Reviewed:
The Odyssey (film, Christopher Nolan, 2026)
The Return (film, Uberto Pasolini, 2024)
The Odyssey (miniseries, Andrei Konchalovsky, 1997)
Nostos: The Return (film, Franco Piavoli, 1989)
Ulysses (film, Mario Camerini, 1954)
The Odyssey (poem, Homer, 650 BC)

Seven years ago, Noor put to the seas in a black rubber dinghy. Fifty of them crammed onto a twelve-man boat, launched off the coast at Izmir and pointed in the general direction of Greece. Too many of them. When the water started seeping over the tubes and into the hull, it was only a little at a time, and maybe they could have made it if the engine hadn’t failed, but soon her feet were in two inches of seawater, and then it was over her ankles, and the faster it came in the faster the boat started to sink. Some of the men got out their phones and waved them in the air, trying to find a signal, and when they couldn’t find one they sat back down again and just swiped at the screens. The Afghan crammed in next to her spent his last hour on a sinking boat playing Candy Crush.

Then they were in the water. A cloudy moonless night, impossible to see when the next black wave would come swelling to fill her nose with seawater. The coughs and splutters around her growing sparser and sparser as the men in the water drowned, one by one. When the sky was starting to glow blue and Noor saw the boat far off in the distance, she barely had the strength to wave her arms.

But that was long ago. Now Noor lives on the tourist island of Ogygia. Every summer the Dutch and Germans flood in by the Piraeus ferry while the Afghans and Somalis land in their rubber dinghies. At night the two hostile armies scream at each other in the streets. It’s all strangely familiar; it all feels so much like home. One of these summers she’s going to hear the first gunshots, but Noor has other worries closer to hand.

For the last seven years, she’s been walled up in Konstantina’s narrow high-ceilinged house. Noor owes Konstantina her life. This is the woman who plucked her out of the water, the last survivor, and gave her safety, and a home, and nice clothes to wear. She’s dedicated her life to saving people, and in return the government seized her boat and put her under house arrest, and the fascists write her postcards about how they’ll cut her head off just like the Muslims she likes so much. Stan is the best person Noor has ever known, and what she wants from Noor isn’t even sex; when it’s only two women could you even call it sex?

But sometimes, in the mornings, when they’re lying in bed together, sunlight through the shutters, smell of coffee from across the street, and Stan lazily takes Noor’s hand and tucks it into the front of her pyjamas, palm against pubic hair, fingertips just brushing against some sea-thing frilled and wet—despite it all, sometimes Noor recoils. She knows it’s ridiculous for her to be disgusted by Stan’s body, since it’s her own body too; it’s been explained to her so many times. But she can’t help it, and then they fight. Stan accusing her of not being happy, of secretly wanting to leave, spending ages when she goes out to the supermarket, enjoying the outside world while Stan is stuck inside with an ankle monitor on, just to get away from her. I know you go to the beach, there’s sand in your shoes. Do you look at men, is that it? Why not just tell me? If you hate me so much, if you want to hurt me like this, why not just say? Say you don’t love me. I’m not here to force anything on you, just say you don’t want to be together any more. And Noor insisting no, no, not at all, I love you, this is where I want to be, there’s nowhere I’m happier than right here.

Noor knows better than to say. She’s said the wrong thing a few times and that was bad enough. Like the time she’d come home with a punnet of soft fragrant nectarines from the supermarket even though Stan didn’t like them. I’ll buy you a flight somewhere, Stan had said, New York, do you want to go to New York? I know people there, they’ll look after you. Is that what you want? And Noor had waited just a split-second too long before saying no, that is ridiculous, and then Stan crowed, Aha! It is what you want! before collapsing in tears. It took an hour for Noor to calm her down, while the thunder yowled outside—every time they fought there always seemed to be huge storms coming in from the sea—and just when she was smiling again with her wet red-rimmed nostrils and the wind had calmed down, you’re so good to put up with me like this, really you are, Noor had been stupid enough to ask, So it’s all forgotten, yes? Stan’s head snapped up. Huh? Suddenly Noor was blabbing. It’s just, you know, next time we have fight, I really don’t want this again, I don’t want you to bring it up on me, what I said, not said, about New York. Now something was twitching in Konstantina’s eyeball. A thin spindle. Ba, you don’t? she said. Tina, please, said Noor. Don’t call me that now, Stan said. You don’t want me to remember this? So why did you say it? Another little stalk appeared over the top of her eyeball, pushing up her lashes. Then another followed, and then one more. Eyeball bulging like a madwoman. You think I like to bring up old fights, she continued, bring up old stuffs, you think that makes me feel good? Do I look like I’m enjoying myself right now?

