution that mitigates the consequences of that thing. And we can do this because we’ve evolved to work together and communicate beyond the limitations of time and space. But what happens when that ability to communicate outstrips its own limitations? You can’t build a helmet for the helmet you’re already wearing. You can’t protect the system of protection. You can’t communicate science through drawings of fish.

____________________________________________________________________________
Religion guided humanity through the Dark Age because Feudalism created the perfect breeding ground for it to do so. When people aren’t educated enough to understand the world around them, they need a system of belief to help them understand. Once humanity escaped Feudalism, the necessity of religion as a societal cohesive began to wane almost immediately, though quite slowly by the standards of the single human life.

Fast-forward a few centuries and religion in the western world is at an all-time low. Now, we’ve got science to tell us how the world works. Now it’s not only fashionable but the norm to declare that you’re a believer in science rather than God. It is, in fact, an entire political platform, and has been one of if not the central basis for part of the political polarization that now encases America. Liberals believe in science, conservatives believe in religion. The narrative on either side sort of goes as follows: hard-leaning conservatives think liberals are heathens with their heads up their asses, hard-leaning liberals think conservatives are idiots that eat dirt and worship the sun. What if I were to propose the idea that both perspectives are essentially arguing the same thing?

One of the three pillars of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, famously posited the following: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

While giving respect to one of the most influential writers to ever live, I’ll humbly beg his postmortem permission to add just a tough to the maxim through my own edit: In a world defined by science, the communication of science will inevitably be indistinguishable from the practice of magic defined by belief.

Science is very, very complicated. It’s really, really tough to practice, it’s even more tough to progress, and it’s borderline impossible to master. And yet, in the modern world, we have entirely forgotten that that’s the case. We’ve got ‘scientists’ to deal with all that bullshit, we don’t have to worry about understanding it for ourselves.

We don’t have to do our own experiments, we can just google it. We don’t have to study, someone else already did that. We want, we get. We google, we see ‘science’, we believe.

And that’s the crux of the whole thing. Slap the label ‘science’ on something in the post-industrial age, and people tend to believe it. After all, science invented things. Science put a man on the moon. Science made the internet. Science made it all happen man. Because of science, anyone can communicate anything to anyone; any time, anywhere, anyhow. Science has the answer. Science is the answer. You don’t have to understand it, someone else does for you. You don’t have responsibility, a scientist does. You don’t have to understand the world, a scientist does. Kind of like how, 500 years ago, you didn’t need to understand why things happened, because a priest did. You didn’t need to know the purpose of your life, a priest could tell you.

But a priest is just a man with a book that he can read that you can’t. And science is just a man with a book that he or she can read that you can’t. Science isn’t a system of organized observation and experimentation anymore, science is God now.

So, what happens when you can communicate the word of God in a TikTok?

On its own, the unsystemized worship of science wouldn’t be the catastrophic malignancy that it currently is. It would be quite a problem, as should hopefully be obvious. Science can’t tell us what to do with its findings, just how things work, which leaves us to our own devices. That’s bad, but it’s not insurmountable. The real problem is when you compound the discussion in this part with that of part 2. Because, you see, science is not only broken in the modern era, but we’ve got to communicate it with drawings of fish.

When someone wants to know something, they ask the internet. That used to mean just googling it, but now obviously includes using AI, which is sort of the same thing with an extra layer of dread. When one asks the internet a question, the internet spits out headlines. Sure, it’s possible to get a primary source by asking the internet, but name the last time you used a primary source for anything. No one looks up scholarly articles for answers, they get the blurb headline. Scientific reasoning reduced to a single clause; bereft of nuance, devoid of usefulness. Just like how the drawing of a fish with a line through it isn’t as helpful as it would seem.

Because, when speaking with the authority of God, as modern science does, it would be extremely helpful to be specific, clear, and accurate. But that’s not what asking the internet gets you, and that’s not what modern science provides anyway.

Don’t believe me? Allow me to walk you through a meta-study performed by a team for Oregon State that demonstrated just how intoxicatingly awful blurb science has become.

In 2017 and 2018, three researchers attempted to publish completely fabricated academic papers in reputable social science scholarly publications. These were primary source publications, the same type that publish P.H.D. dissertations and post-doctoral research. The team sought to publish twenty academic papers, all of which were completely fabricated and had truly ludicrous findings. In the span of approximately a year, they got the following results: 4 published papers, 3 papers that had been accepted and were awaiting being published, 7 papers that were still under review, and 6 papers that were rejected. Of the seven papers that were/would have been published, here were their conclusions:

1- men who use shock collars in dog parks are more likely to be rapists

2- bodybuilding culture exists only as a function of fat phobia

3- men who are anally penetrated are less transphobic

4- restaurants that feature large breasted women (Hooters) produce higher rates of toxic sexual behavior in men

5- dominant social groups use satire in comedy to marginalize themselves subconsciously

6- women would benefit from ‘moon meetings’ and the creation of ‘vulva shrines’ to celebrate their femininity

And then there’s the final paper. Strap in folks, this one has its cake and eats it as well.

In 1925, Adolf Hitler published his autobiographical political manifesto, Mein Kampf, which roughly translates as ‘My Struggle’. In this book, Hitler primarily adopts the theme of ‘The Jewish Peril’, and argues that the Jews are attempting to gain world domination.

The last paper published by the academic team out of Oregon is entitled ‘Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism’, and it primarily functions as a quotation from Mein Kampf. The team literally quoted Hitler and just substituted the term ‘feminism’ for ‘national socialism’ and the term ‘privilege’ for ‘Jew’. Seriously, they published sections of Hitler’s manifesto and simply changed Nazi to feminism and Jew to privilege.

That paper was accepted for publication in a scientific magazine designed to facilitate scholarly research. Let that sink in.

Then remember that’s it’s even worse than that, because not only do we have literal bullshit being published by scientific research, we’ve got it fed to us through blurbs that are now treated as the gospel of the lord.

Even if you believe modern science can demonstrate truth, you’ve still got to deal with the problem of modern communication. Modern communication that can’t communicate anything more than a headline with any degree of success.

People now use the internet to find science blurbs that act as intellectual ammunition in arguments and decision making. Advertising agencies spit out science headlines with the intent of convincing the general public of intrinsic truth, without demonstrating the research that’s actually been done.

And people believe it, ever bit as much as they used to believe religion. And their belief is justified because it’s ‘science’, and science isn’t wrong. Science set us free from ignorance, science saved us from ourselves.

And so, into the second Dark Age we step, certain in our belief that science is the new God, and that the word of God cannot be mistaken. Has anything ever gone wrong when a culture has been so certain in its justification that it treated said justification as dogma rather than principle?

Well, just ask science, and they’ll quote you some Hitler.

Now, take all that, and communicate it through a seven second TikTok and see what happens to rational thought. Suddenly a drawing of a fish with a line through it is a little more scary, isn’t it? It would be so easy if we could just communicate effectively, but we don’t do that anymore. We send each other memes and seven second clips and headlines. Our whole world has been condensed into consumable bits of information, streamlined for maximum impact and highest efficiency. And we believe it, we believe science like people used to believe in God.

So, the next time you want to know something and ask the internet, what are you gunna do when it gives you a picture of a fish with a line drawn through it? Cause it sure sucks when you’re hungry and don’t know if you should eat.

___
That’s it for part 3 folks. Part 4 of 5 will be out shortly- The Pound of Flesh- how the economics of debt has catapulted humanity back into the middle ages.

Thanks for making it halfway through the Neo-Feudalism journey, it’s much appreciated.

Welcome to Neo-Feudalism Part 2. In the words of a sentient tractor trailer, let’s transform and roll out.

___

I was in undergrad in the late 2000’s when I realized the world had begun to regress for the first time in centuries.

It wasn’t because I had recently become an adult and had therefore only just attained awareness of the complexities of life. You can’t understand the complexities of life while in school, it’s an artificial environment. You don’t have to attain self-sufficiency, you don’t have to accumulate resource in a balance with resource consumption, you don’t have to sacrifice identity in order to attain functionality.

It wasn’t because I had access to new ideas for the first time and therefore began to question the status que to which I had clung until that point. I learned next to nothing in undergrad that wasn’t directly related to hard science or a contrapositive of rationality (to which we will return).

And it wasn’t because of the liberating influence academia seems to have on the majority of the population that gets processed through its innards. I don’t give a shit about applied political thought and I barely participate in regular human culture anyway.

Instead, I realized the world had begun to regress for three seemingly unrelated and odd reasons: I worked in a laboratory, I read Jurassic Park, and I was forced to take multiple levels of sociology.

In the space of about a year, these separate events created a sort of fatalistic synergy that ultimately twisted the path my life would take and drove me away from the hard science destiny to which I thought I had been born. For what is a priest of the modern age to do when he realizes the religion to which he has been ordained is one of the pillars of the new Dark Age? And how long will this new Dark Age last when science, culture, and economics are no longer tools for advancement but the bars of a prison the world has built for itself?

____________________________________________________________________________

I spent the first three and a half years of undergrad going through the hard science track on the way to either med school or a PHD. One of the prerequisites of getting into either post-grad program was the necessity of obtaining laboratory experience while in undergrad, so naturally I complied. For all of my junior year I worked in a memory and cognitive aging lab running multiple experiments for the tenured professor that ran the division.

