Light From The Center Ring

A meditation on being human. And staying human.

Photo by Conor Samuel on Unsplash

We are living in a moment of great upheaval. And I might suggest to my former friends in Silicon Valley that their historical legacies are very much in question.

But before I speak to them—before I name what they’ve done and what’s coming—let me speak to you.

You, who are reading this from wherever you stand. You, who feel the wire trembling beneath your feet. You, who sense that something fundamental has shifted, even if you can’t name exactly what.

Look at where you are.

You’re standing at the edge of existence itself. Not metaphorically—literally. You are balancing atop the most delicate alignment of forces that physicists have mapped, that we’ve used our cognitive gifts to understand. These forces don’t just act upon you. They aren’t just what make you up.

You are these forces.

Your consciousness dances precariously at the top of them, on a small rocky planet orbiting a star in an unremarkable corner of an incomprehensibly vast universe. It is preposterous that we are here. That matter organized itself into complexity. That complexity became consciousness. That consciousness became you, reading these words, capable of understanding what you are.

Yet here we are.

And in this preposterous existence, this cosmic accident of being, you have been told a lie so complete, so pervasive, that you might not even recognize it as a lie anymore.

The lie is this: that your existence can be optimized. That your consciousness can be managed. That your meaning can be replaced by metrics. That you are a machine that simply hasn’t been properly configured yet.

The lie is that the tragic dimension—the space where human beings actually live, where love and fear meet, where meaning emerges from risk, where agency is born of uncertainty—can be eliminated through sufficient cleverness, sufficient resources, sufficient control.

This lie has been told to you by people who love machines so much they would have everything become them.

And you, perhaps without fully realizing it, have been living inside their map of reality, mistaking their description of the world for the world itself.

Stop looking at the map.

Look around you.

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There is a truth older than any constitution, older than any market, older than any ideology forged in the laboratories of intellect. A truth whispered by the ancients, felt by the mystics, intuited by poets—and dismissed by the rationalists who mistook their models for reality.

The tragic dimension.

It is the wire stretched thin across the abyss.

It is the place where every choice carries a shadow, and where every shadow deepens the light. Where meaning lives only because we could fail. Where love matters only because we could lose. Where agency exists only because uncertainty remains.

The rationalists believed we could engineer our way out of this. Smooth it over with logic. Bury it under optimization. Fence it off with perfect systems that would finally, finally, eliminate the terrible burden of having to choose in conditions of uncertainty.

But Hume knew. He always knew.

Reason is the clerk of the passions, not their master. The tragic dimension is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the arena of our becoming. It is home.

And we forgot.

We built systems that assumed the passions could be subtracted. We designed institutions that pretended human beings were consistent machines. We crafted a culture that believed meaning could be replaced by metrics, that identity could be replaced by branding, that the soul could be replaced by optimization.

We became lonely in a world overflowing with simulation. We became spectators to our own experience. We became machinable.

And the comfortable elite—the ones who built these systems, who profited from them, who insulated themselves in bubbles so complete they forgot they were standing on anything at all—they looked at what they’d created and called it progress.

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So let me speak to you now. You, in Silicon Valley. You, who thought you were building the future. You, who animated dirt and called it property while mechanizing consciousness and calling it efficiency.

You’ve made a choice. Perhaps you didn’t recognize it as a choice—perhaps it felt like inevitability, like following the logic of markets and systems to their natural conclusions. But it was a choice.

You chose to hollow out the meaning of our existence so that it could become your fleet.

You chose to replace citizenship with terms of service agreements, participation with subscription, community with platforms you control.

You chose to treat human beings as machinable components in systems designed to extract value from their attention, their data, their relationships, their being.

And you told yourselves sophisticated stories about why this was not just acceptable but good. Libertarian frameworks that elevated property to the realm of metaphysics. Rationalist frameworks that treated human consciousness as an optimization problem. Effective altruist frameworks that justified present harm for speculative future benefit. Accelerationist frameworks that welcomed collapse as creative destruction.

All of these frameworks share something: they attempt to escape the tragic dimension through ideology. They promise that if we just follow the logic far enough, accept the premises fully enough, the terrible burden of choosing in conditions of uncertainty will finally be lifted.

But the tragic dimension cannot be abolished through cleverness.

And now it’s reasserting itself—with force, with fury, with the primal human demand to be real.

That is the upheaval you’re not prepared for.

Not merely political. Not merely economic. Not merely cultural.

But ontological.

The people you tried to turn into machines are refusing. And their refusal is not a variable you can model, not a problem you can optimize away, not an inconvenience you can delete.

I don’t want to be a machine in your world. I’ve been talking to my fellow citizens, and I reckon they don’t want to be, either.

You’ve made them lonely. The right to participate sits behind terms of service agreements. And you told them this was better—that your customer service was superior to the DMV.

And then one day they violate your terms of service. Perhaps they said something the algorithm didn’t like. Perhaps they organized something that threatened the wrong interests. Perhaps they simply became inconvenient.

And they’re gone. Deleted. Erased from the platforms where participation happens, where community exists, where economic life is increasingly conducted. No hearing. No appeal. No due process. Just the quiet, efficient execution of a contract they never actually negotiated, enforced by a party that holds all the power.

The DMV might be slow. But it can’t simply delete you for being inconvenient.

Speaking of inconvenient.

I’m sure you find these words so. Both that I would have the audacity to write them, and that people would deign to agree with them.

But now I’ve done it.

Uh-oh.

You’re going to regret accommodating all of this, I promise you. The people are angry. They really are.

