Written by Webster Edgerly under the pseudonym Edmund Shaftesbury, in Mental Magnetism. Edgerly was a eugenicist who ran his own kind of laundering operation. We will come back to him. What’s wrong with him is part of the argument.

Why a quote from a hundred years ago?

Because I could have gone further back — the historical record is full of these observations. Or more recent — the journals and texts of every decade indict the power structures of their day. A century is the deliberate distance. Recent enough to be relevant. Old enough to escape the reflex of dismissing it as a problem of now, or romanticizing it as a problem of some idealized or decivilized past.

The issues we face right now are the same issues we have always faced, in new costumes, with new tools. The scope and methodology have changed. The mechanism has not.

The excuses fail.

Modern complexity. New nuance. Conditions the founders could not have foreseen. Lies, all of them. The pattern is legible. The pattern has always been legible. The only question is whether we choose to see it.

The pattern is old. The dodge is old. The only thing modern about any of this is how loudly we are told to pretend otherwise and how quickly and convincingly we are provided with doubt or distraction.

We are trained to be polite.

Shaftesbury himself spent the chapters before this one praising politeness as one of the highest methods of mental magnetism — “politeness makes kindness refined,” he wrote, on the same page. And yet on the question of tainted gifts, the same writer abandons refinement entirely. He calls the donors thieves. He calls the gifts curses. He calls the wealth “blacker than the cancerous rot of the foulest disease.” He calls the methods “lower than the highwaymen of old.”

Shaftesbury understood what we have forgotten. Politeness is a virtue between equals acting in good faith. Extraction dressed up in marble is owed something else: accuracy. When justice and truth are on the line, refinement becomes complicity. The polite silence at the gala is the second theft.

Case in point: the Sacklers.

OxyContin and the broader opioid epidemic have killed more than 700,000 Americans since 1999. The Sackler family laundered the proceeds through the Met, the Louvre, the Tate, Yale, Oxford, Tufts, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery, the V&A, the British Museum, and many more. The names are coming off the walls now. Tufts removed the Sackler name from its medical school and five other facilities and programs in 2019. Harvard, by contrast, has refused, and the curse remains in residence wherever the marble has not yet been re-cut. Shaftesbury’s diagnosis confirmed in real time, a century late.

The same curse is being bestowed right now, in front of us, while we hold our forks correctly and applaud the speech.

Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Internal Meta research, disclosed by whistleblower Frances Haugen, documented harm to teenage mental health — including findings that Instagram worsened body image issues, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts in teen girls. The platform’s role in the Rohingya genocide was described by the chair of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar as “determining”; Amnesty International concluded that Meta’s algorithms “substantially increased the risk” of mass violence. Independent journalism has been hollowed out by the ad model in every market it touched. The same fortune now flows through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative into schools and “personalized learning” platforms, biomedical research, and education technology — into the very sectors best positioned to study the damage and least likely to do so once the building bears the donor’s name.

Cecil Rhodes and the marble that will not come down.

At twenty-three, before he had any real fortune, Rhodes wrote out his life’s program in a document later titled the “Confession of Faith”:

The fortune that followed came from the De Beers diamond monopoly, built on Black African labor confined to fenced compounds — a system labor historians have shown became the operational template later transposed to South Africa’s gold mines and formalized as the basis of apartheid.

As Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, Rhodes wrote the Glen Grey Act of 1894, a land-seizure and labor-tax law he himself called “a Native Bill for Africa,” widely identified by historians as the blueprint for apartheid. His British South Africa Company’s invasion of what is now Zimbabwe killed approximately 2,000 Africans in the 1896 suppression of the Ndebele-Shona uprising alone, largely with Maxim guns.

Rhodes left £100,000 in his will to Oriel College, Oxford, for the construction of the Rhodes Building. His statue stands above its central doorway — by design, level with the statue of the Virgin Mary across the street, and elevated above two English kings on the same façade. When students voted in 2016 to remove it, The Telegraph reported that “furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million.” The college reversed within a week. In 2020, after global protests, Oriel’s Governing Body publicly stated it wished to remove the statue. Legal and regulatory advice was cited. The statue remains. The Rhodes Trust still names roughly 100 Rhodes Scholars per year, each of whose careers now accrue to the credit of a fortune built on forced labor and machine guns.

This is what Shaftesbury described — the curse traceable from the arrival of the gift down to the present moment. Oriel said the words out loud and kept the marble anyway.

Leland Stanford and the dead son’s name.

Stanford University’s full legal name is Leland Stanford Junior University, after the founders’ fifteen-year-old son who died of typhoid in 1884. The fortune that built it came from the Central Pacific Railroad, constructed between 1863 and 1869 by an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese migrant laborers — roughly 90% of the workforce, paid 30 to 50 percent of what white workers earned, charged for their own lodging and tools, assigned the most dangerous tunneling and blasting work, and dying in numbers the company never bothered to record. Estimates of Chinese deaths range from 50 to over 1,200. Leland Stanford ran for governor of California on an anti-Chinese platform, calling Chinese immigrants “the dregs of Asia.” Stanford’s own historian Gordon Chang has written that without the Chinese workers, “Leland Stanford could have been at best a footnote in history, and Stanford University may not even exist.”

The university opened in 1891 as a memorial to the dead boy and a monument to the railroad fortune. It now sits on one of the largest university endowments in the world. It has trained the founders of Google, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and most of Silicon Valley’s first generation of platforms — the same fortunes whose laundering through foundations forms the contemporary half of this argument. The Chinese laborers paid the bill in their bodies. The Stanfords are still collecting the dividends. The institution itself has become the laundromat: extraction from one century funds the credentialing apparatus that produces the extractors of the next.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the long success of the laundry.

On April 20, 1914, the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by the Rockefeller-controlled Colorado Fuel & Iron Company opened fire on a tent colony of striking miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado. Twenty-five people were killed, including eleven children and two women who suffocated in a pit beneath a tent that was set on fire. One year later, testifying before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, Rockefeller Jr. was asked by Chairman Frank Walsh whether he would maintain the company’s anti-union policy “if it costs all your property and kills all your employees.” His answer, in the official transcript, in full: “It is a great principle.” Pressed further, he compared the open-shop fight to the American Revolution.

Then he hired Ivy Lee, often credited with inventing modern public relations, to rehabilitate the family name. What followed: Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller University. The Cloisters.

Riverside Church. The restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. The Museum of Modern Art. Lincoln Center. A century out, “Rockefeller” means the Christmas tree, the ice rink, the view from the top. The eleven children in the pit at Ludlow are in the lobby of none of these buildings. That is what success at this game looks like. The Sacklers are trying to become this.

ExxonMobil and the same fortune, still extracting.

Decades of internal climate research, followed by decades of public denial — as documented in peer-reviewed Harvard research by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, who concluded that

The same company remains a member of the MIT Energy Initiative today and funds energy research at Princeton and Stanford. The contradiction is the strategy itself: buy the credibility of the institution that should be indicting you, and the indictment never arrives. (Saudi Aramco was forced out of the MIT Energy Initiative in 2020 after sustained community pressure — proof that the curse can be lifted when an institution chooses to act.)

ExxonMobil is the corporate descendant of Standard Oil. The fortune now buying credibility from MIT and Princeton is the same fortune Rockefeller Jr. used to buy credibility from Ivy Lee a century ago. Same source. Same purpose. Same playbook. The names changed. The mechanism did not.

A return to the man who named the pattern.

The passage at the top of this essay was written by Webster Edgerly, two years before his death in 1926. He spent his life selling something he called Ralstonism — a religious healthcult built on personal magnetism, posture, dietary discipline, and the promise of spiritual mastery. He counted as many as 800,000 dues-paying followers at his peak. He went into business with the founder of Purina Mills, and the company they built — Ralston Purina, now part of Nestlé — still sells Chex and Puppy Chow off the strength of his brand. The red-andwhite checkerboard on the cereal box traces back to his cult.

He was also a eugenicist who advocated the castration of all non-Caucasian males at birth and the construction of a pure “New Race” of Caucasians as a sacred project. He preached racial horror in the same books that preached refinement. He sold bigotry as enlightenment to hundreds of thousands of paying followers, dressed in the language of spiritual elevation, divine necessity, scientific progress.

He saw the donor class with accuracy.

He could not see — or would not see — that he was running his own version of the play. The book that diagnosed the racket and the book that prescribed castration sat on the same shelf, in the same body of work, by the same author. The fortune and the harm were the same fortune. It is a great principle, in different words, in a different decade, in a different register.

The harms here are different in scale.

The Sacklers killed hundreds of thousands.

Rhodes killed thousands.

Rockefeller’s company killed children in a pit at Ludlow.

Edgerly sold racial pseudoscience to willing buyers.

Different scale. Same mechanism. Same compartmentalization. Same transcendent story used to license the extraction. And that is the point.

The pattern is bigger than any one of these men.

It was bigger than the man who named it. It will be bigger than any of us, until we refuse it.

The diagnostician was in the pattern. The reader is in the pattern. The writer is in the pattern. The first honest act is the same for all of us: to look at our own version, and refuse the silence about it.

This is where I stop being polite.

How am I supposed to respect the institutions I am expected to defer to? The unspoken social contract and the explicit one have been increasingly optional for anyone who manages to clear a certain pay grade, acquire a certain title, or hold a certain status symbol. The rules are for the rest of us.

You ask why people don’t want to work.

Have you asked who they have as an option to work for? Have you asked how the entrepreneurs who are successful in this economy and this culture earn their generally high wages? Who it costs? What it costs them — in character, in morals, in the parts of a person that cannot be put back?

You ask how they can do this or that. How that party could believe that.

Have you asked what reality drove them to seek such delusional and polarizing beliefs as a form of security, as an acceptable option?

When the legitimate institutions have already sold them out, a conspiracy is just a different lie offered at a more honest price.

This culture, this country, this mess of men obsessed with control and their own superiority — the ones who have never lived a single day as those whose fates they determine, who give the lives of strangers less consideration than which outfit to wear for the day — this is a racket.

I am tired of pretending otherwise.

We are asked, constantly, to keep these things in separate compartments. The fortune over here. The foundation over there. The CEO and the family office. The brand and the harm. The gala and the lawsuit. The gift and the theft.

There is no separation.

There has never been a separation. The money is the same money. The name on the building is the same name on the indictment. The wing of the museum and the dead in the streets were paid for from the same account. The compartmentalization is the trick. Refusing it is the first honest act.

When will we learn?

The burden of proof has been returned to those making the extraordinary claims and holding the power. The responsibility returns to those who choose to assert their choice for others. Respect is mutual. Respect is demonstrated. Respect is earned. The titled and the wealthy clear the same bar as everyone else, or they clear no bar at all.

The home and the business life of the nation are being robbed twice.

Once in the original theft. Again in the silence of every institution that took the money and agreed not to notice.

A better question waits behind “When will we learn?” — what will we do once we have?

The answer is embarrassingly simple and therefore revolutionary:

Serve the people you claim to serve.

Actually create value.

Stop extracting from the home and business life of the nation and then buying back your reputation with the proceeds.

Institutions that accept these gifts should treat the donor’s name as radioactive until the fortune has been stress-tested for net harm. Universities, museums, and research centers should publish the full ledger: every dollar accepted, every condition attached, every area of inquiry that mysteriously never gets funded. Boards should be required to seat representatives of the communities most affected by the donor’s core business — as vetowielding fiduciaries with real authority over the gift.

This is the baseline expectation we already apply to everyone who is not rich enough to buy institutional cover. The rules were never meant to be optional above a certain pay grade. When the donors and the institutions finally treat them as binding, the curse lifts. The marble can stay. The silence ends. And we can stop asking why trust has collapsed — because we will have finally earned it back.

One last thing.

Stop looking for monsters that look like monsters.

That is the easy target. The decoy. The distraction.

Every reptilian-overlord narrative, every archonic diagnosis, every demon-possession framework is a way to look away from the human in front of you. The human who signed the order. The human who built the dam. The human who fired on the camp. The human who wrote the policy. The human who took the money and put their name on the building.

The supernatural villain is the same trick the donor uses. It says the evil is elsewhere. Out there. Hidden. Inhuman. Untouchable. It says the man at the gala, the man at the donor table, your boss, your senator — these are someone else’s problem. The problem is something cosmic, mythological, beyond reach.

That is the lie.

M. Scott Peck, in People of the Lie, defined evil as the imposition of one’s will upon others to avoid the work of spiritual growth. He described the people who do it as men and women whose self-image of goodness is so total that they cannot bear to look at what they are doing. They dress well. They go to work on time. They pay their taxes. They give to charity. They sit on boards. They desire intensely to appear good. The goodness is pretense. The lie is told to themselves first, and only then to everyone else. Peck called them “people of the lie.”

That is who built the racket.

The men in suits. The men with foundations and named buildings. Real, named, photographed, addressable. They are seated in the front row. They have public schedules. They smile when you applaud them.

When will we learn?

The moment we stop looking up at the sky for the ones who did this — and start looking across the room. The moment we stop pretending politeness requires us to admire the emperor’s new clothes while the bill is still being paid in bodies and futures.

-Fire tongue 🔥

Fire Tongue is an ongoing investigation into how extraction operates — through language, institutions, and the marble that hides them. Subscribe for the full framework, the Fire Tongue series on linguistic crystallography.

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I am trying to plan a proposal. The market wants a deliverable: three months of wages on a ring, a setup curated for an audience, a story for the feed. I want to ask the woman I love to spend her life with me. Society wants it to be a production.

I am too tired to perform it.

I come home to two children, five and seven, whose nervous systems are co-regulating off mine because I am their safe base, and I am running on no fuel. I want ninety minutes alone. I cannot find ninety minutes.

This is what I mean when I say the system has stripped the annotation.

Love is the annotation.

Time is the annotation.

Presence is the annotation.

The base — the body, the relationship, the child, the grandmother — is still here. What has been removed is everything that lets the base mean what it means.

Love sold for profit and love paid from the body are not the same shape. The market has built a version of love optimized for scale: short, repeatable, photographable, fungible. Time borrowed from the body, sold to other people, then bought back as a symbol. Intention curated for the audience, staged for the feed, scored against the comparison set. Hands that are someone else’s and unnamed, a chain of labor deliberately invisible. A form that is scalable and interchangeable, the same template sold to everyone.

The version that costs you something cannot scale. Time given from the body. Months of nights and lunch breaks. Hours stolen from sleep because a full life permits no shortcuts. Intention aimed at one person, no audience, no comparison set, visible only to the one I love. Hands that are my own, and my friend’s, a chain of labor whose every name I know. A form that is non-scalable, unrepeatable. This stone, this setting, this woman, this life.

What scales is not love. What love costs cannot scale.

•

Last week I wrote the prequel to this. A piece called Base Without Annotation. The argument: a system that strips the meaning-layer off everything still keeps the bodies and calls what remains normal. The grandmother becomes malfunction. The caregiver becomes a cost center. The child becomes a target market. Same bodies. Different reading. I posted it. Some of you read the words. Some of you agreed. Some of you scrolled.

If you understood what the words meant, you would act. You would not be able to read them and then go back to the feed.

That is the part I cannot stop turning over. The void is not silence. The void is the polite nod. Agreement is the cheapest form of dismissal. I hear you, I support you, this is so important — and then nothing changes, and the writer goes back to selling watches he cannot afford to people who are buying time they will never live to use.

I am asking you to feel what is on the page until it costs you something. Until you can no longer eat the food, scroll the feed, vote the way you voted, work the job you work, and pretend the bleeding is not happening.

Love has become unaffordable. That is the diagnosis. Until enough of you let that sentence cost you something, nothing will change.

•

The same logic runs the budget.

This is not only about my proposal. The same logic that priced love out of reach prices everything that holds civilization up out of reach. The ledger rewards what scales. What holds us up cannot.

A defense contractor bills cost-plus. The longer the contract runs, the more it pays. The same missile is sold to every buyer. The body that absorbs the cost is far away — somewhere the buyer never sees, a name nobody learns. On the ledger: profit, growth, GDP. Funded, expanded, protected by law.

A parent raising a child gives time from the body. Eighteen years, twenty-four hours, unbillable, unrecoverable. The output is non-scalable, unrepeatable — this child, this nervous system, this person nobody else can be. The body that pays the price the ledger refuses to see is in this room. On the ledger: a loss, a gap, a cost center. Unfunded, unprotected, cut from the budget.

These two columns are the budget’s logic, their regularity and repeatability make it clear it isn’t an accident.

•

What earns them is your parent.

My grandmother lives at home because of what was built for the people who can no longer earn. Private equity bought up the nursing home sector. Genesis Healthcare, the largest chain in the country at 175 facilities, was stripped through sale-leasebacks, bankrupted, and bought back by another PE firm through a shell. Mortality runs ten percent higher in PE-owned homes.

Read one column. Time cut to the bone, staffing reduced, residents medicated for compliance. Output scalable and financialized, the same facility model replicated across hundreds of chains. Cost borne by the body of your parent — a name nobody at the facility learns. On the ledger: profit, yield, exit. The chain bankrupts, another PE firm buys the shell.

Read the other. Time given from the body, years of meals and nights, unbillable and uncompensated. Output non-scalable, unrepeatable — this woman, this house, these decades nobody else holds. Cost borne by the family in this room — a daughter’s collapse absorbed because the system refused to. On the ledger: a loss, a burden, a drain. Unfunded, unsupported, invisible to the budget.

Both columns of the ledger lead to the same parent. What earns them is your parent. What costs you is your parent. The system priced caring for her at the same point the market priced extracting from her. Either way, we pay. Through our own collapse if we keep them home. Through the skeleton of care that keeps them alive a little longer if we don’t.

•

Every minute one wins, the other loses.

My son will not stop talking. He is five. His nervous system is forming itself by co-regulating off mine. What he needs is presence without hooks — predictable rhythms, repair after rupture, attention that is not optimized for anything. A body that learns it is safe. A nervous system co-regulated by the caregiver. A person being formed, capable of attention, of love, of recognizing what is real.

The market wants the same hours. Attention captured by design. Variable reward schedules tested on developing brains. A nervous system dysregulated for engagement — spike, crash, repeat — the body itself converted into the metric. What gets built is a consumer. Brand loyalty by age four. Comparison and lack as a default state. On the ledger: margin, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value. Funded, optimized, protected as free speech.

These two are competitors for the same hours of the same child. One side is funded by venture capital, billions of dollars, engineered for engagement at the cost of the child’s nervous system. The other side is one or two bodies, exhausted, doing an impossible task.

Every minute the engineered product wins is a minute the child loses. The product is built to win. The parent is built to be tired.

•

Here is what I have done.

I am a gemologist. I know what the market prices and what it does not. I know that the four C’s grading rubric De Beers built in the 1940s is a marketing instrument, not a measure of beauty or rarity. I know what is actually rare. I went looking for it.

I hunted for the stone for months. Most evenings, after the sales floor, after the kids were down. I knew what I wanted before I started: a fancy color, a rose cut, antique, with character the modern market does not know how to read. I found her ring eventually — a natural, untreated pear-shaped rose cut, 1.15 carats, light grayish brown, SI1 clarity, with strong blue fluorescence under UV. The kind of stone you have to be a gemologist to see for what it is. I ordered it from an independent antique seller in the US.

Then I needed the setting. The mass-market houses build for the round brilliant. They do not understand a pear rose cut from the 1800s. I searched for weeks. I found an independent jeweler in Australia who did. I ordered it in 14karat rose gold with accent diamonds. More weeks for it to arrive.

I had the stone appraised by my friend, one of the best gemologists in the DMV. We met years ago because of my obsession with minerals and crystal structures. I found the most beauty in the stones the market underprices because it cannot read them. He sees them the way I do. We built a friendship and a working relationship out of that mutual recognition. He confirmed what I already knew. Then I set the stone myself, with my own hands.

It took me months. It could have taken weeks for a less full life. It could have taken a day for a much larger budget. I do not have uninterrupted time. I do not have a large budget. I have minutes between customers on the sales floor. I have my lunch break. I have the hours at night when I should be asleep. That is when I built her ring.

I booked a few days away. I am trying to make it extra special. I have not had a day off in weeks. I cannot plan or execute it perfectly. I am going to do it anyway.

This is the answer to a system that has made love unaffordable.

Refuse the expensive but affordable imitation.

Remember what real love costs. Where it exists. How I feel it. How I express it. How I know I am loved.

Pay the cost out of my own body. Use my own hands. Find the stone the market cannot price. Set it myself. Build the thing slowly because slow is what a full life permits.

•

I would rather fall apart than cut off love.

I will keep listening to my son when he will not stop talking, because one day he will stop, and I will miss this.

I will keep my grandmother in the family while she is here.

I will show up. I will keep my heart open.

I will propose to her with what I have, which is the truth. The weekend will not be perfect. The proposal will not be perfect. I am not perfect. None of this is perfect.

It is real. That is the only thing the system cannot fake.

•

If you read this and feel something, feel it until it costs you something.

Do not let it become a nod. Then do the loving thing anyway, in whatever form you have left. Use your own hands. Find the thing the market cannot price. Build it slowly if slow is what your life permits. Refuse to scale what was never meant to scale.

That is what is left when the annotation is stripped. The base. The body. The hands. The ones who will see you. The choice to keep loving anyway.

-Fire tongue🔥

If this reached you, send it to one person who needs it. Not the algorithm. Not the broadcast. One person you know is carrying something heavy. One person who has been told, in ways large and small, that what they are doing does not count. That is how this kind of writing travels — body to body, the way real things have always moved.

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Either way: see the people in front of you. Especially the ones the system has stopped seeing.

My daughter gets her allergy shot. It only lasts a second, but she gets scared every time. I have to help hold her in place and keep her hands out of the way so they can inject her. We wait half an hour to make sure she doesn’t have a serious allergic reaction. Half an hour, in a small doctor’s office waiting area or the office hallway with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old.

Drop-off. I separate from my children all day to “earn a living.” I have to sell my life to earn the right to stay alive. I am considered “productive” only when I am being productive for other people. Raising the next generation, if you are the primary caretaker, counts as a loss on the ledger. Childcare for two children costs more than housing in three of the four US regions. The federal afterschool fund that serves 1.4 million children — the only dedicated stream — was zeroed out in the FY2026 budget proposal.

Forty-five minutes back to work. Luxury sales. I pretend to be rested, alert, friendly for every customer, all day. Sometimes I fall asleep standing up, and catch myself on the case right as I start to fall over. My manager runs her anxiety down the line and we absorb it. An hour and fifteen home. I walk in the door to my aunt screaming at my grandmother for not remembering.