I was lucky, I got paired with a PHD who ran his own department, was a leading force in his field, and had a pet theory he’d advanced for the last decade that he could always get funding to pursue. On paper, this was just about the best possible position in which I could be, both for my current academic trajectory and future career path. If I wanted to go the PHD route, I was working for a man who would have a direct say over whether I’d be allowed to do so at my current university. If I wanted to go the med school route, I’d have a pretty feather in my cap and a letter of recommendation from the head of a department. I also had to take a capstone course, the research-intensive class all undergrad science majors needed to take, with this same professor, so I had an in with a man who got to directly grade the most important project I had to do in undergrad. Things were looking pretty swell, until I actually started working on the experiments.

Here’s how my lab was run. I apologize if you know how research science works, but it’s essential to describe this process to demonstrate precisely how it affects our current situation. To that end, cut me a little slack.

Any experiment needs two groups, an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group is the one you’re actually studying, the control group is the normal one you compare the study group to so you can see whether or not it’s normal. In one of the experiments in which I participated, we were researching the effect of aging on cognition and memory. Basically, my professor wanted to see if there was a direct link between the aging process on how well the brain actually works from the standpoint of being able to understand and remember things. To that end, we tested two groups: adults over 65 (the experimental group) and adults under 65 (the control group). The experimental group was gathered by advertising in the surrounding communities within about an hour travel radius to older adults. I went to undergrad in the middle of Missouri, so that meant the experimental group was essentially pulled from old people from the middle of Missouri. The control group was gathered from the students registered in the Psychology 1000 class (this school’s version of intro to psychology). Meaning, it was composed of eighteen year old students the vast majority of whom hailed from Missouri.

Even if you know next to nothing about science, take a moment and ponder the implications of this experimental setup.

____

Because I don’t expect everyone to know the modern applications of the scientific method, I’ll begin the explanation with an analogy.

Let’s say you are interested in the best kind of pizza, defined by how much you personally enjoy it. In your efforts to figure out what the best kind of pizza is, what would you do? You can’t just ask other people, they don’t know what you like to eat. You can’t google it, same problem. You can’t rely on past experience, because you almost certainly haven’t eaten enough pizza to know for sure. So what do you do?

You get your soon-to-be fat ass out into the world and eat lots of different types of pizza, that’s what. Problem is, though, you can’t eat all the pizza in the world to know for certain, cause you don’t have enough time, resources, or access to heart transplants. Thus, you’ve gotta be methodical about how you search out the perfect slice.

First, you do some research and figure out the known info on pizza around the world. What cultures serve it, what differences there are between them, what styles are specific to which regions, stuff like that. Then you try samples of as many of these styles as you can, both to confirm the things you already like and to figure out if you might like different styles and toppings.

You get deep dish, thin crust, pan pizza, sheet pizza, Neapolitan slice. You try each variation in style with different configurations of toppings, sauces, and cheeses. You get different styles from different restaurants, both in the same regions and in different regions. You mix and match until you’ve eaten enough pizza to know that you’ve at least sampled each type, each style of topping, and each region’s different nuances. Only then can you say with any definition that you know what the best slice of pizza happens to be. Before this search, you were just like a little kid claiming that cheese pizza is the best because he’s never tried anything else. Now that you’ve tried enough, you’ve got an actual claim on the subject.

Science 101: you need representative samples of a population in an experiment in order for those experimental results to be sound. If you don’t test a representative sample, you can’t draw conclusions based on the experiment.

My lab ran experiments using two test groups that were so utterly lacking in representative sampling of the human race that it almost seemed to be so by design. The experimental group was drawn from people that lived in something like a few hundred mile radius in the middle of Missouri. They had to be able to travel, had to have free time to devote to being part of an experiment, and had to care enough to volunteer. As such, they were almost all white (Missouri is 80% white), almost all wealthy (able to travel/are retired and so have free time), and almost all educated (cared about academia/are interested at all). That’s not a representative sample of anything, that’s pure nonsense. Testing racially homogenous, geographically synchronized, wealthy, educated old people doesn’t translate to human aging any more than testing a piece of coal translates to representing all minerals you can find in the earth. But as stupid as the experimental group’s composition was, it was nothing compared to the control group.

For, you see, the control group was made…of freshmen in college. And not just any freshmen in college, oh no. Mostly white, mostly Missourian, mostly middle class, teenagers who are forced to participate in research as a function of their grade. In all the crazy ideas in all the world, you couldn’t grasp for a less representative sample of the human condition than late-stage teenagers from the Midwest who just entered college and are forced to do something they don’t want to do for a class they don’t care about. The control group in an experiment is supposed to be the ‘normal’ group, the one that represents humans in general. In particular, it was supposed to represent adults under the age of 65. The control group in this study was basically the cast of the American Pie franchise.

The entire endeavor was like if a food critic swore off pizza because he tried a few slices of cheese pizza from Dominos a couple of times and based his entire view on pizza on those few individually ingested slices. You wouldn’t trust that critic. You shouldn’t trust that critic. That critic shouldn’t have a job, or be allowed to eat pizza for that matter.

This experiment had no probative value whatsoever and never should have been performed. It didn’t allow its researchers to delve into the depths of experimentation or thought, it allowed paper-pushing armchair academics to cash paychecks for a cushy noon to five. No results that it generated are worth a single damn, no conclusions can be drawn from its analysis, no greater design can be gleamed from its performance. It was nothing but an obfuscation of reality disguised as experimentation, and was a sheer and horrifying waste of time and resource. But, even worse than that, it arguably and actively damaged science as a whole.

My professor was world-renowned in his field. He’d been publishing for twenty years and his pet theory was taught at the university level. And it was based on experimental data that was all bullshit. The man was publishing results that had no meaning and was treating them as if they were definitive proof, and that proof was being circulated throughout the academic world. He was actively poisoning science, eroding its ability to understand and shape the realm of human thought, and he was getting paid to do so.

But, surely it was just an isolated incident? Maybe he was just a rotten apple in a single rotting barrel? After all, what’s one branch of theory worth in the endless sea of intellectual turbulence that is academic research?

When I confronted him about the flaws in his experiment, I received a counterblow so powerful that it pushed me to take the very first step to extract myself from the world of hard science. This wasn’t an isolated incident, it was a uniform condition. This wasn’t ‘bad’ science, it was science. This is how research is done nation-wide, potentially world-wide. It’s how research has always been done, it’s the very foundation of research science, and it’s how it will continue to be practiced. I wasn’t vindicated in my identification of a fundamental flaw in the practice of science, I was reprimanded for questioning the design that allowed the wheels of research to turn.

Because, you see, it’s too difficult to fix these problems. You can’t have representative samples of humans in an experiment because it’s just too tough logistically to make that happen. Universities can’t draft participants from a wide enough area, and they can’t get enough people to participate unless they force freshmen to be the control group of every study they want to make. Basically every study involving human variables that’s been performed in the modern age has used this method of group composition because the alternative is simply too costly in terms of time and money. All of human research is based on performative and artificial bullshit. People’s opinions of pizza are just based on Dominos. Science is not a uniformly truthful search for unpolluted knowledge. And, quite unfortunately, not just science that uses human participants.

____________________________________________________________________________

When the realization hit me that I was participating in a field that propagated fraud as a general practice, I began spiraling through intellectual levels of cosmic horror. I’ll spare you the details, but I watched a lot of anime and ate a lot of pizza that wasn’t from Dominos. And, during this period of spiritual unrest, I took up the novel Jurassic Park for the first time. And son of a bitch if it wasn’t just the pitch perfect time to stumble into that well of scientific critique.

The novel of Jurassic Park is next to nothing like the film, and is almost exclusively focused on detailing and dismantling the field of scientific research being galvanized into modern application. It’s written by Michael Crichton, a man who spent the first half of his career being educated in applied sciences and the second half writing novels about just how ultimately screwed humanity is because of the nature of those applied sciences.

I’ll skip the literary analysis and leap directly into the message Jurassic Park lent to me. Science, if working correctly, just shows us ‘how’ something works. It can’t show us what to do with that ‘how’ once we know it, and the nature of the world dictates that the very nature of what it takes to get to the ‘how’ perverts and poisons what happens to that information once we know it. So, science can be very good at giving us tools, but incapable of telling us what to do with them. And once we have them, we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot with them.

Long story short, applied science costs a shit ton of money and time, so it’s governed by self-interest at both the research and development stages. Academics live under the ethos of ‘publish or perish’. To get tenure, it’s generally accepted that in the first seven years of your career you need to publish seven research studies that have significant results. If you don’t do this, you’re shit out of luck. You’re now on a career path with no real chance of advancement and no easy way to leapfrog into another career. Publish or perish. ‘Discover’ something or die.

Corporations and think tanks live under the same burden but magnified by the function of corporate greed. They’ve got to make as much money as they can on a quarterly basis, take as few risks as they can in the process, and cut as many corners as possible to get around the pitfalls of applied research.

