I’m not wont to do this, but I’m rattled by the Charlie Kirk situation—rattled, but not surprised.
And amidst all of the horrific violence, the suffering and disintegration of people close to me, and the general atmosphere that a kind of societal reckoning is upon us, I feel compelled to give people a reason to hope.
We are killing each other over ideas, and there appears to be no way to stop it…
Because at the root of the modern West is a self-defeat that makes the chaos, suffering, and violence inevitable.
No matter how noble our values may seem—liberty, freedom—it’s all a mask hiding the rot of our metaphysical dissociation from any kind of center around which we could orient, as opposed to unraveling.
Echoes of the Sacred
When I use the term sacred, I know that for most it carries a sense of baggage—of a kind of heavy, stuffy religious piety. But imagine there’s a breaking news story—wouldn’t you want to find the most recent, up-to-date, and most authoritative source?
That desire to be connected to the pulse… to what’s most alive and real—that is a desire for the sacred.
This may sound silly, but the Super Bowl is sacred. Prom is sacred. The releases of each Harry Potter book? Sacred.
That which punctuates ordinary life and causes you to organize around it… that which is most charged with existential relevance—these are echoes of the sacred.
That’s what everyone wants—even atheists—and being oriented around that is to be centered. To be oriented, as opposed to unraveling.
Once I establish some context, I’m going to give you a condensed, play-by-play genealogy of the Western spiritual apocalypse. I’m going to show you how we got here.
But hold onto this idea—it will help you make sense of the seemingly disparate threads in this video:
My arm is only functional when it’s connected to the rest of my body.
If it were to be cut off, it would become lifeless.
The Ritual of Platitudes
Charlie Kirk was a political commentator who would frequent college campuses to engage people in discussion and debate.
Political alignment aside, I’ll leave it to others to engage in the exhausting, obligatory social ritual of politicizing the issue and reacting with predictable platitudes and perspectives at varying levels of quality and insight:
- that this was horrific;
- that violence is unacceptable;
- that this is an assault on free speech;
- that we should get rid of the guns;
- that guns don’t kill people, people kill people;
- that this is a mental health crisis;
- that our laws aren’t strict enough;
- that Charlie did say that a certain number of gun deaths is acceptable for the sake of the Second Amendment, so maybe he deserved it;
- that he was a supporter of Israel’s genocide;
- that Israel killed Charlie because he was starting to criticize their actions in Palestine;
- that the deep state killed Charlie because it’s a way to get to Trump;
- that Charlie said George Floyd was a scumbag and said other offensive, racist, and misogynistic things;
- that the Democrats are the party of violence;
- etc., etc.
I’m not here to contribute to the grift and sophistry of what the public discourse has become. And instead of descending into divisiveness and drowning in disillusionment, I want to do the opposite—
I want to show how a way out of darkness may emerge by broadening the frame.
On Anger and the Good
Let’s start with the most immediate of emotions: people are angry.
But here’s the thing about anger: anger is only possible if we feel that we’ve been wronged, and that presumes some notion of goodness—some criterion of judgment.
It is an act of discrimination to prefer being safe over being unsafe.
Goodness—the sacred—whatever you want to call it—provides vertical structure, hierarchy, priority.
When we say that we prefer to protect children and not abuse them, we have some notion of goodness in mind.
And not only that—but the nuances of a debate from the earliest days of psychology at the hands of Aristotle aside—the Good is the great engine of desire.
Everything we do, everything we want… it’s all aimed at what we perceive to be goodness.
Whether it shows up in religion as God, political ideology as liberty, in wokeness as social justice, or veganism as health—some notion of Goodness serves as an ordering principle. It is the ultimate ideal that makes the whole value system intelligible.
This isn’t to say that people have a conscious, rational, articulable understanding of Goodness—no. People have an implicit, subconscious, unexplored relationship with the inner machinations of their own soul.
As Plato discusses in First Alcibiades, when you were a kid and someone stole your toy, you felt wronged…
but now that you’re 40, you still have the same prereflexive perspective of justice.
It’s not that your intuition is wrong—it’s just that maybe there’s more to reality than our immediate assumptions and reactions.