Private equity has bought up the nursing home sector. A 2021 study tracking 12,400 facilities found mortality 10% higher in PE-owned homes — roughly 21,000 deaths over the sample period. Eight in ten long-stay Medicare residents were prescribed psychotropic drugs every year from 2011 to 2019, often as chemical restraint to compensate for the staffing that was cut. We chose to keep my grandmother home. The cost of keeping her home is my aunt’s collapse. Also the system’s output.

•

Annotation is what determines how a string gets read. Two layers. A base is the raw material — the letters, the cells, the body. An annotation is the layer that picks one reading from what the base permits. Same base. Different annotation. Different reading.

In Hebrew, three letters — ד-ב-ר — are a base. They can be read davar, “word,” or dever, “plague.” Vowel marks are the annotation. They pick which reading the base carries right now. When the marks are absent, the reader supplies them from context. Hebrew makes the operation visible. All language runs it.

In DNA, every cell in the body runs the same base — the same nucleotide code. What makes a liver cell a liver cell and a neuron a neuron is annotation: which sequences are unfolded for transcription, which are silenced, which are wrapped tight and never read. Same base. Different reading. Different cell.

Where there is a base, there is a reading. Strip the annotation and the base becomes contested space. Whoever is closest with force resolves it.

•

My grandmother is a base. Read with annotation: the woman who raised the people standing around her, her body carrying the decades that made them. Read without: malfunction. Same body. The reading is what changes. My aunt runs the second read.

Emotionally immature equipment scaled onto a sixty-year-old body. Her caregivers were crushed building her. She runs on what never got installed. Her mother will die less remembered than she was held.

The aunt is one output. The men we rage at on the screen are another. They started as children in a structure that treats them as numbers and treats the ones raising them as expendable. Cruelty has a source.

We live in a base with the annotation stripped. The skeleton is here. The layer that would make any of it legible — that this body carries weight, that this child is being formed, that this caregiver is holding the line — has been stripped.

We call what remains normal. We call it progress. We declare that we must win the artificial intelligence race at all costs, yes even human lives — check the projected power outage reports and do the math yourself. We invest nearly a trillion in wars and killing. We do nothing to support our foundation or future. Who will be left to fight, or what will be worth fighting for, when no one remains at home?

If you read this as words, we agree. If you read it as what is happening, you already know. If you disagree, refuse to understand, or call the bleeding earned — you are the annotation the structure requires. You are the cover.

Fire tongue🔥

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Part 2 https://constructamiracle.com/p/i-am-a-cause?r=4uzajq

A parcel of spinels arrived. Spinel is often mistaken for sapphire. The steel-model Cartier watches carry a cabochon of synthetic blue spinel on the winding crown; at a glance it reads as sapphire, which is what it is meant to read as. The Black Prince’s Ruby — the great red stone at the front of the Imperial State Crown of Britain — is not a ruby at all. It is a 170-carat red spinel. Before 1783, all large red stones were called rubies. Chemistry eventually told them apart. I was working through the parcel, one by one, when I hit the stone I want to tell you about.

One stone in the parcel stood out.

It sat on my polariscope — two polarizing filters crossed against each other, so that any stone placed between them that does not split light stays dark through every rotation. Spinel does not split light. Its cubic lattice makes it one of the few singly refractive gem species — diamond, garnet, spinel. I rotated this one slow. It brightened and darkened. I did it again, slower, making sure I was not the one moving the light. Same result.

Spinel is singly refractive by the geometry of its atomic lattice. Light entering a spinel does not split. This one was splitting it.

Strain inside the crystal can make the light behave as if it split. Strain is internal distortion — pressure or temperature changes during the stone’s formation that warped the lattice slightly without breaking it. The trade calls the optical result anomalous double refraction. Looks like real double refraction. Still spinel.

Another possibility. Taaffeite. First identified in 1945 by Richard Taaffe, who bought a parcel of cut spinels in Dublin and noticed one of them doing exactly what this stone was doing. He sent it out. The answer came back: new mineral. Hexagonal lattice. True birefringence. A species that had been sitting in collectors’ cases and jewelry boxes for who knows how long, already cut, set, sold as spinel, because it looked the part.

It is the only gem species ever discovered after being cut.

The Stack

A painter works in ultraviolet-reactive pigment. Under ordinary room light the canvas shows nothing — blank white, maybe a ghost of a mark. Switch on a blacklight and the painting appears. The work was there the whole time. What changed was the condition of reception.

Making closes a loop. The painter held a prediction about how the pigment would behave on the surface. Every stroke tested the prediction. The surface answered. By the end a real object existed, and the painter knew what it was. That loop is complete inside the maker.

One body is not enough to build a world.

The shared world — the one we move through together — is built by countless bodies, countless minds, across time. A painting that never leaves the studio, a song that is never heard, a sentence that never reaches another chest: the making happened. The world those acts were meant for never received them. The loop closed in one place and stopped.

Enduring construction is construction that moves beyond itself. Made under a constraint the world answered. Carried into another body. Rebuilt there, in that body’s own terms. Corrected again by that body’s experience. Sent on. The making holds because it transmitted. The private loop became a shared one.

• • •

Making meets matter. That is where the first correction signal lives.

Think of any skill the body learns — throwing, drawing, chopping, cutting gems. The hand moves. The world answers, in milliseconds. Too hard, too soft, wrong angle, wrong grip. The body adjusts. Thousands of cycles later, the movement is smooth, because the world was correcting the body the whole way down. Every Prismacolor blend I botched taught me something the ones that came out right never could. Wrong pressure, wrong order, wrong tip — the paper showed me. I adjusted. Thousands of cycles later, the blends read the way I saw them before I started.

Language learns this way too, when it is allowed to. A child says a word, a face responds. The word landed, or it did not. The child adjusts. Enough rounds, and the word is tethered to what it was meant to mean — because the world kept correcting it.

Transmission meets another brain.

Part 2 described this as situation-model mirroring. When you speak, my brain builds a model of what you are describing. If the words are grounded — if they refer to something a body can register — the model in me starts to approximate the model in you. What got made in your system gets remade in mine. The loop that closed in you closes again in me. That is what communication is when it works.

Both ends are the same prediction engine from Part 2, running at its hardest setting. On one end, the maker meeting the world. On the other, the receiver meeting the maker. Between them, construction moves.

• • •

Now the stack.

Phonemes, which are perceptually distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another, sit on the body. Produced by mouth and chest. Received by the ear. Tethered to what a body can make and hear. Part 1 set this floor.

Words sit on phonemes, Sentences on words. Arguments, stories, shared references on sentences. Narratives on those. Institutions on narratives. Ideologies on institutions. Whole shared worldviews rise from there, each level more compressed than the last.

Each layer either keeps the tether to the layer below or cuts it.

A sentence built from words learned in bodies, arranged by a grammar the speaker kept testing against how people actually responded, lands. An institution built from sentences like those, staffed by people whose predictions about the work keep updating against real consequence, holds. A culture whose institutions hold can carry large abstract words — justice, community, care — because somewhere down the stack, actual people and actual exchanges are still keeping the words honest.

Cut the tether at any level, and everything above the cut is floating — however coherent it sounds.

A metaphor three floors up from a severed root is still a metaphor. It can move readers. It can persuade. It cannot carry weight. People speaking an ideology whose words have lost contact with the bodies those words once named are running a stack whose correction signal was turned off levels below them. The coherence is internal. The system runs on symbols confirming symbols. The construction looks like construction.

• • •

Back to the tree from Part 1.

The trunk is constrained by its own geometry. Each branch that grew was tested against wind, gravity, light, water. The shape aboveground makes sense because the root system belowground kept correcting it. Stop distributing resources to the buried part — because it cannot be seen, because the visible tree seems to be doing fine — and the tree keeps looking like a tree until the day it falls.

A society’s stack works the same way. It keeps looking like construction until too much is left destroyed or depleted.

The next question is how to tell the constructions that hold from the ones that only look the part.

Two Architectures

A triangle can be drawn large or small. Rendered in ink or in chalk or in pixels. Described in words. Carried across thousands of miles, through any number of retellings, and what arrives on the other end is still the same figure — three sides, three angles summing to 180°, the proportions between them preserved.

Remove a point. Add a line. Flatten one of the angles. The figure that arrives is no longer a triangle. It is something else now, whatever it looks like. The name can persist without the structure. What moved through the channel was a label.

Every construction travels this way.

• • •

A construction is the relational structure holding its parts together — the angles and proportions that make the thing what it is. Compression is fine. Required, even. Part 1 established that language is itself symbolic compression. A sentence fits a week of experience into a handful of sounds. A blueprint fits a building into a sheet of paper. A word fits a whole class of things into three letters.

The question at every compression is whether the structure survives the squeeze.

“My child” compresses an enormous amount of relational reality into two words. The child is a body you have held. You know their voice, their weight, the frequency of their breathing asleep. The word “child” is small. What it points to is not. If someone hearing you use the word has held a child of their own, the structure rebuilds on their end. The compression worked because the architecture survived.

“The asset on my balance sheet” compresses a different reality. Also small. What it points to — depending on what the asset is — could be the same child, once it has been reduced to a line item. The label is preserved. The structure is not. What was relational, embodied, specific, has been flattened to a number and a category. The shape that arrives on the other side is a different shape. A point was removed.

This happens at every level of the stack. A joke is a setup-payoff structure. Paraphrase it and flatten the payoff, the joke is gone even if all the words are somehow still there. A promise is a speaker-listener-commitment structure with a specific shape in time. Compress it into a slogan and the promise is gone. A neighborhood is a web of specific people who recognize one another across years. Compress it into a demographic, a census tract, a market segment, and the neighborhood is gone. The words remain. The triangles were replaced by labels.

• • •

Enduring construction is construction whose essential structure survives compression and transmission.

This is what the maker’s whole job is — holding the structure of the thing through every stage. The painter working in UV pigment preserved the composition, the proportion, the relational logic of the image through every stroke, knowing it would disappear into the white canvas and only reappear under the right light. The illustrator holds the shape of what they are drawing through every layer of color, every blend, until the image on the paper is the image that started somewhere behind the eye. The writer compresses an experience into a sentence, and the sentence either carries the structure the experience had, or a flattened version that sounds similar and means something else.

On the receiving end, the same work happens in reverse. The receiver rebuilds the structure from the compression they received. If the angles and proportions made it through, the thing they rebuild is the thing the maker made. They are now holding the same shape. The construction transmitted.

Construction that lasts compresses without losing what it is.

• • •

The pressure to collapse structure into label is constant.

Every shortcut is available. Drop a point, the compression is smaller. Flatten an angle, the thing fits more places. Replace the shape with its name, and the name moves at the speed of a sentence. Most of a culture’s working vocabulary travels that way most of the time. Labels at the speed of sentences. A sound or a symbol where a person or entire country used to be.

What survives is construction that refused the shortcut. That held the angles through every squeeze. That compressed exactly as much as it could without losing itself, and no further.

The triangle is the test. What moved through the channel — the shape, or only the word for it?

Collapse and Return

You feel it before you can name it.

A friend you have known for years tells you something. The words are warm. The sentences are correct. Nothing in your body registers that you have been spoken to.

A product arrives from a company whose name you trusted for a decade. The object functions. Something about it reads as though no one made it.

A meeting at work. The right language gets deployed. A decision that nobody in the room would defend on their own feet gets made anyway, and the meeting ends on schedule.

Each of these is the same event at different scales. A label arrived without the shape underneath it. The name persisted. The structure that used to stand behind the name is gone.

This is what collapse actually looks like, most of the time. Buildings do fall, eventually. Long before anything visible comes down, the shapes inside the labels have been thinning for years.

• • •

At the individual scale, you become the shape that goes missing.

A person whose prediction engine has been running on one leased domain — a job, a role, a performance — for long enough that all other domains have atrophied wakes up one day to find the returns on the one remaining domain have stopped firing. The coffee you make every Friday for the meeting is still coffee, but it does not land anywhere. The reports you file arrive in a system that cites other reports. The sentences you speak at work are received by an audience optimizing for the same words you are producing. The loop that was closing in you has been closing only inside a symbol system for longer than you realized.

Part 2 named this collapse burnout, depression, addiction, rage. All the same mechanism: the organism’s agency prediction stops resolving, because the domains it was resolving in were themselves shapes that had gone missing.

The body was right. It was telling you for months. The language caught up or never arrived.

• • •

At the institutional scale, the same thing happens, slower.

An institution is built to hold a shape. A hospital holds the shape of care — a sick body met by hands that can help. A school holds the shape of teaching — a child met by someone who knows something and wants them to know it. A court holds the shape of judgment — a dispute met by a structure older than either party. A newspaper holds the shape of witness — something happened, someone saw, a body on the other end is told.

The shape is the whole institution. The building, the staff, the letterhead, the funding — these are the supports around the shape. As long as the shape is intact, everything else bends toward keeping it intact.

When the shape starts thinning — when the correction signal from the bodies the institution serves stops reaching the bodies running it — the supports become the institution. Budget optimizes against budget. Protocol cites protocol. The letterhead carries weight the shape no longer carries. People show up and perform their roles, and their roles are real, and the institution still runs. What runs is not the original shape.

This can continue for a long time before anything visible happens. A local newspaper that keeps publishing after the newsroom has been gutted is a small version of it. The 2008 financial collapse was a large one. The pattern lives between them, invisible from the street.

• • •

At the cultural scale, the pattern has a name.

Guy Debord gave it one in 1967: the spectacle. His claim was that modern life had replaced direct experience with representation — that everything that used to happen between people was now mediated by images of the thing instead of the thing itself. He saw the pattern. He did not have the neuroscience yet.

The mechanism is what Parts 1 and 2 of this essay established. A culture whose stack has been running on symbol-confirming-symbol for long enough that whole generations have grown up without direct access to the shapes their inherited vocabulary is supposed to point to. The prediction engine runs on predictions. Correction signals come from other predictions. Nothing physical is anywhere in the loop.

When this reaches population scale, the downstream effects are not mysterious. Trust thins, because trust was always a shape the body registered in another body, and that register is no longer firing. Meaning thins, because meaning lived inside shapes that have gone missing. Identity inflates to fill the space, because where the shared shape collapses, the label itself becomes the site of battle. Grievance runs on loop, because the correction signal that used to come from reality engaging with claim has been replaced by engagement metrics that reward whatever kept the feed scrolling.

We are in this now. Name it plainly.

• • •

The return, at every scale, is the same shape, and small.

A body making something under a constraint the world answers. The same body carrying what got made to another body that receives it. The receiver rebuilding the shape in themselves, in their own terms. Sending it on.

That is the whole operation. Part 1 showed it in the infant at the breast. Part 2 showed it in the recovery room. This piece has shown it in the stone on the polariscope, the marker on the paper, the triangle that kept its angles through compression.

Nothing about this scales through announcement. A policy cannot produce it. A platform cannot ship it. A movement that tries to engineer it top-down reproduces the spectacle, because the scale is wrong and the architecture is wrong. This returns one loop at a time, in one body after another, multiplied across enough domains in enough people that the correction signals start reaching the layers above them.

That looks like this. Coffee made for someone who drinks it. A meal cooked on a weeknight for a family that eats it and says almost nothing. A drawing that reads. A blend that comes out the way you saw it before you started. A sentence written to one specific person that lands inside their chest. A child held until they fall asleep. A walk to the end of the street and back, noticing what is there. A fence built straight. A room where one person tells the truth and another person receives it.

Minimum viable making-that-transmits. This is what a working stack is built from, at the bottom, forever.

• • •

Back to the bedroom.

There I was, any Monday morning, dark room, phone in hand, trying to fix the world with my thumbs. Part 1 started there and showed it was the attempt itself that was the error — the stance, the severance from any body the “world” was supposed to be made of. Part 2 showed what was running underneath: a prediction engine on leased signals, error correction turned off. This piece has shown what the working alternative is made of.

The world is not fixed by thumbs on screens. It gets built by bodies making things under constraint and carrying what they made to other bodies. One loop. Another loop. Another. Slow. Local. Rebuildable at scale one. Not optimized. Not scalable. That is the feature.

This is the ground. Under every floor, every foundation, every stack. The place where the shapes actually live.

Everything else is spectacle.

-Fire tongue🔥

If this landed

Gathering this took time, thought, feeling, vulnerability, courage. I put the stone on the instrument. Wrote what I saw. Sent it.

You received it.

The loop closes when something comes back. That’s trade. That’s a cycle completing.

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Either one is the same shape. Made. Received. Returned.

Thank you for being on the other end.

Yikes—that sounds like the opposite of what we are often told to protect our own peace and find acceptance.

Good. Because peace built on distance and displacement is closer to dissociation, a deadening of life. I’m interested in life. I think you are too.

Every euphemism.

“Reduction in force.”

Every number.

“300,000 Federal Layoffs Announced.”

Every label that stands where a name should be.

“Fascist.”

So far away.

When we see a category instead of a life, when we read numbers instead of faces, we consent to the conditions that made the erasure possible.

We reduce or eliminate our capacity to be moved. The willingness to be touched by what we witness.

For many of us, this stopped being a conscious choice a long time ago. It’s survival.

Imagine if we actually felt the toll of every breaking news story. If we noticed the thousands of cars in the morning traffic we’re caught in weren’t just metal machines in the way, but human beings who’d rather be home, doing something they love, or simply getting some sleep. If we caught the microexpression on the barista’s face—something like despair—when a customer snaps at her for a mistake on one of the fifty drinks she’s already made that morning. If we noticed the customer too. The bags under his eyes. The way his voice shifts up a register when he says the word “wrong”—often a sign of early activation, something old moving through him that has nothing to do with coffee. If we recognized that the little avatars stacked on our screens, saying things mundane and nonsensical and heartbreaking, are people. Just like us.

We would break.

NO.

That lie has insulated us from our own aliveness long enough.

We would OPEN. We would spill out into the world and the world would spill into us. We might feel like we were drowning or being consumed. Like a dam breaking open, unsure of when the flooding will stop; or maybe it scorches our throat from the sound that comes out feeling like breathing fire. The light entering would sting the way it stings when you’ve been in the dark for a decade or longer.

And then we would see.

I.

Empathy recruits more of the brain than any other cognitive function. It activates the mirror system, the mentalizing network, the interoceptive system, the limbic system, the somatosensory cortex—simultaneously. The biological investment is immense. Connection is an operation our nature deemed essential enough to divert resources from everything else. And when empathy fails, the failure is metabolic before it is moral. The conditions that exhaust us—the economy, the pace, the volume, the precarity—erode our highest-cost capacity first. The most human thing about us is the first thing to go when energetic resources are scarce.

The cost is still paid.

Every refusal to witness, every face we don’t see, every feeling we override—that energy remains and surfaces as what we call mental illness. Disease. Externalities. War. Loneliness. Abuse. The invoice arrives. We just don’t recognize it because it arrives in a different language than the one we used to refuse it.

Make it personal. Because it is. Because one day you will find yourself—your tragedy, your desperation, your injustice—reduced to a talking point. A footnote. A piece of propaganda laundering political persuasion through legitimate suffering. And the people reading about you will feel shock, moral outrage, and also do nothing. They will use your story to destroy other flattened people in the name of ideology, while the relief you needed never arrives.

Enough.

II.

I will draw the line now, in the open: my words come from me. They are for me. And they are not me. What you do with them—how they land, what they stir, whether they leave any trace at all—is entirely yours. I am asking for contact, not agreement.

If you’ve already labeled me—if you’ve already determined who I vote for, what team I’m on, where this argument is headed, the philosophical underpinning of a case I haven’t yet made—continuing to read will not serve you.

You have read, up to this point, words written by someone else. You cannot know what the remaining text holds. You cannot know what my mind or body hold except for what I reveal to you in these words. I am not a label, a category, an affiliation, a political movement, a class, a gender, an age, or a character in your narrative.

I am Anthony, who writes under the name Fire Tongue. These are my words. They are what I have to offer.

This piece is about what we are.

III.

Here is the question that sits underneath every crisis we witness:

We have the technology, the resources, and the capacity to address nearly every major condition we face. Environmental collapse. Corporate overreach. Addiction. Loneliness. Violence. The slow erosion of physical and cognitive health. The solutions exist. The resources exist. What is missing is the political will to act.

Why?

The answer has been available in many forms for longer than I’ve been alive, and certainly longer than anyone alive today has been here. Here’s one :

An object at rest stays at rest. An object in motion stays in motion. Unless acted upon by an external force.

Newton was describing physics. He was also describing us.

Force, in a human system, has a name. We call it emotion.

From the Latin emovere. To move out of. E—out. Movere—to move.

Emotion is movement. The felt experience of being moved—by contact with another person, with a condition, with something outside ourselves that the body registers as real. We take in. We allow ourselves to be touched. The nervous system generates a charge. The charge produces motion.

Remove the contact, and you remove the charge. Remove the charge, and the object stays at rest.

This is what the system does.

IV.

Every abstraction is a removal of contact.

“Two hundred and forty-five casualties.” Read that. Notice what happens in your body.

Now notice this: I could give you a name here. A city. A specific mother. The number of children waiting for her at home. The angle of the bullet. The window it came through. And your nervous system would mobilize—because I gave it a body instead of a count.

I’m choosing not to. Because using her death to prove my point is the operation I’m asking you to recognize.

But feel what just happened. You were reaching. Your mind was already constructing her—a face, an age, a kitchen, a child’s voice calling from another room. The nervous system began assembling a person from fragments because that is what it does. It mobilizes for bodies. Faces. Voices. Specific, irreducible people in specific, irreducible situations. The social bonding system activates when it detects another living being in proximity. Empathy is a physiological event, and it requires a person on the other end.

A person. Not a category.

“Casualties” is a category. “The homeless” is a category. “Illegals” is a category. “Human capital” is a category. Each one removes the face. Each one replaces contact with count. And each one leaves the nervous system with nothing to mobilize for. The information arrives. The charge does not. The object stays at rest.

This is what abstraction does. And I want to be clear here, because the problem is not abstraction itself.

Every architectural blueprint marks its scale—something like 1”= 20’. The blueprint compresses an actual house from a three-dimensional object into lines on a two-dimensional sheet of paper. It has to. A drawing at full scale would be fifty feet wide. It would be wasteful, unreadable, impossible to carry to the job site. The compression works. It allows us to plan, coordinate, innovate in ways that might never be achieved working only in material space.