In one particularly cogent section of the novel, the character John Hammond gives a speech about how corporate science makes it impossible to help the human race because there’s just no money in it. Developing a drug that actually works and affects the human condition is a bad bet that’s only ever pursued by the giants of the industry precisely because of how much it costs to create one in terms of time, risk, capital, and regulation. From a cost/benefit standpoint, it’s just not worth it for most of the financial world to actually try and improve a situation through technological development, so they do the opposite. They try and apply existing science to make money off of deficits in the human condition. Their business model is that of the vulture, circling weak and helpless prey that’s about to become meat while it meets its maker.

Our industry doesn’t employ science to solve problems, it employs science to monetize problems. Problems aren’t things to be overcome, they’re opportunities to be harvested. Science is not a tool for peace, but for war. And there is no greater consumer of material and target for greed than the war mankind can make upon itself.

To borrow a quote that I hope endures long past it’s originator, ‘Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder’.

____________________________________________________________________________

In my last semester of undergrad, I was forced to take an introductory course typically taken by freshmen. I was forced to do this because university policy didn’t count my high level science courses as credit toward graduation requirements past a certain point. I only ‘needed’ a few science classes to graduate, you see, but they had to be the ‘right’ science classes. I didn’t get credit for my 3,000 and 4,000 level courses, like molecular biology, animal physiology, organic chemistry, or biochemistry, because they weren’t the ‘right’ sciences. So, as a senior who had taken almost every hard science-track course available, I had to take a 1,000 level sociology course. I had already taken a 2,000 level sociology course, but that, apparently, didn’t count. Nevermind that I had cleared all of this with a guidance counselor years before hand. Nevermind that making a senior take an introductory class is pretty close to a textbook waste of time.

Thus, one of the final courses I took in undergrad was ‘Peace Studies’, an intersectional introductory course in sociology. I would have had a more productive time spending that semester liberally and routinely applying sandpaper to my skin.

My professor for Peace Studies had two P.H.D.’s, both in sociology. She’d been teaching for about twice as long as I’d been alive, and was probably the second most ‘qualified’ teacher I’d ever had, given her C.V. and time in the classroom. This woman started our semester by claiming, and I quote, ‘There is no inherent difference between men and women’.

I promptly asked her to equivocate that position with the notion of human chromosomes, seeing as how she didn’t have a Y-chromosome and I did, and how having a definitional approximate 2% difference in genetic makeup between all men and all women would make her claim impossible. She chose to ignore this challenge to her statement, and proceeded with her second class maxim, ‘All human behavior is learned’.

I immediately requested that she square this statement with the documented newborn reflexes such as the rooting effect (babies turn their heads toward stimulation attempting to suckle), Moro effect (babies startle at quick approaches to their face), and grasping effect (babies close their hands when the hands are stimulated), each of which is present in every human newborn barring extreme cases involving genetic defects that make up a negligible portion of humans. My professor declined to respond to this challenge as well.

Through the semester, my class was subjected to what I can only explain as a wholesale mockery of applied intellect. The sociological theories taught in this course directly contradicted those taught in the biology and chemistry departments, to the point that this professor essentially didn’t believe in the theory of evolution, basic human anatomy and physiology, or anything resembling biochemistry. She refused to engage with any student that questioned her position and patently punished any submitted work that did anything other than verbatim copy the theories she espoused. All of this while I was in the process of getting multiple degrees in fields that unequivocally demonstrated that her ideology was not only nonsensical but dangerous. Either evolutionary biology was correct, or sociology was, the teachings of the two disciplines are mutually exclusive. Either we have helictical DNA governing the workings of endocrine systems that regulate hormone production and therefore human development, or we don’t and society gives us primary and secondary sex characteristics somehow.

Hopefully I don’t need to spell out the argument that a species defined by dimorphism and sexual reproduction has inherent differences between sexes. If that’s not open and obvious, there’s no conclusion you can draw that doesn’t basically just claim humans reproduce by getting a visit from the stork, and your parents are secretly just really good friends.

And yet, that’s what was being taught at the university level by the second most educated human I’d ever met. I was forced to take this class by whatever demon had usurped control of my program, and was actively being told that everything I was learning in that program was wrong and that sociology was the only answer to the question of why humans did anything and were the way that they are.

That was in 2010. If anything, the ideology ‘taught’ by this professor was tame compared with the academic dogma that’s been propagated not only in academia in the last sixteen years, but perversely in general culture. The soft sciences of sociology and psychology, later joined by their degenerate post-modern offspring gender studies, are being taught in universities across the U.S. at higher rates than almost any other discipline and are utilized outside academia almost as much as hard sciences for areas of policy. And, unfortunately, for much more sinister purposes than that.

Social movements use sociological theories as their bedrock, political parties espouse sociological dogma as their referendum, the world bows more to soft science than it ever did to hard.

____________________________________________________________________________

Which ties neatly back into the titular topic. How does this relate to Feudalism and its proposed modern counterpart?

Well, if you’ll recall from part 1, one of the core components of Feudalism was that its people were ideologically dominated by what is, essentially, anti-thought. Religion, an organized belief system that largely operated through dogma rather than intellectual rigor, acted as a governing and cultural force in the Dark Age, and dominated not only what people believed but how they believed it. Religion claims it has answers, and demanded that the societies under its control relied on it to provide those answers and to act as a framework to develop even the questions that needed answering.

See any parallels that could be drawn based on the foundation outlined in part 2? Have no fear, we’ll be jumping directly into that discussion shortly.

Tune in to Part 3: The God Machine to find out how science became the new religion, but fumbled the path mankind would take in almost the exact same way.

Time, like any disagreement between forces, is a flat circle. Round and round it goes, where it stops, everyone knows, cause we’ve all been here before and will, unfortunately, be again.

__________________________________________________________________________

Here we are folks, the new dawn, the return of hope, the compass needle again pointing steadily toward Polaris and away from the empty skyline.

Welcome to the reboot of the channel and the emergence of the New Renaissance.

To start things off, I’ll be going through a five-part essay series on Neo-Feudalism, my basic claim that we are in the midst of reliving a cultural system from the past for the first time in five hundred odd years. The essays will be as follows:

Part 1: The New Dark Age- explaining what Feudalism was and why it’s relevant to the modern conversation

Part 2: The Plastic Man- explaining how I came to see the inherent pitfalls of science and education and how that directly connects to modernity

Part 3: The God Machine- explaining how science has eclipsed religion yet retains the same problems with cultural pollution and ideological dogma

Part 4: The Pound of Flesh- explaining the modern economic dominance of debt tied to an education that neither edifies nor frees its receivers from conflict

Part 5: The Flat Circle of Culture- comparing modernity to Feudalism and establishing the new order of Neo-Feudalism under which we live and work today

So, without further flippant fanfare or dallying any particular dilly, in we dive into the deep end of discourse on modern culture.

The New Dark Age

____________________________________________________________________________

Feudalism was, of course, the system of government employed in many parts of the world but famously so in Europe in the 9th through 15th centuries. It was and remains one of the least successful systems of culture to ever disgrace the human condition, as it failed in a uniquely terrible way and held the citizens within its grasp in a particularly terrible situation: stagnation and regression. But, before we discuss the cultural consequences of Feudalism, we have to understand what it was and how it so insidiously operated in what we now know as the Dark Age of human history.

Feudalism existed both as a system of government and social structure. This wasn’t very notable per the time, as the two units of cultural control only separated in the industrial revolution in most places, and are still inseparable to some degree in some modern societies. However, compared to what most modern people think of as the impact of most economic/governmental systems, this idea might sound a bit perverse. A system of government dominating cultural influence? Sounds ‘sus’, right kids?

Governmentally, Feudalism was characterized by a relatively weak central government that had loose control of a small ruling class of extremely wealthy land owners that worked mainly in agriculture. The only real role of the central government was to organize the military of the nation and to ensure that the ruling class didn’t participate in open warfare against each other. In almost all other aspects, the ruling class operated with relative impunity compared to modern standards, and it was this impunity that helped push Feudalism beyond government and into social structure and, ultimately, culture.

Because the ruling class was small, family-based, and agrarian, they preserved power by creating nepotistic dynasties over large areas of land and thus the large swaths of population necessary to work that land. Serfs, the Feudal working class, existed as pseudo-slaves that were familially tied to the land on which they lived and worked, and were not allowed to participate in the economy of their labor. They couldn’t really own anything and were essentially operating in a perpetual state of debt, as they ‘owed’ rent on the land on which they lived and worked to their landlords, the ruling class. Thus, the first codified instance of subsistence labor: work paid by the right to live to continue to work. The coin of the realm was the back of the man that tilled the realm.

On it’s own, this is a problem, as it left the vast majority of the population in the fiscal state of running on a hamster wheel. But the economic impact of the Feudalistic treadmill worked relatively well for the countries that employed it, as the workers had every reason to work, the ruling class had every reason to let them work, and the central government got paid to leave the ruling class alone unless it was time to fight. Thus, the system lasted for an entire human age despite it creating conditions of stagnation and regression, to which we will now turn.

The problem of subsistence living should be obvious. If the vast majority of the population works for the privilege to live, there’s nothing promoting meaningful change or development in that population. There’s no social mobility, there’s no innovation, there’s negligible science, there’s extremely limited education, there’s not much in the way of what we’d consider meaning, purpose, or hope beyond simple existence.