The Power of Words
A part of my book explores the complete saga of humanity’s metacognitive blindness—of why "the unexamined life is not worth living"—but for our purposes, it’s enough to suggest that people are not conditioned for open discourse without getting offended.
Let me be the first to say that—with certain exceptions—people should be able to say the most heinous, taboo, transgressive, and sacrilegious things imaginable. I won’t even say should and project… I’ll just be selfish and speak for myself. Historically, people like me get crucified and burned at the stake, so I appreciate living in a country that at least pays lip service to protecting my proclivities.
But let me also acknowledge that, contrary to modern sentiment that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" — the pen is often mightier than the sword. Words and ideas are more than phonetic or graphical gestures. And if we’re not so modern that we’ve rejected metaphysics altogether, then words are more than mere referents to reality.
A part of my book will explore the different versions of consciousness in which words have more… cosmogonic force. But the point is that words are capable of violence — not the empirical, materialist kind — but psychological violence.
And although you may be well-adjusted and content to live in an absurdist hellscape with no apparent meaning, some people are struggling. Their religion, political ideology, or whatever may be the only thing tethering their mind to sanity.
Because ideas have existentially ordering force and provide "maps of meaning" that make life intelligible and not a chaotic mess. The default human posture is to fear the unknown… and to a mind not conditioned to entertaining an idea without accepting it, ideas can be disruptive.
But the problem can’t be localized to individuals because our whole society is a powder keg. We’re at the point of such palpable tension that we’re talking about literal Civil War. We’re killing each other not over geopolitical or existential threats, or access to resources.
We’re killing each other over ideas. Or just internally snapping and senselessly killing each other, or killing each other from our own internal brokenness. Either way, the situation feels helpless, and no amount of dialogue seems able to bridge the gap or bring people to common ground.
And it was all… inevitable.
From Myth to Modernity
For the sake of brevity, we’ll only go back 4000 years to the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt.
Pharaohs were divine, but the people were not—and the people began to want a role in eternity. The mythic centralization of immortality was unsustainable, because the people wanted to participate in sacred structure, not just serve it.
And so the cult of Osiris universalized the afterlife, creating a kind of metaphysical populism. Consider this one of the first steps toward equality. Hold onto that.
The ancient world was one of cosmos—an integrated whole. Reality had not yet differentiated into distinct strata of being, and so the gods were what we call intramundane — embedded in the facets and functions of nature: rain god, fertility goddess, volcano god.
Then the early Yahwists compressed sacred power into a transcendent moral will: Yahweh. And with Yahweh standing completely outside of creation, this effectively de-divinized the cosmos. It desacralized nature by making it a derivative act of creation.
The early Yahwists wanted to stabilize the sacred and make it just—similar to Hesiod in ancient Greece lamenting the inequities of his personal spats with his greedy brother, wondering when the wicked would ever get their due.
The desire was for the divine to be rational: if I obey God, I’m rewarded; if I disobey God, I’m punished—and not something capricious, local, or superstitious. And so we began to purify the divine of its chthonic and feminine undertones.
Then came the earliest pre-Socratics—the Milesians: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes—who sought to understand the world without recourse to myth. They effectively demythologized the cosmos and gave birth to metaphysics. Reality was no longer a story to inhabit but a structure amenable to intellectual abstraction.
When the poets and mystics from Sappho to Heraclitus discovered the soul as an ontologically distinct realm, we began to pull truth inward. The sacred was not "out there" but within.
We see the seeds of individual dignity and inner authority arise as every citizen becomes the bearer of reason—of the logos, the principle that structures the world. Hence democracy begins—not merely as populism, but as shared participation in order.
That each individual was not a passive participant, but a co-articulator of reality.
Speaking of Logos, at the very moment of Jesus’s death—as reported in Matthew, Mark, and Luke—the veil in the temple was torn.
We’ve bypassed the temple structure. Access to the sacred is no longer mediated by priesthood—for we can know God personally. Salvation becomes internal—by faith and grace, not ritual performance or purity. The human soul becomes the site of sacred encounters, echoing Parmenides.
Fast forward to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and now the Bible is translated and accessible to the masses. Interpretation of the sacred becomes a private matter of individual conscience.