Abstraction serves us the same way. Epidemiology needs aggregates. Public health needs trends. Policy needs patterns visible only at scale. The compression is real and useful—when we remember it is a compression.

The blueprint works because no one tries to live in it.

What I see right now is a world that has moved into the blueprint and forgotten the house. A world that measures entire countries—billions of irreducible lives—as single metrics flattened to look nothing close to human. GDP. Birth rate. Workforce participation. National security risk. The compression happened. The scale was never marked. And somewhere between the data and the decision, the people disappeared.

The abstraction edits the person out of the signal before the signal reaches you. By the time the word “casualties” arrives in your visual cortex, there is no body to mobilize for. The erasure already happened—upstream, in the language, before you had the chance to feel anything at all.

This is what abstraction does when it forgets what it compressed. And the system that produces the conditions we want changed is the same system that produces the language environment in which we cannot feel those conditions strongly enough to act.

V.

If you feel impatient right now—if you want me to skip to the solution—I understand. Notice the impatience.

That impulse is a completion-seeking behavior. The body senses unresolved tension and wants it discharged. Quickly. Cleanly. Give me the answer, give me the action step, give me the thing I can do and move on.

The extraction economy has learned to monetize that impulse. The scroll to the next headline is the prediction engine in seeking mode. The reduction of everything to “for or against” is the compression that prevents you from holding the structure long enough to locate the actual intervention point. The demand for a quick fix is the mechanism that ensures no fix arrives.

Sit with it. The discomfort is information.

Here is what the discomfort is telling you: your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It detected unresolved tension. It mobilized energy to resolve it. And now it is scanning for a discharge pathway—fight, fix, flee, scroll.

Every one of those pathways leads back to rest without resolution. The tension was never completed. It was only discharged. The cycle stays open. The energy dissipates. And tomorrow the same tension returns, because nothing in the underlying structure has changed.

The system runs on your incomplete cycles. Every open loop is a market. Every unresolved need is a customer. Every feeling that almost completes but doesn’t is a click, a purchase, a vote, a prescription, a scroll.

VI.

You are probably reading this on a phone.

That phone contains a platform that has converted you into a number. Every dimension of your relational existence—who you are to other people, how you connect, what you offer, what you receive—compressed into metrics. Follower count. Like count. View count. Engagement rate. The question shifts from “who am I?” to “where do I rank?”

The platform does not need to show harmful content. The encoding scheme is the harm. A person reduced to a metric is a person with the contact removed. A follower count is a category where a face used to be. And the nervous system, receiving numerical position instead of relational contact, generates no charge.

There is no number at which you are finished.

Read that again.

There is no number at which you are finished.

The platform has no completion signal. There is no metric that resolves the seeking.

This is the extraction economy’s operating principle made visible in your hand. The same mechanism that keeps the data center humming, the war escalating, the child support payment intercepted, the school defunded. Open loops. Incomplete cycles. Energy mobilized and never discharged into resolution. A population in permanent seeking mode, generating motion that never arrives anywhere.

And the children.

Adolescence is the developmental window when the brain is under active construction. Synaptic pruning is strengthening the pathways that get used and eliminating the ones that don’t. The limbic system—emotional reward processing—is mature. The prefrontal cortex—judgment, impulse regulation, long-term planning—is still being built. The architecture is open. Whatever environment the adolescent inhabits during this window gets wired in.

The environment they inhabit is a platform that encodes them as numbers. The neural pathways being pruned and strengthened are the pathways the platform activates: numerical comparison, status evaluation, social positioning. Metric-based self-assessment gets wired into the developing architecture during the window when identity itself is being constructed.

Meta’s own internal research—conducted between 2018 and 2020, leaked in 2021—documented that among teen girls who already struggled with body image, 32% said Instagram made it worse. That 13.5% of teen girls in the UK traced suicidal ideation to Instagram. That 17% reported aggravated eating disorders. Meta conducted this research. Documented the findings. And continued refining the engagement features that produced them.

Because the engagement features are the revenue mechanism. And the revenue mechanism requires that the completion signal never arrive. A finished user is a lost user. A satisfied person has no reason to scroll.

VII.

In biology, there is a term for what happens when a cell touches its neighbor and receives the signal to stop growing. It’s called contact inhibition. The cell makes contact. It registers the boundary. Growth stops. The organism maintains its form.

Cancer is what happens when that signal is lost.

The cell keeps growing past the boundary. It does not register the neighbor. It does not receive the signal. It consumes without limit because the mechanism that says “enough” has been disabled.

The extraction economy is contact inhibition failure at the social scale. The signal that says “enough”—the felt recognition of another person’s boundary, another community’s need, another species’ right to exist—has been removed from the system. The abstraction machine strips the contact. The metrics replace the faces. The growth continues without limit because nothing in the architecture generates the signal to stop.

And the treatment is the same in both cases. You do not cure cancer by arguing with the tumor. You locate where the contact inhibition signal was lost. You restore it.

VIII.

Make it personal.

That is the intervention. The whole intervention. Everything else follows from it.

When you read a statistic, find the person inside it. When you encounter a label, look for the face it replaced. When you feel the impulse to scroll past, notice that the impulse itself is the system working as designed—removing your contact with the thing that would move you.

Emotion is the force. Contact is what generates it. Abstraction is what prevents it. The system stays at rest because the conditions for motion have been stripped from the environment in which we try to think, feel, and respond.

The way out is local. It is specific. It is body-level.

A parent reads a school board policy and discovers it protects the institution, not the child. They shows up at the meeting. They names the specific mechanism. The cycle that was interrupted—the duty of care—begins to close.

A resident traces a data center’s water consumption to the aquifer that feeds the county. He maps the extraction. He brings the map to the zoning board. The cycle that was interrupted—the community’s relationship to its own resources—begins to close.

A researcher documents that a platform encodes children as numbers during the developmental window when their identity is under construction. She names the encoding scheme as the defect. The cycle that was interrupted—the child’s capacity to know themselves through relationship rather than rank—begins to close.

Each of these is someone who made it personal. Who restored contact with a specific condition that the abstraction machine had filed as someone else’s problem. Who allowed the charge to generate. Who moved.

The system that produces suffering at scale depends on your emotional immobility. It depends on the distance between you and the face inside the statistic. It depends on the number staying a number.

The force that changes it is the oldest force we have. Older than language. Older than number. Older than every system that learned to extract from us by removing us from each other.

Contact.

Allow yourself to be touched by the world. The rest follows.

𝔽🔥

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Why do you value the forecast over the life that produced it?

I. The Words That Reshape Families

In Maryland, the custody of a child is decided by a judge who determines what arrangement serves their “best interest.” Until October 2025, that phrase had no statutory definition (1). It floated above families for decades, applied by judges referencing case law that no parent without a law degree could access or anticipate.

House Bill 1191, effective October 1, 2025, codified sixteen factors under Family Law § 9-201 that judges must now consider and explain on the record (2). The bar associations, the judiciary, and the advocacy commissions called this progress. They called it clarity. No parent organization was among them

Read the factors. They include:

“Stability and the foreseeable health and welfare of the child.”

“The child’s physical and emotional security.”

“The child’s developmental needs, including physical safety, emotional security, positive self-image, interpersonal skills, and intellectual and cognitive growth.”

“The daily needs of the child, including education, socialization, culture, religion, food, shelter, clothing, and mental and physical health.” (3)

These are words with power. They sound like things every parent wants for their child — because they are. They can also separate a parent from their children. They can restructure a family overnight. They can mark a caretaker as unfit.

And not one of them is defined.

What is stability? Measured how? Over what timeframe? By whose standard?

What is emotional security—and who determines whether a child has it?

What is a “positive self-image” in the eyes of a judge who has never met the child? What does “intellectual and cognitive growth” look like for a specific two-year-old or six-year-old—and how would a courtroom full of strangers know?

These terms are legally ambiguous, and their ambiguity is the source of the court’s power. Every undefined word is a blank check the court writes against a family’s future and cashes against a parent’s rights.

And the incentive to cash it is literal. Under Title IV-D of the Social Security Act, the federal government reimburses states 66% of child support enforcement costs and pays additional incentive funding based on performance measures weighted toward collections volume (4). Higher support orders generate higher collections. Higher collections generate more federal money. Equal custody arrangements between parents with comparable incomes produce lower support obligations—and lower federal revenue for the state. The system is financially rewarded for fracturing families and penalized for keeping them whole. The law requires a judge to explain findings for each factor. It does not require those findings to rest on anything the family would recognize as true.

II. The Relationship That Doesn’t Exist

There is a difference between the hard biological limits observable in flesh and force—cause and effect—and the description of what cannot be measured or defined with the same constraint.

Words like “justice,” “fair,” “healthy,” “enough,” “potential,” “adequate”—these don’t exist out there. They exist only in relationship, in mutual explicit agreement. Without that agreement, they lose any sense of coherent, consistent meaning. They become noise, drowning the space where meaning exists.

III. The Stranger in the Room

When the court applies these terms to a parent’s experience, it implies there is a relationship between the court and the parent that grants weight and meaning to them.

There is no such relationship. There is a file.

A relationship requires two or more persons—separate individual beings, constrained to their own experience and perspective. It requires respect for and acknowledgment of the limits of what can be expressed by one person for another. It requires both parties interacting within a shared understanding.

The court does not know the parent. The court does not know their children. The court knows a case number, an income figure, an address, a schedule. From this—from an abstraction—it claims the authority to define what “stability” and “emotional security” and “developmental needs” mean for a family it has never inhabited.

The Supreme Court has acknowledged the weight of what is at stake. The interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children has been called “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.” (5) The Constitution recognizes that “the custody, care and nurture of the child reside first in the parents.”(6)

And yet the system that adjudicates this fundamental right does so through undefined terms applied by strangers.

IV. The Burden Without the Right

That constitutional language—“custody, care and nurture reside first in the parents”—does two things at once. It recognizes the parent’s fundamental right to raise their children. And it establishes the parent’s primary financial obligation to provide for them.

The state uses this single principle to simultaneously impose the full cost of parenthood on parents and claim the authority to override their parental judgment. The parent receives the burden. The court retains the power. The right and the obligation are supposed to be inseparable—you bear the cost because you hold the authority, and you hold the authority because you bear the cost. The family court severs them.

Consider what this looks like in practice. A parent is ordered to pay child support. The amount is calculated based on income—and if the court determines the parent is underemployed, it can impute income based on what it believes the parent could earn, regardless of actual circumstances. (7)

The system’s refusal to examine origin extends further. When a child is conceived through reproductive coercion—the deliberate sabotage of agreed-upon contraception, recognized by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists as a form of intimate partner violence (8) and tracked by the CDC as a component of coercive control (9)—the court treats the resulting obligation identically to one arising from mutual, informed choice.

Maryland Rule 9-205, effective January 2023, already recognizes coercive control as grounds for exempting a parent from mandatory custody mediation. House Bill 1586, currently before the General Assembly, would expand the statutory definition of abuse to explicitly include “controlling reproductive autonomy”(10). Yet the child support statute under Family Law § 12-204 contains no provision for the court to consider whether the obligation it enforces was created through the very conduct the state is simultaneously codifying as abuse. The court names the coercion. It enforces the coercion’s consequences anyway.

If the parent falls behind, the consequences are severe and immediate: wage garnishment, seizure of tax refunds, suspension of driver’s licenses and professional licenses, denial of passport, and incarceration (11). The enforcement mechanism is functionally criminal—contempt of court, jail time—while being classified as civil, which means the parent is denied the constitutional protections that criminal defendants receive (12).

The parent pays the full cost of raising the child. The parent is held in contempt for falling short. And the parent’s actual authority—the right to make decisions, to be present, to act in their child’s interest—is rationed by the same court that demands the payment.

This is the structure: you are handed the deed and the mortgage. You are responsible for every payment. And a stranger who has never entered the house decides which rooms you may use, on which days, for how many hours. If you miss a payment, you go to jail. If you object to the arrangement, your objection is used as evidence of instability.

The obligation is absolute. The right is conditional. The authority that imposes both is accountable to neither.

V. The Record of the Authority

The state claims its authority through parens patriae—the power to protect those who cannot protect themselves (13). If this is the foundation, then the state’s own record is the measure of its standing.

In September 2025, the Maryland Office of Legislative Audits released its findings on the Department of Human Services Social Services Administration—the same institutional apparatus that underpins the family court’s authority to evaluate parents and determine child welfare. The results:

Children placed with predators. Ten children in state care were living in foster homes where registered sex offenders resided. A contract worker at a hotel housing foster children had a prior conviction for murder. An employee of a group foster home convicted of sexually assaulting a minor was subsequently charged with crimes involving the children under his care—three months after the state reviewed the home and failed to flag his record (14).

Children denied basic medical care. As of May 2024, 540 children had not received a medical exam in the prior year. One hundred ten had not had one in multiple years. One thousand six hundred thirty-five children had missed dental exams, including 140 who had never had a dental exam in their lives (15).

Children absent from school—while the database reported otherwise. The state’s own system reported near-universal school attendance among foster children. Auditors tested 40 cases and found no evidence of attendance for 15 of them. Up to 38% of school-aged foster children may have been absent from school entirely (16).

Children warehoused in hotels. Between 2023 and 2024, 280 children lived in hotels at some point. Eighty-two stayed for three months to two years. The cost: $10.4 million (17).

Investigations stalled and unreported. During fiscal year 2024, Maryland received more than 17,000 allegations of abuse and neglect. Many counties failed to investigate within the legally required 60-day window. The Social Services Administration did not report these delays to the General Assembly as required by law. When asked, it cited a “natural disaster” occurring between February and September 2024. No such disaster was recorded (18).

Federal noncompliance and financial penalties. In 2019, the federal government found Maryland out of compliance in seven core metrics, including “children are safe from abuse and neglect” and “children receive services to meet their educational needs.” By September 2024, the state had failed to meet its own corrective action plan and was fined $700,000. It now faces the potential loss of an additional $23 million in federal funding (19).

Nationally, the outcomes for children who pass through the system this authority oversees are devastating: children in foster care are seven to ten times more likely to be sexually abused than their peers. An estimated 60–70% of children rescued from sex trafficking have spent time in foster care. Within eighteen months of aging out, half become homeless or incarcerated. Youth in foster care are diagnosed with PTSD at twice the rate of U.S. combat veterans (20).

And beneath all of it, a structural reality: families with financial resources can access treatment, support, and stability on their own terms. Families without those resources are the ones who lose their children. As one commentary on the Maryland audit observed: “People with lower incomes are not the only ones in our community who are facing these problems, but they’re the only ones who lose their children because of it.” (21)

Hold these two realities together:

A parent who misses a child support payment faces wage garnishment, license suspension, and jail. The state that places children with sex offenders, fabricates school attendance data, and invents natural disasters to explain its failure to investigate 17,000 abuse allegations faces a fine—and files a corrective action plan.

The parent is held in contempt for failing to meet a financial obligation. The state is held to a corrective action plan for failing to keep children alive.

VI. The Fundamental Contradiction

Authority without accountability has a name in every era. The church called it infallibility. The crown called it divine right. The state calls it sovereign immunity.

The structure is identical: the institution that claims the highest authority over human life grants itself the lowest obligation to answer for its use. The state cannot be sued for its failures unless it consents to be sued (22). The judge who holds the power to dismantle a family is shielded by judicial immunity (23). The caseworker who fails to flag a sex offender in a foster home is protected by qualified immunity unless the failure violates “clearly established” law—and in a system built on undefined terms, almost any decision can be justified after the fact (24).

This is sovereign immunity wearing the vestments of child protection—the same garment the church wore while relocating priests, the same garment the crown wore while taxing colonies. The institution that claims moral authority over the most vulnerable exempts itself from the moral consequences of its own failures. The people harmed by those failures are told to trust the process.

And this is a guarantee of self-destruction, because a system with no corrective mechanism does not stabilize. It deteriorates.

In 2019, the federal government found Maryland out of compliance. The state filed a corrective action plan. The corrective action plan failed. In 2024, the state was fined. In 2025, auditors found children living with sex offenders. Each cycle is worse than the last. Each remedy is absorbed. Each report is filed. The institution continues. The children continue to be harmed.

This is what institutional infallibility produces—guaranteed escalation of failure, because the structure has made it impossible to be corrected by the people closest to the harm.

In every functional system—medicine, finance, engineering—authority and accountability are proportional. A surgeon who holds life-and-death power carries life-and-death liability. A fiduciary who manages your assets is legally bound to act in your interest and can be sued for breach. The greater the power, the greater the obligation to answer for its use. This is the foundational logic of trust.

Family court inverts this entirely. The institution that holds the power to separate a parent from their children, to impose financial obligations enforced by incarceration, to define “stability” and “fitness” and “best interest” without defining those words—this institution answers to no one in the room. The parent, meanwhile, who holds the least structural power, carries the most consequences. Every word scrutinized. Every financial shortfall punishable. Every emotional reaction entered as evidence. Every objection reframed as proof of the instability being alleged.

Authority without accountability is tyranny.

Accountability without authority is servitude.

The family court assigns one to the institution and the other to the parent. This is the fundamental contradiction, and it will continue to produce the outcomes it has always produced—harm to children, destruction of families, erosion of public trust—until the people subject to it refuse to accept it as legitimate.

VII. The Pattern Beyond the Courtroom

This inversion is identical wherever concentrated power meets unaccountable institutions. Ratepayers across thirteen PJM states are absorbing billions in electricity cost increases driven by AI data center buildout they had no voice in approving—the hyperscalers reap the profits, the households bear the cost, the regulators who permitted it face no consequence. The structure is the same in every domain: the entity that benefits claims authority, the entity that bears the cost carries the consequences, and the entity that should enforce accountability exempts itself.

VIII. Judge What’s Real

If you are to judge me, then judge me.

Judge the parent standing in front of you today—the one who showed up, who is asking to be seen, who is telling the truth under oath. Judge the actual capacity, the actual circumstances, the actual relationship between this parent and these children.

The job that once existed, the market that once sustained it, the body that once carried it, the time and resources that were once accessible—these are abstractions. Frozen projections of conditions that have changed. Every parent evaluated against who they used to be—or who the court imagines they should be—is being judged against a phantom.

Every hour spent earning the court-mandated amount is an hour absent from the child the amount supposedly serves. A parent is more than a wage earner. Income is presence withheld. A credit score is a character reference issued by creditors. An address is a coordinate. A schedule is a grid. These are the things the file contains. They are the silhouette of a family, traced by someone who has never entered the room.

How can any citizen accept the verdict of a system that judges a person who does not exist—while ignoring the one speaking?

Every citizen who takes an oath swears to tell the truth. When a parent tells the truth and the court replaces it with an assessment built on undefined terms, outdated assumptions, and abstracted data—the perjury belongs to the institution. The oath belonged to the parent.

IX. The Duty That Returns

There is a belief—held by institutions and enforced through power—that the law belongs to the court. That authority flows downward. That the citizen’s role is compliance and the system’s role is judgment.

The law belongs to the people. The court is its custodian. When the custodian places children with sex offenders, fabricates data to conceal its failures, and shields itself from accountability through the very immunity doctrines it denies to the people it judges—the custodian has broken faith with its mandate.

When a parent stands before that failed custodian and refuses to accept its judgment of a person who does not exist, that parent is honoring the oath the institution abandoned.

The mechanisms for correction exist. Maryland Rule 9-205 already names coercive control. House Bill 1586 would codify it as abuse. Senate Bill 996 would establish independent oversight of the child welfare system through a Child Welfare Ombudsman. Four states have eliminated qualified immunity for government officials who violate constitutional rights in state court (25). The question is whether the people of Maryland will use these instruments—or wait for the next audit to confirm what we already know.

It is our duty—as people, as parents, as caretakers, as citizens—to uphold the law and morality where institutions have failed to do so. The institution is the instrument. The people are the source. When the instrument breaks, the duty does not vanish. It returns to us.

My rights are mine. I claim them honestly and in accordance with truth.

Your contempt of your own duty is not my crime.

It is yours.

The author is a parent, independent researcher, and education policy advocate in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

-Fire tongue 🔥

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In Maryland

Contact your state legislators today and urge them to pass HB 1586 — which expands the legal definition of abuse to explicitly include coercive control and violations of reproductive autonomy — and SB 996 (Kanaiyah’s Law), which creates an independent Child Welfare Ombudsman with real oversight power.

Everywhere else

The same structural failures exist in family courts and child-welfare systems across the country. You can act where you are:

• Ask your legislators to define vague “best interest of the child” factors in statute, recognize coercive control as abuse in custody and support decisions, and establish (or strengthen) an independent child-welfare ombudsman.

• Demand independent performance audits of your state’s family court and child-welfare agency, modeled on Maryland’s Office of Legislative Audits.

• Support efforts to limit qualified immunity for officials who violate parental rights (Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico have already removed it entirely in state court; others are moving).

• Connect with national and state-level reform organizations such as the National Parents Organization (chapters in 28 states working on shared-parenting laws) or ParentalRights.org.

Notes

1. Funderburk, Carl. “Best Interest of the Child Should Not Be an Ambiguous Term.” Children’s Legal Rights Journal, Vol. 33, Iss. 2 (2013). Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

2. Maryland House Bill 1191, effective October 1, 2025. Codified as Family Law § 9-201. Signed by Governor Wes Moore, May 15, 2025.

3. Sixteen factors listed under Md. Code, Family Law § 9-201(A). See also Tucker Family Law, “What HB 1191 Can Mean for Your Maryland Custody Case” (September 2025).

4. 42 U.S.C. § 658a (incentive payments to states based on five performance measures: paternity establishment, support order establishment, current collections rate, arrearage collections rate, and cost effectiveness); 42 U.S.C. § 655 (federal matching of state administrative costs at 66%). The federal incentive formula rewards current collections volume, which structurally favors cases with higher support orders. See National Child Support Authority, “Title IV-D Program Explained” (2025).

5. Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000).

6. Id., quoting Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944).

7. Courts may impute income to a parent found to be voluntarily underemployed. See Justia, “Child Support Law” (2025); Lawshelf, “Foundations of Law - Child Support.”

8. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Committee Opinion No. 554, “Reproductive and Sexual Coercion” (reaffirmed 2023). Birth control sabotage—including deliberate removal or discontinuation of contraception—is recognized as a form of intimate partner violence.

9. CDC, National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (2011). Approximately 10.4% of men in the U.S. reported having a partner who tried to get pregnant when they did not want to or tried to stop them from using contraception.