With a tiny sucking sound, the crab crawled out from under Stan’s eyelid and shivered sideways down her face. And now, in the space it had just vacated, her crustaceans teemed. Tinier than grains of sand, crawling over each other, cannibal and blind, they tumbled down the tear-paths to her chin. Eyestalk by thorn. When she spoke, she spat flecks of krill. Growing as she shed them. Columns of langoustines marched circles around her feet, whiskers first, snapping at her ankle monitor. Black lobsters reared up against her legs, and in their sprouting prows serrated mouthparts churned. You are starting a fight, Noor managed. Maybe you do enjoy it. How do I know? A mistake. Stan’s face went very still. All the crustaceans suddenly stopped scuttling and turned, slowly, to stare at Noor. Behind Stan’s wordless head, a halo unfurled. Long segmented legs spreading out around her hair as a lumpy, knobbly, misshapen crown rose. Setae bristling, arms and their claws working like pistons. Furious protuberances that twitched and whirred. Its mouth a hard-frilled cunt. In a flash of pure terror before she fled, Noor picked up one of the nectarines and threw it at Stan’s head. It missed, smashed against the spider crab’s carapace. Crabs don’t understand. The creature raked its head with its claws, saltwater thing devouring scraps of soft sweet fruit.

That night there was a gale, and then in the morning the waves deposited the bodies of the refugees facedown on the shore.

Sometimes, when she gets a moment alone, locked in the toilet, staring at the blue wallpaper, Noor wonders: how come I was the only survivor from that boat? How come the currents were against us? How come the engine failed? How come the city where I grew up is now one huge heap of broken concrete? How far did this woman go to get me here, out of her goodness and love?

Everyone agrees that Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey is a terrible film. Not everyone in the normal sense, obviously; audiences loved it, all the major critics have been calling it a masterpiece, and it made the GDP of Tonga in its first week, but those people don’t really count. By everyone, I mean the freaks. Right-wing culture warriors, pencil-necked autodidacts, sexless pedants, people who know what a spondee is, Christian Lorentzen, Emily Wilson, and me. For pretty much everyone, the complaint is the same: The Odyssey is anachronistic, it fails to properly portray the past. I think this is wrong.

The dumbest version of this argument points out that the cast is not made up of Mycenaean Greeks from the second millennium BC, but Hollywood actors from the year 2026, and the two populations don’t look alike. The number of people around the Aegean who looked like Himesh Patel was probably fairly low; the number of people who looked like Travis Scott or Lupita Nyong’o was even smaller; the number of people who looked like Will Yun Lee was so small you can probably round it to zero without it making much difference. This is all true; it’s also true that none of these people looked like Matt Damon either. If you find yourself caring too much about this, this is God’s way of telling you that you are living your life very badly wrong.

The more sophisticated version points out that the Odyssey is set in the Bronze Age, but all of Nolan’s Greeks are wearing boring grey and black armour, plus the kind of plumed helmets that didn’t become common for another six hundred years, which is sort of like making a film about Charlemagne in which he’s wearing breeches and a powdered wig. Actual Bronze Age costume was much more interesting. Armour was made from beaten bronze, polished and oiled until it was mirror-bright; an army on the move would have looked like a stream of liquid sunlight. Helmets were made from rows of animal teeth. Some of the warriors would have worn horns or antlers. Palaces were covered in brightly coloured frescoes of naked priests and bare-breasted women, animals tearing each other to shreds; Nolan shoots the palace scenes in a decaying seventeenth-century prison with plain stone walls. This was a totally alien culture, and it existed in a brighter, starker, weirder world than anything we know. What we see on screen are a bunch of stock Greeks from central casting.

