Category: political philosophy

The Browns Stadium Boondoggle: Elite Socialism in Action

Cleveland Browns Stadium

The Browns stadium deal is not merely a bad investment—it is a paradigm of elite hypocrisy, a socialist redistribution of public wealth upward, executed by lawmakers who claim allegiance to free‑market principles while enacting policies that privatize profit and publicize risk.

Earlier this year, Ohio’s Republican supermajority passed legislation requiring that high school students be instructed in the virtues of capitalism.¹ At the same time, these very lawmakers voted to seize $600 million from the state’s unclaimed‑property fund—money legally belonging to ordinary Ohioans—and redirect it to fund a $2.4 billion private stadium project for billionaire owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam. That is not capitalism. That is elite socialism, a state‑directed transfer of private/collective resources to elite private interests.

The Haslams, whose estimated net worth exceeds $8.5 billion, are not merely beneficiaries of state largesse—they are its architects. Whether the team remains in downtown Cleveland (with the city offering $461 million in renovations) or relocates to Brook Park with state and county subsidies, the outcome is the same: private/public funds extracted to enhance elite private empires.

Let us strip away the euphemisms. This is not a “public–private partnership.” It is a state‑sanctioned seizure and redistribution of wealth, orchestrated by legislators who demand work requirements, means testing, and behavioral monitoring for ordinary Ohioans receiving food, housing, or healthcare assistance—but offer no such oversight when the recipient wears a suit and owns a football team.²

When working families receive modest aid, it is denounced as “government dependency.” When billionaires receive hundreds of millions in public money, it is praised as “economic development.” This is not pedestrian ideological inconsistency; it is class warfare masquerading as policy.

County Executive Chris Ronayne called the proposal “piracy,” rightly charging that lawmakers are robbing Bob and Betty Buckeye to pay Jimmy and Dee Haslam.³ And indeed, the state has now declared the unclaimed‑property fund reverts to public ownership after ten years—not to be reinvested in public education or healthcare, but to underwrite the speculative ventures of the ultra‑wealthy.

Even the supposed safeguards are laughable: a mere $50 million in escrow from the Haslams, and another $50 million line of credit—a token hedge against a half‑billion‑dollar state exposure. Meanwhile, individuals requesting a few hundred dollars in public aid are subjected to rigorous oversight and bureaucratic suspicion.

This arrangement is a perfect study in the moral inversion of modern American political economy: public discipline for the broad citizenry, public indulgence for the rich; free‑market platitudes for the powerless, centralized socialism for the powerful.

This stadium subsidy is merely the latest manifestation of a systematic pattern—from pharmaceutical companies capturing billions in public research funding while charging monopoly prices for resulting drugs, to defense contractors operating on cost-plus arrangements that guarantee profits regardless of performance, to agricultural corporations receiving millions in annual subsidies while preaching individual responsibility. The Browns deal simply makes visible what usually operates through more obscure channels.

This is not merely the marginalization of the interests of the poor, working, and middle classes, but the broader appropriation of public resources away from the citizenry at large—those who should have access to public investment without facing moral scrutiny, bureaucratic suspicion, or ideological disapproval.

It is telling that both Policy Matters Ohio and the Buckeye Institute—voices from the ideological left and right—oppose the deal. They understand, as do many citizens, that this is not governance in the public interest. It is the use of state authority to engineer a systematic upward redistribution of wealth, cloaked in the language of jobs and development.

The real divide in America is not between socialism and capitalism—it is between elite socialism, in which wealth is extracted and insulated for the privileged, and democratic socialism, in which collective resources are used for collective needs. (Ours has always been a mixed economy—part capitalist, part socialist, the latter increasingly tilted toward elite interests—though this has rarely been acknowledged in our political discourse.) Until we name this truth and demand ideological consistency from our legislators, we will continue subsidizing billionaires while denying the citizenry investment—and calling it “fiscal responsibility.”

The scaffolding of economic life already exists. The only question is whether it will remain a scaffold supporting billionaires or be reclaimed as a structure serving all the people.

NOTES:

¹ Senate Bill 17, signed by Gov. Mike DeWine in March 2024, requires ten principles of “free market capitalism” to be taught as part of financial literacy courses required for high school graduation. The Ohio House passed the bill 66–26 in February 2024. See: Ohio Capital Journal, “Ohio House passes bill that would add capitalism to high school financial literacy curriculum,” Feb. 12, 2024.

The Statehouse News Bureau, “Former Gov. Rhodes said ‘Profit isn’t a dirty word.’ Now, Ohio students will learn about capitalism,” Mar. 15, 2024.