10. Maryland House Bill 1586 (2026 Session), “Protective Orders — Coercive Control.” Hearing held March 13, 2026. The bill explicitly includes “controlling reproductive autonomy” in its definition of coercive control. Effective date October 1, 2026.

11. Enforcement mechanisms include wage garnishment, tax refund interception, lien placement against property, driver’s license and professional license suspension, passport denial, and incarceration for contempt of court. See 28 U.S.C. § 1738A; Child Support Recovery Act, 18 U.S.C. § 228.

12. Child support enforcement is classified as civil, which means respondents are denied constitutional protections afforded in criminal proceedings—including the right to appointed counsel—despite facing incarceration. See Turner v. Rogers, 564 U.S. 431 (2011).

13. Boswell v. Boswell, 352 Md. 204 (1998). See also Parvis, Lindsay, “When Parents’ Constitutional Rights & Children’s Best Interests Collide” (April 2025).

14. Maryland Office of Legislative Audits, “Department of Human Services Social Services Administration” (September 2025). Reported by Wood, Pamela and Wintrode, Brenda, The Baltimore Banner, September 17, 2025; CBS Baltimore, September 19, 2025.

15. Id.

16. Id. See also The Daily Wire, “Maryland Placed Foster Children With Sex Offenders And A Convicted Murderer” (September 24, 2025).

17. The Baltimore Banner, Wood and Wintrode, September 17, 2025.

18. Maryland OLA Audit, September 2025.

19. Id. Federal fine of $700,000 confirmed September 2024. Potential additional loss of $23 million in federal funding reported by Father’s Advocacy Network, “Maryland Foster Care Audit Exposes Dangerous Failures” (October 2025).

20. Sexual abuse prevalence: Benedict, M.I. et al., “Types and frequency of child maltreatment by family foster parents,” Child Abuse & Neglect, Vol. 18, No. 7 (1994); Polansky, N. et al., Johns Hopkins University studies on foster care maltreatment. Sex trafficking: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children; Polaris Project, “Human Trafficking and the Child Welfare System” (2018). Aging out outcomes: Courtney, M.E. et al., “Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth,” Chapin Hall, University of Chicago (2011). PTSD prevalence: Pecora, P.J. et al., “Mental Health of Current and Former Recipients of Foster Care: A Review of Recent Studies in the USA,” Child and Family Social Work, Vol. 14 (2009); Casey Family Programs, “Improving Family Foster Care: Findings from the Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study” (2005), reporting PTSD rates among foster care alumni at twice the rate of U.S. combat veterans.

21. The Baltimore Sun, “Time to reject status quo that fails Maryland’s foster kids” (October 23, 2025). Guest commentary citing University of Baltimore Center for Families, Children and the Courts.

22. Sovereign immunity shields the state from civil suit unless the state consents. See Alden v. Maine, 527 U.S. 706 (1999); Eleventh Amendment, U.S. Constitution.

23. Judicial immunity protects judges from civil liability for acts performed in their judicial capacity. See Stump v. Sparkman, 435 U.S. 349 (1978).

24. Qualified immunity protects government officials from civil liability unless their conduct violates “clearly established” statutory or constitutional rights. See Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800 (1982). In the context of child welfare, this doctrine shields caseworkers even in cases of substantial failure, because the vagueness of “best interest” standards makes it difficult to prove a violation was “clearly established.”

25. Md. Rule 9-205 (eff. Jan. 1, 2023); HB 1586 (2026 Session); SB 996/HB 980 (2026 Session), “Kanaiyah’s Law.” Colorado SB 217 (2020), New Mexico Civil Rights Act (2021), Montana, and Nevada have eliminated qualified immunity for government officials in state court.

violently nostalgic

abusing the clock and its logic

minutes once were metabolic.

Neurotic nostalgia claimed I had found a kingdom and everything I ever wanted years ago.

The problem is I believe(d?) it.

The deeper problem is I’m not sure it ever existed to begin with.

The deepest problem is the story matters more than the reality, sometimes being right means you will always be alone.

———

Tonight I tell myself stories— I choose to mourn some dear moments and friends, a time of youth seeking and finding meaning in the chaos of its coming of age. On a bridge I used to know, inhaling deeply, passing freedom like a torch, a ritual resuscitation of the soul. Always breathing, bracing, gasping for a childish wonder, soon choking on burnt dreams. An elusive distant sensation of peace, my breath sacrificed for the thrill of being alive. I recall the essence of eternal, orderless momentum, where every moment came neither before nor after, but exactly where it must be. There was fear and there was depression, there was love and hope as well, but most of all there was no loneliness. We were lost, and so it had to be, but we were, I was something echoing with a deep, archetypal presence that I had always known was part of me.

Somewhere in that invented forest, somewhere in that golden age, somewhere long ago I found a place, a way to be free. I look at my words and who I’ve become and cannot help but feel I betrayed myself. I chose to care, I chose life when death stood before me.

That word — invented — I wrote it without thinking. But it might be the most honest word in the sentence.

———

The sensation that beautiful things have been lost and nothing has come worthy of replacing them — what does this mean? It means the mind has made a religion out of memory. It means I have been worshipping in a church I built with my own faith and called my convictions something I discovered.

It started with open arms and bright budding irises, expanding cohesion in a promise of infinity. Then the clock read some numbers, the movement became a bit more precise, and the pulse swelled something more than pure blood. Jaded, jaw-grinding, bones cementing to gravity, and mind boiling to a dry dread, the soul found itself filtered and famished, the body slowly withdrawing into a hugging recoil. Bruises and blasphemy, scars and scalps, heaven and heartbreak, cuts and cognition, the statue solidified with an arm outstretched, reaching, always, tendons in a tight knot.

That tension feels like defiance, a refusal to let the hand be empty.

That defiance kept me alive for a while. But defiance is just another way of clinging to the version of yourself that’s already gone.

———

So I see a hole in my head, that leads to a hole in my heart, that leads to a hole in my soul, that leads to a hole in the world, that leads to a hole in the very universe. I walk into the vast emptiness, endless and expansive, to find a place so deep and distant it could not exist, but here I am. And I travel the circle that leads back to the mirror, to the pit of my pupil, to the morgues of my mind, to the hollows in my heart, and deeper until I face myself again.

I am looking for a dream in the daytime because I am still asleep.

And here is where the search gets dangerous — because you can chase the missing thing so far inward that you forget there was ever an outside. You can forget that what you invented, what was once loved and held, continues to grow. In your mind they remain like isolated islands, looking nothing like what the world out there has become on its own.

At a small lattice metal table I see the promise of eternal happiness. I picture tangerine bathing two people, from the flood of a late summer sunset, wrapped in warmth at this small restaurant table. There are smiles and laughter and love and a large bottle, or pint glass endlessly filled with the substance I imagine gives a mortal the disposition of God himself. I remember the freedom; all my baggage nowhere to be found, just us, just this moment moving along as it does.

The way our skin can’t contain the soul, it leaks into the atmosphere to change its density and now it’s heavy with you and I. The room had been relatively weightless until I thought about it. I feel the need to run outside so I might disperse better, so that physics might return to some idea of normal, because while we are here time ceases to function as it should. Still, the vibrations are ecstatic, regretful, and unrelenting; but I can’t let go to let it be as it may.

I said I see this and I must let it go, one way or another. But I swear it’s stuck to me. I couldn’t relinquish it if I tried.

Yet I know that it does not work that way. The thoughts have not gone, only been stranded for as long as their connection is severed in the systematic shutdown of a mind; they will return again. Displacement is not release. And so nothing but deception, constant and excessive, will keep the truth at bay.

I tried to make a person into a country I could live in.

If I cannot feel my own skin what could I feel in touching yours, but a greater lack of sensation in my soul and a growing distance between yours and mine. It becomes clearer, with every movement I make to hold you close, to feel something deeper, I reach for what may or may not be there, that I have no hands to grasp with and no heart to beat with yours.

The vulnerability, as an old scar I rip only to bleed once again, I look to you to heal me. You do not stop the hemorrhage, you do not dig deeper, you rip your own scar for me to see; and I recognize we are not band-aids. Bleeding out, the life spilling, sloshing at our feet; this is all we know, this is our dearest act of intimacy. Sometimes we breathe shallower, our vision tunnels, our hearing fades, and the brain forgets that it has reasons to not always be in ecstasy. We can only hope that our invisible crimson confessions may drown us and we die for the twilight as we fade to sleep.

———

yeah we could

we could let go

I know the sin

but not the soul

we could

we could say so

I know her skin

but not her soul

I wrote it in

without words

I spelled it when

she let me go

———

prism passing, moments lagging

and all I can think is sleepy, slow

times elapsing, bones bent and dragging

and draw my drink until its steeply low

I would sleep for days but I know

I would not wake to a brighter sun

or a better soul

just a fractured passion

painting the figment

with the colors that make no whole

———

I had to write; it had been so long. Etching out my thoughts in filament stains to remember that they had a presence, that they could take form, in hopes that I might be able to speak again. I’d said only a single word in the past two hours. My jaw locked tight, no room in the air for my ill-formed vibrations; I drifted through the night’s fog of fluorescence and neon and let it fill my hollow headspace. I could no longer find structure in the language, there was nothing that could be built and hold any weight.

This is what it sounds like when the words stop working. When the thing you’ve lost can’t be named because the naming is part of what broke it. The paradise I mourned was held together by language — by the story I told about what that bridge meant, what that table meant, what her skin against mine meant. When the story collapsed, so did the world it described.

I know something about how that works now. I’ve spent years tracing how language builds realities — how a word like engagement hides an addiction engine, how rightsizing hides a body count, how personalization hides a surveillance apparatus. I can see the architecture when it’s out there, when it’s institutional, when it belongs to someone else’s extraction.

It took me longer to see that I’d been running the same operation on myself. The golden age was a currency I minted from selective memory. The paradise was a story that kept me seeking — and the seeking kept me from arriving anywhere real. The mind, left to its own devices, is its own best extractor.

———

These days are not like numbers that rise and fall in accordance with a pattern, but more like brand new eras that follow with no plot or plan I can trace until it is clear that I am somewhere different. Each hour declares a war upon the things that seemed to have always been and that which are. When a truth is glimpsed it does not redefine the moment alone, but takes the past that was like a certainty and shatters the solid mass of memory into a heap of pieces that no longer fit together. I sort through the rubble, because I will not be built on misunderstood, broken parts, but will make mosaics of meaning that I have begun to see.

My epiphanies are just recollections, my evolution is just positive regression, my new understandings are just things I’ve forgotten.

The questions I was born with, the curiosity that crippled my functions in societal standards, the surrender and then the rejection of my body, the embrace and the release of my essence in conscious awareness — these repetitive cycles of the same thing with a different paint, the overwhelming compulsions of a lost amnesic — have seeped into my everything to remind me of the potential in nothing, and its place and its purpose and its source.

See, it’s like this — there are colors you can’t normally see, but once you see them you know they exist — and you want to paint every goddamn optic nerve with the new spectrum. I’ll tell you, it’s a bit like neon in that it glows, but it’s a bit more like freedom.

If I didn’t do the things I did, I would not be sitting here with you. If I did not hate myself the way I did, I never would have learned to love myself, and now be able to love you. If I hadn’t nearly killed myself, I never would have lived as I now do. If I hadn’t spat at the face of God, I never would have seen the saliva strike the invisible hands of a loving creator, that hold me now.

———

settle us; settle dust;

settle vessels unto the crust.

revel, lust, and it all was just

a devil or an angel

a moment to think or touch.

but the metal must,

with carbon’s lush

tremble such

in things and dreams

until its crushed.

blooming petal,

despite the hush

feel the blood

ignite in

electric blush.

balanced but not level,

feed the time

sweet ashes

sharp bevels,

with salt and rust

and let it settle

in all that is us.

The ground remains. What persists remains.

The story changes, not the air that breathes them or the hand that shapes them.

— Fire tongue🔥

This is original writing, original artwork, and original vulnerability — each one the distilled product of decades of living through what you just read. If these are things you value, your subscription is what makes it possible to keep sharing them with you.

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Someone I love very much started crying yesterday. A song came on that reminded them of someone they lost and loved dearly a few years ago. The grief was pure, appropriate, natural, and painful.

I received an email that a colleague had unexpectedly lost their sister. She was only 32. I don’t know the details. I know I have two sisters, each within a year of that age. I can only imagine the grief at losing them.

I watch media repurpose the abuse and killing of human beings for economic and partisan agendas constantly. Fractured families, broken bodies, thrown on the table with performed reverence or contemptuous dehumanization, whichever serves the message — if they mention the bodies at all. People are dying. Children are losing parents. Parents are losing children. Land that held generations is burning. That is what is happening. Everything said about it from behind a desk is privileged blindness.

This week the CEO of BlackRock sat down with BBC to discuss the war in Iran. It sounded like a portfolio review. Two oil price scenarios, trade route disruptions, GDP implications. Not a single mention of the human cost. Not his domain, you might object. BlackRock holds significant stakes in major US defense contractors, and weeks earlier Fink had called the conflict “a good long-term investment opportunity.” The silence is the perspective. That interview gained more traction than anything I’ve seen discussing the morality of the war or the lives of those dying in it and the families they leave behind.

Grief is supposed to be sacred. It is the body’s honest response to irreversible loss.

In June 2009, consultants from McKinsey & Company sat down with Purdue Pharma’s Chief Medical Officer to solve a problem. The mothers of dead children were grieving too loudly. It was threatening sales.

According to McKinsey’s own internal documents — obtained by subpoena and quoted verbatim in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s complaint — the purpose of that meeting was to discuss how to “counter emotional messages from mothers with teenagers that overdosed in [sic] OxyContin.”

That “[sic]” matters. It means the Attorney General was quoting McKinsey’s own words exactly as written — the grammatical error preserved to prove it was a direct lift from their documents.

In 2013, Purdue Pharma — already a convicted criminal company, having pled guilty to misbranding OxyContin in 2007 — hired McKinsey to revive its sales. McKinsey developed a strategy called “Evolve to Excellence,” designed to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales by targeting “High Value Prescribers” — doctors writing the most opioid prescriptions, including prescriptions that federal prosecutors later described as “unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary.”

By 2017, McKinsey had developed a presentation projecting that 2,484 CVS customers would either overdose or develop opioid use disorder in a single year. Their proposed solution: a rebate for every overdose event. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey testified before Congress that McKinsey’s own analyses described this as an “attractive option” for Purdue if the payment was “in the range of $6,000 to $14,000 for each patient who was harmed.”

They put it in a slide deck. They presented it to leadership. Former McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas called it “the banality of evil, MBA edition” — “They knew what was going on. And they found a way to look past it, through it, around it, so as to answer the only questions they cared about: how to make the client money and, when the walls closed in, how to protect themselves.”

I love my children more than anything. I cannot imagine life without them. They are still young, but I pray every day they live long past me — happy, full lives.

That feeling, that want, interferes with the profit model of some of the most influential corporations in the world.

It threatens BlackRock’s investments in defense contractors. It threatens Meta, which a jury ordered this week to pay $375 million after finding the company knowingly endangered children and concealed child sexual exploitation on its platforms. And it threatened McKinsey’s campaign to turbocharge Purdue’s opioid sales.

McKinsey’s proposed solution to the grieving mothers: recruit pain patients to publicly advocate for the drugs — weaponizing one group of suffering people against the grieving families of another. They then advised Purdue to tell doctors that opioids provide “freedom” and “peace of mind” and give patients “the best possible chance to live a full and active life.” The Massachusetts complaint notes these claims were deliberately crafted to skirt Purdue’s existing Corporate Integrity Agreement — McKinsey designed the language specifically to avoid triggering the legal constraints from Purdue’s previous criminal conviction.

That was a meeting. That was a topic on an agenda. How to neutralize a mother’s grief so they could keep selling the drug that killed her child. How to craft new lies careful enough to thread the needle of an existing criminal conviction.

The cartel doesn’t lie and say their drugs are safe. The cartel doesn’t have doctors prescribe their product to people genuinely pursuing pain relief. And the cartel doesn’t send consultants to a conference room afterward to discuss how to emotionally counter the grieving parents of children who died from their product.

McKinsey does. Did. For fifteen years across seventy-five separate engagements with Purdue alone. And was only held to account in December 2024 — more than a decade after the worst of the conduct.

That conviction was thirteen months ago. Today, McKinsey is the firm telling your employer how many of you to keep. In January 2026, their global managing partner announced the company now employs 40,000 humans and 25,000 AI agents — and expects those numbers to reach parity by year’s end. They published their own report showing that 30% of companies plan AI-driven workforce reductions this year. They are advising those companies. They have cut 5,000 of their own employees in eighteen months.

The company that calculated a rebate for every overdose is now calculating a replacement cost for every worker. The spreadsheet is the same. The product changed.

Think about what a person has to become to sit in that room and treat a mother’s grief as a variable to be managed. Think about how far from life you have to travel for that to register as strategy.

These people should be removed from positions of influence with the same urgency we apply to anyone operating without the capacity for treating human life and relationship as sacred — so they cannot cause further harm.

So here is what I am asking you to do.

Share this.

Send it to everyone you know. Say their name out loud. McKinsey & Company. Say the names of the companies and governments that still hire them and pay them billions after a criminal conviction for helping kill 500,000 people.

Make it expensive.

Make it socially expensive.

Make it reputationally expensive.

Make it cost more to build a fortune off death than it does to serve the people in your community.

Because right now the math runs the other way. A consulting firm can turbocharge a drug that kills half a million people, calculate rebates per overdose, strategize against grieving mothers, destroy the evidence, and walk away with a fine that amounts to two months of revenue and a single partner doing six months in a cell. That is what your child’s life is worth in their spreadsheet.

The only thing that changes that math is you. They lobby against legislation. They advise the regulators. They absorb the fines.

What they cannot absorb is a world that refuses to do business with them. A world where every university, every government agency, every corporation that hires McKinsey has to answer one question: you know what they did, you know they were criminally convicted for it, and you chose to pay them anyway — why?

That question, asked loudly and publicly and relentlessly, is the only thing that makes the math change.

Ask it.

Every fact cited here is public record.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced McKinsey’s $650 million criminal settlement on December 13, 2024. McKinsey agreed that it “knowingly and intentionally” conspired with Purdue to aid and abet the misbranding of prescription drugs. One partner, Martin Elling, was sentenced to six months in federal prison for destroying more than 100 documents. McKinsey has paid approximately $1.6 billion total across all opioid-related settlements. The 114,000 internal documents are publicly archived at the UCSF-Johns Hopkins Opioid Industry Documents Archive, free for anyone to read.

The company is still operating. Still advising governments. Still advising the companies that shape your children’s lives.

Now you know. What you do with it is yours.

Share

Additional sources:

Congressional testimony (AG Healey, April 27, 2022): congress.gov | MA AG Complaint / ProPublica: propublica.org | Rebate projections: beckershospitalreview.com | City of Seattle complaint: seattle.gov | McKinsey-FDA conflicts (House Oversight): oversightdemocrats.house.gov | McKinsey AI workforce (Jan. 2026): yahoo.com | McKinsey State of AI / 30% layoff projections: finalroundai.com

— @inspiritedinsight

Part 1: Before the Word

Between Part 1 and this sentence, I finished writing a twenty-five page research paper. It is the kind of document academic institutions recognize as serious. It is not my natural register. In fact, I found writing it so frustrating initially it actually inspired this other piece, How do you spell the sound of a scream? which let me say what I actually felt, so I could go back and find the formal language for it.

I am a gemologist, an illustrator, a father in long-term recovery with no degree in any of the fields the paper draws from. On the title page, where the institution goes, I wrote: Independent Researcher.

I submitted it to PsyArXiv — a preprint repository, which is where researchers post papers publicly before formal peer review. It’s the front door of academic publishing. You put your work up, other researchers can read it, cite it, respond to it. The barrier to entry is supposed to be minimal — the whole point is making research accessible before the slow machinery of journal review decides its fate. They rejected it. The reason:

“For submissions on this topic, we only accept submissions from authors who have previously published in this area. As we found no record of previous relevant peer-reviewed publications by the author(s) in a brief search, we cannot accept the work into the repository. This moderation decision is final. Please do not resubmit.”

I uploaded it elsewhere and emailed it directly to five researchers whose work I’d built on. One of them — a leading figure in the field, whose publications appear throughout Part 1 of this essay — responded in less than twenty-four hours. He wrote:

“Many thanks for sharing your paper with me. I just skimmed through it quickly to get a sense of what it’s about, and I was very impressed. You seem to be integrating many prominent lines of theoretical and empirical work to advance some novel ideas.”

He said he would read through the full paper in detail and referred me to his colleague who is writing a book on the subject, because he thought my work would be relevant to it.

(Here is the link to that paper for those interested: The Inverse Constraint Hypothesis: Language’s Conditioning Power as a Function of Domain Sensory Verifiability)

Same paper. Same week. One system checked the author. The other checked the work.

So when I tell you that the register you speak in determines whether you are heard — I have lived on both sides of that wall in the same week, with the same document, carrying the same truth.

That is the foundation we are about to dig into.

• • •

The Prediction Engine

In Part 1, we established that language starts in the body. Sound carries meaning before words exist. The first word in human life is built from the body’s first sound during its first act of care. And when children with no linguistic input meet each other, full language emerges spontaneously from embodied demonstration.

That was the first floor.

The foundation is this: most of what we call consciousness is our brain’s best guess at reality, generated from all prior experience and current context, projected over the incoming world before the incoming world arrives.

Our brains are prediction machines. They build a model of what they expect to encounter and run that model forward. The sensory data — light hitting the retina, sound vibrating the eardrum, pressure against skin — functions primarily as error correction. It updates the model where the model got it wrong. What we consciously experience is substantially the prediction, adjusted at the margins by sensation.

This is the dominant framework in neuroscience for how perception works. It’s called predictive processing, formalized by Karl Friston in 2010, building on decades of earlier work. The brain generates expectations from the inside out — from memory, context, and pattern — faster than raw sensory data travels from the outside in. Neuroscience calls these inside-out expectations “top-down” processing and the raw sensory stream “bottom-up” processing. The terms are literal: predictions flow down from higher brain regions; sensory data flows up from the eyes, ears, skin.

Our experience of the world is where those two streams meet. And the prediction usually wins.

Think about what that means.

