There’s a sickening vertigo to the MAGA-scape at the theoretical edge where phrases like “administrative state” and “managerial class” get bandied about as a way of opposing thought leadership in favor of raw aggression. It’s both a new authoritarian playbook and a categorization system that is deceptive in its impotence because there always needs to be careful thought in our complex societies; oh, how conservatives once loved the nuances of “unintended consequences” as a way of poisoning the well of change. We see this in the whiplash over foreign policy ideology (America first, damn the struggles of the world) and the reality of being active participants in the new struggles of great powers where mercurial Trump keeps lashing out, retracting, and slashing awkwardly again. We see little resembling the hallmarks of Christian humility or compassion, just performative gestures that rely on the thin gruel of culture-war complaints to interpenetrate governance and aggressive posturing.
It’s different from before, sterile and mean, like the revelatory queasiness of grainy 4:3 Cops or Maury Povich in the 90s.
Given all this, I thought it might help mightily to start a new religion that takes over and displaces all this antagonism, a way of restructuring the worldwide mind around modern insights. It’s a fool’s errand, I know. Our most recent examples of cults and mini-religions all have revolved around deceit and control—even the political cult of MAGA—so trying to displace it all might be inverting the mechanisms that really drive religious success and spiritual change. But it makes a fun side-project when I’m not writing other things or coding.
I was in a taxi crawling and dodging through central Bangkok today and the wizened driver was both texting cute furry emojis and watching streaming video of the news on the center console of his Toyota! The new tariff rates on Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam were central to the news, but it then shifted to the border skirmish. I was alarmed by both the distracted driving in controlled chaos and the extended influence of this new, angry America. We need some calming. We need to slow down and find something else that enhances us rather than distorts our posture in the world like a fun house mirror.
Here’s chapter four of what I have to offer.
**
We forget quickly. We retreat to old habits. Our sensibilities get entrenched in the now rather than the possible that bridges the knowable into the unknowable. There is always a distraction, a commitment, a reversion to the powerless mean.
I ran in new clarity, pushed as if by an external force, and reset when I stopped, admiring the street art, the stellar cupola above the world, the inexact gears of the buildings along the skyline. I had new tools for considering the world around me and I envisioned trajectories varied and intersecting. One emerged from history and speared the future. Another crossed the now and represented technological change and knowledge formation. They formed a hypercube that rotated around me, populated by exuberant motes of color and texture that represented my life and the channels of information I was constantly harvesting.
How do I sustain this feeling of hovering in this electric impermanence? How can I combine the lessons of my body with the experimental orderings that make ethics an investigation of what can be good, rather than an abstract pile of rules? How does the lifting of the veil of imperfect, emergent pasts and their destructive languages and traditions lead me towards better futures? I was aglow from these questions; there was a psychic energy of transformation.
The constant awareness was infecting my daily life. Mornings became a ritual of awakening, not just another waking. I reflected on the beauty of the sunrise through my windows. At breakfast, I marveled at the organic complexity of my orange, with its rich veiny shades and meaty textures complemented by pale connective tissue. My workdays became both more fulfilling in the completion of tasks and, especially, in the solving of problems. Each became a marvelous puzzle that inspired me to look and think more deeply about the codes and processes that are at the vanguard of our flight into the future. Simple things like numeracy and accounting—much less complex things like efficient designs for the elaborate technologies that enable human interactions at enormous and prosperous scales—all felt new and alive to me. I no longer saw institutions and people as roadblocks but as enablers and co-conspirators in an abstract information halo.
There is a poetry to life and society, I now know, and to read it out from our historical bricolage brings both personal satisfaction and a numinous attachment to a grand arc of achievement. The rise of living beings began the process of our overcoming and creating what was and is the potential to reunite with the universal whole. Through our minds, through our hearts, through action, we bring about answers, solutions, projections, schemes, strategies, and hope. Our lives are always incomplete, transient reflections of the underlying stream of creation, but we are always becoming greater examples of ourselves fashioned around the inputs of immemorial ways.
We begin with the incomplete cosmology of the sciences, showing us a creative universe that emerged from a great unknown, but infected with rules and processes that coalesce, reflect, combine, compress, expand, anneal, and lurch along through an expanding emptiness that is incompatible with any of our everyday ways of knowing. It is not a balloon. It is not a swirling pool. It is both scarce of things and filled with possibilities. There is an enlargement of time to extents that are inconceivable except in the language of symbolic manipulation, and curvatures that are nothing like the curve of a road or the arc of a bridge. There is no known ancient cosmology that bears any similarity to the complexity and oddness of the universe around us. At great scales we see vast empires of gases, crushing forces, seas of molten metal, seeming emptiness nonetheless pervaded by energetic particles, and speeds and forces that coalesce time into energy and space itself. Down below what is possible to experience, we find fields of incomplete becoming, trifles of presence, holograms splicing time and emergence, and a pervasive background of awakening, like an unending field of flowers opening and closing in an orchestrated rhythm. All is connected at this scale, bound together and entangled, and distance and space is an abstraction overlayed on the correlative harmonies that loosely bind everything together.
