Category: political philosophy

The Stranger Among Us

A Modern Parable

Tom Homan, Trump Border Czar, Fox News, July 2025:
“People need to understand, ICE officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them. They just go through the observations, get articulable facts based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions.”

U.S. federal agents stand guard while blocking a road leading to an agricultural facility where U.S. federal agents and immigration officers carried out an operation, in Camarillo, California, U.S., July 10, 2025

Scene 1: The Raid

The pre-dawn silence of a Central Valley farm is shattered by the low rumble of diesel engines. Unmarked ICE vehicles crawl down the dusty access road. A sudden flash of tactical lights. Barked orders. The field erupts in chaos.

Workers scatter like startled birds through rows of lettuce and beans. Shadows flit beneath the irrigation lines. A woman screams. A man falls.

The first canister arcs through the air, trailing white smoke. Then another. The acrid burn of tear gas mingles with the scent of overturned earth. Workers stumble, eyes streaming, choking on chemicals and fear.

Hector, broad-shouldered, quiet, sees only one thing: his son, Mateo, crouching near the equipment shed, toy truck forgotten in the dirt. Hector runs—faster than he has in years—dodging crates and shouting agents, lungs searing. A crushed weed clings to the cuff of his pants as he runs. He reaches the boy and pulls him close. They crouch behind a rusting disc harrow, trembling, Mateo’s small hands pressed to his eyes.

In desperation, Hector begins to pray aloud in Spanish through the burning air.

“Jesús, protégeme. Ten piedad de mi hijo.”

Out of the chemical haze, a figure approaches—not running, not afraid. A man in simple linen, worn sandals, dark hair, and a weathered face. His eyes are kind, though tears stream down his cheeks from the gas. He kneels beside them, placing one hand on Hector’s shoulder and the other gently on Mateo’s head.

He begins to pray—not in Spanish or English, but in the cadence of scripture:

“I was hungry and you gave me food… I was thirsty and you gave me drink… I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me.”

The sounds of boots crunching dirt grow louder. ICE agents round the corner through the dissipating smoke, rifles raised, armor clanking, gas masks covering their faces. They see three brown-skinned figures huddled together.

One agent hesitates. “Wait… who is—?”

Another cuts him off, voice muffled behind his mask. “Doesn’t matter. They match the profile. Bag ’em.”

The agents swarm. Zip ties bite into wrists. Mateo cries out as he’s yanked from his father, still coughing from the gas. Hector shouts in panic. The stranger offers no resistance—his gaze full of grief, not fear.

“Do not be afraid,” he says softly. “They do not know what they do.”

The agents drag them toward the transport van. No one asks the stranger his name.

Scene 2: The Hearing

A windowless immigration courtroom, sterile and indifferent. A fluorescent hum fills the air. The docket reads:

“JESUS — No Last Name.”

The defendant sits at the table, still wearing the dirt-stained robe from the fields. His feet are bare.

The judge, gray-suited and impatient, flips through forms without lifting his eyes.

“Do you have documentation establishing your legal presence in the United States?”

Jesus replies, softly:

“I have roots in this land older than maps. I have walked its fields and wept at its borders. I have come for the least among you.”

The judge sighs. “This court does not recognize mythology, metaphor, or messianic claims. Do you have a valid visa or asylum paperwork?”

“I was here before paperwork.”

The interpreter glances up but says nothing.

The judge shrugs, jots a note, and speaks without emotion:

“Absent documentation, this court orders your removal from the United States.”

He pounds the gavel. The sound echoes like a tomb closing.

The bailiff calls out the next name:

“González, Maria.”

Scene 3: Alligator Alcatraz

Deep in the Florida Everglades, forty-five miles from Miami, an airstrip rises from the swamp. Chain-link fences topped with razor wire stretch across the tarmac. Guard towers pierce the humid air. Beyond the perimeter, dark water reflects nothing—cypress knees and saw grass disappearing into mist where alligator eyes glide silent as death.

The official name is Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. Everyone calls it Alligator Alcatraz.