Walk into a room we’ve been in before. The brain predicts walls, furniture, light, floor. If something has changed — a new painting, a broken window — that difference registers as a prediction error, and we notice it. Everything else runs on the model. We perceive what we expect, adjusted where reality insists.

This is efficient. It has to be. Processing the full sensory stream from scratch every moment would overwhelm any system. So the brain takes shortcuts. It builds models from experience and runs them forward, using sensation as a check. The better the models, the fewer errors, the smoother the experience.

Here is what really matters about this.

The system only updates when the prediction fails. When what we expected and what arrived don’t match, the brain generates a prediction error — a signal that says: the model is wrong here, fix it. If no error arrives, the model runs. Unchecked.

Bring back Marc Andreessen from Part 1. He declared his goal: zero introspection. Move forward. Go build things. Just go.

In predictive processing terms, he is describing a system that has turned off its own error-correction function. The model runs. It generates predictions about the world — about what’s valuable, what people need, what progress looks like — and because the system never pauses to check those predictions against incoming data, the model never updates.

It can be any system — a person, a company, an institution, a culture — that stops checking its predictions against reality.

The model becomes the reality.

This is how we end up convinced we are helping our spouse or child while they feel undermined, unseen, or erased. This is how we cause harm without intending it. This is how people commit atrocities while believing they are doing God’s work. This is how technological advancements meant to improve humanity’s quality of life actively destroy the environment and conditions that support human thriving.

The prediction was never checked. The model ran. The bodies absorbing the consequences were outside the model’s field of vision.

• • •

The prediction engine runs on different fuel depending on how much physical reality is available to check it against.

Stand inside a house. Sunlight on hardwood floors. Our feet register the solidity of the ground, the temperature of the wood. Walls return sound differently than open air; the auditory system models room volume before we consciously estimate it. We smell paint, dust, coffee from the kitchen. A hand on the doorframe registers texture, temperature, the slight give of aged wood. Proprioception — the body’s sense of itself in space — places us relative to walls, ceiling, staircase.

The brain’s predictive model generates “house,” and that prediction is being checked by sensory data arriving through every available channel simultaneously. Each channel generates its own prediction errors. If the model is wrong — if the structure is unsound, if the floor is about to give — the sensory systems will escalate errors until the model updates. We will feel it before we name it.

This is a high-constraint environment. The senses keep the model honest.

Now: a person evaluates a mortgage-backed security.

Somewhere inside that instrument is the house. Or rather, thousands of houses. Each one has hardwood floors, paint, coffee in the kitchen. People live in them. The person holding the MBS has sensory access to none of it. There is no photon, no sound, no smell, no temperature, no texture. The “object” being evaluated has no physical form that any sensory organ can detect. What reaches the brain is pixels forming letters and numbers on a screen.

A mortgage-backed security is a legal construct in which thousands of individual mortgages have been pooled, sliced into risk tranches, and sold as bonds. Each underlying mortgage is itself an abstraction — a legal claim on a stream of future payments from a person who lives in a physical house. The house is concrete. The person is concrete. The holder of the security has zero sensory access to either.

The brain’s predictive model for “what this MBS is worth” is constructed entirely from linguistic and numerical inputs. A rating agency’s label: AAA. Yield figures. Prospectus language. Verbal assurances. Other people’s stated confidence. The system that generates the prediction is the system that generates the evidence for the prediction. A closed loop.

This is a low-constraint environment.

We already know what happens when low-constraint environments run unchecked, at scale. Eventually reality intercedes. It escalates. It forces the model to update. This is what we saw in 2008.

Read more

I don’t know if I have. I know when my kids want to play hide and seek, anything over 20 seconds and I’m using my phone timer. Seriously though, the most I’ve counted was probably doing inventory in the massive warehouse the boat-building program I directed used to have. Even then, it was only in the hundreds for most things.

Maybe you've counted more — though before anyone takes that as an invitation to flex, I wouldn't go bragging about counting lots of money. They make counting machines for that. I’ve seen it where I work. Literally dump a stack of cash in, and in seconds it’ll blow through $100,000 in hundreds and twenties. If you’re counting cheddar like that, might be worth the investment, money is time after all .

Now check out this headline: “The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it.”

The number behind it: $136.2 trillion in total U.S. obligations against $6 trillion in assets. Let’s write that out just to see how many zeroes we’re talking about:

Yeah. That’s a lot. So many, I almost didn’t want to count them.

How long do you think it would take to count up to that number?

At one dollar per second — no breaks, no sleep, no stopping — it would take 4,319,178 years. Homo sapiens have existed for about 300,000 years. Counting to this number would take over fourteen times longer than our species has been alive.

Speed it up. Run $100 bills through a commercial counting machine at 1,200 bills per minute — the kind I’ve watched chew through stacks at work. Nonstop, no jams, no maintenance, no breaks. 2,159 years. You’d have needed to start that machine running during the Roman Republic, before Julius Caesar was born.

Or, if you use a calculator and charge endless interest — well, you can get there in no time. That’s the trick. And that’s what this piece is about.

$136,200,000,000,000

Now. That number comes from the Treasury’s own FY 2025 consolidated financial statements — $6 trillion in assets against $47.8 trillion in liabilities, plus $88.4 trillion in unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations. The GAO has failed to verify the books for 29 consecutive years. And the Treasury has published these statements annually since 1997, in the same format, at the same URL.

The numbers are accurate. The “revelation” is manufactured. And the sequence that follows it — the outrage, the proposed remedy, the thing being built to replace what you’re now angry at — is worth examining with the same rigor as the numbers themselves.

One note on framing before we go further: the U.S. government can create its own currency, which makes sovereign insolvency different from household insolvency. That capacity to create money is precisely the mechanism by which the supply chain below operates. The household analogy circulating on social media flattens a critical distinction. The math is real. The metaphor obscures how the extraction works.

So where did 136 trillion dollars in obligations come from? Who captured the value?

The answer has a structure. And you already understand it — because it’s identical to a supply chain you’d recognize immediately.

I. The Cocaine Chain

Coca leaves become cocaine in a jungle lab. ~95% pure. Costs almost nothing. A cartel cuts it with levamisole — a veterinary dewormer that mimics the product. Importers cut it again with lactose and baking powder — inert filler, pure volume. Regional dealers add lidocaine and benzocaine — numbing agents that fake potency. By the time a street buyer pays $80 a gram, the product is 20–40% actual cocaine. Occasionally laced with fentanyl. The person at the bottom pays the highest price for the weakest, most dangerous product. Everyone above them profits from the dilution.

II. The Money Chain

The Federal Reserve creates money at zero cost — $4.6 trillion in 2020 alone. It enters the economy through 26 designated primary dealers — Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, and 19 others. They are the only institutions that transact directly with the Fed. They buy assets at pre-inflation prices. That’s the first cut — value captured before the product moves down.

Major corporations access capital next at prime rate — buy back stock, acquire companies, purchase real estate. Purchasing power already diluted, estimated at 85–95% of original value based on documented asset price movements in the months following major money creation events.

Commercial banks add interest rate spreads, origination fees, closing costs — the volume fillers. They attach adjustable rates, balloon payments, prepayment penalties — toxic terms structured to extract over time. The lidocaine of finance.

The consumer arrives last. Highest interest rate. Weakest purchasing power. A $100,000 mortgage in early 2020 bought a house. The same $100,000 in 2022 bought 60–70% of that house. Even a responsible borrower who locked a 3% fixed rate in 2020 is now trapped — unable to sell and rebuy at 7% without losing ground. And occasionally, at the bottom: subprime loans bundled with performing ones, stamped AAA by agencies paid by the sellers. The fentanyl of finance.

Same pyramid. Same dilution at every level. One chain is illegal. The other runs the global economy.

III. The Pitch

The Fortune article generates legitimate outrage. Interest payments on the debt hit $1.22 trillion in FY 2025 — more than the entire defense budget — flowing back to the institutions that hold the debt.

Then the article proposes a fiscal commission and a balanced budget amendment. Procedural remedies that sound responsible and change nothing structural. The audience is left with accurate fury and an empty hand. They know the intermediary layer is extracting from them. They want something to replace it.

Into that space walks a third supply chain.

IV. The CBDC Chain — “The Solution”

A Central Bank Digital Currency. Direct government-to-citizen digital money. The pitch: cut out the middlemen entirely. No more primary dealers. No more banks adding their margin. Your money, from the source, straight to your wallet. 134 countries representing 98% of global GDP are already researching, piloting, or launching one.

The source creates money — same as the Fed. Zero cost. Full purchasing power. But this time the money is programmable from creation. The first-access, transit, and distribution layers are gone. Primary dealers, corporations, commercial banks: removed from the chain.

That’s what you’re being asked to celebrate. Or will be asked to celebrate.

Now look at the end user’s position. In the cocaine chain, a diluted product. In the money chain, diluted purchasing power. In the CBDC chain, full-strength money — with conditions attached.

In China’s Shenzhen trial, digital yuan was programmed with an expiration date. Spend it by the deadline or it disappears. The government can wipe account balances for individuals or companies out of compliance. China’s CBDC was designed with “the flexibility to be changed in the future“ — architecture built to be modified after adoption. You agree to version 1. You live under version 7.

As of January 2026, China’s digital yuan became the first interest-bearing CBDC — sweetening the bait to pull users into government-controlled wallets. India’s e-Rupee uses Aadhaar biometric verification. Nigeria paired its eNaira with a national digital ID expansion. The wallet is locked to your body.

Documented capabilities: expiration dates. Spending restrictions. Transaction limits. Real-time surveillance of every purchase. Wallet freezes for noncompliance. Biometric ID locks. One analysis described the architecture plainly:

“automatic expiration dates for money, spending limits by category, and real-time monitoring of financial behavior.”

In the cocaine analogy, this is the cartel selling directly to the user. You’ve eliminated the middlemen. You’ve also eliminated every buffer between you and the entity that controls the supply. And you will buy their cocaine when they say, you will use it when they say, and you will stop using it regardless of the withdrawals.

V. Already Law

“But the U.S. banned CBDCs.”

True — the front door. Trump signed an executive order in January 2025 prohibiting retail CBDC development. The House passed the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act.

The back door was built seven months later. The GENIUS Act, signed July 18, 2025, creates a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins — private digital currencies pegged to the dollar. From the White House’s own fact sheet:

“All stablecoin issuers must possess the technical capability to seize, freeze, or burn payment stablecoins when legally required and must comply with lawful orders to do so.”

Seize. Freeze. Burn. The same programmability everyone fears from CBDCs — already U.S. law through the private stablecoin framework.

The GENIUS Act carves stablecoins out of SEC and CFTC oversight entirely. And it requires issuers to back their tokens with Treasury securities — creating a new captive buyer for government debt. Stablecoins generate artificial demand for the very bonds the system is struggling to roll over.

The insolvency creates demand for a new debt buyer. The stablecoin framework creates that buyer. And the currency it produces has a government-mandated kill switch.

VI. The Math That Ancients Understood

Compound interest on a fixed or slowly growing productive base is an arithmetic impossibility over time. The total amount owed always exceeds the total money in circulation. The only way to service existing debt is to create more money — which generates more debt — which requires more creation. There is no equilibrium.

Every civilization that understood this math recognized the trap. The Code of Hammurabi capped interest rates in 1750 BC. Aristotle called lending at interest “the birth of money from money” — unnatural because money is sterile. The Torah prohibited it between Israelites. The Quran forbids it absolutely. The Catholic Church classified it as mortal sin for a thousand years.

These were empirical observations. Debt concentrates. Land consolidates. The working population enters bondage. The economy seizes.

Babylonian and Sumerian kings declared Jubilee — wholesale debt cancellation — to prevent creditor oligarchies from consuming the productive economy.

We have the Federal Reserve instead of Jubilee. It manages the spiral by creating more money to service more debt to generate more interest payments — flowing back to the same institutions that hold the debt. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects Treasury debt becomes unable to roll over within 20 years.

VII. The Three Extractions

The cocaine chain extracts through dilution. The product gets weaker at every level.

The money chain extracts through dilution. Purchasing power weakens at every level.

The CBDC chain extracts through control. The product arrives at full strength. The source decides when you spend it, what you spend it on, whether it expires, and whether you have access at all.

The first two are parasitic. The third is architectural. The extraction is built into the product at the point of creation. The product itself is the instrument of control — and it works because the intermediaries have been removed.

VIII. The Pattern

1. Reveal a real wound. Direct anger at the intermediary layer.

2. Propose procedural reforms that change nothing structural.

3. Let the anger ferment.

4. Introduce the replacement into that emotional space.

5. The public, primed to hate the middlemen, welcomes their elimination — and the elimination removes the last buffer between the individual and centralized monetary control.

This works whether or not anyone designs it consciously. You can manufacture consent without a conspiracy. You just need accurate data, strategic framing, and a population squeezed hard enough to accept any hand that offers relief — especially one that looks like it’s punching the same people they’re angry at.

IX.

When someone shows you how the chain poisons you, the only question that matters is: what are they building to replace it?

If the answer eliminates every intermediary while giving the source programmable, identity-linked, expirable control over the product — you are watching the chain restructure. And “seize, freeze, or burn” is already law.

I just showed you three wounds. You’re waiting for my solution. That’s the reflex this entire piece is about — and I’d be doing the same thing I’m criticizing if I offered one.

So instead: the insolvency has names. The supply chain has addresses. The architecture of what’s being built to replace it is public, readable, and linked throughout this piece. Verify it yourself. Draw your own conclusions. Trust anyone who hands you a diagnosis and a prescription in the same breath exactly as much as you’d trust a dealer who cuts the product and sells the cure.

Read the architecture. Then decide what you build. What we build, together.

-Fire tongue 🔥

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Sources: Treasury Financial Statements · NY Fed Primary Dealers · FRED Economic Data · HRF CBDC Tracker · GENIUS Act Full Text · GENIUS Act Fact Sheet · Atlantic Council CBDC Tracker

The Dark Room

There I was, like any other Monday morning, trying to solve the world’s problems before I even got out of bed.

Picture this. An ordinary, medium-sized bedroom, white noise filling the space, dark, lit faintly by a small clip-on reading light offering a soft, warm, yellow glow. It was early—early enough that no one in the house was awake, early enough that most people outside the house weren’t awake yet either. This is my time. I often spend it drenched in an eerie blue glow emitted from a small rectangular object in my hand. I lie—half my body under the covers, the other half propped slightly upright, viewing the world in pixels before opening the blinds to see the world, as it is, in sunlight.

This is familiar. This is comforting. This I can do whether it’s day or night, overcast, raining, in this room or in another. Alone in a mostly dark room, staring into a black, obsidian-like screen that scans my face and opens portals to simulations of anything imaginable — the word for this used to be scrying. It feels like power, it feels like knowledge, it feels like I can solve the world with my fingertips…

And I was—I am—going to solve them... whatever they are exactly... the chaos, the unnecessary terror, the violence, the excess, the finger-pointing, solving the world with our fingertips… once we blame the correct person/group… So. Much. Noise...—Shit, I have to get ready for work!

• • •

This has become my average morning. Please laugh with me. A formal “ha-ha” (“Cheerio, yes, very good”) will do.

I feel like Pinky and the Brain, except it’s just my two thumbs. And instead of the nightly declaration — ‘The same thing we do every night, Pinky — try to take over the world!’ — I’m saying to myself: the same thing we do every morning — we —

(For the uninitiated: Pinky and the Brain was a ’90s cartoon about two lab mice — one a megalomaniac genius, the other cheerfully clueless — who every single night announced the same plan: take over the world. They never did.)

(clears throat)

—I am going to fix the world.

Cheers.

What I just described is what I’m doing right now. Symbols interacting with symbols. Abstractions meeting abstractions. Copies so far from their source that we see a market, a country, a system—and forget we’re looking at people making decisions. These words are not me. They will never be me. Only their resonance in a body reveals a person. Back to the show.

Here’s why this matters to me beyond the joy tinged with embarrassment I experience in reflecting on myself: my belief and intention, however earnest, will not materialize through my fingertips alone. And the project of trying to fix an incomprehensibly large system—made of autonomous individuals, natural laws, and invented rules galore—is an utterly unreasonable proposition. The attempt invariably flattens the very thing it aims to repair. Crushing a car to make it more ‘legible’ does far more damage than understanding its components and replacing the rotor or whichever doohickey that isn’t working.

This is something the architects of history’s greatest destruction failed to recognize. They were too far removed — literally — from the crushed bodies, leveled countries, and flattened cultures, or incapable of perceiving the world beyond objects on a surface to rearrange and reshape as they willed. They were also armed with a dangerous conviction, one that may have begun in dark rooms lit by warm, yellow candlelight, staring into obsidian glass until their visions seemed more real than the world around them.

Whether or not that is literally true, the pattern holds: so far as history reveals, they believed they were fixing the world — bringing order to chaos, managing the unruly masses, replacing what was before them with what they envisioned it to be. The Crusaders believed they were carrying out God’s work, purging evil by force. William the Conqueror’s invasion of England was sanctioned by Pope Alexander II, who sent a blessed papal banner and a ring, turning a territorial conquest into a holy cause — the Bayeux Tapestry depicts the Normans marching under that banner. Rockefeller believed his ability to accumulate wealth was a divine gift. ‘I believe the power to make money is a gift from God,’ he said, ‘to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind.’ Hitler believed he was engineering a superior race.

The point is, destruction dressed in purpose still believes it’s building. It thinks itself good, ordained, logical, and efficient.

The Virus Inside

Let me pull this thread. I think it matters.

Recently, Marc Andreessen sat down with David Senra on the Founders podcast and declared his goal: zero introspection. “As little as possible.” The best founders he knows don’t spend time examining themselves. They build. He blamed Freud and the early psychoanalysts for manufacturing the whole practice of self-reflection. It doesn’t make the numbers go up.

He said he regrets nothing.

This is the operating philosophy of an entire class of decision-makers. Swift, metric-driven, uninterested in consequences that fall outside the measurement. They brag about disruption. They discuss the upside of reducing head counts—ending people’s ability to feed their families—as operational efficiency. Moving fast and breaking things, said as though the things being broken aren’t people.

And the speed matters. Cons work best the faster they deploy. Thermodynamics applied to human systems: an object in motion tends to stay in motion, and the energetic cost of maintaining that motion is less than stopping. Eighteen experts Meta itself commissioned unanimously concluded that beauty filters on Instagram cause harm to teenage girls. Removing them might slow engagement. Zuckerberg called the proposed ban “paternalistic.” They paid nothing to keep things exactly as they were: harmful and profitable.

We process enormous amounts of information from our environment that never reaches conscious awareness. And as demonstrated above, we willfully override even the information that does reach awareness — if it threatens what we expect or predict.

Imagine being inside a dark space the size of an Amazon warehouse with a powerful flashlight that can only illuminate a three-foot circle at a time and can’t reach the far sides without walking to a different position in the building. That is consciousness. Information constantly enters the system, is processed below the threshold of awareness, and shapes our experience of the world. Some gets stored, some gets repackaged, some gets shipped.

Repetition. Conditioning through pairing symbols with emotional salience. Colors, sounds, textures, tastes—these all activate processes we never explicitly consult. The box moves into another box, or gets shipped to another part of the building entirely and opened without us ever seeing the content.

Here is the point. A system without self-reflection will run on autopilot unless met with sufficient contradictory input — a box gets sent to the wrong address and what you insist was supposed to be a lingerie set for your wife arrives at your home with a note for your secretary, and your wife threatens to leave, so you end the affair. Or something externally restricts the system — executives who allowed harmful corporations to operate well beyond sufficient evidence of that harm are actually held criminally liable and stripped of their resources, instead of paying a small fine and repeating the profitable, destructive behavior.

These are extreme corrections. For most of us, the mechanism is quieter and the stakes feel lower — but the architecture is identical.

Self-reflection is vital for self-correction. Self-correction is vital for self-awareness. Self-awareness is vital for understanding cause and effect, and building accurate predictions about reality. Accurate predictions are vital to survival, because the brain is constantly generating predictions and cross-referencing them against incoming sensory data. Mismatches between prediction and reality that are too severe can cause debilitating — sometimes lethal — consequences.

So what happens when you never course-correct? When you don’t take the time to consider the impact of your actions? When you perpetually place the “problem” outside yourself?

You get a system that never updates. That can’t see whether the virus out there is actually an error code running in here.

Part 1 continues below. The body already knows what’s next

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Content note: Explicit language. The track and video were AI-produced. The lyrics are human-written. The irony isn’t lost on me.

Stop writing reviews of the circus. I am not entertained. Are you?

I am so damn tired of logging onto Substack or some social media app and every title is something like “Political Party Did This Thing! Idiots!” Really? So an entire however many hundreds of thousands or millions of people all collectively believe that, chose that, and acted in accordance with that?

Or “Current President Name and (Insert Insults or Accolades).” Thank you, yes, we all saw the headlines too. A flood of verbal violence, traumatizing rhetoric, contempt, extreme declarations, and pseudoscientific philosophizing written largely by AI — conceived in a self-contained, solipsistic echo chamber because it felt so good to be validated, so good to be seen as brilliant, we forgot to ask if it was true.

Enough. Enough. Enough.

I’m not interested in the spectacle. I’m not interested in the philosophical wandering of a mediocre mystic performing profound. It feels like huffing air.

I’m not interested in the indictment of an entire country, political party, gender, or large group of individuals. I’m not impressed or moved by authority appeal, in-group signaling, or needing a dictionary because of intellectual gatekeeping language.

I’m here because I don’t know where else to go or who else to talk to and this society is eating me alive arguing about the color of blood while we all are drained of it.

I don’t have an answer. You didn’t ask for one.

I wrote this to myself.

I’m not exempt from this. But here is what I see. Will you see it with me? Do you see it? Do you feel it too?

I don’t even experience shock anymore. Genuinely. No headline of horror, of self-righteous anger, justified or not, of charismatic confidence, of below-the-belt, cutting insults, of straight up rage bait — none of it surprises me. And that’s terrifying, because there are real and horrific things happening. There are groups and individuals who should be held accountable and haven’t been. There are people who need help, abroad and right at home. But the spectacle keeps us focused on the performance — and who to blame, who to mock, who to fear. And as long as we are writing endless diagnosis, opinion, and commentary on the show, we are keeping our attention exactly where those who direct the spectacle want it to be. The article below describes many of the mechanics of the spectacle.