This made it easy for the so-called “Enlightenment” to replace revelation altogether and put reason in its place. Truth becomes self-evident, and the individual becomes the moral and epistemic center. The individual is no longer ordered by a transcendent good—they are now “autonomous”: a self-governing, rational actor, perfectly prepared to be slotted into an Adam Smith Wealth of Nations capitalistic paradigm—and let’s not get started on the cosmology of socialism.
By the time of modernity, Nietzsche just comes out and says it: “God is dead… and we’ve killed him.” Psychoanalysts like Freud are busy psychologizing transcendence, collapsing metaphysical and spiritual realities into psychological functions:
- God is a projection of the father.
- Religious longing is repressed infantile helplessness.
- Moral law is an internalized superego.
It’s all just daddy issues.
Meanwhile, Hegel is historicizing the Absolute—as if God is something that dialectically unfolds through time via an evolution of human consciousness and social structures, dissolving transcendence into a process that culminates with Hegel himself. God is history becoming conscious of itself through Hegel.
And so is it any wonder that today we’ve become atomized?
It started as a Protagorean relativism: truth is subjective and perspectival. “To each their own.” “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” “No one has privileged access to the truth.” “Who are you to decide what’s right and wrong?”
It sounds so tolerant. So democratic. It’s giving “let’s all try to understand each other’s point of view since we all see it differently.”
Modernity, of course, fetishizes the idea of hearing all sides—as if merely a multiplicity of external information will inevitably lead to the truth. But while people are ready to question the authority of others, how many are willing to turn inward to question their own epistemic authority?
Why should what makes sense to you be valid? Are you even internally aligned in such a manner as to be receptive of truth?
I’ll save the metacognitive treatise for my book, but once truth becomes contingent on individual perception, there’s no higher order to adjudicate between conflicting truths. If everything is valid, how do you resolve inevitable conflicts?
The Impossibility of Communication
You would hope we could communicate. But communication—from the Latin root communicare—is to make common, to make public. Which implies that there’s a reality beyond myself in which others may mutually dwell.
But modernity has decided that there is no external reality beyond individual perception—because if there was, it would collapse the entire multimillennia project of transmuting each individual, with their private delusions, into demigods.
To assert that perception is NOT equal to reality is to subordinate me to something beyond myself as an ordering principle. But we’ve spent the past several millennia alienating the individual from everything—even themselves.
Look. Every turn that brought us to this point was justified—that’s what makes it tragic.
- Desacralizing nature protected justice from the capriciousness of local gods.
- Demythologizing the cosmos made universal knowledge possible.
- Internalizing the sacred affirmed inner dignity and broke priestly monopoly.
- Privatizing conscience let people access the divine without gatekeepers.
- Grounding truth in reason tried to hold things together after theology shattered.
- The invention of “rights” was meant to prevent tyranny.
- And subjectivizing values seemed like the only way to coexist in a pluralistic society without violating the interiority of others.
But pay attention to the logic of this drive toward equality. We’ve been conditioned to think of equality as something good—and that’s not without reason. But if we detangle equality from its conflations—if we separate equality from things like giving due consideration for the dignity of others—we find that equality is a kind of negation of hierarchy. A lack of priority. A collapse of vertical structure.
And vertical structure is what helps us discriminate that harming children is bad and not harming children is good.
Pushed to its limit, true equality would be to privilege absolutely nothing—not even equality itself. And so all you’re left with is horizontal flatness.
And this is where the real devastation begins:
If reality is always deferred to individual judgment, then I get to rule as an absolute tyrant—but only in my own mind. Outside of myself, I am powerless.
Because if everyone’s personal truth is valid—then who is to say that being fit is better than being fat? Who is to say that slavery is wrong? If everyone’s personal truth is valid, every perspective must be weighed equally— aka: democracy.
The Tyranny of Equality
We live in an age of the least common denominator. Piers Morgan is tweeting angrily about the woke left. Some leftists on Twitter are basically celebrating that the shooter seems to be a straight conservative white guy. Everyone is frothing at the mouth to have their SIDE validated—because even though you’re a dictator in your own mind, you need the external world to validate your truth.
And you all think that with enough consensus, that what? That the other side will relent and capitulate? That enough people will come together to collectively demonize an evil? The truth is far darker.