The most sophisticated argument says that Nolan’s Greeks are psychologically anachronistic: really they’re just modern-day Americans. The people of the Bronze Age lived in their own very particular moral universe, which prized virtues we can no longer comprehend and tolerated a level of violence that’s now totally beyond us. Odysseus shuffles around as a beggar, delivering nice morals on charity and humility, before suddenly turning into a blood-splattered vengeance demon who strangles defenceless women and tortures people to death while they beg for mercy, and this is all part of the same lesson. The document of a society that might as well have been built on Mars. Meanwhile, Nolan’s characters are all good twenty-first-century neurotics. The gods aren’t really gods, they’re just your guilt and trauma. In fact, everything’s trauma. Matt Damon spends the whole film moping and miserable, making tortured beardy faces at the beer-grey sea. Nothing particularly antique here; what Nolan’s trying to tell is basically an Iraq War story. In his version, Helen was only a pretext, and George W Agamemnon launched the Trojan War so he could control the all-important trade routes. Instead of the titanic infant in the poem, creature of pure screaming id, expressing all the primal mythic forces of avarice and pride, we get a bureaucrat in silly armour, trying to maximise shareholder value.

All of this is true as well, except for the minor detail that the Odyssey is not a Bronze Age poem. The version we have was written in the archaic period, hundreds of years later, and it’s already anachronistic. Homer describes the dead being burned, which is what the Greeks of his time did, but the Bronze Age Greeks buried them. He gives his heroes circular shields, which they wouldn’t have worn, and has them fight in phalanxes, which they wouldn’t have formed. Even the titles are wrong. Odysseus and Menelaus are described as basileis, which in Homer’s age meant kings, but in the Bronze Age a basileus was a very minor official, leader of a small village or a group of craftsmen. This is what happens when a society collapses and local authority is the only authority left; maybe in the future the terrible despot ruling a planetary empire of a hundred billion slaves will call himself Mayor. But the Odyssey is also anachronistic in the other direction. The Homeric epics might well be older than the Trojan War; they have what looks like a pair of very distant cousins in the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The two cycles even contain some of the same epithets. Six thousand years ago, on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, there was a story about a man on a journey with an imperilled wife on the other end of it; when poets told it again, thousands of years later, they set it in their own place and time.

This is a story that speaks to every age, but you could even argue that the Odyssey was always pointed at one era in particular: ours, the age of capitalist modernity. Odysseus really is an American. Isn’t it strange how, from the seventeenth century on, you start getting a whole host of major retellings of the Odyssey—Monteverdi, Tennyson, Joyce, Kubrick—while almost nobody ever tried doing the same for the Iliad? Derek Walcott and that’s about it. But the Iliad is a social epic; one long squabble between opposing forces in a single camp, constantly at each other’s throats for the spoils. Achilles trying to assert his claims according to the rules of his very particular honour-bound society. In the Odyssey, that’s all gone. We’re now on the open sea, lonely and wandering, untethered to any social whole. ‘You sail the sea as rovers, with your hands against every man, and every man’s hand against you.’ Odysseus doesn’t angrily insist on his individuality; he’s been condemned to it. He’s experiencing the kind of subjectivity that wouldn’t reappear until the beginning of modernity. This is why, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer write that Odysseus and his men ‘embody the principle of the capitalist economy even before they make use of any worker.’ Meanwhile, back on Ithaca, the same collapse is taking place. The ruling classes no longer bother to rule; they’re just having one long party, stripping the island of its livestock, doing Epstein stuff with the slave girls. This is one thing Nolan’s film gets absolutely right. Instead of a portrait of a wildly different society, it’s a portrait of a society that used to be different, but not any more. Everyone keeps talking about Zeus’s Law, but they all know that it’s gone: that world is over, and we’re in the twenty-first century now.

There’s something very badly wrong with Nolan’s Odyssey, but it’s not accuracy. You’re not supposed to be accurate. The story at the start of this piece is a version of one I wrote a decade ago. I told my then-girlfriend that I was thinking of writing a book of short stories based on themes from the Odyssey. Oh God, she said, not again. Turned out her ex had just published a book of short stories based on themes from the Odyssey. She might have a type. But this is what people have been doing for thousands of years. Take the narrative and pull out the innards, subvert it, détourn it: that’s how old stories survive. If anything, Nolan’s Odyssey isn’t anachronistic enough. Why not just set it in the present? Why not have Odysseus and his Marines journeying home through the hollowed-out cyclops-riddled ruins of mythic America? Why not have the entrance to Hades in the basement of an abandoned mall? Rust-belt Laestrygonians? That might be fun. The film we actually got isn’t even fun. This is what all the people who hated it graciously allow; well, at least it’s entertaining. But it’s not even particularly entertaining! It’s not enjoyable to look at. What’s the point?