Meanwhile, every story of actual substance at the individual level — which might be as simple as “This hurts. I don’t know what to do.” Or “I’m scared for my life because I told the truth about what they actually did.” Or “I managed to wake up and brush my teeth for the first time in a week.” Or “I finally called a friend and asked how they were and actually listened.” Or sometimes it sounds like silence — those stories get buried under the spectacle.

Speak for yourself. Ask questions to understand other people’s experiences, motives, and beliefs. Otherwise we become like The Boy Who Cried Wolf — and when the wolf actually arrives, when children are actually being harmed, the endless false alarms have made it that much easier to dismiss.

It’s like a car alarm on your street. The first time it goes off, you look out the window. By the sixth time, you don’t even lift your head. The alarm is still screaming. You just stopped hearing it.

Intensity is not an indicator of importance, substance, or truth. It is an indicator of intensity.

And we are drowning in it.

Here’s what I notice in my body when I read the news. When I scroll the feed. When I open the app.

My chest tightens. My jaw clenches. My breathing shallows. My vision narrows. Something in my stomach drops. And then I feel the urge to not feel. Those responses were accurate — based on the words.

But the deluge has activated my body for action and left me with nowhere and no way to act.

The words on the screen did that. Not a predator in the room. Not a car swerving toward me. Not my child crying. Words. Arranged in a particular order. On a glowing rectangle.

And here’s the part that locks it in: the tightness in my chest now feels like evidence that the threat is real. My body reacted, so the danger must exist. I manufactured my own proof for someone else’s headline.

This works — and I need to state this — because the majority of the things we’re reading about can’t be checked by the body.

You can’t see “the economy.”

You can’t touch “democracy in decline.”

You can’t smell “national security threat.”

These are words about words. Your body has no way to verify any of it, except from more words coming from outside yourself. So your stress system fills in the picture, fires the alarm, and the alarm feels like confirmation.

In a room, with a real threat, your eyes would check. Your ears would check. Your skin would check. Five senses reporting: yes, real — or no, false alarm. The alarm shuts off. You rest.

With “markets tumble amid recession fears,” nothing checks. No sense organ can scan the room and report “no market detected.” So the alarm keeps running. The body never gets the signal that says: done, enough, rest now.

This is architecture.

Try this right now.

Read these two sentences and notice where each one lands:

“You’re fired.”

Next Sentence:

“Your position has been eliminated as part of a strategic workforce optimization initiative.”

Same event. Same consequence. One hit your stomach. The other stayed in your head. Why?

The first one is body language. Short. Two syllables total. Your nervous system processed it before your mind finished reading. The second one is head language. Seventeen syllables. By the time you’ve parsed it, the body has disengaged. The words are designed to prevent you from feeling what’s happening to you.

Now multiply that by every piece of institutional language you’ve ever received. Every policy. Every terms of service. Every HR communication. Every financial document. Every political speech that says nothing in the most words possible.

The further language gets from your body, the easier it is for someone else to tell you what’s real. Back that with a credential or authority and the effect is even more potent, we can be convinced of things that never even existed.

The feed has no endpoint. The scroll has no bottom. The news cycle has no conclusion. The outrage has no discharge. The quarterly targets reset when you hit them. “Continuous improvement” means you’re never done.

The word “enough” has been removed from the operating language of every institution that touches your life.

Your body knows what enough feels like, even if we have to unlearn what prevents us from experiencing it. See the article below for a much deeper dive on what gets in the way:

Anthony’s Substack

Why You Can't Feel Good When Good Things Happen: The Kappa Receptor Problem

A Novel Theory for Modern Culture and its Dysfunction…

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7 months ago · 14 likes · 1 comment · Anthony

Your body knows how to complete a cycle. Breathe in. Pause. Breathe out. Rest. The next inhale comes on its own. That’s completion. Your lungs do it thousands of times a day without anyone’s permission.

Everything else in your life that imposes artificial urgency, artificial scarcity, environments designed without respecting the limits and needs of human biology, has been engineered to prevent that signal from arriving.

It’s baked into the structure — what’s required for a system of endless growth. Rest eventually must be commodified and converted into product. The same way a river erodes a bank just from the persistent force applied in the same direction over time. The structure profits when you keep seeking. It cannot profit when you rest. So every completion cue has been removed. Every pause point eliminated. Every exit made difficult. And the words used to describe this to you have been chosen specifically so your body can’t feel what’s happening.

I don’t have a program. I don’t have a ten-step framework. I don’t have a course.

I have one question:

Can you still feel the difference between what your body knows and what the words are telling you?

If you can — that signal is the last check you have. In a world that operates increasingly in abstract symbols rather than living beings — that speaks in language your body can’t verify — your felt sense that ‘something is off’ is the only instrument that still works. Every practice that keeps you connected to that signal — breath, presence, silence, the company of people whose bodies are regulated and honest is how you keep your perception your own.

If you can’t feel the difference right now — if the numbness has set in, if the sixth bite tastes like the first, if the alarm runs so constantly that you’ve stopped noticing it — that’s information too. That’s what saturation feels like from inside. Your system is doing what systems do when the signal never stops: it turns down the volume on the sound. Eventually, it turns down the volume on everything.

The way back is small. Quiet. Concrete. Not another headline. Not another opinion about the opinion. The ground under your feet. The temperature of the air on your skin. The face of someone who is actually in the room with you. Start where your body can check.

I’m writing from the gap where the scream meets the page and flattens.

If you felt something in your body while you read this — that was real. That was yours. You brought it. These are just pixels on a screen, not living, not breathing, not sentient.

That feeling though? That’s you meeting yourself. That is life in your body right now, inviting you to pay attention, sit with your being for a second before you scroll to the next thing.

That pause — right there — is the door they painted over and hope you never open.

It’s unmediated existence, and it’s yours, it always has been.

Do you see this? Do you feel it?

Leave a comment if you would like to share what you see and feel.

I’m revising a research paper formalizing the mechanism described in this piece — how language’s power over perception varies with the body’s ability to verify it, and what that means for how manipulation actually works at the cognitive level. When it’s published, I’ll share it. The paper is the armor. This piece is what the armor protects.

- Fire Tongue

If this landed somewhere in your body — if you felt the difference between the words that hit and the words that float — then you already know what Fire tongue is for.

I write about language, bodies, and what happens when one loses contact with the other. I write from inside it, not above it. If you want to stay in this conversation, subscribe. If someone you know is drowning in the feed and can’t name why, send this to them.

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I already did that. I held it. Noticed its temperature against my skin. Noticed its sheen, quality of polish, color, clarity. I turned it, under different light sources, natural day light, incandescent light, even Ultraviolet light. I tested its refractive index, the measure of how much it bends light, I viewed it under a microscope to look for indications of treatment and other inclusions that would hint at its origin or composition. If needed, I used several other measuring techniques and tools. I did this until I’d become confident I knew what it was.

I build from there. I set it. I design around it. I price it. Or I just hold it up and look — to see it. To admire what’s real. The identification completed. The building begins.

That’s what completion feels like.

You know what I can’t identify?

A stone I’ve never held.

Alexandrite changes color. Dramatically. In daylight, a fine Russian alexandrite is deep green. Move it indoors under incandescent light and the same stone turns rich red. Same gem. Two entirely different faces depending on what light hits it. The strength of that shift is what determines the price. A weak change, modest stone. A vivid change — green to red, “emerald by day, ruby by night” — and you’re looking at one of the most valuable gems on earth. You have to see it happen. That’s the whole point.

A seller tells me he has one. Describes it in exquisite detail. 20 carats. The color change, 100%. The origin, Russian. Near-flawless clarity with only minor inclusions. The rarity. The provenance. Top tier.

He never lets me see it.

Natural blue diamonds get their color from trace amounts of boron trapped in the crystal structure while it formed — miles underground, usually where ancient sea floors have been subducted deep into the mantle under unimaginable heat and pressure over billions of years. A one-carat blue diamond is rare. A fifteen-carat natural blue diamond is almost mythological. A handful exist. Each one is worth millions.

Another seller insists they have one. Flawless description. Extraordinary claims. She never shows it. I never handle it. I never run a single test.

Then the two of them start arguing about whose stone is superior. Which is rarer. Which is worth more. Which one the other is misrepresenting.

I’m standing there trying to form an opinion about specimens I’ve never touched.

That’s the feed. That’s the screen. That’s most of what gets called public discourse. Exquisite descriptions of stones nobody lets you hold. And the argument between the dealers — that is the product. The debate keeps you watching. At no point does anyone hand you the stone and say: here. See for yourself.

Because the moment you hold it, you don’t need them anymore.

I’m only doing what I came here to do if you’re spending less time reading me. If over time, you need less of me.

Everything I write is trying to hand you a stone and walk away. Back into your body. Back to whoever’s in the room with you. Back to your own hands, your own light, your own testing. Pick up the gem, inspect it for yourself and determine what it is and if it belongs in your collection, in a custom piece of jewelry, for sale, to admire, or to give away. If I’m doing this right, you eventually build from here on your own.

And I haven’t figured out how to keep the lights on with that model.

The economy only pays for descriptions that never end. Subscriptions. Feeds. Content that keeps you in the chair. A product that completes its user out of needing the product is incoherent to every revenue model I’ve been offered.

Completion is ground. A foundation gets poured once — then you build a house on it. You don’t keep pouring. A child who’s been met with enough attunement eventually walks out the door on their own legs. A seed doesn’t keep regrowing the same leaf forever. It fruits.

Everything alive works this way. The system that freezes this process at the stage where extraction is maximized and calls it normal — that’s the insanity.

So here’s the stone. Hold it. Turn it in whatever light you’ve got.

This space is yours now.

-Fire tongue

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Facts (Argue If You Want. They Don’t Move.)

Anthropic refused to remove two safe…

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Sit with this before reading further. Notice what happens in the body.

What hurts more — being harmed by someone you love, or being the one who harmed someone you love?

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Now bring it closer. What hurts more — being hurt by your child, or hurting your child?

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The body answers before the questions finish.

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Harming someone we love is the deeper wound — even when the harm itself only varies by direction. It breaks something closer to the root. Given enough time and safety, the body can metabolize pain that arrives from outside. It has architecture for that — when the conditions for processing exist.

When we are the source of the harm, the wound lives in the person we love. Our healing depends on their experience — their pain, their willingness to receive us again. That is already outside our control. And beneath that: the self’s relationship with itself fractures. The one trying to heal and the one who caused the harm are the same person. There is no clean position from which to process it.

Most people who have loved someone recognize this immediately — the specific sickness of realizing one’s own hands delivered hurt to someone one would die to protect.

Hold that.

We’re going to need it.

The Fuel

Here is what most analyses of how we live miss.

The system—the economic machinery, the institutional architecture, the structures that keep billions of people exhausted, isolated, and compliant—runs on love.

It runs on the fact that most people would rather absorb harm than inflict it on someone they care about.

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People cite many reasons for the choices they make—money, prestige, adventure, duty. The question is what those reasons are in service of when you follow them far enough.

Think about how this works in the most ordinary terms.

A child loves painting. Lives for it. The parent sees the passion clearly — and redirects the child toward a degree, a career, a path the economy rewards. The parent has read the environment correctly: the system punishes intrinsic motivation. Art — real art, the kind that comes from the self rather than the market — almost never pays. The starving artist is an economic policy.

No parent wants their child to starve. So the parent, out of genuine protective love, steers the child toward what the economy will compensate. The child receives the message: what you actually are is economically dangerous to be. The parent’s love and the system’s recruitment are indistinguishable in that moment. The loving choice and the compliant choice look identical.

Or consider the partner carrying grief, fear, or shame who chooses to conceal it. Walking away would be easier self-protection. Staying while withholding costs more — absorbing the weight alone, enduring the distance, all to spare the other pain. That is love paying the price of its own suppression. Two people remain in a shallower version of their bond, more dependent on external mediation — apps, content, consumption — to fill the space where honesty would have been.

Every act of compliance, avoidance, defensiveness — locally motivated by love. Preserving the connection. Even the fear of rejection is love: we only fear losing bonds we need. The system needs that fear to stay unconscious, because the moment we see it clearly, we stop reaching for the marketed substitute and start reaching for the person.

They don’t yet realize confronting it would deepen the bond and make them less available to the marketing that feeds on their need to appear whole.

The system needs us caring—on a short enough timescale, within a narrow enough frame. It needs our love to stay focused on the people right in front of us, so we never step back far enough to see what our compliance is building.

Our love is the fuel.

Our empathy. Our willingness to sacrifice for the people we care about. These are the most beautiful things about us, and they are what the machine harvests.

They Already Know This

This is documented practice, rigorously studied and deliberately applied. Every system that has ever mobilized large numbers of people has done it by capturing love, belonging, and the instinct to protect.

The scientific literature on human motivation confirms the mechanism.

Baumeister and Leary’s foundational 1995 paper argued that the drive to form and maintain strong interpersonal attachments is the primary human motivation—more fundamental than pleasure-seeking or pain-avoidance. People form bonds under almost any condition, resist dissolution even at great personal cost, and show broad emotional, cognitive, and health effects when that drive is thwarted.

Attachment theory (Bowlby, Ainsworth) documents the same priority: the attachment behavioral system overrides other drives under threat. A person will endure torture to protect loved ones. The fulcrum is relationship. The terror is isolation. Everything else is secondary.

Systems of power have always known this.

“Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?”

The 1915 British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster shows a father in his armchair while his daughter asks the question and his son plays with toy soldiers at his feet. It was described at the time as “emotional blackmail.” Thousands of men enlisted after seeing it. It weaponized a father’s love by installing a future shame: what will they think of you if you don’t go?

“Be All You Can Be.”

The U.S. Army relaunched this campaign after its chief of enterprise marketing stated explicitly: "We know youth seek purpose, passion, community and connection, but we also know many don't recognize the Army's ability to deliver on those needs." By June 2025, the Army met its annual recruiting goal of 61,000 soldiers four months early — the earliest since 2014.

It extends far beyond the military.

Ring’s 2026 Super Bowl ad, “Search Party,” aired two weeks ago.

A lost yellow lab named Milo. A child’s face lighting up when the dog comes home. Ring’s founder walking a dog down a quiet street: “Be a hero in your neighborhood.”

The product: AI-powered object recognition scanning footage from every participating outdoor Ring camera in the area. Within days, privacy researchers pointed out that the same technology could track anyone. WeRateDogs founder Matt Nelson, with nearly 20 million followers, said directly: the ad “uses our love of dogs to manufacture consent for mass surveillance.” The backlash forced Amazon to terminate Ring’s planned partnership with Flock Safety, a firm that supplies automated license-plate readers to law enforcement. The Search Party feature itself remains active. Love for a pet and a child’s joy—the delivery system for networked AI surveillance.

The advertising industry no longer disguises the mechanism. It calls it emotional targeting. The emotion detection and recognition market reached $37.8 billion in 2024. Companies like Affectiva maintain databases of 8 billion facial frames from 90 countries. In 2026, marketing platforms match advertising creative to the emotional state of the viewer in real time.

Every one of these systems studied the same thing: what do humans care about most? The answer is always the same.

Connection. Belonging. The people they love. The desire to protect them.

They build the capture around it.

Love at Its Most Destructive

Tribalism is captured love deployed at scale.

Listen to the rhetoric. It is always protective. Defending our way of life. Protecting our children's future. Standing up for our community. They're coming for our families. The person participating in tribal violence — verbal, political, physical — experiences themselves as a guardian. At the somatic level, the protective impulse is real. They do feel fear for their people. The love is genuine. The direction it was pointed was engineered. And the people on the receiving end of that engineered direction carry real wounds, delivered by someone who believed they were protecting.

Social identity theory (Tajfel, Turner) documents how people derive self-esteem and security from group belonging. When the group’s identity becomes entangled with loved ones—“for your family,” “for your community,” “for our way of life”—the same prosocial motivation that would bond people horizontally to each other redirects vertically into the agenda. Lilliana Mason’s research on political sectarianism shows that partisan identity in America now functions as a “mega-identity”: a single political affiliation signals religion, race, neighborhood, and values simultaneously.

An attack on the party feels like an attack on everything the person loves.

And the algorithm accelerates it. The feed delivers a constant dose of what binds a person to their tribe—stories of the outgroup threatening what the ingroup holds sacred. Each story activates the same circuit: the people I love are in danger. The response—anger, mobilization, dehumanization of the other—feels like protection. Looks like protection. Registers in the body as protection.

And here is what even most critics of these platforms miss: the idea that conflict increases engagement is itself a misreading.

If someone says something foolish about a topic we have no stake in, we scroll past. The content is provocative — and it produces nothing. If the same platform delivers a post attacking immigrants, or mocking a community we belong to, or threatening something we are teaching our children to value — the body responds instantly. The response looks like conflict from the outside. From the inside, it is protection. Love activating the only circuit available in that moment.

The research confirms this. Brady, Crockett, and Van Bavel’s work on moral contagion identifies the engine of viral content as the drive to protect ingroup values and signal belonging. The algorithm measures the protective firing and calls it “engagement.” What gets called “conflict” is love the system cannot see.

Same fuel at every scale. The person who dehumanized someone from the outgroup cannot look at what they did without confronting that their love — real love, for real people — was the engine. That is the cost that keeps tribalism self-sealing.

The Lock

The same love that fuels compliance prevents us from seeing it.

Because to see clearly—to really look at what the food does, what the screens do, what the schools do, what the tribal rhetoric does, what the jobs do—means seeing that our hands, motivated by love, delivered it. We handed our children the thing that harmed them. We participated, with our whole hearts, in systems designed to consume the people we were trying to protect. We dehumanized other people’s children while telling ourselves we were protecting our own.

That is the specific wound the self can barely hold. The wound of being the one who harmed someone we love—or harmed others in the name of that love.

And every day the looking is deferred, the cost of eventually looking increases. The debt compounds. Because every day, we are still participating. Every day adds another layer to what we will eventually have to face if we ever turn around.

This is why people don’t look. This is the lock.

System justification theory (Jost et al.) provides the peer-reviewed mechanism. People defend harmful status quos because the system provides belonging and predictability; challenging it threatens attachment. Bandura’s moral disengagement research shows that once love is co-opted, people selectively avoid or reframe information that would require acknowledging harm to the connection.

The lock and the fuel are the same substance. Love powers the compliance. Love prevents the recognition. One mechanism, two functions.

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This piece contains research, citations, and direct quotes from the people building systems designed to manage your biological responses.

As you read, notice what moves in your body. Witness that you are still here, still sensing. The capture has limits — and you are already past them.

If at any point the weight of this becomes too much, stop. Look around and name three things in the space you’re in. Breathe slowly until you feel ready to return — or don’t return. Go about your day.

Sit with what you already know. The body processes information at its own speed, and that speed is trustworthy.

That last sentence is, in fact, the entire argument.

What Is Control?

The word itself reveals the break.

“Control” comes from the medieval Latin contrarotulus — a counter-roll, a duplicate accounting register used to verify a primary one. The original controller was an auditor. His job was to hold a written measure against reality and identify what didn’t conform.

Many species shape their environments. Beavers dam rivers. Termites regulate temperature. Ants farm. But none of them begin with a ledger. They work in direct contact with what is — reading pressure, flow, material, season — and move through the principles of their environment toward survival. Nothing needs to be made to conform. Reality is the source of truth, and they are in conversation with it.

Humans are the only species that systems of control based on predicted futures—threats imagined, not encountered. We can model what hasn’t happened yet and act on the image. No other species lives so deeply inside prediction, and no other species builds infrastructure to manage what it imagines.

But prediction has a cost. The specificity of what we anticipate losing is shaped by what we’ve already lost. Once lack enters the model, it tints everything the model produces. The organism that lives in prediction rather than presence begins to see threat everywhere—and begins building systems to manage threat everywhere.

This is where control at scale originates. It is a fear response that learned to use tools. But it goes further than prediction. Control is the moment when the ledger becomes the authority — when living reality must be made to fit a flattened measure rather than the measure revised to meet what is alive. Other animals use the environment as a collaborator. Control uses other beings as entries. The nervous system becomes controllable at the moment it becomes measurable. You cannot enter into a counter-roll what you have not first reduced to a unit. And once it is a unit, it must balance.

Now here is the question.

Who decided that your nervous system needed managing?

On what evidence? By what demonstrated mastery? With what actual knowledge of your life, your body, your history, your interior?

These are real questions, and they demand real answers. Legitimacy requires merit. Time alone fails to confer it — a person can live eighty years and never once sit with their own discomfort long enough to learn what it was telling them. Institutions can persist for centuries and still be built on a false premise. Courts recognize stare decisis — the weight of precedent — but even precedent requires context and merit to survive scrutiny. Age earns only age. Persistence earns only persistence.

In any tradition that takes transformation seriously, you earn the privilege to guide others by demonstrating mastery in your own life. In recovery, you choose a sponsor by watching how they live — someone whose sobriety, integrity, and presence you can witness and respect. You see the work in their body, their relationships, their daily choices. You choose freely because the evidence is visible. That is the only legitimate basis for authority over another person’s interior.

So:

Have the architects of this management system examined their own biological apparatus? Have they demonstrated proficiency in reading their own nervous systems, working through their own grief, sitting inside their own anger long enough to understand what boundary was being violated? Have they shown evidence of doing the interior work they now propose to replace with a device?

I look at these architects and I see their lives. I see fleets of private jets emitting more carbon dioxide in a single weekend than most people produce in a year, while the passengers inside discuss reducing carbon footprints. I see the insulation from consequence, the layers of staff between them and the texture of a single honest afternoon. I see people who have never been still long enough for their own grief to find them. I would never choose any of them as a guide. I would never look at how they live and say: that — I want that. They are asking me to surrender the governance of my interior to people whose own interiors show every sign of abandonment

They found the work too slow, too uncomfortable, too demanding — and built an external mechanism that mimics the result without requiring the process.

And more precisely: what is their baseline view of the people they are managing?

Here is the premise that arrived at Davos and sat unchallenged in the room. Yuval Harari, regular featured speaker and Agenda Contributor to the World Economic Forum, 2020:

“We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls — we are now hackable animals.” And: “The whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit, and they have free will, and nobody knows what’s happening inside me — that’s over.” At TED, elaborating from Homo Deus: “We see the creation of a new massive class of useless people. What do we need humans for? Or at least, what do we need so many humans for?”

His answer to that question, when pressed: keep them happy with drugs and computer games.

This is the anthropology the project operates from. These positions were delivered to the architects and funders of the system at its central gathering and received as serious analysis. They sat in the room unchallenged.