Inside the compound, heavy-duty tents and FEMA trailers house thousands. The hum of industrial air conditioning battles the crushing heat, never quite winning. Mosquitoes cloud the recreation yard. In the distance, something splashes in the canal—too large to be a fish.

Jesus sits on a metal cot, sharing his meal with a trembling boy whose parents were deported separately. He tends to an old woman’s infected foot with water and torn fabric. Around him, the detained speak in whispers—some have been here days, others weeks. No one knows when the final expulsion orders will come.

A guard leans against the fence, sweating despite the cooling units. “That one thinks he’s some kind of prophet,” he tells his partner, nodding toward Jesus.

The other shrugs. “Least he’s peaceful. Better than the ones who try to run.” He glances toward the swamp. “Though where would they go?”

That evening, Jesus stands at the perimeter fence, fingers resting on the chain link. Through the mesh, he watches the sun set over an endless maze of waterways and predators. Behind him, someone begins humming a half-remembered hymn. Others join in—Mexican ballads, Salvadoran lullabies, the songs of home, sung low through clenched hope.

Mateo sits nearby, no longer crying, but hollow-eyed. He stares at the fence, at the razor wire, at the guard towers with their searchlights that never sleep.

“He came to his own, and his own received him not.”

In a crack between concrete slabs, where a drainage pipe meets the ground, a single green shoot pushes through. Impossibly small. Impossibly resilient. The guards walk past it twice a day and never see it.

Jesus kneels and touches the tiny leaf with one finger.

He whispers something no one hears—a prayer, a promise, a word riding the night wind across the water, past the alligators and the pythons, past the razor wire and the searchlights, out into the vast American darkness where other hearts are breaking, other prayers ascending.

The detention facility sleeps fitfully in the swamp.

But the green shoot grows.

Method and Meaning in an Unteachable World

Prefatory Note

The following are two companion reflections—On Truth and Empirical Fact and No Arc, No Lessons—presented together under the shared heading Method and Meaning in an Unteachable World. Though each may stand alone, they are best read in conversation with one another. Both essays resist the comforting notion that history, literature, or art functions as teacher or guide, and instead consider interpretation as an act of encounter—provisional, situated, and shaped as much by silence as by statement.

The first essay explores the distinction between fact and truth, exploring how memory, intention, and metaphor complicate the act of knowing. The second rejects the idea that history bends toward moral instruction or cumulative wisdom, and instead proposes a posture of reflective attention to the recurring patterns and failures of the human condition.

Versions of both essays with full citations and scholarly apparatus are in preparation for future publication. What follows here is intended for open reading and contemplation.

On Truth and Empirical Fact

“You cannot step into the same river twice.”
—Heraclitus (Fragment 91, DK B91)

In the course of recent reflection, a distinction long known, but not always properly honored, must be drawn again: that between truth and empirical fact. Though often conflated in casual discourse, these are not synonymous—nor should they be.

An empirical fact is a datum: observed, measured, verified. It is the yield of experiment, the result of record, the artifact of sensory perception. That water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius at sea level is a fact. That a coin weighs 3.2 grams and bears a cross upon its reverse is a fact. That a battle was fought in the year 1066 may be supported by a host of facts: chronicles, bones, weaponry, et cetera. Such facts, when properly corroborated, are not unimportant. But they are not truth.

Truth, if it exists at all, is something larger, more elusive, more alive—not constructed by us, but encountered when consciousness prepares itself to receive what appears. It does not come when summoned, but when the conditions for its appearing have been made ready: doubt, humility, attention. It is apprehended in this prepared openness, grasped in the space between what is seen and what is understood.

Philosophers have long attended to this disjunction. Plato distinguished between the world of appearances and the world of eternal Forms, the former unstable, the latter enduring. Augustine found truth not in the fluctuating realm of sensory report, but in the divine Logos. Nietzsche, ever unsettling, dismissed truth as a “mobile army of metaphors”—useful, yes, but neither objective nor stable. Heidegger, resisting the reduction of truth to correctness, instead spoke of aletheia—not truth as correspondence, but as unconcealment, as that which emerges into view. And Gadamer—whose influence upon this approach is not accidental—taught that truth emerges in understanding itself, not as a proposition but as a happening, shaped by dialogue and historical consciousness.