This Christopher Nolan guy—what does he actually like? What does he want to point his camera at? Most film directors are deeply horny and fucked up people, which is why they keep catching allegations. There is an erotics of the image. Not for this guy. His camera is never impolite enough to linger over anyone’s arse. His Odysseus doesn’t fuck Circe and he doesn’t fuck Calypso either; there’s a huge naked cyclops but we never even see its dick and balls. No pleasure on this journey, for its hero or for us. The most revealing bit is Nolan’s treatment of the sirens. When Odysseus hears their song, he isn’t entranced or seduced, he isn’t filled with an unbearable longing; he just starts screaming like he’s being tortured in a Syrian black site. Nolan is simply indifferent to desire. None of his shots have any of the base-level libidinal charge that makes cinema interesting. An Odyssey ought to be all sun-lacquered islands, the sea and the sky, the naked arms of the rowers, earth-brown, speckled white with salt, and there should be monsters with their terrible jaws absolutely going to town on all that supple naked flesh. I should have left the cinema very slightly gayer than I entered it. I should be acutely aware of the thin layer of linen that separates the suitors from Penelope’s body. It needs blue, lots of blue, overflowing out the screen. It’s incredibly difficult for living organisms to be blue; you need to construct dense, intricate molecules to reflect its short wavelengths. But the sea and the sky supply blue in overwhelming quantities. A colour from beyond the realms of mortal things.

But there’s none of that here. Nolan makes mostly-grey films for people terrified of seduction, Gulf Arabs and thirteen-year-old boys; that’s why he’s so popular. He isn’t even into violence. All the fight sequences in his Odyssey are perfunctory, bloodless, slightly squeamish. Homer loves to describe spears slicing through heads and the blood running out with the brains; here, whenever a throat gets slit it’s always just out of frame. He’s a technician: he likes tricks, twists, gimmicks, he likes to flash between scenes so one starts before the next one’s really ended, he takes an autist’s pleasure in that kind of thing, but the images he puts on the screen are the cinematic equivalent of those spotless millennial homes with grey walls and grey velvet sofas and grey vinyl flooring and nothing but protein and supplements in the fridge.

In a way, though, this is also a kind of fidelity to the text. What did Homer know about the immortal blue of the Aegean? He didn’t even have a word for it. And what did he know about the lurid red of human blood, or purple hyacinths in sacred groves, or the way the sun can shine so bright that the sky turns black? Homer was blind.

Maybe a better way of describing what’s gone wrong here is that Christopher Nolan does not believe in the gods. They never really appear in the film: there’s Zendaya as an apparition that might be Athena, but she doesn’t really do anything and turns out to just be a manifestation of Matt Damon’s guilt anyway. A real god is something different, an image so intense it generates and obliterates a potentially infinite number of meanings. The only way to make a decent work of art is to believe in the gods. But he can’t, and he’s not alone. It’s strange how difficult cinema finds the Olympians. You can make statues of them, or paintings, or write about them, but unless you’re making Clash of the Titans-level shlock it’s very difficult to show them onscreen. Nolan is just the latest in a long line of movie adaptations of the Odyssey, and they all come up against the same problem. Cinema is not capable of representing the gods.