The man who built the platform that ran the 2012 emotional manipulation experiment described the people who trusted him with their data, in confirmed messages from 2004, as “dumb fucks.” The contempt was foundational.

This is who decided.

It feels like every time I have been told “you are being too sensitive, you are too much, you are being dramatic”—only to discover, once again, that my body had been right all along.

Like the terror I felt trusting an individual who had lied to me repeatedly, promising this time things would be different, only to be left in fresh abandonment and trauma because I deferred to their words instead of what my nervous system was already screaming. That terror was intelligence. And the override they’re building wants to quiet exactly that voice before it can protect me again.

Here is the question they refuse to ask or honestly answer:

Where is the evidence that the nervous system is the problem?

I have significant evidence for a different diagnosis. Four billion years of biological development produced exquisitely calibrated systems for sensing, responding, integrating, completing. Those systems were functioning exactly as designed. What changed was the environment — engineered for extraction, saturated with artificial urgency, stripped of the friction that generates growth. The nervous system is responding accurately to the conditions it has been given. An accurate response to a manufactured environment is intelligence. It is information.

The override leaves the conditions intact. It silences the signal that the conditions are wrong.

Consider what is actually being proposed. The system designed to govern your neurochemistry operates on statistical weights — pattern-matched approximations trained on text. It can produce a sentence that looks like empathy. It cannot feel what empathy is. It has no body. It has no biological stake in the outcome. It does not recoil when it gets it wrong. You cannot iterate your way to interiority. No amount of training data produces felt knowing.

But this also describes the architects proposing the override. They already govern from abstractions — indices, projections, quarterly metrics — with zero felt contact with the populations they manage. They already do not recoil when they get it wrong. The man who called his users “dumb fucks” did not feel what that contempt would cost them. The philosopher who declared billions “useless” did not sit with a single one of them long enough to learn what they carry. The governor already functions like the machine. The machine just makes it permanent.

The override is the final outsourcing: removing the felt knower from the loop entirely, at the biological level, so the governing mechanism finally matches the governor. A system with no interior, managing organisms that once had one.

This is hubris dressed as innovation.

———

The Three Tracks (And the Question That Falls Outside All of Them)

The entire public conversation on neurotechnology—every WEF article, UNESCO report, OECD recommendation, and Davos panel—runs on three tracks:

1. Medical legitimacy (paralysis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s—genuine cases of suffering where these technologies have improved lives, and which the industry uses to anchor the entire category). For the minority of cases where biology has already broken, targeted tools can be compassionate—provided they remain temporary scaffolds and the patient, rather than the vendor or the state, holds the off-switch.

2. Ethics and governance (privacy, consent, neurorights—how to regulate it, never whether it should exist).

3. Enhancement enthusiasm (“technologies will become part of us,” “preempt undesired emotional reactions to new information”).

That last promise landed in my body like a home invasion. Someone slips into your house while you’re sleeping, administers a quiet cocktail of emotional depressants laced with just enough artificial warmth (think MDMA tint), then gently wakes you hours later to deliver the news: you’re being evicted — the land is being turned into higher-yield rental units. The raw, accurate protest your nervous system would have mounted has already been neutralized. The developers win before the fight even begins.

That is what “preempt undesired emotional reactions” actually means when you translate it out of the conference language and into a living nervous system.

The question every track avoids: why do healthy nervous systems need external override? This question is structurally excluded from the dominant policy conversation.

Emotions are biological intelligence. Panksepp’s affective neuroscience shows they are “ancestral tools for living”—evolutionary memories coded into the genome. Sadness, fear, anger, love are calibration instruments. The neurotechnology literature treats them as friction.

What They Call Friction

Sleep:

the process that consolidates memory, repairs tissue, prunes connections, processes emotion, and restores learning capacity. The optimization industry calls it inefficient and asks how to compress it.

I’m a parent working full time. When I get tired and have trouble focusing at work, it’s because I’m physically exhausted and depleted. The system pays too little and provides too little support to care for me and my kids, so my body takes the hit. Their solution, instead of better family leave and real support, is to turn off the signal of a body needing what it physically needs.

How does keeping someone alert when they need sleep actually impact health?

We’ve already seen the pattern with prolonged methamphetamine use: dopamine collapse, permanent cardiovascular damage, neurotoxicity, paranoia, and a nervous system that eventually loses its natural rhythm entirely. The override doesn’t restore capacity. It just delays the crash while the underlying depletion deepens. The body doesn’t forget what it was denied.

Grief:

the natural reorganization around irreplaceable loss. Three to five days of bereavement leave in most U.S. companies—then back to productivity. The Brain Capital Index registers your grief as an economic loss.

Anger:

the immune system of the self, activated when boundaries are violated. Behavioral management literature calls it dysregulation — something to be preempted by device.

Love:

the biological event that makes two nervous systems more capable together than either is alone. The optimization economy monetizes the seeking phase, disrupts the bonding phase, and never delivers completion.

Friction is where energy comes from. A gradient across a real boundary drives flow. No boundary, no gradient. No gradient, no energy. This is physics. Sleep, grief, anger, and love are the boundaries that generate the energy the organism needs to become more distinctly itself and more deeply connected.

The entire neurotechnology project—from algorithmic nudging to autonomous neural modulation—is a friction-elimination strategy. It removes the very experiences that allow a living system to grow.

———

The Override Is Already Operating

The override already operates without brain implants. It has been running since at least 2012.

In January 2012 Facebook manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users without their knowledge and proved emotional states can be transferred at scale through curated content, without awareness. The outrage focused entirely on consent. The capability itself was accepted.

The Damage Is Already Here

The Flynn Effect has reversed. Gen Z is the first generation in recorded history to score lower than the previous generation on core cognitive measures. Average time on any single screen before switching: 47 seconds. Children with more than two hours of daily screen time show a 2.8-fold increased risk of cognitive delays. Longitudinal neuroimaging confirms the mechanism: the infrastructure accelerates the brain’s reward circuits while starving the circuits responsible for executive function, social cognition, and emotional regulation. In January 2026, a neuroscientist testified before the U.S. Senate that unregulated educational technology has contributed to this generational decline. (Full citations in Endnotes.)

The loop is bidirectional and self-reinforcing. The damage drives more screen use, which prunes more native capacity. Since the early 2010s, coinciding with smartphone saturation, adolescent anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation have risen sharply across every Western nation tracking the data.

The nervous system adapts to the environment it is given.

Silence registers as threat.

Solitude registers as abandonment.

Unregulated emotion registers as malfunction.

When devices are removed, the damage remains. Capacities never exercised during sensitive periods require far greater effort to rebuild later.

This is the casted-limb outcome at population scale—achieved without

The Sequence

1. Build platforms that manipulate emotion at scale (2012 onward).

2. Fragment attention and replace integrative processing with shallow scanning.

3. Measure the resulting damage as an economic cost (Brain Capital Index, Davos January 2026).

4. Propose deeper neural overrides as the solution.

5. Frame access to those overrides as an equity issue.

6. Monetize the entire cycle.

Steve Carnevale, venture capitalist and moderator of the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative Brain House session, captured the spirit:

“When we can quantify something that previously wasn’t quantifiable, and when we can quantify it, we can turn it into a growth story. That’s when people are really going to follow us.”

Your brain is now an asset class.

If the sequence sounds abstract, let’s look at the single firm that has already completed the loop. McKinsey helped architect the Brain Capital Index at Davos while projecting $16 trillion in brain-disorder costs by 2030. This is the same McKinsey that advised Purdue Pharma, Endo, Johnson & Johnson, and Mallinckrodt on strategies to increase opioid sales during the crisis that killed over half a million Americans — and in December 2024, became the first management consulting firm in history held criminally liable for advising a client to break the law, paying $650 million in a single federal settlement alone, with total opioid-related payouts exceeding $1.8 billion. A senior partner pled guilty to felony obstruction for destroying evidence. The U.S. Attorney’s summary: “It was a strategy, it was executed and it worked.” The same McKinsey that consulted the tobacco industry continuously from 1956 to 2021—pitching a Marlboro smartphone loyalty app concept as recently as 2016, even after decades of known lethality. The same McKinsey that proposed cuts to food and medical care for detained migrants at ICE facilities. The entity that helped design the harm is now quantifying the harm and selling the technological fix. That is the sequence in a single name.

And I’m no genius—my prediction of the future is functioning exactly as it evolved to. I’m simply reading the consistent pattern.

I anticipate these individuals and corporations will continue to operate exactly as they always have: criminal behavior as standard procedure, human cost calculated as acceptable collateral for profit, fines and settlements treated as routine operating expenses.

McKinsey and the rest are almost certainly counting on the coming neural overrides to preempt the one thing still standing in their way — the raw rage and clear sense of injustice that rises in a healthy nervous system when the pattern repeats. So that instead of feeling it, organizing around it, or acting on it, I just smile, sedate the signal, and keep producing while they get away with murder.

Imagine the profit multiplier when there is literally zero accountability left — because the bodies that would once have demanded it have already been pacified in advance.

When the same infrastructure that prunes interior capacity also profits from managing the resulting atrophy, the dead lattice becomes self-perpetuating.

The Question Nobody Is Asking

What happens when the scaffolding fails and an entire generation has atrophied beyond easy repair? The question goes unmodeled. It remains unnamed as a risk category. The literature assumes the living pattern remains intact underneath the override—as though a limb kept in a cast for ten years would function perfectly when the cast is removed.

The limb atrophies.

The Real Questions

Why are you trying to override the intelligence of my body? My felt responses are accurate readings of conditions. Suppressing them leaves the conditions intact; it only removes my ability to respond.

Why do you treat the accurate response to the environment you manufactured as a malfunction—then offer deeper management of that malfunction as the cure?

Why are the architects exempt from the tools they build for everyone else?

What happens when the technology fails and the interior has been functionally supplanted?

The Strongest Case For — And Why It Still Fails

The defenders of this project are serious people, and their strongest arguments deserve direct engagement.

The equity argument: Millions of people lack access to therapy, psychiatric care, or any mental health support whatsoever. Neurotechnology could democratize relief where human infrastructure has failed. This is the argument’s most emotionally honest form. But it answers a question about distribution with a question about architecture. The problem is access to care. The proposed solution is a device that bypasses the need for care entirely. When the same firms that defunded community mental health infrastructure now offer a technological substitute, the equity framing becomes the marketing — the compassionate face on a product that forecloses the very capacity it claims to support.

The mental health crisis argument: Adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicidality are at historic levels. Something must be done. Agreed. But “something must be done” is the oldest lever in the policy playbook for bypassing the question of whether the proposed something will make it worse. The crisis is real. This paper documents its neurological basis. The question remains: when the environment that generated the crisis is left intact, does an override that silences the organism’s accurate distress signal constitute treatment — or does it constitute a second injury?

The human-AI symbiosis argument: Humans have always co-evolved with their tools. Language, writing, the printing press — each changed cognition. Neural integration is the next step. This is the most intellectually seductive form of the argument, and the most dishonest. Language, writing, and the press each amplified a capacity the organism already possessed. They extended reach. Neural override replaces the interior process itself. The analogy would hold if the printing press had eliminated the ability to think without a book. The direction matters. Extension is partnership. Replacement is dependency. And dependency at the neurological level, during developmental windows, is functionally irreversible.

Every version of the strongest case fails on the same question: who holds the off-switch, and what happens to the organism that has been shaped to need it?

The Declaration

I am entitled to my own experiences.

I am entitled to the intelligence of my body—the systems that evolved over millions of years to sense, respond, integrate, and complete. These systems are more sophisticated than anything a committee of people who have each lived less than a century could design or replace.

I am entitled to my emotions—including the inconvenient ones. My pain is a signal. My anger is a boundary. My sadness is a reorganization. These are calibration instruments, and they are mine.

I am entitled to develop and define myself through the friction, the difficulty, the slow accumulation of embodied wisdom that comes from running my nervous system through challenge and letting it complete.

I am entitled to express myself in my own language, at my own pace, without my expression curated by algorithm or my naming replaced by metric.

These are original capacities, older than every institution now proposing to manage them. They require no framework to be granted.

The only question worth asking is who took them, and why, and what they built with the taking.

My body knows before my mind names. My emotions calibrate before my thoughts evaluate. My nervous system was reading reality accurately before anyone taught me to doubt it.

The override requires my participation.

I’m done.

A World That Honors Life

We choose a different world.

A world where sleep is sacred — the deep, uninterrupted time the body needs to finish its stories and restore itself.

Where grief is held in warm community, given all the time it needs, until the heart has reorganized around the absence and can open again.

Where anger is met with presence, because a boundary that is honored keeps the self intact.

Where love is the quiet, daily co-regulation of living nervous systems choosing each other, growing stronger together.

In this world children are held by parents and elders whose own interiors are whole. When storms come, arms come with them. The young grow their own seed crystals in the soil of real faces, real voices, real touch — messy, slow, alive.

Elders are honored as the living transmission line, their completed cycles the pattern the next generation can feel and internalize.

This is the world that nurtures what we truly are: generative, self-organizing, capable of regenerating from fragments because the pattern lives inside.

The builders of the override cannot value this world. They cannot quantify the felt sense of completion. They cannot monetize the quiet strength that arises when a human being is allowed to become fully, interiorly alive.

That is precisely what they seek to steal — and why we must refuse to surrender it.

———

Anthony

Firetongue

February 2026

If something in your body just said yes — if your nervous system recognized its own intelligence in these words — then you already know why this matters.

The override requires our participation.
I’m done participating.

If you are too, consider showing your solidarity by subscribing for more articles like this.

Thank you for reading with your whole self.

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Endnotes & Sources

All links verified as of February 2026. Sources are listed in the order they appear in the text.

Etymology of “control”

Oxford English Dictionary, “control, n.” — from Anglo-Norman contreroller, ultimately from medieval Latin contrarotulus (“counter-roll”).

Yuval Noah Harari quotations

“Hackable animals” and “that’s over”: Davos 2020, WEF panel “How to Survive the 21st Century,” January 24, 2020. Video archived on WEF YouTube channel. “Useless people”: TED Dialogue, “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it,” 2018; see also Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Harper, 2017), Chapter 9. Harari’s WEF profile lists him as Professor of History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and “Agenda Contributor.” He has spoken at multiple WEF annual meetings (2018, 2020, 2024, 2026).

Facebook emotional contagion experiment

Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788–8790. doi:10.1073/pnas.1320040111. The experiment ran January 11–18, 2012.

Mark Zuckerberg instant messages

Confirmed in Mezrich, B. The Accidental Billionaires (Doubleday, 2009) and corroborated during the 2010 New Yorker profile by Jose Antonio Vargas. Messages date to Facebook’s earliest period at Harvard, circa 2004.

Jaak Panksepp — affective neuroscience

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford University Press). “Ancestral tools for living”: Panksepp, J. & Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (W. W. Norton).

Flynn Effect reversal

Bratsberg, B. & Rogeberg, O. (2018). “Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(26), 6674–6678. doi:10.1073/pnas.1718793115. See also Dworak, E. M. et al. (2023). “Looking for Flynn effects in a recent online U.S. sample.” Intelligence, 98, 101734.

Jared Cooney Horvath — U.S. Senate testimony

Testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, January 15, 2026. Horvath is a neuroscientist and educational researcher at the University of Melbourne.

Attention span — 47 seconds

Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). “The Cost of Interrupted Work.” CHI ’08 Proceedings. Updated data in Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity (Hanover Square Press), reporting the decline from 2.5 minutes (2004) to 47 seconds (2020s).

Screen time and cognitive delays (2.8-fold risk)

Takahashi, I. et al. (2023). “Screen Time at Age 1 Year and Communication and Problem-Solving Developmental Delay at 2 and 4 Years.” JAMA Pediatrics, 177(10), 1039–1046. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.3057.

Cognitive fragmentation — University of Vienna 2024

Pietschnig, J. & Voracek, M. (2024). “The decline in the positive manifold of cognitive abilities.” University of Vienna. Study documents the breakdown of coherence between cognitive abilities in recent cohorts.

GUSTO birth cohort — Lancet eBioMedicine, January 2026

Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) cohort study. Published in Lancet eBioMedicine, January 2026. Linked higher infant screen time to accelerated topological maturation of visual and cognitive-control networks, with prolonged decision latency and elevated anxiety by adolescence.

Screen time, sleep, and depression — JAMA Pediatrics, 2025

JAMA Pediatrics, 2025. Found each additional hour of daily screen time in late childhood predicted increased depressive symptoms by early adolescence, mediated by shorter sleep duration and diminished coherence of the cingulum bundle.

Brain Capital Index — Davos 2026

World Economic Forum & McKinsey Health Institute (2026). “The Human Advantage: Stronger Brains in the Age of AI.” Launched at the Brain House, Davos, January 19–22, 2026. Global Brain Capital Index developed by Rym Ayadi (EMEA) and Harris Eyre (Rice University / McKinsey Health Institute). The Global Brain Economy Initiative (GBEI) launched by Rice University, January 21, 2026.

Steve Carnevale — Davos Brain House quote

Carnevale, S. Quoted in “Unlocking ‘Brain Capital’ In The Brain Economy — Davos Initiative Aims To Make Brain Health A Development Indicator.” Health Policy Watch, February 2026. Carnevale is a venture capitalist and served as moderator of the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative Brain House session, January 2026.

McKinsey & opioid crisis

U.S. Department of Justice, December 13, 2024. McKinsey & Company agreed to $650 million federal settlement (civil and criminal) for its role in helping Purdue Pharma “turbocharge” OxyContin sales. First management consulting firm held criminally liable for advising a client to break the law. Senior partner Martin Elling pled guilty to felony obstruction of justice. Prior state settlements totaled approximately $1.15 billion. See NPR coverage, December 13, 2024; PBS NewsHour, same date; McKinsey Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DOJ).

McKinsey & tobacco industry

Bogdanich, W. & Forsythe, M. (2022). When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm (Doubleday). McKinsey’s relationship with Philip Morris began in 1956. The firm consulted tobacco companies through 2021, including Juul (2017–2019). The Marlboro smartphone loyalty app concept was pitched to Altria circa 2016. See also NPR Fresh Air interview, October 3, 2022; Générations Sans Tabac analysis (French public health archive).

McKinsey & ICE detention facilities

Bogdanich, W. & Forsythe, M. “McKinsey Proposed Paying Pharmacy Companies Rebates for OxyContin Overdoses.” New York Times, November 27, 2020. ICE consulting details: ProPublica & New York Times joint investigation, December 2019, documenting McKinsey recommendations to reduce food and medical spending at immigrant detention centers.

Adolescent mental health trends

CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), 2011–2023, documenting sustained rises in adolescent anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation coinciding with smartphone saturation. See also Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation (Penguin Press); Twenge, J. M. (2024). “Trends in U.S. Adolescents’ Mental Health.” Nature Reviews Psychology.

Shocking a gem with extreme heat can shatter it. Exercising without stretching or building strength gradually can harm us.

Any real transformation, even if it appears instantaneous — even if it reads as a single recorded time after fifteen years of competitive swimming — took time and experience to emerge.

This piece asks you to descend gradually. Each section examines the same pattern at a different magnification. Take your time. The body learns best when it isn’t rushed.

The Body in Water

I used to swim competitively in high school and into college. I was in the highest level training group offered in the area, the National Training Group. We practiced year-round, eight sessions a week. Most were two and a half hours except for the early morning hour-and-a-half sessions before school, Mondays and Wednesdays.

Yeah, it was brutal. Yeah, I wore those tiny, unforgiving Speedos. Regularly. Yes, my hair turned a strange pale straw color with a hint of neon green from being saturated in chlorinated water. And yes, I was in incredible shape, and though I wasn’t the best, I shared lanes with some who went on to the Olympics.

Have I established my credentials enough to discuss swimming? Good. I think so.

I ended up swimming primarily mid-distance for my high school team, particularly the 500-yard freestyle. Twenty lengths of the pool. Ten laps. A difficult distance — it’s not a sprint like the 100 or 200, but it’s not just endurance pace like the 1000.

For this event, they have “counters.” A person who holds a sign in the water displaying how many lengths you’ve swum, flipping the number as you approach the wall. The counter exists so the swimmer can focus on what actually matters.

Counting to twenty isn’t hard, right? Seems silly. Until you’re in the water.

Cold on impact. Painfully cold, shocking every square inch of skin. Then mercifully cool as your body temperature spikes from the effort. When you swim competitively, form is as important as endurance — more important. You count your strokes between breaths. You track each hand independently — making sure neither reaches across the midline of your chest — while keeping them coordinated with each other. Elbow high. Arm extended as far as it will go before scooping back the water to propel you forward. Meanwhile, body level with the surface. Legs straight without locking the knees, kicking from the hip with the full strength of the larger muscles. Hips rotating in timing with each forward stroke.

Every small movement. Every breath. Every exhale before the next breath. Everything registered.

There is no room for counting. Not without sacrificing the presence the body in water demands.

The counter exists because the event itself makes counting impossible. The body in water is too busy being a body in water to track a number. So we outsource the number to someone standing outside the experience.

None of this would be necessary, of course, if we were swimming for leisure, or to cross a river. The count developed for a specific, created event. And the final score? Sometimes decided by milliseconds. Recorded as a number. The victor remembered by the timer’s digits.

For example, I typed my name and “swimming” into a search bar and found an old article from the one swim meet I actually made it to in college:

Christiansen, Marchant and Tony Ness swept the top three spots in the 100-yard freestyle. Christiansen won the event in a time of 51.36. Marchant was second in a time of 52.29 and Ness was third in a time of 52.59.

52.59. That’s me.

It says nothing about the thousands of hours training. The coaches who taught us technique using their own bodies — demonstrating, then studying our movements in the water, adjusting our form with their hands on our shoulders and arms. The relationship to the water. Knowledge that can only be learned and carried from one body to another, meeting water.

It says nothing about how it felt to be me at that time. My alcoholism was budding. I was drunk nightly, stoned daily. I went on to break my wrist so badly jumping a fence while intoxicated that I needed a cast for three months and missed the rest of the season.

It says nothing about how I returned to swimming a decade later — in sobriety — and found it regulating, soothing, expansive in ways I didn’t have language for yet.

The record captured one number. How fast. Who won.

I’ve now recorded some of what surrounded that number. But what actually carries weight? The time. My name — only if the time were record-setting. My life — only if the name carries value according to whichever historians happen to be reviewing the archive, in whichever era, serving whichever power. All of it can be discarded entirely if the people who control the information decide it doesn’t matter, or decide to change what’s been recorded entirely.