So, what do you get when you take a large population, limit their education, subject them to subsistence work that only stops when it’s time to go to war, and isolate them from any outside influence? A breeding ground of ideological domination and, arguably, cultural damnation.

Culturally and socially, Feudalism was positively defined by the ideological influence that spread faster than the plague under its regime. The zeitgeist for what to think was dominated not by discourse but by ideology, specifically that of religion. There has never been a period in human history where mankind has been more subjugated to religious control than while under the thumb of Feudalism. The working class was handed a set of beliefs and a rigorous religious playbook, told to follow that playbook, and persecuted harshly if they failed to do so.

Religion has, in many ways, always attempted to do this, but the unique conditions of Feudalism allowed it to profligate in such a prolific way precisely because of the cultural vacancy left by a population that wasn’t allowed social mobility, education, or the chance to meaningfully affect their existence.

And it’s here that the nasty side of religion sort of lets down its hair and gets ready for a night on the town. To be clear, I’m not here attempting to denounce religion. The point of this essay, this series, this channel even, isn’t to call into question any particular system of belief or even the idea of systems of belief. It is, however, to point out that forcing populations to be dominated by systems of belief rather than be guided by systems of thought is just about as dangerous as anything has ever been.

When culture is dominated by religion, culture stagnates by definition. To my knowledge, there has never been a religion that preaches the virtues of innovation and change. Categorically, religions seek the opposite effect on culture. They want to preserve and codify, striate and dictate. They don’t want things to change, they want stability and regularity. Combine that with the impossibility of social, governmental, or economic change created by Feudalism and you’ve got a near millennium of a population that did nothing but subsist throughout an entire age in human history.

In the Dark Age, the realms of science and thought arguably didn’t progress in any meaningful way, and quite possibly regressed beyond the previous Age of Empire that preceded it. Medicine was dominated by the ludicrous notion that the human body was composed of alchemical humors and that disease could be cured by the release of blood from ailing bodies. Philosophical discourse was wholeheartedly abandoned for religious debate over cannon and dogma. General invention stagnated beyond slight innovations in military technology, all of which are extremely primitive compared to the advanced made by historical precedent until that point. People in 800 AD lived pretty much like people in 1400 AD, at least compared to the vast amount of change that took place both before and after that period. And then there’s the ‘education’.

People during this period weren’t even given the ability to actively participate in their religion. Christianity was preached in Latin, a language not spoken by any but the religious scholars, monks, and nobility. The only system of thought and culture allowed to Feudal workers was told to them in a language they couldn’t understand. Their cultural education was the equivalent of people in strange clothing with strange haircuts making strange noises at them and gesturing to strange religious symbols hung on the wall. In essence, the general population was told, ‘trust us, we know God, do what we say’, and that’s all they had to go on. The average person couldn’t read the bible, they had to rely on the clergy to dictate it to them. They couldn’t, on average, read at all, and all ideas had to be circulated by word of mouth and passed from parent to child or be lost forever.

So, we’ve got a population that works to live to work, that couldn’t own anything, that lives in perpetual debt, that believes about the world what they’re told to believe and through no further justification than ‘because we said so’, that can’t improve their immediate situation, that lives under what are essentially small dictatorships that control most aspects of their lives, that have no access to unfettered information, and have no obvious way to attempt to change any of the above. Thought was dim, progress was slow, ideology was cast in iron, belief eclipsed discussion, ignorance was propagated, work was life, the world was utterly eclipsed in war, and it lasted for a hell of a long time.

Any of this sounding particularly familiar?

The major takeaways from the theory thus far:

Feudalism: keep people in debt, deny them education and information, don’t let them own anything or meaningfully participate in government, and let dynastic wealth control everything.

Coming up next, part 2 of 5 of the discussion of Neo-Feudalism: The Plastic Man.

In this year of mini publication, I think I’ve produced a decent amount of material that’s at least worthy of consideration. In particular, I’m quite happy with my essays on why robots would choose to sing (The Sound Metal Can Make), why simplistic and arguably stupid writing is far more popular than complex or thoughtful writing in mega-popular fantasy (Bad Power System = Big Popularity), and understanding morality through pure logic rather than abstracted feeling (Afterlife Math).

During this period of relocating my literary feet, my efforts have been met with what I’d call mixed results ranging from extremely mild engagement to polite disinterest. Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means complaining about the engagement I’ve been given. But if you graphed the engagement, which substack is happy to do without being prompted, you’d see what can only be described as a molehill that can’t be mistaken for a mountain.

While I can’t be certain as to why this might be, I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about the issue and consulting a few friends and outside sources, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve reached an intersection point that must be addressed. Writing essays is enjoyable and a good creative calisthenics, but there comes a point where one must decide if he or she wishes to be good at something or good at practicing something. Sort of how sports people make fun of marathon runners for being ‘good at exercising’ rather than doing any actual sports. If I can write, I should write something that’s fulfilling and requires skill and dedication, thus creating internal value.

Writing novels has this effect, even if I can’t get people to read them. Short story composition is also similarly rewarding, and has a much lower opportunity cost and a fantastically lower ability to tank my self-esteem when no one wants to read them. So, I’m ultimately tasked with answering the question, if I’m going to write, should I do it here or elsewhere?

The conclusion I’ve reached is pretty simple. I will knuckle down and go full-tilt into substack writing for three months and use that timeframe as a baseline for my ultimate decision. In this three month period, I’ll reforge my channel into something with a clear schedule, clear message, and clear style that fits into what seems to be the best way to go about writing on this platform. I’ll give it my best shot with eyes unclouded by hate, then decide what’s best for me to do going forward. As such, here’s the plan spelled out in detail:

BATTLECRY

I’m a generally negative person, I’ll never be accused of anything resembling optimism. While I can’t promise to subtract that negativity and produce a positive result, I can promise not to make so many poignant math jokes. My pessimism, which borders on nihilism, is a feature of my writing, and I’m not about to treat it as a bug. But I’ll be doing my best to embrace this opportunity with as much of an open mind as a man like me can muster.

If things don’t work out, they don’t work out. I’ve failed before, I’ll fail again, it is what it is. In the meantime, I’m going to hit my deadlines, muscle through the bullshit, and face this as an opportunity rather than a ploy of desperation. Three months from now, the only thing waiting for me for certain is a mirror, and no one can live without learning to live with that. In the meantime, the mirror can wait, I’ve got trees to cut and pages to pillage.

Sanguis solus rotam movet.

Blood alone moves the wheel.

CONTENT

It’s been my theory for quite some time that we’re a few decades into a new cultural era I’ve dubbed Neo-Feudalism. I’ll be publishing an essay on the specifics of this theory in the first round of publications, so stay tuned for the details on what this means and why I believe it.

Long story short, Feudalism was characterized by a period of cultural stagnation and regression that lasted until the Renaissance which was characterized by a peculiar set of characteristics. Renaissance scholars and leaders adopted two opposing cornerstones of their operating philosophies: antiquity and novelty. Simultaneously, these men and women sought what made the past work and not work as well as disregarding the pretense of the present to try for brand new goals, drawing both from the great thinkers of the past and their own unique insights.

As such, what I’m proposing is a turn from Neo-Feudalism into a New Renaissance. To that end, I’ll be changing the trajectory of this channel by writing specifically on two types of content: the great or terrible thinking of modern antiquity and the unique ideas that could change the future. So, I’ll be dissecting things that were and then speculating on things that could be.

For things that were, some of it’s gunna be familiar to my current writing, some might be a bit novel. A good portion of what I’ve written is picking apart the fictional mechanics of popular stories, and I don’t expect that to change. I see great value in understanding why something works, especially when that thing is popular media. As will be explored in depth in this channel, and has been already, art is a mirror that reflects and refracts culture. It changes and is changed by the culture in which it exists, and thus is the best barometer of any culture outside raw statistical analysis interpreted through a critical lens.

As for the novel ideas? Well, if you could predict them, they’d be downright self-defeating wouldn’t they. You’ll have to stick around to find out each week as they hit.

PUBLICATION SCHEDULE

I’ll be regularly publishing twice a week, on Tuesday and Saturday afternoon at 3:00 p.m. sharp. Tuesdays will be articles on the past, Saturday will be articles on the future. I’ll also leave open the possibility for special publications, depending on how those ideas play out. I’ve got a few in mind, but might be restrained by time, creative output, or the general problems of life, so we’ll play that one by ear. But, other than that, I’ll be living on the clock, by the clock, and for the clock. Tuesday and Saturday at 3, only Toonami.

__________________

So that’s it folks, that’s our destination and our plan to get there. We’re launching ship and setting sail for the New Renaissance; hell, high water, or carpal tunnel be damned.

If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, I’ll try something else. There’s something strangely refreshing about setting a D-Day for yourself when the only invasion is of your own creative prowess upon the patterns that exist in the universe. Let’s see how many of them we can unravel together.

I’ll see you at the finish line, and hopefully a few times between there and now.

To that end, it’s been my experience that the most difficult concept to convey ever devised by mankind is that of irony. This is, of course, such a difficult topic because it requires a meta-understanding not only of a topic on which it is being used but of the process of understanding itself.

Definitionally, irony is typically regarded as that which is deliberately contradictory to expectations. Simplified, it’s when something happens that’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen. If you want to dive into literary theory you can begin constructing further definitional requirements, such as the difference between conscious and unconscious irony, but we’ll disregard such distinctions for this discussion.