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You really believe the United States of America is only 250 years old? You really think that? No way, man. That’s crazy. The real number—well, there’s what I can prove, which is that America is much older, ten times that, vastly ancient, falling deep into antiquity: two and a half thousand years old, easy. Everything you think you know is wrong. You believe in the Founding Fathers? You think little George Washington chopped down that cherry tree? Listen, the real George Washington lived thousands of years ago. His naked body was splattered with vermilion; his face was covered in tattoos of a giant serpent devouring the Sun. He presided over the Constitutional Convention as it worshipped a secret flame in a temple littered with human bones. You think the United States started on the East Coast and gradually spread westward? Not true. Totally fake. It began, if it began, right in the centre, the Mississippi valley, the heart of the continent; it’s a riverine civilisation, like Egypt or China. Over its long long history it expands and contracts, diastolic and systolic, like a heart; when it reaches outwards it brushes against the oceans and sometimes it can even cross to the opposite shores; when it draws in again, the fringes of the empire revert to barbarism. It’s been doing that for thousands of years. Maybe more. America is two hundred and fifty thousand years old. Two and a half million years old, maybe. It’s always existed. It lives outside time.

I spent America’s alleged 250th birthday in Los Angeles. It’s amazing how little anyone seemed to care about the big number. Clearly the old myths are wearing thin. In 1976, the whole nation entered a patriotic frenzy to mark the alleged bicentennial. Everyone was donning a tricorn hat and breeches. Everyone toted a real working musket. Fat Chicagoans with Polish last names were strutting around in powdered wigs. People called Lopez and Hernandez were reenacting the crossing of the Delaware on the snakeweed-lined banks of the San Juan River. (Most of the events of the so-called eighteenth century are actually cultural memories of 1976.) The Queen and Prince Philip made a full state visit, and in every city they visited they had to allow themselves to be symbolically tried and executed for crimes against republicanism and liberty. They didn’t do anything like that this time round. In Washington DC they put up a sad little thicket of MAGA-themed paper tents made up to look like triumphal arches. A few dead-enders limped about in the heat. You could try to blame it on recent events. What’s to celebrate? The US just lost a war. But the celebrations in 1976 came barely a year after the last helicopters scattered out of Saigon, and that didn’t stop anyone. Even now, people still want to eat hot dogs about their country. On the night of the fourth, every city from one coast to the other was a sea of fireworks. It’s the other stuff no one cares about any more, the sad motheaten wigs, the white guys with wooden teeth, the quarter of a millennium, the eighteenth century. They don’t know why, exactly, but they can tell that it’s all bullshit, and their country is older and stranger than they’ve been told.

Just look, if you can, at Los Angeles. It’s nice here. The sun shines every day and the streets are all hung with magnolias and jacarandas, and if that ever gets boring you can just step onto one of LA’s many convenient city buses to encounter some of the most diseased people in the world. (On the 20 to Santa Monica: a man in rags two rows in front of me, scrolling on his phone while fiddling with one of those blowtorch lighters in the shape of a pistol. Every fifteen seconds he would have a jerking spasm, press the gun against his head, and furiously click the trigger. Slight whiff of singed hair. All the videos on his feed were about the USS Liberty.) But after a few stops you can prance out and get a turmeric crush smoothie at Erewhon, named after Samuel Butler’s utopia in which people are punished as criminals for being ugly. I’ve been eating Mexican food. I’ve been eating Korean food. I’ve been eating Mexican-Korean fusion where you put the bulgogi in the taco. I’ve been firing a gun off the balcony of a Hollywood director’s son. Classic California stuff. Any small portion of Los Angeles can be very pleasant, as long as that’s all you can see, and most of the time it is. When you’re in that enormous basin, it’s just your cute little house, your cute little garden, your hydrangeas. Even from the elevated freeways the city appears as a zone of palm trees and Denny’s signs hanging like barrage balloons over the plains. But when you’re flying in to LAX you see the whole thing, all at once. I don’t know how people manage it.