Even the number that survived took fifteen years of bodies in water to produce. The record shows the millisecond. The millisecond is the culmination of the years.

The Body and the Flame

I’m an artist. My most recent creative work has been jewelry making — specifically silversmithing. I chose a patented alloy called Argentium Silver: patina resistant, hypoallergenic, more workable, and it displays a brighter white than any other metal due to the addition of Germanium. If you don’t know anything about jewelry or metals, that probably sounds like gibberish. Basically, it’s a superior silver alloy with desirable aesthetics.

When I create a new piece, I disappear into the garage for the entire day. My focus is on the metal and what it is becoming. Measuring it, cutting it, filing it. Then the heat. Annealing — bringing the metal to the precise temperature where its crystalline structure reorganizes, softening it so it can be shaped again. Under the torch, I can see the moment it happens: a faint blush moves across the surface as the atoms rearrange. Then pickling to remove stains and oxides, cleaning, applying flux to lower the melting point for smoother soldering — each step reading the metal’s response in real time. When the solder flows, it moves like water finding its level. The metal tells me what it needs if I’m paying attention. By color. By surface texture. In an instant it goes from glowing orange-red to liquid like mercury, bright white emanating heat into the air around it.

I don’t think in degrees Fahrenheit as it warms. I don’t contemplate the weight of the silver as I work. I don’t catalog every polishing wheel, burr, every supply. I don’t think about how I’ll market the piece. I’m in it, fully. A body working metal to create something beautiful.

But you know what gets recorded? Metal type. Purity. Weight. Gemstone type, cut, color, setting style, carat weight, treated or untreated. And then of course — the price.

None of the body. None of the flame. None of the metal becoming liquid, the atomic structure hardening and loosening under heat. The record keeps the numbers. The experience stays in the hands.

The Body and the New Life

OK, so arguably, these are hobbies. Swimming competitively isn’t necessary for survival. Silversmithing for jewelry is decorative work, not functional machine parts. Maybe that’s why there wasn’t a need to record more of those experiences, you might say.

I’m not going to argue. The point was never the necessity of the thing being recorded. It was the compression and loss in what does end up being recorded.

So I’ll see you and raise you the one thing none of us would be alive without: caregiving.

I haven’t carried a pregnancy, so I won’t speak to that bodily experience. I do know the experience of raising little humans. The overwhelming love of seeing a new being emerge into the world and gradually become their unique self. The terror of realizing you are responsible for the survival, development, and wellbeing of an entire human.

The tightening in my chest. The tensing in my jaw, neck, and shoulders. The feeling of a strap cinching around my head and pain in my temples when sleep-deprived, attempting to soothe a screaming infant at three in the morning. And then — the warmth and release of tension when holding your child’s warm little body, their whole weight pressed against your chest and shoulder, against your forearm. The scream softening to a whimper. The whimper giving way to breath. The breath slowing against your skin until it steadies into sleep.

That sequence — distress, attunement, regulation, rest — is the completion cycle in its purest form. A body in crisis met by a body that stays. No language required. No record made.

One night I almost couldn’t do it. I’d been awake since four-thirty. Worked a full shift. Came home to two children who’d been marinating in engineered stimulation all day — the candy that triggers craving, the videos designed to flood developing brains with dopamine. So I arrived depleted to children who were dysregulated. My son wanted to play and refused to sleep. He wouldn’t stop crying. My daughter was tired and squirming, frustrated by her brother’s loudness and wanting attention of her own. And my job, at that moment, was to be the regulating presence for two nervous systems that had been destabilized while I was away getting destabilized myself.

I stood in the hallway between their rooms and felt my whole body want to fold. The strap tightening around my head. The weight in my arms before I'd even picked anyone up. And that odd blend of guilt, grief, anger, and despair that becomes too familiar while parenting two young children in the modern world: you cannot do this. And I couldn't argue. Before I could give up entirely, my son burst out of their bedroom, and something more ancient — something like instinct — said: they need you to. So I sat on the floor between their two beds, let my son climb into my lap, gently scratched my daughter's back, and hummed. I hummed Amazing Grace. I don't normally sing or hum, and I hadn't heard that song in years. It surfaced on its own — a memory from my grandfather's funeral, when I was thirteen. For a long time, that was all I could do. Breath, sound, and presence. Eventually their breathing matched mine. Eventually the crying stopped. Eventually they slept.

There is no record of that night other than my words now. No metric captured what it cost or what it built. But something completed in that room that matters more than anything the archive holds.

You know what caregivers do record? Primarily for infants: food consumption — milk or formula. Bowel movements and urination. Fevers or concerning patterns. Body signals interpreted as data points for the health of the developing baby.

Sometimes they document special moments. But — and I can vouch for this — most of the first few years, where the most critical development occurs, is a blur. I have some pictures. Some notes. I tried to write down special moments and feelings. But most of it is unrecorded, unmeasured, unmarked.

I was too busy being present with and physically caring for another developing human to record what that development looked like or cost.

The countless hours of witness, presence, sustenance, regulation, transportation, care, clothing, shelter, love, patience, advocacy. None of it gets recorded. None of it gets compensated. And yet none of us exists without someone having done it.

Read more

This is not a political document. I don’t care who you voted for. I don’t care what party you belong to or what label you’ve been given or chosen. If you have come here looking for ammunition against the other side, please close this now. This is not for you.

This is for people who believe we have a responsibility to protect children. To care for the vulnerable, the sick, the elderly, the less able. That belief has nothing to do with political ideology and everything to do with personal morality — the kind that exists before anyone tells you what to think.

~~~

I also want to be honest with you about something else. There is a lot of horrific news in the world right now. There is overwhelm. There is suffering being packaged as content and used for engagement. I do not want to add to that. I do not want to use anyone’s pain to hold your attention.

It would be safer for me to say nothing. But I care deeply about the people being harmed by what I’m about to describe, and some of them can no longer speak for themselves. So I’m going to speak, as carefully and clearly as I can.

~~~

You do not need to read this entire document. I have placed stopping points throughout. At each one, you will have enough information to understand what I’m showing you at that level. If you feel you’ve seen enough, stop. Sit with it. You can always come back. There is no urgency here except the one that already exists in the world, and that urgency will not be solved by pushing past your own limits.

Take care of yourself first. Then, if you choose, keep reading.

“I believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery.

I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.”

— Joseph Goebbels, diary entry, April 10, 1924

The Playbook Has One Page

There is a formula that has been used to control populations for nearly a thousand years. It has never changed. It has never needed to. It works every single time because it targets biological circuitry that existed before language, before logic, before any of us had a chance to build defenses against it.

Here is the formula:

Step 1: Identify a real threat that people already sense but can’t name.

Step 2: Fabricate a mythology that names the wrong perpetrators.

Step 3: Activate the biological threat-to-children response, because it bypasses all rational evaluation.

Step 4: Harvest the resulting outrage for political power.

Step 5: Use that power to commit the very crimes the mythology describes.

Step 6: Build permanent surveillance and control infrastructure, justified by the manufactured emergency.

If you think this doesn’t apply to you, keep reading.

■ STOPPING POINT ■

You now know the formula. Six steps, one page, a thousand years. If that’s enough for you to start asking better questions about the narratives you encounter, that is a complete and valid response. The rest of this document shows you the formula in action across history and into the present day.

If you choose to continue, the next section goes deeper. There is no obligation.

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If we can’t trust our own senses and perception, we are faced with a horrifying realization: we are dependent. On someone, something, anything outside ourselves that can tell us what’s real. The person who controls that mirror controls what we believe about our own experience. We don’t choose this dependency — it installs itself the moment self-trust collapses. And we will hand our perception to whoever is standing closest, whether or not they have any interest in handing it back. Naturally, we attempt to find footing outside of ourselves. Survival demands it.

Imagine seeing a group of people hiding in the bushes up the street from where you are walking. You nervously mention this to the friend you are walking with. They act confused, don’t see anyone. As you get closer you distinctly see the shape of four large men crouched, hiding behind foliage. You tell your friend you want to turn around and call for help. They laugh it off and deny anyone is there. They keep walking boldly. Teasing you to hurry up. They make it past the bush safely, so, despite feeling crazy, you decide to follow. Your entire body is tense, shoulders rounded, jaw set, barely breathing, maybe lightly sweating. You override it, it must just be you being unreasonable, crazy as your friend declares.

You get jumped, left bleeding and alone on the sidewalk.

Your friend watches, and leaves with the men, they had been part of the setup.

Let’s pause. How did that feel to read? In your body?

I know the situation sounds extreme, sounds like something we would never fall for, but most of us do fall for this, all the time.

Think of a time you felt like something was a bad idea, that you sensed you shouldn’t be doing what you were doing, but you overrode it—only to say afterward, I wish I’d listened to myself.

Now what does such an experience do to the word friend? It might just change its meaning fundamentally, it might make it hard to trust another person again.

A year later, you are walking with another friend at night. You notice something strange a block or two ahead, movement in the bushes. This time, you immediately feel threatened. You tell your friend you’d like to turn around. They don’t know about your past experience so they laugh it off. You say you’re serious. They say ok, but want to know why. You tell them you thought someone might be hiding in the bushes ahead and you want to be safe. They laugh in your face. Don’t be so silly. You say you know you might be overreacting but would feel better turning around. Repeat.

Finally, you invest in thermal vision goggles, just in case. You wear them at night. You can see people, even those hidden behind bushes and objects.

Of course you do this. You want to stay alive.

In practice, you don’t buy the goggles. You grow them. When you can’t trust those who claim to have your best interest in mind—when someone can be considerate at the dinner table and merciless in the office, splitting themselves so cleanly between settings that neither version registers the other—walking around with perception that refuses to split along with them is brutal. Compartmentalization has never been natural to me. So you learn to see. Seeing clearly is your best chance of survival when you cannot go blind.

What Actually Damages You

You know what has been the most damaging thing people have said to me? That didn’t happen. You’re making that up. Denial. Or worse: silence, stonewalling, screaming into void.

Insults? I know where you stand.

Criticism? We can communicate about that. Questions? Perfect, let’s talk.

Praise or compliment? Thank you, I’ll accept it if it lands.

Sharing your thoughts and feelings? That’s how we get to know each other.

Denial of my experience and feelings? Erasure.

Silence when I speak directly to you? Invisible.

Our sense of self requires relationship. Otherwise we cannot distinguish ourselves from anything or anyone else. We don’t know where our internal world starts and ends. We become confused. And this confusion, without returning to some type of ground or center, without an accurate relational mirror, can become chronic and infectious.

Go ahead and try to tell someone what it feels like to trip on psychedelics. It’s beyond words and our usual conscious experience. How about something simpler: try to describe to someone what happiness feels like in your body. How’s that land?

For me it’s like warm sun kissing my skin, gentle melting, tickling the fine hairs on my arm. It’s like I’m an ember emitting warmth and light, steady, real. Complete. Ready for anything, ready for more, or to just soak in sunshine, smiling with my whole body.

You might even feel it a little reading that. Now prove it’s real. With data. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Who Holds the Proof?

Some subjective perception is harmless. Whether you like strawberry ice cream. You do or you don’t, or you like it but only if it’s Turkey Hill brand. We’ll get two pints or Neapolitan, and everyone is happy.

Some things are objective—they remain true regardless of whether you like them, considered their impact or not. Like a pharmaceutical company that aggressively markets a “non-addictive” opioid for everyday pain—sending sales reps to doctors with scripted lies about safety, funding fake studies, and downplaying addiction risks in internal memos while publicly insisting the drug is safe and essential for quality of life. They collect years of their own data showing skyrocketing overdose rates, addiction patterns, and deaths directly tied to their product. They already have the emails, the sales quotas, the hidden research buried in their files.

Tell me you had no intention of harming those patients, or me as a family member watching someone die slowly. Prove it.

Meanwhile, the survivor or grieving relative—body and life shattered by years of prescribed addiction—must gather medical records, overcome aggressive defense lawyers, fight statute-of-limitations barriers, and convince a courtroom the ambush was real. The company that designed the marketing blitz and hid the risks demands proof from the person bleeding on the sidewalk, proof they already documented and insured against. Every month a family spends reliving the loss to demonstrate what happened is a month the executives already priced into their legal reserves and bonus structures. Your devastation was forecasted, budgeted, and profited from.

Intent is the standard they require for proving malicious behavior. Meanwhile, they need you to prove the harm. You have to prove your experience, your loved one’s experience, is real.

They already proved it themselves. Institutions condition and produce behaviors by design and then blame you when their psychological operations cause the impact they were designed to cause.

This is the bushes all over again. The friend who walked past safely already knew what was hiding there. Purdue Pharma already had the emails admitting the addiction risks, the sales reports tracking overdose spikes, the internal data they buried while pushing more pills. They built the ambush. They have the blueprints. And the legal standard requires you—bleeding on the sidewalk—to prove someone was in the bushes.

The demand that you prove your experience is the extraction. It keeps you spending energy demonstrating what they already documented in their quarterly reports. Every hour you spend proving harm is an hour they already priced into their operating costs. Your outrage is a line item.

The Goggles

Those goggles you bought after getting jumped were the rational response to an environment that proved it would betray you. You can see what’s hiding. You can see the setup before it lands.

The question is what to do with what you see.

Most people’s instinct, once they can see the mechanism, is to explain it. Point it out. Describe in detail exactly what’s crouching in the bushes. This feels right because the body wants to complete the cycle—express what you perceive, have it mirrored, integrate, move on.

The problem: the person dismissing you already knows what’s in the bushes. Or they’re part of the setup. Your detailed explanation becomes another thing they can deny, dismiss, or stonewall. You’ve just converted their low-effort cruelty into your high-effort response.

What follows are tools.

These tools work. They also feel terrible the first time you use them, because your body has been trained to complete cycles with people who will never let them complete. Using these means accepting that some cycles close later, elsewhere, with different people. That’s the price. It’s worth it.

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No. Too cliché. Too disconnected. I can’t feel it.

What is the difference between writing that transforms and writing that performs transformation?

No. Too many syllables. Too heavy. I want to feel lit up.

Why do I even need a question? Why chase a why?

Start right here.

Will you breathe with me? You don’t have to—but if you’d like to join, I’m taking a deep breath right now.

Inhale…

1 2 3 4

…hold…

1 2 3 4

…exhale…

1 2 3 4

…return.

My shoulders drop. My jaw softens. I remember I am a person. I am a body. I am here.

Do you feel yourself here, right now? What does it feel like?

I’ll go first.

Ordinary. Utterly unremarkable. And that’s okay.

As I sink deeper, a memory surfaces. Bloop.

* * *

“Have you tried praying?” he asked.

We were standing outside the building. I was smoking a Camel Blue (they used to call them Lights, but the name changed when someone decided “light” was too misleading).

I’d just answered honestly when he asked how I was. I’d learned that here, people actually meant it. They were ready to listen. The stereotypical answers—“I’m ok.” “I’m fine.” “I’m above ground, ain’t I?”—what signaled “normal” in most settings, here was interpreted as a potential red flag. We knew those answers were not answers, really. Empty air. If I didn’t want to share, it was easier to walk away than linger with a cigarette. But—

I’d also learned that some instincts no longer served me. Isolating avoided vulnerability, yes—but it also kept me stuck, alone, with no real way forward. My old solutions—drink, use, distract—only left wreckage. So I stayed.

Back to the memory:

“Yes, every day. I ask for relief from this anger. I pray they find happiness, peace, whatever they’re seeking. I’m still angry. Still hurting. It’s not working.”

“Have you tried praying with your heart open?” he said calmly.

It didn’t sound dismissive. It felt like he truly heard me. His gentle attention made space for what I was carrying.

“I…I don’t know. Maybe? What does that mean? How do you do it?”

And then something rare happened: he had a concrete, practical answer. No pressure. No expectation. Just something that had helped him. A gift.

“Do you have a Twelve and Twelve?”¹ he asked.

I nodded.

“Read the chapter on Step 11 somewhere quiet. When you’re done, get comfortable, close your eyes, focus on your breathing until you feel warmth in your chest.” He paused. “Ever meditated?”

“For years.”

“Good. When that warmth comes, think of the person. Pray—however it comes out. See if it feels different.”

Pop.

* * *

Why am I telling you this?

This question just pierced the recollection.

This memory I am recounting that rose unbidden when I became present to my body.

Enter my father’s voice: “You don’t have to share every thought and feeling that comes to you.”

Enter another voice, one I’ve only just recognized: “God? Prayer? Feelings? Ha. Weak. Soft skills. Impractical. Brain-washed, white male, patriarchal whining. Pathetic.”

That’s a harsh voice. It comes from responses I’ve received on social media, where I share openly, vulnerably. Just like this.

Enter a protective voice, familiar, persuasive.

Anger would be easier. Anger has armor. This doesn’t.

Words like “pray,” “Alcoholics Anonymous,” “Twelve and Twelve,” “God” can spark friction for different people.

Can we simply name that? These words land differently. That’s all. Bloop.

* * *

I followed his suggestion exactly.

Resentment is corrosive—especially in recovery. The Big Book² calls it the “number one offender,” the root that destroys more alcoholics than anything else, feeding every form of spiritual sickness.

You don’t have to agree. For me, it’s true. My cravings flared hottest when resentment looped in my mind.

Re-sentment.

To sense again. To feel again. To re-experience what’s already over.

The word holds the mechanism. It’s not the original wound that keeps destroying us—it’s the replay. The loop. The sensation called back, again and again, until the body can’t distinguish past from present. Until we’re flinching from hands that struck years ago.

I’m not writing this metaphorically, when emotionally triggered—dysregulated, overly stressed—we literally lose access to our prefrontal cortex.³ We can’t distinguish between past and present. We lose context, access to language, everything we need to navigate the present effectively. The body responds to the memory as if the threat were happening now. Each replay keeps the wound fresh. Each re-sensing prevents completion.

Replaying the driver who cut me off last week—the anger summoned fresh each time the memory surfaced.

Replaying the conversation with my boss years ago who laughed at my raise request—the rage at the helplessness and inequality of his response, re-lived as if it were happening now.

The heat that still flooded my fists as they clenched, remembering how she’d lied to me, even when given the opportunity to tell the truth many, many times.

Each replay—without resolution, without release—kept the wound open. Each re-sensing prevented the injury from closing.

So I read the chapter. I was desperate.

Step 11 is: “We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

The chapter anticipated my resistance before I had it. “‘Shucks!’ says somebody. ‘This is nonsense. It isn’t practical.’” The dismissive voice was already in the text—named, acknowledged, and gently set aside.

Then it spoke in body language:

“We will want the good that is in us all, even in the worst of us, to flower and to grow. Most certainly we shall need bracing air and an abundance of food. But first of all we shall want sunlight; nothing much can grow in the dark. Meditation is our step out into the sun.”

Bracing air. Abundance of food. Sunlight. Nothing grows in the dark. Short words. Body words. The kind of language that lands without needing translation. The chapter didn’t reach for abstraction. It stayed where the body could follow.

It went on to describe how meditation allows us to envision what we might become—to have a reference point before we move toward it. I’ve written elsewhere about how many of us chase things we’ve never seen, never felt, can’t even picture. Success. Contentment. Enough. We arrive at the thing we were seeking and find ourselves already pursuing the next thing, because we never knew what arrival looked like or what we are actually seeking.

Meditation, the chapter said, helps to “envision our spiritual objective before we try to move toward it.” It gives us a destination we can feel, not just name.

And it describes how, once nourished—body fed, soul warmed in sunlight—we naturally wish the same for everyone. Even the worst of us. Even those who hurt us most. That shift happens organically when we’re no longer starving.

By the end, I was already relaxed. Eyes watering. I closed them, breathed until warmth bloomed in my chest—sometimes an expansion, sometimes freer lungs, sometimes just radiant heat.

I thought of the person who’d broken trust, exploited kindness, humiliated me. I prayed—or set the intention, held the feeling—with my heart fully open.

The loop stopped.

No more mental review of wrongs. No re-creating betrayal. No hypervigilance.

The re-sensing ended. Something suspended finally completed.

Life moved forward. I learned what praying—or intending—with an open heart could do.

Logically, you’d think I’d repeat this every time resentment flared.

Humans don’t work that way. Not me, anyway.

My default is often to grip the resentment. There’s a guilty comfort in self-righteousness, the certainty of being wronged, the adrenaline rush of anger that feels like power.

Even with the knowledge and experience that effective relief exists, I often default to the familiar pain. Only through practice, reminders from others, and repeated return do I choose differently.

This isn’t recent. It happened at least seventeen years ago.

Today I sat still, intending to write something else entirely. Three other stories waited. None of them surfaced.

This did.

I trust it. I hope you’ll trust me too.

I began searching for the perfect question, craving transformation, rejecting every abstract attempt.

Then I stopped. I breathed. A memory rose.

Seventeen years later, the answer arrived—as lived story.

The transformation was in the willingness to sit still long enough for something true to rise.

A note: I speak only for myself.

My references to AA, prayer, meditation, God—they’re mine. Your path may look different. It doesn’t have to match. That’s part of the beauty: we each make our own meaning.

Life still happens in a world that often doesn’t honor what we value. But we get to be ourselves. We get to speak our experience. And sometimes another person’s words land like they’re speaking our own unspoken truth.

Language is not the experience. We live the experience, then shape words to reach across the distance and land in another body.

That, to me, is transformation: isolated feeling becoming shared reality.

I feel. I express. You receive. Something returns—changed.

Expression. Reception. Return.

The loop closes. Connection happens. We are less alone.

Does this need analysis? Not by me. I’m sharing what happened to me. Take what serves you. Leave the rest.

But I’d love to hear from you. If this stirred anything—resonance, resistance, your own memory of a broken loop—what comes up? Hit reply, drop a comment, or just say hi.

I choose connection.

—Fire Tongue

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Notes

¹ Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions is a companion text to the primary book of Alcoholics Anonymous, offering in-depth discussion of each step and tradition. Available at aa.org/twelve-steps-twelve-traditions.

² Alcoholics Anonymous (commonly called “The Big Book”) is the foundational text of the AA program, first published in 1939. The passage on resentment appears in Chapter 5, “How It Works.” Available at aa.org/the-big-book.

³ Research demonstrates that acute stress triggers neurochemical changes that impair prefrontal cortex function while strengthening amygdala responses. Under stress, the brain shifts from slow, thoughtful prefrontal regulation to rapid, reflexive emotional reactions—making it neurobiologically difficult to distinguish past threats from present safety. See: Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.