Facts may be marshaled. Truth, by contrast, is survived.

Even intention, often treated as the surest witness to truth, must be interrogated. The poet’s intent, the author’s purpose, the painter’s design—these are not fixed coordinates but shifting recollections. Memory does not preserve; it reconstructs. And with each return to the well of what was once meant, the water tastes slightly different. Heraclitus observed that one cannot step into the same river twice—not only because the river flows, but because the self who steps in is no longer the same. So it is with intention. If asked now what was intended in a particular line or gesture, one may offer a reply—but it is a construction, shaped by who speaks now, not by who once acted. Intention, like truth, is not preserved in stillness—it is shaped in motion. It, too, is not possessed, but pursued.

In the poem At the Crossing, the aim was not to name truth—such a thing cannot be done—but to describe the space it haunts. The poem speaks of words that fracture, colors that deceive, touches that both reveal and withdraw. It ends not in assertion, but in a trembling, a silence where meaning nearly forms but does not solidify. A reader once dismissed it: “Life is too brief,” he said, “to spend in the space where meaning almost forms.” The impulse is understood. But the objection must be declined.

For it is in that space—that trembling margin—that life does happen. To live fully is not to claim truth as possession, but to encounter it as presence. Not to seal it in certainty, but to allow it to move, shadowlike, across the inner walls of the soul.

Empirical facts anchor us to the world. But truth is not what anchors—it is the thread we follow across the abyss.

And we follow it not with measuring tape, but with metaphor, with memory reshaped each time it stirs, with intention half-forgotten, and with the courage to walk where the light breaks, not where it rests.

No Arc, No Lessons: On Method, Encounter, and the Tragic Repetition of History

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’… It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”
—Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Each age brings forth its own imperative—shaped by its wounds, haunted by its questions, driven by its unspoken needs. The present is no exception. Whether in the study of history, the contemplation of art, or the exegesis of sacred or poetic texts, interpretation does not arise in a vacuum. It emerges from a condition: the place, the moment, the unease that calls forth inquiry. And yet, though each generation may believe itself newly burdened or singularly illuminated, the recurring gestures of human life belie that novelty. There are patterns, yes—but these do not confirm progress. They reveal persistence.

The idea that history bends—toward justice, truth, wisdom—is seductive. It offers shape to the shapeless, comfort to the anguished, and direction to the lost. But there is no arc. The metaphor distorts by promising what experience consistently denies. If history teaches, its students are unteachable. The same motives recur, the same errors repeat, the same vanities endure. Progress, when claimed, is often little more than a rearrangement of circumstance. The root remains.

The players do not change. Their names shift, their languages evolve, but their roles remain remarkably constant. Power is sought, justified, and abused. Fear is stoked and traded for security. Hope is minted into symbols, then worn threadbare. Love, loss, betrayal, glory, shame—these are the constants. The stages differ: the scenery updated, the choreography modernized. But the script draws upon ancient instincts. And the audience, again and again, forgets the last performance, believing the story to be new.

Images of Warsaw Ghetto 1943 and Gaza 2925 ruins ... same destruction, different players, same human patterns.

Interpretation, then, cannot rest on the assumption that knowledge leads to virtue or that understanding necessarily yields transformation. It may. But often it does not. History is not a teacher. Art is not a moralist. Scripture does not condescend to pedagogy. If anything is revealed, it is revealed despite the will to ignore, deny, or disfigure it.

This position echoes Walter Benjamin’s image of the Angel of History, whose face is turned toward the wreckage of the past even as a storm drives him blindly into the future—what we call progress. It stands also in contrast to the historicism that treats the past as lesson-book or path to telos. Gadamer reminds us that understanding is not methodical recovery, but an event of fusion between past and present. Yet this fusion must be entered with humility, not control.