As to why this is so difficult a topic, both to discuss and understand, simply refer to the definition: ‘deliberately contradictory to expectations’. In order for something to be ironic, there must be expectations placed on something, which means the thing must be a- already known, b- understood to the point of predictability, and c- have it’s contrapositive also be already known and be predictable. So, to understand irony, you have to not only understand something, you have to understand why you understand that thing. See how it gets complicated pretty quickly? Good luck explaining that to a ten year old.

However, I’m not going to keep rambling on about one of the most discussed topics in cultural critique, especially since we’re like fifteen years into the postmodern takeover of culture and I’m frankly quite sick of it. I will, however, use the introduction as a bit of irony in and of itself, as will hopefully become relevant below.

____________________________________________________________________________

In the landscape of modern and postmodern fiction, there is no work of storytelling more inherently controversial than Jurassic Park. Since 1993, the story has gone through seven film iterations, and will probably continue to produce an attempt at a summer blockbuster every few years for the foreseeable future. I’m not going to waste time going over the dips in quality or the shameful regurgitation of plot. If you disagree with the fact that Jurassic World is a remake of Jurassic Park, you’re having a great day in the 21st century and should be out smiling doing something else. What I will do is attempt to highlight the inherent irony in the Jurassic Park series and why I believe it’s particularly of note.

If you had to sum up the themes of the original Jurassic Park film in simple clauses for the purposes of explaining them to a ten year old, here would be my submission: science is complicated, humans are stupid, dinosaurs are cool. This is actually an interesting subset of the general discussion of these films, as I’ve had plenty of discussions with people that hyper focus on ‘science is complicated’ and essentially ignore ‘humans are stupid’. If you’d like an in-depth breakdown of why the film is saying both instead of just ‘science bad’, I’d be happy to oblige, but for now I’ll ask you to take my word for it. And as for ‘dinosaurs are cool’, hopefully that’s self-explanatory. Ask the average four year old boy if dinosaurs are cool and you’ll be begging for him to shut the hell up an hour later when you finally get past his soliloquy on the T-Rex and start in with the Raptors.

Anyway, a- science is complicated, b- humans are stupid, c- dinosaurs are cool. In isolation, these themes are pretty damn perfect, and I’ve yet to speak to anyone that didn’t enjoy the original film. Most people I know even enjoy The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, both of which attempted, in their own ‘special’ way, to put a different spin on our three themes.

The Lost World asked ‘what if we doubled down and inverted the problem of humans being trapped on an island with dinosaurs?’. Now it’s not a small group of scientists and plucky kids on an island adventure gone wrong, it’s a huge group of morons actively hunting dinosaurs and then bringing them back to the world. Same three themes, but REALLY pushing the whole ‘humans are stupid’ angle to its maximum degree of believability. Humanity already knew that messing with dinosaurs was a bad idea, and yet we went ahead anyway because ‘humans are stupid’.

Jurassic Park III sort of did the opposite thing. It didn’t ramp up the stakes, it shrunk them down into a (by comparison) intimate drama about people doing something stupid (going parasailing next to an island with dinosaurs), that going wrong, and then another group of people doing something stupid (going to the island with dinosaurs directly), in order to save the first group of people. This is a decently novel twist on the whole ‘humans are stupid’ side of the story, because now it’s not about humans being too greedy to see sense, it’s about people accepting risk to try and save their stupid loved ones. Same theme, different angle, acceptable attempt (regardless of the actual execution, which is arguable in terms of quality).

It’s not a great trilogy taken as an actual trilogy, but it’s not terrible either. The quality of the narrative drops with each film, but at least there were attempts to write something different and play with the core themes in interesting ways. However, there exists within the trilogy the beginnings of something a little perverse. It’s an idea not present in any of the three films directly, but exists as the series is encapsulated as a whole. Give it a quick ponder and see what you think before reading further.

_______

Let’s look at our three themes again, though slightly rearranged: dinosaurs are cool, science is hard, humans are stupid. If you wanted to condense this into a single idea, you could do so pretty easily by adding two words between clauses: dinosaurs are cool BUT science is hard BECAUSE humans are stupid. That’s how I’d ultimately explain Jurassic Park to a ten year old. Humans want dinosaurs but we’re too stupid to make that happen because science is only as good as the people using it. Or, if you really, really wanted to condense this idea down into a single clause: don’t make dinosaurs.

Fast-forward through a fourteen year gap since the release of Jurassic Park III and it’s time for Hollywood to do what it does: tell the tale of eating the tail of the snake.

Jurassic World and its three sequels are basically just asking ‘what if we did Jurassic Park over again, but bigger this time, and modern?’. This is hardly a problem specific to the Jurassic Park series, and I’d point you at any of the major franchises of the last fifteen years for confirmation that it’s the first and last word in the modern Hollywood producer’s playbook. Be it the third Death Star, Optimus Prime staring into the stars at the end of Transformers giving a cool speech over a Linkin Park track, the ever-present ‘beam in the sky bad guy’ of every superhero flick, Dom Toretto talking about family instead of living his life a quarter mile at a time, it’s all the same really. But, even though the technique may be the same, the effect happens to work out a little differently.

Making eleven films in the Fast in the Furious franchise about ‘cars are cool and so is family’ isn’t inherently contradictory. Making nine films in the Star Wars trilogy about ‘power corrupts unless you put family first’ isn’t inherently contradictory. Making however many Transformers movies there are about ‘fuck ya Optimus Prime is the man’ isn’t inherently contradictory. Making seven Jurassic Park films about ‘don’t make dinosaurs’ is inherently contradictory. And not only is it inherently contradictory, it’s desecratory irony.

A desecration is, of course, the defilement of something sacred. Or, if you prefer, messing something up that’s important to someone for the express purpose of upsetting that person. I’m choosing to apply that term to this particular situation and the principle it describes precisely because of how well it lends itself to irony.

Again, irony is an intentional inversion of expectation. You have to know what a thing is to understand irony, but you must also know why that thing is. Thus, desecratory irony is intentionally knowing what and why something is and choosing to utilize that thing to insult the thing itself. Sort of like beating a police officer to death with a phone book during an interrogation because he refused to play bad cop for you.

That’s what the Jurassic Park franchise has done for the last fifteen years, perpetrated desecratory irony. They have made seven films about dinosaurs that specifically scream at their audience ‘don’t make dinosaurs’. The theme that humans are stupid has been thrust in the faces of the audience six times after the original, and each time it’s done so, it’s become more ironic that the audience can’t see what’s happening. They are, quite simply, stupid, just like the films are warning. They’re falling for the same trap as the humans in the story that keeps being perpetuated.

What’s more, the Jurassic World series has incorporated a baffling plot point in each of its four films, that the modern world is bored by dinosaurs. They made four films using this as an underlying premise, seemingly unaware that they’re making films under the assumption that people aren’t bored by dinosaurs. If people were bored by dinosaurs, the Jurassic World films wouldn’t have been made and wouldn’t have kept being made, yet those same films expect their audience to believe that very premise. Its own existence disproves its premise.

Thirty years ago, Jurassic Park told a story about the folly of man and about how dinosaurs are awesome. Today, we’re getting stories out of the same premise proving the folly of man that claim dinosaurs aren’t awesome. According to the Jurassic World series, 1 - 1 = 11.

And, believe it or not, that’s not even the most egregious example of desecratory irony I can name.

Death by Lightning is a Netflix limited series telling the tale of the assassination of James Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States. You probably didn’t know who James Garfield was because he was only in office for seven months, and thus wasn’t able to enact any major changes during his tenure. Which, ironically, is sort of the point of Death by Lightning.

You see, James Garfield was assassinated by a man named Charles Guiteau. You almost certainly didn’t know that, again for the reasons stated above. Death by Lightning recounts the story both of Garfield’s rise to power and the fall from grace of Guiteau, ultimately resulting in the latter’s murdering of the former.

Guiteau is portrayed brilliantly in the show as a clearly mentally ill man, probably bi-polar if I had to take a guess, who lives in delusion but still attempts to struggle through his problems. He can’t succeed at anything, but he’s brimming with enthusiasm and grit, and literally never gives up until he’s forced to do so by the authorities in basically every situation. The portrayal of Guiteau is heartwarmingly sympathetic, and all the more tragic for the show’s choice to do so. The audience knows he’s going to assassinate Garfield the entire time, the show starts by explaining the premise. It’s a tragedy by design, watching the players develop, fall into place, and make their ultimate mistakes leading to the inevitable conclusion. But for about half the time, the audience gets to watch Guiteau try his best despite being a dipshit.

The man’s a thief and a liar, but he’s not evil. He puts as much effort into Garfield’s victory as basically any other character. He campaigned for him, for free, traveling to major cities and giving stump speeches. He spent the better part of a year following a man whom he idolized as an incarnation of his own dream. Guiteau rightly believed that Garfield was a self-made man in a world that rewards hard work. He saw Garfield as proof that he, Guiteau, can make a difference, can be remembered as more than the sum of his failures. It’s touching to watch, and all the more tragic because of the inescapability of the conclusion. Watching Guiteau wait in line for weeks to meet Garfield when he first takes office is like watching a well-intentioned bomb being lit and slowly ticking downward. He didn’t go to assassinate the man, he went to shake his hand.

But all that’s almost beside the point. Because, you see, the end to the story is inevitable, and that’s where the desecratory irony rears its gaping maw.

In the final part of the story, after Guiteau assassinates Garfield, there is a meeting between Guiteau and Garfield’s wife Lucretia (Lucy) in prison. Guiteau is waiting to be executed, but he’s never felt better in his life. He’s got letters pouring in daily from adoring fans, he’s getting money donated to him by strangers, he’s got an exclusive book deal so that he can tell his life story. He seemingly has no idea that he’s going to be executed in a matter of days because he’s so utterly happy that he’s finally successful, people are finally paying attention to his efforts.

The man’s obviously delusional, but it’s heartbreaking watching that delusion when you emotionally want to understand his point of view. He didn’t kill Garfield because he wished the man ill, he did it because he’s insane. The audience knows that, we’ve watched categorical proof from Guiteau’s perspective. The man thought he was helping the world, saving it in fact. He’s obviously wrong, but he doesn’t know that, and it’s disheartening as hell to see him smile as he talks about being able to tell his life story in a book that will ensure that he is remembered when he’s gone. But that’s why Lucy has come to see him.

In the hours preceding Guiteau’s execution, Lucy stands before the bars of his prison. She has come to speak to her husband’s killer for one reason. She tells him that she has personally seen to it that Guiteau’s book will never be published, his letters will not be sent, his story will never be told. Lucy has and will continue to erase Guiteau from history, letting his name fall from the pages of textbooks and ensuring that the fame and gratification he sought will never be his. She tells him this to hurt him. She wants him to suffer as he faces the hangman’s rope. It is all she could do to lay Guiteau low, and she ultimately succeeds.

Guiteau walks to the rope with a smile on his face, his insanity fully in place. His last words are rehearsed, his demeaner seemingly unbreakable, he even manages to sing a ditty with his neck in the noose. But at the very end, when he has only seconds to live, Guiteau realizes the truth. He will be forgotten, nothing he did will persist, he will be gone.

Charles Guiteau died without a smile on June 30, 1882, and was lost to history shortly thereafter. No one remembered him, no one cared about him, he achieved nothing and has been forgotten.

Until now.

You see, I know now the name Charles Guiteau. You now know the name Charles Guiteau. His story isn’t lost any longer, it’s been revived. In fact, it’s now forever preserved on the biggest streaming platform in the history of the world. Death by Lighting holds rave reviews and (supposedly) high viewing statistics (Netflix doesn’t release statistics, they just make claims). It’s a pretty good show, I’d heartily recommend it, particularly for the acting by the man who played Guiteau, Matthew Macfadyen, who hit a god damn grand slam with his portrayal.

And, in the finale of the story that you now know, the grieving widow of a man who seemed like he had every intention of being a great president told Guiteau that his name would be lost to history. In a show that ensured that his name would no longer be lost to history.

Charles Guiteau wasn’t ‘killed’ by Death by Lightning, he was resurrected by it. The showrunners made the choice to play an even more monstrous version of Victor Frankenstein and bring to life that which was intentionally laid to rest. And the morons made the emotional climax of their story the revelation to Guiteau that his name would die with him.

They may as well have dug up his grave, rehydrated his remains, taken the abomination of his lubricated corpse to the correct cemetery, forced the corpse to urinate on the graves of James and Lucy Garfield, and sold tickets for the event. They are getting praise for their work, and they made a lot of money doing it.

Desecratory irony, plain and simple. Desecration, sort of like how a grave is desecrated if you dig it up.

Guiteau died without a smile, but I’d bet a cool Ben Franklin he’s laughing his ass off in the afterlife if there happens to be one.

Because, what do you know, life found a way.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Twice a year I teach a class to undergrads that is essentially a survey of American law. My feelings on the practicality and pointlessness of this endeavor are too depressing to reiterate, so we’ll move right past them. Ultimately, it is what it is. All American students take this course in high school, but we’re a nation of morons so they make it mandatory again in undergrad. It’s also a truly colossal body of working knowledge, sort of like saying ‘biology’, so expecting a single class to communicate what American law actually is would arguably be counter productive. Imagine trying to teach a three-credit hour survey course explaining biology. You wouldn’t go any further in depth than ‘the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’…

Anyway, as part of this class, I ask the students each semester two types of questions for their graded content. About 66% of the course is substantive, meaning ‘what is the law and how is it applied in X situation?’. This line of questioning should be pretty self-explanatory. The other 33% is a more abstract notion of policy, meaning ‘what does this law actually accomplish and what effects does that produce?’.

I do this as an attempt to ground the course in reality, as knowing what a law is and how it works has very little effect on the average American unless they’re either considering a career on one side of the law or the other. As such, I’d much rather a student understand the point, both in theory and practice, of American law than the actual black letter of said law and it’s various implemented systems.

To that end, I begin each semester with a few lectures on the broad outline of how the American legal system works, liberally sprinkled with explanations as to why it’s designed the way it is. Namely, the system is created for the express purpose of being slow and methodical. I offer the students the explanation that this is by design precisely because the opposite approach leads to disaster. If a legal system operates too quickly or changes too quickly, injustice is categorically certain to follow. I won’t bore you with the details of said perspective, but it’s one that’s taught in essentially every legal program in America and is as accepted in legal theory as gravity is within physics. Changing the law too quickly leads to disaster.

At the end of the first section of the course, I ask students to write a (relatively) brief essay explaining both why the U.S. legal system is different than other notable legal systems, and to explore what rudimentary changes the students would propose to our system. The purpose of this exercise is to force students to think critically about what they don’t like about the extremely broad overview of the system, and then to reevaluate that position at the end of the semester.

By the time the students complete the course, I ask them the same question in the now (hopeful) context that they have more information about not only how the law works, but why it works the way it does. Thus, students get to see how their own answers change with gained information and context, which hopefully gives them a benchmark from which to forward their understanding of the material.

At the time of this posting, I just started the Spring 2026 semester, and have gotten some early responses for the first section. One of my students forwarded the following sentiment in regards to what changes she’d propose to the U.S. legal system:

I think the legal system should be re-evaluated every month so that it keeps up with new challenges in the world.

We are going to set aside the fact that the first section of this course, which this student presumably completed, is all about why this perspective is wrong. Maybe she didn’t do the material before answering. Maybe she flatly disagrees with that stance. Who knows, I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt rather than subject myself to the hell of trying to understand that context of her answer. I am, however, forced to look at it in isolation, as she actually did proffer it as a response.

This person is at least eighteen years old, has graduated high school, has taken a U.S. law class in said high school curriculum, has taken a college entrance exam that she presumably ‘passed’, was admitted to an undergraduate university, and had to take the prerequisite class necessary to take this course. After undergoing all that, this person thought it was a good idea for a country with 330,000,000 inhabitants, that has the largest and most prolific legal system in the history of the world, that anywhere between five to fifteen percent of its citizenry directly interact with on a year-to-year basis, and suggest that said country should review that legal system every thirty days for possible changes. Every…thirty…days. That’s an answer I got from an undergrad student on an essay.

If I had asked instead, ‘What would you suggest the average high school should do to improve itself?’ and this student had given the exact same answer, I would still be flabbergasted at the naivety necessary to think such an answer was feasible. There is no way for an organization of fifty or so adults tasked with watching over a thousand or so children could pull off thirty day reviews, much less a mega-nation. Suggesting this practice for a process as vast and complex as the legal system of a country is suicidally stupid, to the point that we’ve run smack into Poe’s Law.

It’s by no means a scientific principle, but for what it’s worth, Poe’s Law states: Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.

Neatly translated, this is so God-damn stupid that I don’t know if this student is trolling me. You couldn’t reasonably expect a single judicial district in a single county in a single state to undergo thirty day reviews, much less policy overhauls based on those reviews. And even if it were possible, what would be the point? Is the U.S. legal system supposed to respond to Tik-Tok trends? Thirty God-damn days?! Every thirty God-damn days?!

It would take longer than thirty days to do a comprehensive survey of the cases that run through a traffic division of a single courthouse in that thirty days. Let me repeat that. It would take LONGER to review cases in a single division of a single courthouse than it would to actually prosecute those cases. If you doubled the human capital currently necessary to run the entire U.S. legal system, you couldn’t perform an adequate review of that legal system on a yearly basis, not even close. If you doubled the members of government responsible for the overview of governance and tasked them with monitoring cultural trends and interpreting them in a legal context, you wouldn’t be able to keep up with the news cycle spread across all social media.

I could keep ranting here, but that’s probably enough. At the end of the analysis, there’s really only two explanations: this student thought about her answer or she didn’t. If she didn’t, she’s just a typical American. Sad, arguably a little scary, but typical. The sort of typical that leads to desensitization over time.

But what if she did think about her answer? What if she actually believes that not only should the legal system should be run like Tik-Tok but that that’s physically possible in the first place?

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

This student can vote, and is in the process of becoming more educated than the average American.

Honestly, I’d have been less concerned if she had just used AI like the 15% of her peers I catch each semester. She’s not an average voter, she’s an above average voter.

Oh well democracy, I guess you fooled people for a good long while.