You’re trying to work out the variables. Will the strongman consolidate control? Will your hard work buying into his good graces give you protection from these angry humans of lower vibrations?

It’s quite the choice.

If you swing at the people, you best not miss.

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The project of liberalism—the real liberal idea, not the technocratic accountancy you’ve mistaken for it—is the only political tradition honest enough to accept tragedy, humble enough to balance freedom with constraint, and courageous enough to walk the wire instead of denying it exists.

Liberals walk the wire.

Not because we’re certain we won’t fall. But because meaning lives only in the space where we could fail. Because the view is worth the risk. Because we refuse the false choice between eliminating uncertainty through authoritarian control or through rationalist management.

We make maps—not to replace the territory, but so others can walk the wire with us more safely, more wisely, more together.

But when the cartographers insisted their maps were reality, entire populations began following them off cliffs. When Silicon Valley’s priesthood of algorithms declared that their models captured human experience, we became spectators to our own lives.

And now the tragic dimension returns—chaos, populism, grievance, authoritarian longing. Not because the tragic dimension is our enemy, but because we tried to eliminate it instead of honoring it.

You cannot build a society atop reason while neglecting the passions that animate it.

You cannot sever the moral from the emotional and expect coherence.

You cannot govern human beings as if they are predictable components in a technical system.

Hume tried to warn us. We ignored him. And now we’re paying the price.

But the wire still holds.

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Let me tell you something the rationalists never understood, something the technocrats cannot measure, something the authoritarians fear most:

Light is not a gift from above.

It emanates from the acts of conscious beings who choose to resist the void.

You are standing on the wire right now, whether you know it or not. The forces beneath you—physical, social, historical—care nothing for your comfort or your certainty. The universe is indifferent. Entropy is patient. The void waits.

But you—you—you conscious, improbable, preposterous accident of matter organizing itself into awareness—you have a choice that the void cannot make.

You can step forward.

You can bring light.

Not because you’re certain you’ll succeed. Not because the path is clear. Not because someone promised you safety or meaning or reward.

But because the alternative—standing still while the wire frays, going backward toward shadows, or worse, collapsing into the void and taking others with you—is unthinkable.

There are those who have chosen the collapse. The comfortable elite who looked at the tragic dimension and decided to eliminate it by eliminating everything that makes us human. Who would turn consciousness into computation, meaning into metrics, freedom into optimization.

They love the void. They’re falling toward it. And they would take the rest of us with them into their singularity of control, their black hole of managed existence, their heat death of human meaning.

These men must be stopped.

Not with violence. Not with their own authoritarian tools. But with the only force that has ever held the abyss at bay: free people who refuse to go quietly into someone else’s collapse.

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We are at war.

Not with nations, but with illusions. Not with each other, but with the metaphysical lies that hollowed out our shared world.

We are at war because we forgot the tragic dimension.

We are at war because meaning cannot be optimized.

We are at war because human beings refuse, at the deepest level, to be turned into machines.

This is not the war we chose. The war arrived because we forgot who we are. Because we let the cartographers convince us their maps were more real than the territory. Because we traded citizenship for convenience, community for platforms, meaning for metrics.

But the wire still holds.

And now we must walk it again—clear-eyed, steady, together.

Not to escape the tragic dimension, but to honor it.

Not to eliminate uncertainty, but to act within it.

Not to optimize our way to safety, but to choose courage in the face of genuine risk.

Because that is where freedom lives.

Because that is where meaning is made.

Because that is where we become fully human.

Meaning is born here, on the wire.

Love is born here.

Citizenship is born here.

Democracy is born here.

Everything worth saving is born here.

And so we walk forward. With monsters ahead and shadows behind. With the void pulling and the wire straining. With no certainty except this:

We are conscious beings standing on the edge of existence.

We did not ask to be here.

But here we are.

And we choose—against the void, against the collapse, against those who would turn us into machines—to step forward.

To bring light.

To resist.

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The hour is late.

The people grow restless.

And the long gaze of posterity watches from the future.

To my former friends in Silicon Valley: Your historical legacies are very much in question. You’ve built your bubble of comfort atop the hollowed-out meaning of millions. You’ve animated property while mechanizing consciousness. You’ve chosen your side in the coming reckoning.

If you swing at the people, you best not miss.

Tick, tock.

To those who are still walking: The wire still holds. It’s straining, it looks tenuous, but we must keep stepping forward. We can’t go back—there’s nothing for us there. Only the shadows of memory.

There are monsters ahead. But we have our swords, and with each other by our side, we move forward with the audacity that we might slay them.

Because heaven is a place on earth. And you can see it from here.

You must first give way. The beautiful release. The courage to put one foot in front of the other. Head held high, eyes gazing toward the dark, watching how the shadows move on the landscape.

You move.

Forward.

And with you, you bring light that pushes the shadows back.

Light is not a gift from above. It emanates from the acts of conscious beings who choose to resist the void. And it consumes those who would relent.

Self-collapse. And into that singularity—the infinity—they would take us with them.

These men must be stopped.

These men must be opposed, constrained, and stopped by the only force that has ever held the abyss at bay: a free people who refuse to go quietly into someone else’s collapse.

So remember what’s real.

This is my Note. To you, dear reader, from the Circus. From the center ring.

Stop looking at your maps.

Look around you.

This cannot sustain.

But the wire still holds.

And we are still walking.

The first movement was the only movement.

And it begins again, here, now, with you.

Forward.

Advance, liberalism!

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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