² See, e.g., Ohio Administrative Code 5101:4‑3‑13 and 5101:4‑9‑09 (SNAP work registration, employment/training and sanctions); 5101:1‑3‑12 (Ohio Works First requiring 30–55 hours/week of work). Ongoing eligibility mandates include documentation of income, assets, and residency. No equivalent oversight applies to recipients of corporate subsidies or stadium funding.

³ Chris Ronayne described the plan as “akin to piracy” and stated, “This is not just robbing Peter to pay Paul, this is robbing Bob and Betty Buckeye to pay Jimmy and Dee Haslam.” See: WKYC, “Ohio’s unclaimed funds could help build Browns stadium: Here’s how to see if any belong to you,” June 5, 2025. wkyc.com

Axios Cleveland, “Ohio Senate proposes $600 million Browns stadium subsidy using taxpayers’ unclaimed funds,” June 4, 2025.

DeNatale, Dave, Lynna Lai, and Peter Fleischer. “Ohio Senate approves its version of budget, including $600M for new Cleveland Browns domed stadium in Brook Park.” WKYC, June 11, 2025.

⁴ Should the Browns remain in downtown Cleveland, the city’s proposed $461 million commitment is expected to come from municipally issued bonds, potentially backed by revenues through the Cleveland–Cuyahoga County Port Authority or tax levies. The Port Authority, which regularly issues loans and revenue bonds to spur commercial development, functions as a centralized mechanism for steering public resources—effectively a form of state planning within a nominally capitalist framework, choosing economic “winners” with public backing.

General sources consulted: Associated Press, Axios Cleveland, The Guardian, New York Post

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.

We Are a Belligerent People

An Essay on Memory, Power, and the Blood Beneath Our Feet

By Donald S. Yarab

“Taking the proceedings of the Athenians toward Melos from the beginning to the end, they form one of the grossest and most inexcusable pieces of cruelty combined with injustice which Grecian history presents to us … But the treatment of the Melians goes beyond all rigor of the laws of war; for they had never been at war with Athens, nor had they done anything to incur her enmity ….” George Grote, A History of Greece (London 1850) VII, 114.¹

Though we may think otherwise, we are a belligerent people. We flatter ourselves with tales of virtue, liberty, and civilization, but our history betrays us. We are heirs not only to triumphs of culture, learning, and law, but to the unspoken litany of conquest, subjugation, and blood. The soil itself bears witness. Its silence is not empty. It murmurs the blood of men and the cries of women and children—those cast aside, broken, forgotten, or made invisible by the forward march of empire.

This thought came to me not through modern headlines, though there are many that might summon it, but while reading of the Peloponnesian War—of its needless provocations, of its spiraling brutality, of Athens, the “enlightened city,” casting off the veil of philosophy to reveal the naked face of power. It was not necessity that brought on that war, Thucydides tells us, but desire. Desire for power. Desire to dominate. Desire to possess what one has not earned and cannot keep without violence.

Nowhere is this desire more exposed than in the fate of Melos.

During a lull in the great war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenians sailed to the small island of Melos, which had attempted to remain neutral. The Melians appealed to justice, to their rights as a small people, and to the protection of the Spartans with whom they shared kinship. The Athenians responded with brutal clarity: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”² When Melos refused to surrender, the Athenians besieged and conquered the city. They slaughtered the men. They enslaved the women and children.³

Before its destruction, Melos minted coins bearing the image of an apple—mēlon in Greek, a deliberate pun upon the island’s name that now carries unintended prophetic weight.⁴ And in this small emblem, I saw more than a civic badge. I saw a symbol that reached backward to Eden.

Silver stater of Melo featuring an apple on the obverse and dolphins swimming on the reverse.
Silver stater of Melos, buried c. 416 B.C. as the Athenians laid siege. The obverse of the coin bears an apple—mēlon—on the obverse, a pun on the city’s name. The reverse shows dolphins swimming around a central boss. The coin was not recovered until discovered in the early 20th century. Image courtesy of American Numismatic Society 1944.100.27879 CC BY-NC 4.0

The apple—though scripture never names the fruit—is a stand-in, in Christian tradition, for the forbidden fruit of knowledge. With it came the mythical expulsion from paradise and the ensuing inheritance of suffering, toil, and death. But in our age, as in ages past, we have not been cast out merely for seeking knowledge. We have been cast out for failing to know ourselves.

We do not seek knowledge. We seek dominion. We crave possession—of land, of treasure, of people. And in so doing, we deny our complicity. We forget. We suppress. We sanctify the victors and silence the conquered. From age to age, we retell only the parts of the story that flatter us.

And here lies the uncomfortable mirror.