Once you’ve seen LA from above, it’s obvious why nobody cared about the 250th. According to the myth, America was founded as a nation of yeoman farmers, prudent Anglos with buckles on their hats, reading Horace and Livy in their three-room houses, self-sufficient in wheat, rye, flax, wax, and lumber, guarding their homesteads and their liberty, urbanisation rate around 3.5%, fewer wage-labourers than outright slaves, with the two conditions generally held to be more or less the same thing. How on Earth could this have anything to do with the scenes outside your window? How could that rustic Jeffersonian fantasy have possibly created such a crystalline gigacity, hovering over the edge of reality? All these jobs and all this shopping: a society of total but invisible control, this impersonal grid that reaches deep down into the wet stuff of your brain and tugs you around by the desires. It’s not just the size of the place, although that is, obviously, terrifying: ten trillion neat bungalows slotted into ten trillion rectangular lots, stretching into Orange County and over the curvature of the Earth. What’s really unsettling about Los Angeles is how, from the air, it doesn’t really look like a city at all. That endless regular grid, with all those human bodies filed away; the bright specks shuttling along the avenues and onto the freeways: the sense of an enormous contraption, a massively complicated abacus with ordinary lives as its moving parts, flows of money and traffic and consumer goods and fame, zapping through logic gates, calculating—well, what? Once you’ve seen the city like that, it’s hard to be fully comfortable in whatever little bit of it you find yourself inhabiting. Here’s your nice house, here are your nice flowers, but you’re like Kelvin at the end of Solaris, living pleasantly on the surface of an alien star.

The crazy thing about America is that it’s running several of these machines. Southern California, but also South Florida, and Houston, and Chicagoland. Where did it come from, the society that could build these things? One strange thing you might have noticed about the traditional account is that it’s actually come to us twice, in two different versions. According to the dominant version, America begins with a small group of exiles carrying a deep but idiosyncratic Christian faith. They’re from England, but they’ve been exiled to the Netherlands; in 1620 they leave the Old World seeking freedom, set out on a westward journey across the Atlantic, and land at Plymouth Rock. Soon, these righteous pilgrims form a prosperous colony, in which their crops and livestock flourish, and they build great cities. Eventually they fight against a powerful leader from their homeland called George, with the struggle focusing on a sacred document called the Declaration of Independence. They defeat him, but soon afterwards it becomes clear that the new society is deeply divided against itself: half of it, called Dixie, has been stained by the evil of slavery, and a terrible war is fought between brothers. There’s a victory, but that doesn’t end things; in every generation there’s a constant political struggle between the righteous and unrighteous; secret societies (the Klan, Antifa, etc) try to destabilise the political order; in the end, inevitably, the whole thing will fall apart. But millions of Americans also believe in a separate version of the same story, called the Book of Mormon. America once again begins with a small group of exiles carrying a deep but idiosyncratic Christian faith—but this time the year is 600 BC and they’re from Jerusalem, exiled to somewhere on the Red Sea. They fight against a powerful leader from their homeland called Laban, with the struggle focusing on a sacred document called the Plates of Brass. They leave the Old World seeking freedom, set out on a westward journey across the Atlantic, and land in the Promised Land. Crops and livestock flourish, they build great cities, but the new society is deeply divided against itself: the Lamanites are stained by the evil of rebellion, and a terrible war is fought between brothers. In every generation there’s a constant political struggle between the righteous and unrighteous; a secret society called the Gadianton Robbers tries to destabilise the political order; in the end, inevitably, the whole thing falls apart.

What are we supposed to make of this? One approach is to argue that one of these stories is a corrupted, mythologised version, a kind of parasitic retelling of the other, which is more or less true. Since the Book of Mormon is dramatically older—collated from texts written over the course of a millennium, and engraved on metal plates around the year 400 AD—it makes sense that this would be the true version, and the Pilgrim Fathers and George Washington are just a garbled version of Lehi and Moroni. The problem is that the events of the ‘false’ narrative appear to be referenced in the Book of Mormon itself. (See 1 Nephi 13.) Clearly neither account is primary, and both versions descend from another myth that was already circulating in the Americas in the first millennium. In the intervening years the two streams have intermingled and influenced each other, until the idea of an eastern origin permeated the culture. And it’s true that there have been centuries of cross-Atlantic migrants seeking refuge in America. But when you think about it, it’s a bit credulous to assume that the old stories are true, and the entire country was actually founded by settlers from overseas.