Given the absence of reliable progress and the persistence of human patterns, interpretation requires a different posture—one that recognizes repetition, resists despair, and permits meaning to arise without demand. Method, in this context, must be understood not as a tool of conquest, but as a lens—no more authoritative than another, yet capable of bringing certain essences to the surface. Every method is partial, shaped by its assumptions, animated by its framing questions. No method sees the whole. Each reveals what it is attuned to find. Truth, if it appears at all, does so not as result, but as event—as something glimpsed when the interpreter is prepared to receive, not to impose.

Three words mark the contours of a fitting approach: nexus, interaction, and reflection.

Nexus identifies the place of convergence—where past and present, text and reader, artifact and witness intersect. It is not discovered in isolation, but emerges through relation. Interaction marks the dynamic movement within that convergence. Meaning is not fixed; it arises through tension, difference, and engagement. Reflection follows—contemplative, fragmentary, often incomplete. It does not assert finality but honors process. It acknowledges that memory reshapes what it recalls, that intention fades into approximation, and that even the most careful exegesis remains provisional.

This echoes the work of Paul Ricoeur, who reminds us that narrative, memory, and identity are always under construction—never final, always revised in the act of remembering. Warburg’s concept of Nachleben der Antike—the afterlife of antiquity—reveals how cultural symbols and images recur across historical periods not as static forms but as charged fragments, reanimated under new conditions, carrying both continuity and transformation in their repetitions. This persistence of symbolic forms across time exemplifies the broader pattern: not progress, but recurrence with variation.

From art, history, and sacred text, nothing must be demanded. They may instruct, but only when they are permitted to resist instruction. They may illuminate, but not on command. They may wound, they may deceive, or they may pass in silence. The encounter must be enough.

Empirical facts can be gathered. Archives can be organized. But truth, if it comes, does not arrive catalogued. It appears only when conditions are ready—when the reader or viewer stands not with certainty, but with openness. Not as master, but as interlocutor.

Too often, only the facts are preserved. They are worn as tokens of knowledge while the truth behind them—uncomfortable, paradoxical, demanding—is left behind. The lesser lesson becomes the badge of wisdom; the deeper truth is dismembered for convenience.

No arc. No grand instruction. Just the repetition of roles, the echo of stories, the persistence of hunger. Meaning, when it comes, comes not as reward, but as grace.

And yet, even in refusal, in distortion, in failure, there remains something sacred in the effort to attend. To see the pattern, not to worship it. To hear the old lines in new voices. To walk the ruins with open eyes, knowing that the script will be performed again.

Digital Tulips in the Gutter: A Reflection on Cryptocurrency and Speculative Delusion

by Donald S. Yarab

It is even more speculative than the tulips of tulipmania—less beautiful, less tangible, and arguably, less of an asset. Tulips, after all, at least bloomed.

four assorted cryptocurrency coins
Photo by Worldspectrum on Pexels.com

Cryptocurrency has become the modern symbol of speculative excess: a phenomenon untethered from utility, value, or service to the common good. Its defenders proclaim it a revolution in finance, a challenge to the tyranny of central banks, a restoration of liberty through cryptographic purity. But peel back the gilded claims, and one finds something more brittle, more hollow, and perhaps more dangerous.

To be fair, cryptocurrency does serve certain functions. In Venezuela, citizens use Bitcoin to preserve wealth as their currency hyperinflates. In countries with collapsed banking systems, people rely on digital tokens for remittances. In regions where governments block financial transactions, cryptocurrency provides an escape valve. These are real uses, serving real needs.

But examine why these uses exist, and a darker picture emerges. Cryptocurrency functions not as a superior alternative to traditional finance, but as digital tree bark—emergency sustenance consumed only when the normal food supply has failed. It works precisely because the alternatives are catastrophically worse: worthless fiat, collapsed institutions, criminal governments. This is not cryptocurrency succeeding on its merits; it is cryptocurrency serving as expensive, volatile intermediary in humanity’s most desperate financial moments.