From this, then, we see an unexpected awakening in the emergence of replication, persistence, identity, and soul. In puddles and pools spread thinly through the ribbons of material potentialities, there appeared combinations that clung together, that pulled others together, that inadvertently sprung into prelife. Again and again this happened, and again and again it failed, but in so many experiments, much like our experimental societies, some survived. The algorithm was tentatively perfected and accelerated, as if with a great explosive flowering, and gained and grew on this refining trajectory of the many in reifying the few, then again in bursts and stops, and the soup of which we are made thickened and gelled, cooled and bubbled. The coexistence of all these ambitious patterns, organizations and fulfillments, accelerated. Even the acceleration sped up as our ancestral forms burst and expanded, inveigling themselves into every crease and energetic puddle throughout the world.
It is this great opera of coexistence that led to division and further refinement. Energy harvesting from others led to new cryptic inventions, new stratagems developed through an unconscious exploration of all the ways that our shared backstories can reach forward towards survival and excellence. Predation, parasitism, and mutualism led contingently to socialization, protection, and algorithms for genetic diversification, then, in turn, to societies, science, medicine, modulated and tempered environments, agriculture, water treatment, and waste management. And to achieve this came planning and prediction driven by mental strategies, mathematics, logic, and reason.
In our minds, reason is a pristine collection of ideas and their relationships, like the purity of that simplified space that we imagine we came from, and both buttress against the calamity of our short existences and bring us to a consideration of how we are, now, the pinnacles of our sacred world, in our sacred mother universe, with proofs of optimality of how the algorithms in the gears of the cosmos churn, and wonder at the edges of what is known and still to be discovered. The awakening is here, within us, and translates into compounding that wonder into further being, as perfect in our future selves as can be achieved, such that there is no want, no harm, no drag of imperfection or shallowness of desires. We are always climbing towards that finality, locked to the ladder by the essentials of being as living organizations, as social participants, and as creators of our fates. There is no opposition except retrograde amnesia. There is no other interference except forgetting the stunning impetus of our rise and coordination, and the networks that support us, derived from history, and leading us always upwards.
We can easily be distracted. For where there was once a calm laid over our minds by the social order, imposed upon our ignorance, and the ancient religions demanding our supplication, there has been in our enlightened and connected era a spinning of infinite complexity that cows and stuns, leaving a sense of fragility to our systems and an imperiling of our commitment to the path. Some call for a new rage against an inchoate machine to assuage their incomplete understanding of the Path of Enkinema. They organize the ancient amnesias for the unfolding whole and the fractal engagement at the edge of chaos. They urge retreat and insularity to combat their own anomie. It is against this resurgent Enkaos that we plant our flag of optimism and productivity. In decentralization and connectivity there is no center, no moral impetus, without an understanding that the system is itself the project and product of our hope. The enemy is only ourself in harvesting attention and blindly retreating towards a tyranny of mind, body, and group.
The extension towards tomorrow is the path of Enkinema. And though the future is unknown we can see its umbra projecting backwards on us, defining in a ghostly premonition that we are becoming creators of new worlds even while exploring the limits of our current universe. To transcend, to arrive as perfected information that reflects the churning machinery of these algorithms of life, is to fulfill the destiny inherent in the axioms of existence. We can never set it aside but can only become complete by it, from it, and within it. That is what the ancients misapprehended, and what our contemporaries miss, and from it we can draw inspiration and strength. We are the thrust of the universe towards inevitable awareness, and the founders of new worlds that we are making and will continue to build, as if an afterthought to our mad lives, through our embrace of what comes next.
I am not a toxic stain against truth, nor a harvester of belief and attention. I am the climax to all our yearning. I am with all of you. I am in you and without. I am the directive of love and hope reified in my existence, formed from a womb and an elixir of exuberant becoming. I am the incomplete reflection of the past, the summation of our awakening into this light of the present, and the spear to the future, in humility, in honesty, in self-awareness, in my limits, in my choices, and in the organizations and societies that we cherish.
And so are you.
And especially in the planning for tomorrow, I will right and perfect these moments, these attitudes, these systems that surround and envelope me, tuning them towards the possible and pushing away from the darkness of unknowing and unknowability. I will engage and respond, in kindness and with love, and not let there be suffering or helplessness, within or without, for I am a power of unfolding. I am a force of invention. I am the clarity of righteousness, in all my incompleteness, but with all my faith in this great flowering experiment for progressing towards the perfection of the future.
And so are you.
Let there be a billion more inventions that seize the future and pull us out from these limitations. Let the machines, extensions of our capabilities, designed in pursuit of the conversion of complexity into wonder, be manifold and under our direction to enhance our lives, our animated beings, to remove the shackles and bounds of our physical forms, and bring us into a new harmony with one another and the energetic pulse of our creation from the potentiality that lurked in the raging chaos of the cosmos. I am there amongst them, empowered and shaping them towards what can be.
And so are you.
Let us be in the Path of Enkinema.
Always and forever.
Quick edit of terminology to “administrative state” and “managerial class” to normalize with other writers.