In this, we are more like Athens than we care to admit. Like them, we cloak power in principle. And like them, we forget.

We in the United States have long imagined ourselves the inheritors of Athenian democracy. We trace our civic ideals to their assemblies, our rhetoric to their orators, our architecture to their temples. We forget, or do not care to remember, that Athens was also an imperial power, that its democracy was partial and exclusionary, and that it extorted tribute, enslaved its enemies, and turned allies into subjects. At Melos, it abandoned all pretense of justice. It wielded power for its own sake and cloaked the sword in reason.

So too have we. We have invaded and occupied, supported tyrants when convenient, and crushed the aspirations of distant peoples in the name of freedom. At home, we have reaped the fruits of conquest while teaching ourselves to hear only the hymns of progress and patriotism.

Consider the Trail of Tears—where we marched Cherokee, Creek, and other nations from their ancestral lands to distant territories, causing thousands of deaths. That forced removal, justified by the rhetoric of “civilization” and “progress,” has spiraled into generations of poverty, educational disadvantage, and health crises on reservations. Even today, as Native communities face disproportionate hardships, we struggle to acknowledge our national policies as their root cause.

Or look to El Salvador and Nicaragua, where American foreign policy in the 1980s supported authoritarian regimes and death squads in El Salvador while simultaneously funding the Contra rebels against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government—all in the name of anti-communism. Our military aid facilitated massacres of civilians in both countries, devastated civil society, and undermined democratic institutions. The ensuing regional instability bred gangs, poverty, and the very migration crisis that excites our domestic politics today. Yet few Americans connect today’s asylum seekers to our own actions decades ago. Like Athens at Melos, we exercise power, then avert our eyes from the consequences. Yet evidence of our actions remains, waiting to be unearthed.

Silver stater of Melo featuring an apple on the obverse and square divided into triangles on the reverse.
Another silver stater from the soil of Melos, the blood speaks still. This one was also buried in c. 416 B.C. likely during the Athenian siege and recovered only in 1907. On the obverse it too bore the civic emblem, the apple. Its reverse, however, featured a square divided into four triangles. Image courtesy of American Numismatic Society 1959.70.2 CC BY-NC 4.0

From the soil of Melos itself, the blood speaks still. In 1907, a hoard of silver coins was unearthed—buried, according to scholars, in 416 B.C. as the Athenians closed in.⁵ Those who hid them did not live to recover the coins. Both coins bear on the obverse the apple—the symbol of Melos, its punning emblem, its name. But their reverses differ: one shows dolphins encircling a central boss, evoking the sea that once embraced the island; the other, a square divided into four triangles. These buried apples of silver—like their biblical counterpart—bear knowledge too painful to confront: the truth of what power does when unbound by conscience. These coins, long entombed, bear no voices. Yet they cry out. Like Abel’s blood, they testify—not in sound, but in presence. That these objects survived while their owners perished is both historical evidence and perfect metaphor—artifacts outlive empires, bearing witness long after the powerful have fallen. Metal as memory. Silver as witness.

We are not alone in this legacy. But neither are we innocent. The voice of justice does not go silent simply because we stop our ears. As in Genesis, so in history: the blood cries from the ground.⁶ And though we deny it, the Eternal hears.

The apple on the coin of Melos is a relic now, but its meaning remains. It is a warning. It is a mirror. Excavated from darkness, these silent witnesses challenge our comfortable narratives. It is a fruit offered again and again to each generation: not to reveal what lies in the heavens, but what lies within ourselves.

Until we dare to eat of that fruit—not in pride, but in truth—we shall remain wanderers east of Eden, armed with denial, and thus, with destiny.

Footnotes

¹ Seaman, Michael G. “The Athenian Expedition to Melos in 416 B.C.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, vol. 46, no. 4, 1997, p. 385. The epigraph featured above is an adaptation of the citation used in Seaman’s essay, which being a fine summary of emotive outrage at Athenian transgressions, could not be more finely articulated.

² Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book V, §§89–116. The quoted phrase is a paraphrase of the Athenian argument in the Melian Dialogue, often rendered: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” See: Robert B. Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides (New York: Free Press, 2008), 352.

³ See Seaman, Michael G., ibid., pp. 385–418, for a detailed discussion of the motives and actions surrounding the Athenian assault on Melos.

⁴ On the apple (mēlon) as a civic pun in Melian coinage, see Sheedy, Kenneth. “Aegina, the Cyclades and Crete.” In The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage, ed. William Metcalf, 2012, p. 112.

⁵ See: Kallet, Lisa and John H. Kroll, The Athenian Empire: Using Coins as Sources (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 105.

⁶ Genesis 4:10: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”