The Venezuelan using Bitcoin is not proving cryptocurrency’s revolutionary potential—they are demonstrating what happens when a society’s monetary system breaks down. The remittance flowing through Ethereum is not evidence of innovation—it is a costly detour around institutional failure, adding friction, fees, and volatility risk to what should be a simple transfer. Cryptocurrency serves merely as an expensive, volatile intermediary in what remains, at core, a fiat transaction. Convert fiat to cryptocurrency, pay network fees, endure price swings, convert back to fiat, pay more fees. The process only makes sense when every other option is worse.

Yet cryptocurrency evangelists take these edge cases—where their system barely outperforms complete collapse—and extrapolate them into grand claims about the future of all finance. They mistake being marginally better than failed institutions for being superior to functional ones. Should we design our financial systems around the needs of failed states and criminal enterprises? Should we burn massive amounts of energy to create digital workarounds for institutional breakdown, rather than strengthening the institutions that serve stable societies?

This is not currency in any meaningful sense of the term. It is not a stable store of value. It is not a consistent medium of exchange. It is barely a unit of account. What it offers, rather, is a kind of digital alchemy, where symbols stand in for substance and belief masquerades as value.

For the early adopter, it is a lever for disproportionate gain. For the tax dodger and the launderer, it is a haven of shadows. For the credulous speculator, it is a mirage of easy wealth—a mirage often followed by collapse. And for the society that tolerates it, it is a siphon, draining energy—literal and metaphorical—from more productive ends.

Nor is this merely a matter of theory. In 2023 alone, blockchain analysis firms estimated that over $22 billion in illicit funds were laundered through cryptocurrencies—much of it routed through decentralized exchanges, mixing services, and prepaid debit card schemes. From sanctioned regimes like Iran and North Korea to transnational crime syndicates and terrorist networks, cryptocurrency now functions as the infrastructure of choice for bypassing traditional surveillance. It is not only opaque; it is portable, borderless, and persistently one step ahead of enforcement.

The value of Bitcoin, or any coin, is not intrinsic. Gold, whatever its monetary mystique, at least has industrial applications—electronics, medical devices, aerospace components. Strip away gold’s monetary role, and it retains a floor value based on genuine utility. Cryptocurrency offers no such foundation. It represents only that some energy was spent and some consensus achieved that a bit of code might be worth something to someone else. Unlike fiat currency—however imperfect—which is at least nominally governed by institutions with public obligations, cryptocurrency is governed by no one and manipulated by many.

Cryptocurrency’s history is not merely volatile—it is littered with failure. From BitConnect’s Ponzi scheme and OneCoin’s fabricated blockchain to meme-based absurdities like Coinye (sued into oblivion by Kanye West), entire ecosystems have collapsed under the weight of fraud or fantasy. More quietly, hundreds of lesser-known coins—Auroracoin, Peercoin, Feathercoin, Nxt—have faded into digital irrelevance. According to independent trackers, over 2,000 cryptocurrencies have already failed, often within a year or two of launch.

The blockchain may be secure, but the ecosystem is anything but. Scams, rug pulls, pump-and-dump schemes, and algorithmic collapses litter the field like digital detritus. And still the faithful chant the liturgy of decentralization, innovation, and inevitability.

The irony is almost poetic. A movement born from distrust of fiat currency has created something far less stable, far less transparent, and far more volatile. At least fiat is answerable to a polity. Cryptocurrency is answerable only to its market—and its market often answers to no one but the early sellers.

What was once billed as a decentralized revolution has, under the current administration, become a centralized enterprise of a different kind—one in which the instruments of state are quietly repurposed to serve private gain. Since President Trump’s return to office, enforcement actions against cryptocurrency firms have been reversed, regulations have been softened, and public officials with deep ties to the industry have assumed the very posts designed to police it. At the center of this permissiveness is a blatant conflict of interest: the Trump family’s own holdings in digital assets—including the $TRUMP meme coin, the USD1 stablecoin, and affiliated ventures—are now believed to rival or exceed the value of their traditional real estate empire. Cryptocurrencies are no longer mere instruments of speculation; they have become the administration’s preferred asset class. In this light, regulatory indifference is not ideological—it is financial. The state is no longer simply tolerating speculative delusion; it is underwriting it. The line between financial fraud and political favoritism has not just blurred—it has all but vanished.