I was on Barack Obama’s Twitter reading what he said about the incident. And without much scrolling, I saw his tweet about the unimaginably horrifying August church shooting in Minneapolis that left children dead and injured as they prayed.
And every time, it’s the same—“thoughts and prayers.” But you don’t believe in God. You only believe in yourself.
The whole world could agree that there’s a genocide—but it can’t act. Because in a world of equality, eventually not even the rabble of the masses gets its way. All that matters… is who has the biggest stick.
The Protagorean relativism—to each their own—leaves us with no way to adjudicate between conflicting truths. And for a while, we place our hope in the process of democracy.
But at base, modernity’s logic is nothing but a Thrasymachaen solipsism… a Nietzschean will-to-power. There’s nothing left… but violence.
You see, civil society wants to smooth over anything outward that might cause tension—
AS I WAS WRITING THIS VIDEO, I got a slap on the wrist at my IT job for labeling something “TESTING NONSENSE!” in a development sandbox—as a playful reminder to myself that the code could be deleted.
Even in an absurdly low-stakes environment, the message is loud and clear:
“Please rename your creative placeholder to something appropriately inert… Please refrain from authenticity and channel your being through approved, desanctified forms… Please self-neuter and preemptively contain your playfulness in our dead codebase.”
We’re trying to sanitize society. But all that does is outsource the tension to within the individual—where it rots and festers.
What if I think consuming animal products is a terrible desecration of life, but you see nothing wrong with it? Do I content myself to live a neutered life of pluralism—or do I refuse to betray my deepest values and begin a jihadic crusade on behalf of the animals I love? And what happens when even language cannot serve as an appropriate release valve for the built-up pressure?
The Current Situation
Take a look at the field. Many will call for gun control. Sure—taking away the means by which so many of these atrocities happen makes sense… at first glance.
But this is where most people stop—with their surface-level opinion that fails to dialectically integrate competing perspectives. Are you even hearing the other side? They’re trying to point out that maybe it’s not the best idea to centralize power and control into the hands of government officials—especially when the government’s run by a bunch of corrupt, globalist, war-hawking pedophiles.
But on the flipside: is the 2nd amendment your god? Is the post-Enlightenment wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers the ultimate sacred cow that can never be questioned just because you’ve turned Ben Franklin’s quote into a platitude?
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor safety.”
What about when he cautioned:
“A republic, if you can keep it.” “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As a nation becomes corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
Read the room. How is everyone? People are awash in eroding gender relations. Tensions around immigration. Most of the developed world is having a cultural identity crisis. People are being radicalized and factioning into tribalism. And I just spent $3.50 on an avocado.
Maybe these people will say:
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people… the guy was a nutjob!”
But blaming this on the mental health crisis—while partially valid—is also partially just a cope that confuses proximate causes with ultimate causes. It’s an attempt to localize dysfunction entirely within the individual—to pretend that the thread is isolated and not interwoven within a broader context.
It should remind you of how modern doctors manage disease: often addressing acute symptoms… hacking at the branches, not the root.
A Way Forward?
And so where does this leave us? Not only does an arm cease to be functional if it’s cut off from the body—it begins to die.
We tend to think of ourselves as independently existing entities, looking at reality from the outside in. But reality is not some abstraction outside of yourself. Nor are you merely located within reality.
No. You ARE reality—a node of reality.
But it doesn’t end there. Your participation in reality is not reducible to being part of a homogenized genus. There are levels. There is structure. And there’s something at the center—of reality… of yourself—that might be touched… if you are willing to walk the path.
You are not the ground of your own being. You are not a self-caused creation of your own doing. You are connected… to something.
And this isn’t an argument for God via efficient or agent cause—at least not the God you’re used to. For what happens when it feels like God Himself is silent? And no matter how hard we cling to inherited symbolic orders for solace—we feel ill-prepared for our impending reckoning.
I’ve written a work—The Four Horsemen of Inner Apocalypse—that will be on this channel soon.
The world needs a voice. People need someone who can not merely hear the other side—but someone who can inhabit all sides as a native… and yet see beyond them.
If you’re still here—and if my words found resonance—find the key in the description to this video. I’ll leave it up to you what to do with it.
Oh, and… who am I?
Let’s just say that I’m… some psychagogue.