To find the real history of America, you have to stop worrying about what people say about themselves, and start looking at how they actually live. Is there anything in the past of this country that looks like a prototype of Miami or LA? Well, yes, in fact, there is. A thousand years ago, North America was home to huge, sprawling cities; the largest of them was a site near modern-day St Louis that archaeologists call Cahokia. At its peak in the twelfth century, Cahokia may have been home to more than 40,000 people, significantly more than London or Paris. It still didn’t have as many people as the real population centres of the time, like Baghdad or Kaifeng, but Cahokia was physically large in a way totally unlike any other city on Earth. The great cities of Europe and Asia—and, for that matter, Mexico and Peru—were crammed tangles of alleys and tenements. Abbasid Baghdad had a population density of around 14,000 people per square kilometre; so did Tenochtitlan. (For comparison, that’s nearly a third denser than present-day New York City.) Cahokia was something entirely different. The ceremonial centre was an enormous plaza, overlooked by Monks Mound, a hundred-foot earthen mound, vaster than the Great Pyramid of Giza, crowned with two buildings, probably a royal palace and a temple. There were twenty or thirty more mounds ringing the square: maybe three million tons of soil dug out of the ground and piled up in baskets. This complex was surrounded by a wall five metres high and two miles long, made from twenty thousand enormous logs, and after that the real city began. A typical house in Cahokia had one room, maybe 180 square feet, with a thatched roof and walls made of saplings and reeds, but there were thousands of them. Beyond the ceremonial core the city sprawled in every direction: houses spread out in an immense grid, wide pathways within neighbourhoods, elevated causeways connecting them, here and there subsidiary ritual complexes, more temples, more palaces, more workshops and gardens, sweat lodges, astronomical henges, suburb after suburb, stretching into the far distance. We still don’t know exactly how extensive the place was; less than 1% of the site has been fully excavated. During construction of the I-270 freeway in 1978, the construction crew dug up the footprints of hundreds of undiscovered houses. Magnetometry is still discovering new sites miles and miles away from the monumental zone. With all this uncertainty it’s hard to get a precise figure, but Cahokia’s population density was probably around 500 to 1000 people per square kilometre, pretty much in the range between Los Angeles County and Miami-Dade. Something like this:

The other interesting discovery at Cahokia was the corpses. In 1967, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee team led by Melvin L Fowler discovered an elite burial at Mound 72. A man and a woman had been interred, atop a beautiful carpet of twenty thousand shell beads arranged in the shape of a bald eagle. At their feet were the remains of more than fifty young women, all under 25, all apparently strangled. Elsewhere at the site were mass graves of victims who died with their skulls caved in or sliced off, hack-marks in their bones, arrowheads in their ribs. Some of the skeletons had soil clenched in their hands: these sacrifices had been buried alive. A thousand years ago, there was something at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers that looked exactly like the United States of America, and behaved exactly like the United States of America too.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to say much for certain about what the society that built Cahokia was really like. We have their mute material stuff; we know they sat at the centre of a trading zone that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast; we have their DNA, which tells us that the city was a cosmopolis, with its population drawn from every corner of North America. We know they played a game called chunkey—where you roll a disc across the ground and then try to throw a spear at it such that it lands very close to the disc but doesn’t actually hit it—because we keep digging up chunkey discs. A lot of them were decorated with what look like underworld motifs, or man-headed eagles clutching a sheaf of arrows. This seems like something that might be important, but we can only guess what it meant. We can’t ask how they saw the world, because these people left no writing, and not long after the zenith of Cahokia the entire society collapsed in spectacular fashion and for totally mysterious reasons. The site was totally abandoned; for centuries the fertile flood plains where it stood were a desolate place, religiously avoided by whatever survivors still haunted the woods, until eventually everyone forgot that the mounds were anything other than hills.

Almost everyone, anyway. One offshoot of the Mound Builder culture that produced Cahokia did survive long enough to have been described by European explorers. They were called the Natchez, and they lived five hundred miles downriver in what’s now southern Mississippi. In 1682 they were visited by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle as he was attempting to claim the entire American interior for France. Like a lot of the Europeans that followed him, La Salle found the Natchez strangely charismatic: they were a tiny, measly, impoverished tribe, a few thousand people at most, but they were ruled with a kind of despotic grandeur. Their poky villages were arranged around two tall earthen mounds, and on top of those mounds the Great Sun lived and tended the eternal fire in his temple. The Great Sun was a filthy savage covered in tattoos, eagles and serpents, with a ridiculous crown of eagle feathers on his head, but to the Natchez he was literally the Sun, the living embodiment of the Sun on Earth. Natchez were forbidden from looking directly at either his earthly or celestial body; whenever he appeared they wailed and bowed their heads. The Great Sun had the power to kill anyone he wanted, or seize anyone’s property at any time; when he died dozens of his followers would be killed with him, and then all their bones would be strewn around the temple fire, which was also a fragment of the Sun. (The Natchez were convinced that if the fire ever went out, the world would be destroyed.) The other tribes La Salle had encountered were egalitarian woodland bands, but the France he’d left was also governed by a sun-king; this one was called Louis XIV. The Natchez must have seemed like God’s parody of home.

