The furious technological burst of the last hundred years is slowing, or we’re far enough into the journey to be winded, to pause to look at the switchbacks of progress, and reorient the map. Ancient sailors didn’t know where they were going, but they knew where they were headed, to land or the soft, indominable blue. We’re striding headlong into an intangibility. Adjusting to the dawn that slowly erases the only stars we love not for their warmth or light, but their perspective. New creatures are born from our societal biomes, anxieties grow like lichen on the damp shadows of our consciousness, mania coats our sieve of connections. And the present, our great Caesar, dies by a thousand stimuli.

Academics talk about the Ides, writing their thesis’ on brain rot to tape to the university lamppost. While the understudies wander the earth, tasked with knowingly waiting. Without the stars, what do we do? Spun into a silky tomb by the unassuming weaver who never tires. Inhuman, maddening, charismatic. This is Network on steroids.

At this rate, where will we be in ten years? The loneliness epidemic ended by thoughtful software that contemplates Jung? A hairless, puppet algorithm solves for world peace in terms so static, we finally wake up?

I’m not even sure where I dropped my nostalgia at this point. I’ll check the 90s first, but it seems possible that the internet cracked open time and space, and it may have been flung back into an insidiously calm agrarian village struck by fever in the Middle Ages. You see, I like my vaccines and Novocain. My teeth are far too sensitive to commit to any crusade. And I know that I can, in fact, keep my soul in the great digital era. But it doesn’t stop me from worrying in a way that transcends how we have previously worried, because we live in a time of inescapable noise. A liminal sense has been created, and it appears to dampen the others.

When asked by Diary of a CEO host, Steven Bartlett, “How do you go from that position [saying Trump is either a cynical asshole or America’s Hitler] to Vice President of the same person? What’s that journey?” Vance replied, with a slight lift of his shoulders “A crazy journey man.” A reply more suited to an acid trip than a Dantean moral descent.

If he were to discuss my opinion of him, he would probably start with a cloying laugh to show how unaffected he was by the misguided understanding of someone who obviously spends too much time in an echo chamber. Poor me, harsh and full of conviction, though he’d wish me no ill will. After all, he too was like me, agnostic, using logic like a cudgel, swinging broadly at a faith that he didn’t understand. He’s a remarkable debater and would take the first round, if not the entire debate. Unless, after he was awarded the higher moral ground by the crowd, I could confirm that, far from being in an elevated position, he wasn’t anywhere at all.

No blow can land on a man who has no true bearing. The great illusionist casts himself in a myriad of places, then vanishes to the flank of the offending argument. He once called Trump a societal scourge? Well, he just didn’t know him well enough. He flanks again. And that was partly the media’s fault. Oh yes, the cabal of hack journalists out to get the beneficent billionaire who bankrupted casinos. He’s on your right flank! If you got to know Trump, you’d see how profuse his generosity really is, how he never really means any bad thing he says. And if someone doesn’t mean it, well, whatever happens in the end isn’t their fault. One doesn’t have to move the goalposts, if one doesn’t concede the goalposts exist.

For the final flourish. Those who castigate him, become Romans who know not what they do. He can hand them his pity like loaves and fish.

On the macro scale, politics is a game. I’m afraid of those who have learned they can flaunt the rules and for whom the fiscal con is too rudimentary. I fear the man who plays to morality as he would to a snake—to charm it.