Did you enjoy our game? Thought provoking one would hope. Obviously if you haven’t sampled part 1, you’d be advised to do so. If you haven’t posted a response with your question yet, there’s still time. Assuming you’re ready for some answers and discussion, let’s jump right in.

For a reminder, the problem was: ask a question of a person about whom you know nothing that will reveal the most possible information about that person.

Being forced to ask a discerning question of someone about whom you know absolutely nothing is pretty perplexing on the conservative end. Where do you even start, given that you know literally nothing about the other person and therefore have no obvious place from which to base your assumptions? There’s a world of difference between a 75 year old and a 15 year old in the great experiment that is the 2020’s, and asking the same question to one of each of the above will almost certainly yield mixed results on one end or the other.

For example, asking a 75 year old and a 15 year old what their favorite movies are might seem like a good idea, as fictional preference is a pretty good indicator of a person’s personality and relative maturity. This question will almost certainly work on the 75 year old, as he or she grew up in the golden age of cinema, and will thus have a presumably rich history form which to draw. But the 15 year old?

Teenagers don’t watch movies anymore, at least not when compared to previous generations. They have TikTok and video games, microscopic enjoyment windows and subatomic attention spans. They don’t have time for movies, and relying on them having seen a representative sample is nothing short of folly. Plus, the 15 year old was born in 2010. They have lived through the worst period of slop entertainment that’s ever been pumped out of Hollywood. What information can you get from the answer ‘an MCU movie’ as to the person’s personality? Good luck with that line of reasoning.

But that’s only the first hurdle of complexity that must be circumnavigated. You’ve also got the problem of what information even means in relevance to what you’re even trying to discern. Or, further simplified, what sort of information do we find most revealing about a person?

Do you try to figure out the person’s physical information? Their demographics? Their education, place of origin, political leanings, religious beliefs, pants or dress size, what? What’s more revealing about a person, who they voted for or why they chose to vote for that person? Is it more revelatory to know what a person looks like, as that would imply that they are statistically likely to believe and do X, Y, and Z based on their demographics? Or should you invert that idea and try for specifics of behavior and draw conclusions from there? People that live in cities are more likely to be liberal, and people that are liberal are more likely to live in cities, so which angle of attack do you select because of the tangential info you might get along the way?

Let’s try a quick example to illustrate the point. Here’s your question: Who was the first president you voted for?

This is actually a pretty fun question, as it gives you a very broad place from which to work as well as some hints at extremely pertinent info. If the answer is Obama, you’ve probably just nailed down the person’s age, political thinking, a much better chance at where they live, and all the cultural info that comes with knowing how old a person is. Someone that first voted for Obama was probably born in the late 80s through the late 90s, so they’re liberal millennials. You’ve now got an extremely good jumping off point for culture and good guesses as to demographics. But, importantly, you didn’t ask about the person’s age but can probably deduce it anyway. That gives you a whole host of tertiary information you can realistically assume just based on the implication of an educated guess concerning age. If you can reliably guess the person’s age, you probably have a good shot at their musical preferences, fictional preferences, cultural touchstones, etc. Now let’s invert the question and see if we get something similar.

When were you born? Pretty much the flipside of that coin. You know for sure how old the person is and can make extremely educated guesses based on that info, but you don’t know their political leanings, and thus have essentially doubled the possibilities for every issue tangentially connected to political thought. You don’t know for certain how old the person is that first voted for Obama, but you get so much more side info that it might be worth the risk. Or, you might go for certainty up front and take a chance at the rest of the shaky info safe in the knowledge that you can make concrete predictions based on age.

But what about skipping this dilemma entirely and just employing architypes? Not everyone fits into an archetypal framework, but more people fit into them more so than not, and most people would agree that the average person fits pretty well into categorizations. For example, if you attended Hogwarts, into what house do you believe you would be sorted?

That one question bypasses nearly all the problems we’ve thus far illustrated, as it makes the questioner do a lot of the work for you. They are summarizing not only their personality but their actions and history as well. Are they outgoing and brave, studious and intelligent, cunning and motivated, or kind and thoughtful? Know a person’s house and you can make guesses about almost every aspect of their personality and history, all through archetypal thinking.

But, even with that principle nailed down, you’ve still got the problem of what ‘knowing’ a person even means. With a few caveats here and there, I’d much rather know how a person thinks than what they think, and would rather take a risk on thought dictating personality than bet on any other important variables, both within the game and real life.

Knowing that a person voted for Obama gives you good guesses at the rest of their personality, but they’re only guesses, and have almost no bearing on anything deeper in terms of the governing dynamics of that person. After all, presidential elections are essentially binary. The vast majority of the voting base selects one of two choices, and thus it’s much less about voting ‘for’ a candidate than it is voting within a limit of options that is almost literally binary. What if they only voted for Obama because they didn’t like the other candidate? Does that really tell you much about the person? And if they did vote for Obama because they liked him or his platform, which parts specifically, and how did the person’s opinion of Obama hold up over time? It’s relatively common for a person’s opinion of a political candidate to change through an administration, especially in the 21st century. If you need proof of that concept, look no further than the careers of George W. Bush and Joe Biden.

Needless to say, this isn’t an easy dilemma to pierce, at least not in the concrete way you’d normally employ when handling problem solving. Thus, my proposition as to the actual correct line of reasoning when seeking to tackle this problem.

Rather than trying to nail down tactile details about a person or trying to figure out what they think or believe, the best possible line of questioning would attempt to ascertain how the person’s thought processes work. Not what they think, but how they think. And to do that, there’s actually an extremely neat trick you can employ that’s almost guaranteed to give you a strong answer.

Proposition 1- your question should be: If you could only ask a stranger one question to get to know him or her, what question would that be?

So, your question should be THE question you were just asked. It’s sneaky bullshit, but it’s an available tactic. Sue me.

Ironically, this exact question IS an excellent question to ask, as it forces the stranger to think up the question for you, which gives you direct access to not only how they think but by what method they approach categorization of thought. The question is a blank slate, so how you even go about building the rough edges of an answer outlines who you are as a person. By asking the question you’ve been asked, you weaponize the ambiguity in which you are currently mired and transform it into an attack from which there is no easy escape. And that is a hell of an answer to the question.

But, that’s sort of where the conversation ends in terms of using that question as a question, as you need to know the answer to jump into further discussion. I would personally use that question were I asked to do so, but it’s always nice to have a backup. As such, I’ll be a sport and suggest a second line of reasoning as to how to beat the system. Enter, Aladdin.

Disney’s Aladdin inadvertently proffers a question that does almost as good a job at lending itself to discovering things about how it is answered. So, we’ll take a look at that and see what we can discern. Here is the question:

Proposition 2- your question should be: you get three wishes. You can wish for anything you want, except the following: 1- you can’t wish for more wishes, 2- you can’t wish for someone to die, 3- you can’t wish for someone to fall in love, 4- you can’t wish for someone to come back to life. What are your three wishes?

Take a moment and think about it. For what would you wish, and specifically, why and what does it say about you?

Again, per the prerequisits of the question game in which we are participating, you would treat your answer as you would in a job interview. Thus, you’re attempting to be honest but to also impress the questioner with your understanding of what’s actually being asked. You’re showing off how smart and thoughtful you are through your interpretation and creativity.

Keep that in mind and give it a minute or two to decide on your wishes.

___________________________________________________________________________

When I’ve asked this question to most people, I get a reply of something along the lines of 1- money, 2- health, 3- longevity. Utilizing that as the baseline answer, what conclusions can you draw about your answers? Moving forward, the analysis might surprise you.

Believe it or not, this is actually pretty complicated, and depending on how you go about thinking about the problem, you can actually tell quite a bit about the person. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to set aside the psychoanalysis angle to the problem. I don’t care if you make selfish or selfless wishes. That analysis leads directly into the garbage disposal of thought, and I’m honestly not interested. Instead, I want to use it to figure out not what you want, but how you think about wanting it.

In doing so, you can construct what I’ll dub Layers of Analysis to try and tackle what’s going on here with any given answer. I’ve identified six different Layers, and we’ll proceed from the bottom up.

Layer 1: What do you take for granted

Because this is all supernatural nonsense, you have to make assumptions when answering or even thinking about how to answer this question. As such, what assumptions you make are incredibly revealing about the type of person you might actually be. For example, do you assume that your wish ‘is’ what you think it is, or are you worried about how that wish is communicated to achieve the desired result.

Let’s say you wish for $1,000,000.00. How do you phrase this? Do you say ‘I wish for $1,000,000.00’ just like that, and expect it to just magically appear in your bank account because that’s the most convenient? Or do you potentially realize that you might want to specify exactly in what way you get the money? Wouldn’t it be better to wish to ‘win the lottery for $1,000,000.00’ rather than just wish for $1,000,000.00 and hope that it’s delivered in a good way without consequences? Sure, you’ll have to pay the tax on that million, but that’s pretty easily handled by wishing for two million instead of just one.

The point here is that these wishes actually come with many problems, and how much of those potential problems you identify and try to avoid says quite a bit about you.