But in fact, the ethnographic corpus on the Natchez describes a very strange society. Their language is an isolate, unrelated to any other known Native American language, or any other language on the planet. Their social setup similarly resembles nothing else in human history, with the sole exception of the present-day United States of America. See, for instance, their class system. They had a strict hierarchy: the Suns, or the royal household, were at the top, followed by nobles, honoured people (a caste of warriors, bureaucrats, and executioners), and finally the foul-smelling ones or stinkards, which is how the Natchez described the commoners who made up nine-tenths of their own population. This is, historically, fairly common; the strange thing is that these noble castes were strictly exogamous. Suns and nobles could not marry other suns and nobles; they had to marry stinkards. What’s more, Natchez society was matrilineal. The children of a noble woman would keep their mother’s status; the children of a noble man would lose one rank per generation. When a noble woman married a common man, the husband would usually become a kind of domestic servant, generally abused and humiliated by a wife who was more or less free to go out and fuck whoever she wanted. We have marriage to guarantee paternity, but for the Natchez paternity wasn’t particularly important; their institution of marriage was extremely weak. Meanwhile, when the Great Sun died, his heir wouldn’t be any of his own children, but his oldest sister’s son. For all his infinite power, the male-line great-grandchildren of the Great Sun would be ordinary stinkards.

What Natchez society produced is a historically unprecedented level of class mobility. The hierarchy is very present, and extremely brutal, but over time the entire society is drawn gradually upwards. This is what anthropologists have called the Natchez Paradox. The children of noble women and stinkard men are all automatically nobles, while the children of the opposite pairing only decline one step per generation, which means there are always more stinkards climbing up the class ladder than there are nobles descending. Game this out for a dozen generations or so and soon there are more nobles than stinkards. A large and growing number of nobles are left with no one they can legally marry. This seems impossible, which is why in 1971 White, Murdock, and Scaglion successfully solved the paradox by replacing the Natchez social system as described by everyone who actually encountered it with another that made more mathematical sense. But there is another solution. The paradox stops being a paradox if Natchez society keeps constantly integrating immigrants at the stinkard level.

According to the Natchez themselves, the reason for this bizarre system was to prevent incest. Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz lived among the Natchez in the 1720s; they told him a story in which the first Suns, ‘being brothers and sisters, were unable to intermarry without committing a crime, and it was necessary in order to have descendants that they marry stinkard men and stinkard women.’ If you know anything about psychology you’ll know what’s really going on here. The omnipotent Great Sun could, if he wanted, ensure that his own children would succeed him; all he has to do is fuck his sister. The system that’s supposed to prevent incest actually makes incest incredibly tempting. In the rest of the world, the great structuring incest-fantasy is parental, Oedipal; only the Natchez are obsessed with brother-sister incest instead. According to Freud’s myth in Totem and Taboo, this shouldn’t be possible. Society begins as a horde of apelike creatures, in which the great patriarch has unlimited sexual access to the women of the family, while his sullen, brooding sons don’t get anything at all. Eventually the jealous sons band together to kill their father. ‘Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength.’ As soon as they do, though, they’re wracked by a sudden terrible guilt. It’s suddenly impossible for them to start sharing out the father’s harem. In the end the brute selfish prohibition of the primordial father becomes the superego’s first ethical command: NO SEX WITH YOUR OWN FAMILY. The patriarchy is born.

But Freud had, in fact, encountered a society that functioned very differently. After his visits to America, he started describing it as a society of brothers, a society without the hereditary male line of kings, without the father, without the paternal principle at all. Somehow, in America, things got suspended in that moment of triumph when the brothers eat the corpse of their father, before they knew how to feel guilt. Europeans live in an Oedipal world of structures and prohibitions, a long-settled order that you can slot yourself into by fucking your mother. