The Human Choice

Myth, Meaning, and the Last Stand of Democratic Consciousness

Photo by The Prototype on Unsplash

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

I never intended to become a philosopher by exile. The transition from tech executive to full-time writer wasn’t planned—it was forced upon me by an industry that decided asking uncomfortable questions about human agency made me radioactive. But perhaps that’s fitting. We only discover what we believe when belief costs something.

The circus mythology didn’t emerge from academic speculation but from watching something unprecedented unfold—the systematic replacement of human choice with algorithmic optimization, dressed up as inevitable progress. I could see it happening in the industry I helped build, in conversations with brilliant minds who seemed to have forgotten that intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same thing.

What started as weekend intellectual pursuits became urgent when I realized we weren’t just facing another political crisis but something deeper: the question of whether human consciousness has irreducible value or whether it’s just inefficient wetware awaiting replacement by better systems.

I’d spent years balancing building financial technology with an obsession for ideas—podcasts during commutes, audiobooks at night I fell asleep to, online arguments that stretched into the early hours, a lifetime of intellectual sparring partners who sharpened my thinking on everything from political philosophy to the nature of consciousness itself. Those accumulated hours of debate and discussion, it turns out, were preparation for a moment when abstract questions about truth, power, and human nature would become urgent practical concerns.

The mythology was my attempt to create frameworks for conscious resistance—not anti-technology screeds, but stories that help people remain human while engaging with systems designed to optimize that humanity away. The circus, the wire, the flood—these weren’t just metaphors but practical tools for navigating a world where the line between enhancement and replacement had become dangerously blurred.

Some people might be surprised to hear that my metaphysics are completely secular in nature. To the extent that I may invoke “God” now and then, it’s in a Spinozan frame—not as a supernatural entity but as the principle of coherence itself, the underlying pattern that allows reality to hold together and consciousness to emerge from matter. The mythology works precisely because it doesn’t require supernatural beliefs while still providing the emotional resonance and moral orientation that pure rationality alone cannot supply.

What I discovered through writing the Grand Praxis was that analytical detachment, however valuable, isn’t where we actually live. You can’t love an analysis. You can’t be loyal to a theory. At some point, philosophy has to become lived commitment or it remains academic exercise. The series traces that movement—from observer taking notes from the shadows to participant holding stakes against the storm.

This understanding shaped my approach to what I call the lost grammar of democratic virtue. We’re facing a crisis not just of institutions but of moral legibility—the collective ability to recognize ethical action as such. When the same gesture can be read as principled stance or partisan performance depending on your interpretive frame, democracy loses more than its structures. It loses its soul.

The circus mythology was my way of rebuilding that grammar—at the very least, for myself. Whether others found value in it is another matter. There’s nothing literally true about the mythopoesis. But I believe it embeds forms of truth: phenomenological, moral, human. Stories that make democratic virtue visible again. Because without shared interpretive grammar for moral action, we lose even the ability to disagree meaningfully—we don’t recognize what we’re disagreeing about.

This is why I’ve worked to re-enchant liberalism and patriotism. Not as nostalgia but as recognition that these traditions contain essential insights about human dignity and self-governance that we abandon at our peril. Liberalism isn’t just a political position—it’s the epistemic framework that makes political positions possible. It’s fundamentally about how we know things and organize knowledge in societies where no one has privileged access to truth.

When I call myself a liberal, I mean someone committed to the constitutional framework that allows free people to govern themselves through representative institutions while protecting minority rights. This makes me partisan about exactly one thing: the republican structure itself. I’ll fight anyone who threatens the constitutional framework that makes democratic self-governance possible. But on policy within that framework? I’m genuinely democratic.

Patriotism, properly understood, means commitment to constitutional principles, not loyalty to any person or party. It’s the moral courage to defend the democratic republic even when doing so comes at personal cost. True patriots defend institutions even when those institutions deliver outcomes they dislike. They recognize that constitutional processes matter more than momentary partisan advantage.

The timing of launching Notes From The Circus feels almost prophetic now, though I was just paying attention to patterns rather than predicting specific outcomes. I sensed we were headed toward cultural and political disaster. Trump’s victory felt probable, but even if it hadn’t happened, the underlying dynamics were already in motion—the epistemic collapse, the algorithmic manipulation of attention, the systematic erosion of shared reality.

The forces threatening human agency weren’t going to stop with any particular election. They’re deeper, more sophisticated, more committed to replacing democratic messiness with technological efficiency. When I barely use TikTok but encounter its perfect algorithmic curation, I see the logical endpoint: reality redesigned to deliver exactly what we think we want, with no friction, no surprise, no space for the accidents that make existence rich.

But here’s what I’ve learned that gives me hope: our destiny as humans is something we choose, not something that happens to us through technological inevitability. We can shape our tools rather than being shaped by them. We can insist on creativity and pluralistic society that maximizes human potential rather than surrendering to systems that solve human problems by eliminating the human dimension.

The human choice—to create meaning through relationship rather than receiving it from superior intelligence—keeps asserting itself against all attempts to engineer it away. Consciousness choosing to remain conscious is more powerful than any system designed to optimize it into predictability.

The circus continues not because we’re trapped in spectacle, but because we keep choosing to participate consciously. To walk the wire between naive immersion and cynical detachment. To hold the center not through rigid ideology but through ongoing commitment to the conditions that make choice possible.

This is the experiment I’ve been conducting through the mythology: whether we can build frameworks that serve truth rather than obscuring it, create stories that enhance rather than replace critical thinking, develop ways of remaining human while engaging consciously with forces that would reshape us.

We’re not here to be optimized. We’re here to become.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the most radical act in an age of optimization becomes the insistence on doing our own meaning-making—together, creatively, with full awareness of both our limitations and our irreplaceable dignity.

The alternative isn’t just political defeat—it’s the surrender of the capacity to choose what kinds of beings we become. And that choice, however difficult, remains ours to make.