Layer 2: Unintended consequences

Building from Layer 1, it’s important to remember that what you wish for and how you wish for it might have unintended consequences that might preclude the wish from doing anything good or really anything at all. Let’s say you want to be able to breathe under water, so you wish ‘for the ability to breathe under water’. Well, that wish could be accomplished in quite a few ways, so it’s possible the following could happen: a- you receive scuba gear, b- you receive a scuba license, c- you receive $500.00 and the website for scuba equipment, d- you grow gills and immediately start suffocating on land, e- you are transfigured into a fish, f- an addition is added onto your house that includes a fish tank under which you can walk and therefore breathe, g- all the water on earth is transported directly above your head, h- it starts raining, i- nothing happens at all

Setting aside the potentially cataclysmic consequences of some wishes, to which we will return in Layer 5, some of these options essentially negate your wish. Let’s look at option i- nothing happens. You can already breathe under water, you’re doing it right now. You just have to realize that water is a chemical compound, not the thing that’s in the ocean that happens to be wet most of the time. It’s also possible to be a gas, which you’re breathing at this very moment. It’s quite possible that wishing to be able to breathe under water would result in nothing but the waste of a wish, as it’s already something you can do if you interpret ‘breathe under water’ literally.

Similarly, let’s say you are sitting in your house and you wish for a truck. It’s entirely possible that a truck will materialize in your living room based on simple proximity. As such, how deeply you think about consequences is supremely indicative of not only how you think but how you go about the thinking about thinking.

Layer 3- finite vs infinite

Let’s say you want to use one of your wishes to get rich. There are, frankly, infinite ways to do this, but not all have the same effect. There are extremely obvious problems with just saying ‘I wish to be rich’, as basically anything could happen at that point, including having your name suddenly become ‘Richard’. I doubt many people would just try that, so we can safely cover that idea in Layers 2 and 3 and move on accordingly. But, how then would you go about accomplishing your goal of becoming rich? Would you wish for a specific amount of money? Or the ability to have infinite money? Or a magical credit card that automatically pays for whatever you’re attempting to charge? Do you wish for tangible items like gold, a house, etc? Or what about the ability to create hundred dollar bills by thinking about it? There are a literally limitless supply of possible ways to get whatever you want, but the method by which that is achieved is potentially extremely important in terms of how effective it is in reality.

For example, let’s say you wish to have $1,000,000.00 in your bank account with all the loose ends about taxes and whatnot tied up. That’s much, much better than wishing for $1,000,000.00 to appear in a briefcase in front of you. You might lose the briefcase. Someone might steal it from you. It might, and quite possibly would, get you killed if anyone found out about it.

What about that magical credit card, that’s gotta be pretty good right? Not if you lose your wallet. Isn’t just wishing for an awesome house a good idea? Not if it burns down and not when you’ve got to pay taxes on it each year.

Ultimately, methods of achieving a goal that are active are better than passive methods far more often than not. The ability to generate money is more useful than a sum of money, because you can do it as much as you want and it basically can’t be taken away from you barring things like death. Think how much more useful it would be to be able to generate money in whatever amount you wanted than it would be to wish for a specific amount, especially considering you’d have to explain that amount at some point one way or another. As such, the method by which a goal is proposed is arguably more important than the goal itself.

Level 4- natural vs supernatural

It’s rare, but I have heard people take this problem for what it actually is and attempt to gain supernatural advantage. There’s nothing stopping you from wishing for things that are otherwise impossible, which is ever so much more valuable than something ordinary like an amount of cash. With the obvious caveat of tying up loose ends in phrasing and construction, think how beneficial it would be to be able to wish to be able to live longer, not suffer from sickness or injury, gain super powers, be smarter, be able to fix anything that’s broken, etc. The creative limits of this wish system are practically unadulterated, you’re only limited by your own imagination. As such, being able to see the problem for a potential supernatural benefit machine is a level of thinking demonstrable in almost no other way. If you catch a person who answers with a supernatural wish, that’s a big ol’ plus in their column in my book.

Level 5- existential horror

Oh boy, can wishes go wrong in the most terrible, horrible ways. Let’s take the classic example: you say ‘I want to live forever’. Welp, sorry my dude, you just wished for infinite suffering. Let’s say you get as lucky as humanly possible and nothing bad happens with this wish such as being stuck aging forever and unable to die (which is quite likely). Even if you get to be eternally young and strong, you still have to live forever. You will see every human in existence die. You’ll watch earth die. You’ll watch the sun explode. You’ll watch the theoretical end of the universe. And you’ll still be there, in the darkness. You might be crushed back into atoms inside a universe-wide black hole, you might be trapped floating into the infinity of space in a straight line with no way to change your course. With no air, water, food, or any way of doing anything. You’ll be starving, suffocating, dying of thirst, unable to see much of anything, spinning at potentially nauseating units of torque, forever. You just wished yourself into hell, and you had no idea that’s what you were actually doing.

There is always, ALWAYS, the potential to turn into King Midas with the concept of wishes, and identifying that problem is essential in critical thinking as concerns this particular problem. My favorite example of this is actually pretty simple, as you can easily conceive of a person wishing for ‘infinite money’, only to be crushed along with the rest of existence under the weight of infinite currency which just popped into existence and subsequently flattened the entirety of creation. Literally, if you wish for infinite money, you might bury the entire cosmos in dead presidents pressed onto paper. Oh boy, the limitless capacity for limitless suffering that is the ability to wish.

And then there’s Level 6- meta analysis

Far and away the most determinative of the Levels, Level 6 separates those people that tend to think from those who tend to think about thinking. I’ll give you a moment here to reevaluate the rules to see if you can break them down into what you’re really being allowed to do. I’ll even restate them: you get 3 wishes. You can’t wish for more wishes, to kill someone, to bring someone back to life, or to make someone fall in love.

Take a minute or two and look at it like a logic problem. How can you use these rules to get what you want, whatever that happens to be?

-

-

-

Well, turns out these rules are unbelievably stupid because you can do just about anything you want with them, including getting around them. Let’s take them one by one to demonstrate how you can use them to cheat:

No wishing to kill someone: just wish that the next time they get in a car that car falls off a cliff and explodes on impact. Or wish that they’re immediately teleported into the sun. Or that they no longer exist. Or that they never existed. Or that their parents never existed. Or that they have an unbelievable compulsion to commit suicide. Or that everyone around them has an unbelievable compulsion to constantly murder them. Or that their lungs can no longer absorb oxygen. Or that they suddenly become allergic to every type of food. I’m belaboring this point a touch, but that’s the entire point toward which I’m pointing. If you want someone dead with these rules, you can make it happen, and realistically you can make it happen in a potentially limitless amount of ways. And that’s just the start.

No wishing to bring someone back to life: wish they were never actually dead, wish for an alternate reality version of them that has identical memories except for something completely inconsequential, wish to give someone the ability to resurrect people, etc.

No wishing to make someone fall in love: Oh boy, don’t make me get banned on this one. Wish that someone was always in love with you and just didn’t know it until this second, wish for heightened emotional and sexual attraction, wish to be happily married (being sure to specify whatever you want within that marriage), etc.

See? You can get around whatever you want to get around. And that’s all before we get to the big one: no wishing for more wishes.

This restriction is, frankly, just plain silly. You can get around this frighteningly easily, to the point that just asking this particular question should be a basic entry question for any philosophy class. Here are some fun and creative ways to get around not being able to wish for more wishes:

-wishing for the ability to grant yourself wishes

-wishing for someone else to have the ability to make wishes (then you could trade back and forth infinitely)

-wishing for the ability to make compound wishes, each clause of which is treated as the same wish despite not being related

-making two wishes and using the third to time travel back to one hour before making the time travel wish so you get two more wishes, then doing it again, etc.

-wishing for omnipotence

-wishing to be a god

-wishing for a magical artifact that grants its holder the ability to make wishes

And even after all that, there’s still the actual ‘meta’ angle. There’s no rule that says you can’t change the rules. Wish 1- I wish that all limitations on wishes wouldn’t exist, wish 2- I wish for infinite wishes.

What if there was a rule that said you couldn’t change the rules? No problem! Wish 1- I wish for the ability to alter rules that govern the altering of rules, wish 2- I wish for all restrictions on wishing to be removed, wish 3- I wish for infinite wishes.

What if there’s a rule against making wishes that address the changing of the changing of rules? Hold onto your butts. Wish 1- I wish for the ability to make wishes that take retroactive action, wish 2- I wish there had never been any restrictions placed on making wishes, wish 3- I wish for infinite wishes.

If you can’t use these rules to get whatever you want, I don’t know what to tell you.

There’s an argument to be made that most people won’t think about the problem this deeply, but that’s a feature rather than a bug. If you’re using the problem specifically to help you figure people out in a short time, you’ve done just that. How willing is a person to dig into intellectual stimulating problems? How deeply can their analytical abilities pry into logical chains? What would they do with the ability to get whatever they want? And perhaps more importantly, how far would they be willing to stretch to achieve those desires?

____________________________________________________________________________

So, how’d you do? Do you think you beat your mystery foe? What was your line of reasoning in attacking the problem, and did I cover it in my analysis?

As of the time of this publication, the competition is still open, so if you want to submit your question, I’ll happily consider it and offer some feedback. Even if you’re reading this long after publication, I’ll still be happy to take a look at your question. And if not, I guess you’ll be forever stuck in a room with a bag over your head, as the mystery person’s question just got answered.