What we are witnessing is not the future of money, but the future of speculation unmoored from labor, utility, or production. It is a theater of illusion, where wealth appears without work, where tulips bloom not in soil but in code, and where the coin in the hand may vanish before it ever finds use.

As governments struggle to keep pace, the anonymity and jurisdictional fluidity of cryptocurrency shield perpetrators behind webs of decentralized complexity. One high-profile case involved a dark web site trafficking in child exploitation, where more than 1.3 million separate cryptocurrency addresses were used to obfuscate payment trails. Investigators ultimately uncovered the network only through transnational cooperation and painstaking digital forensics. Yet such victories are rare. In most cases, enforcement plays an endless game of jurisdictional whack-a-mole—outmatched by technology’s relentless innovation and the absence of unified oversight.

The few legitimate uses of cryptocurrency—preserving wealth during hyperinflation, circumventing capital controls, enabling remittances where banks have failed—are symptoms of institutional pathology, not harbingers of financial evolution. Building speculative manias around emergency measures is both dangerous and absurd. These are not features to celebrate but problems to solve through stronger institutions, not weaker ones.

It is not that all cryptocurrency is criminal, nor that all who engage with it are fools. But the overwhelming dynamic is clear: a frenzy of fools and frauds, chasing magic coins in the digital gutter, while the desperate few who genuinely rely on these digital workarounds bear the cost of everyone else’s speculative delusions.

Against Magical Thinking: Contemplation, Conspiracy, and the Abuse of Sacred Language

Early manuscript
Photo by silvia lusetti on Pexels.com

Recently, I read with great interest Hari Kunzru’s article “Doing Their Own Research” in the New York Review of Books (May 29, 2025). It is a piercing, sometimes surreal examination of the strange coalition now shaping American political and spiritual culture: a “New Weird Fusionism” of right-wing conspiracy, countercultural wellness, and mystical absolutism. The portrait he offers—of a society increasingly shaped by magical thinking, selective paranoia, and a weaponized imagination—was as disturbing as it was insightful.

But what struck me most was the realization that the cultural atmosphere Kunzru describes makes it increasingly likely that contemplative works like my recent Liber Agglutivi will be not merely misread—but conscripted into the very worldview they seek to resist.

In that work, framed as a fictional medieval treatise on sacred language, I explore how language, when approached with reverence and silence, becomes not a tool of communication but a site of presence—how it may not only speak about reality, but participate in it. Yet as I read Kunzru’s analysis of conspirituality—the synthesis of conspiracy and New Age belief—I saw an eerie proximity between certain rhetorical structures in Liber Agglutivi and the thought patterns of this cultural formation: secrecy, marginalia, hidden knowledge, the recovery of “true” language lost to corruption.

The danger is real: in an age where every form of mystery gets weaponized, how do we distinguish between authentic contemplative practice and its paranoid simulacra?

It is precisely here that the contrast must be made explicit.

The Liber is not a manual for decoding reality through esoteric symbols or a codebook for revealing global plots. It is not a mystical justification for control, nor an invitation to gnostic certainty. Its words are not “keys” to hidden truths in the paranoid sense Kunzru describes. Rather, it is a contemplative experiment—a poetic, philosophical invitation to see language as something we enter with humility, not something we wield with certainty.

What conspirituality offers is often a form of linguistic inflation: a conviction that to name something is to master it, that to imagine is to manifest, that hidden truths are personal weapons in a war against “them.” This is not reverence for mystery but inflation through proximity to it. The practitioner of conspirituality approaches mystery as a puzzle to be solved, a code to be cracked that will grant power over reality itself.

By contrast, the Liber offers a theology of kenosis—a self-emptying approach to speech in which the word is not a sword, but a veil; not a control mechanism, but a site of transfigured listening. Where conspirituality seeks to decode, contemplation seeks to be changed by what it encounters.

Consider the difference in practice. A conspirituality adherent might read the Liber’s phrase about “memory that knows not what it remembers” as a hint toward recovering suppressed historical truths or accessing forbidden knowledge that “they” do not want you to have.

A contemplative reader approaches the same phrase as an invitation to sit with unknowing itself—to let the mystery remain mysterious while allowing it to transform one’s relationship to knowledge. The first approach inflates the ego; the second empties it.

Kunzru’s analysis is especially compelling in its treatment of magical thinking across the domains of politics, religion, and economics. It is alarming to witness the persistence of the nineteenth-century “mind-cure” tradition—the belief that reality is downstream of personal attitude—now manifesting as national governance logic.

That Donald Trump, among others, internalized Norman Vincent Peale’s message of mental affirmation to the point that factuality became irrelevant is not merely a character trait—it is a symptom of an epistemological crisis. Similarly, the self-help gospel of The Secret, evangelical prosperity teachings, and the memetic evangelism of internet conspiracists all illustrate a culture in which to believe is to make it so.

The boundary between wish and world is not merely blurred—it is denied.

The Liber Agglutivi, by contrast, insists that language’s creative power arises not from assertive will but from contemplative reception. The phrase “word that becomes the thing” does not mean that the self wills reality into being. It means that, in sacred silence, the word discloses what is already most true.

This is a fundamentally different ontology. It is not manifestation; it is reverent participation.

Kunzru rightly notes how easily mystical language can be conscripted by paranoid styles. The idea that “everything is connected,” which in contemplative practice leads to compassion and humility, in conspiracy often leads to reductionism and scapegoating.

The Liber speaks of memory that “knows not what it remembers”—a phrase meant to evoke mystery and presence, not cognitive shortcuts to hidden truths.

So while Kunzru’s essay is not a critique of my work, it felt like a necessary caution about the times in which such a work might be read. In an age of epistemic confusion and symbolic inflation, sacred language must be handled with even greater care.

We must distinguish between language as control and language as communion; between the voice that silences others and the voice that emerges from deep silence. We must recognize that in our current moment, the very practices that might lead us toward wisdom—attention to mystery, reverence for hidden dimensions of experience, suspicion of surface explanations—can be corrupted into tools of manipulation and division.

The Liber Agglutivi may look like a book of secrets, but it is really a book about unknowing—about hearing the spaces where speech begins. And in a world where every utterance is increasingly co-opted for political or psychological leverage, the commitment to silence, reverence, and the mystery of meaning may itself be the most radical stance available to us.

Words that reign do so only when they have ceased to serve the self.
In our age of weaponized mysticism, that may be the difference between wisdom and delusion, between contemplation and conspiracy.

The Peril and Promise of Models: Utopia, Economy, and Theology

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (c. 1563)
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (c. 1563, oil on panel)
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Utopias, like theoretical economic models and theological constructs, are among the most daring expressions of human thought. Each arises from an impulse toward order and improvement, born of the conviction that the present is insufficient and the future can be shaped. Yet despite their elevated origins, these frameworks call to be eschewed—not for the good they propose, but for the horrors they have enabled when unmoored from humility and constraint.

The history of ideas is littered with systems that began in hope and ended in terror. Plato’s Republic, with its philosopher-kings and rigid class hierarchy, inspired centuries of authoritarian dreams. Soviet central planning promised rational allocation but delivered famine and repression. The Puritan theocracy in Massachusetts Bay sought godly perfection but produced witch trials and exile for dissenters. Each began as a vision of human flourishing—the utopian city, the rationalized economy, the purified creed—yet furnished the blueprints for regimes of control.

Nor is such danger confined to leftist excesses or theological zealotry. In Chile, the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende led not only to political violence, but also to the forceful imposition of a radical free-market model under General Pinochet, guided by economists trained in the Chicago School. The result was economic restructuring praised by some for its efficiency, yet experienced by many as immiseration and repression. Here, too, theory eclipsed humanity. Market mechanisms became commandments; dissenters were not debated but disappeared. What was billed as liberation through market freedom became another apparatus of dominance—less visible, perhaps, but no less brutal. The lesson is not partisan, but perennial: when theory is elevated above persons, systems serve themselves.

Elevated to ideology, models cease to be guides and become chains. They offer certainty in place of inquiry, coherence in place of complexity, and purpose in place of personhood. What begins as vision hardens into decree; what is meant as a lens becomes law. Mao’s Great Leap Forward exemplified this transformation: an economic model promising industrial prosperity became an unyielding doctrine that cost millions of lives when reality refused to conform to theory.

When the model becomes sacred, deviation becomes heresy. And where heresy is named, there follow inevitably the commissars, the inquisitors, the doctrinaires—those who patrol the borders of the permissible. Stalin’s show trials eliminated those who questioned economic orthodoxy. Both Catholic Inquisitions and Protestant persecutions took inhuman measures against those who strayed from their respective versions of theological purity. McCarthyism destroyed careers in service of ideological conformity. All operated in service of the model, the path, the “truth”—though truth, in such hands, is no longer a horizon toward which one travels, but a cudgel with which to enforce obedience. And perhaps there is no final truth to be had, only a multiplicity of partial illuminations, glimpsed through the mist, refracted through fallible minds.

And yet, it would be a grave error to reject these models wholesale. A utopia, though unattainable, directs the gaze beyond the immediate—Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Dream” inspired civil rights progress precisely because it painted a picture of what America could become. A well-crafted economic model brings coherence to chaotic phenomena: Keynesian theory, whatever its limitations, helped navigate the Great Depression by providing a framework for understanding how governments might respond to economic collapse. A theological vision offers moral orientation and poetic resonance—liberation theology in Latin America, despite its political complications, channeled Christian teaching toward concrete concern for the poor and oppressed.

When held lightly—non-dogmatically, open to revision, aware of their limits—such models are not prisons but tools. They help us navigate complexity, but they must never be mistaken for the complexity itself. The Chicago School economists who influenced policy in the 1980s offered valuable insights about market mechanisms, but when their models became gospel rather than guides, the result was often ideology that ignored market failures and social costs.

The question, then, is one of balance. Can aspiration be disentangled from absolutism? Can man dream without dictating, model without mastering, believe without binding? This is no easy task, for humanity is rarely a creature of balance. We veer, we commit, we grasp too tightly. The same revolutionary fervor that toppled the Bastille eventually devoured its own children in the Terror. But the remedy is not the renunciation of vision; it is the cultivation of humility within vision. It is the refusal to equate map with territory, model with meaning, doctrine with destiny.

If balance is the ideal, then it must rest not on detachment but on a deeper fidelity—one that refuses both rigidity and relativism. This is not a call to valueless existence, but to the most valued existence—one that honors core commitments through responsive attention rather than rigid prescription. The danger lies not in caring deeply about human flourishing, justice, or freedom, but in believing we possess the universal formula for achieving these goods. True fidelity to our highest values often requires abandoning our preconceptions about how they must be realized. It demands constant attentiveness to circumstances, genuine openness to what the moment requires, and the intellectual courage to adjust course when reality refuses to conform to our expectations. The principled life is not one that follows predetermined blueprints, but one that remains alert to the irreducible complexity of human need and the ever-changing demands of genuine care.

To live without models is to drift. To live by them uncritically is to be enslaved. Wisdom lies in the middle path: to aspire without illusion, to theorize without tyranny, and to seek the better without forgetting the cost of the best. In this fragile equilibrium lies the noblest promise of human reason—not to control the world, but to understand it more justly, and to live within it more wisely. And in that wisdom, to leave room for the truth that ever escapes us.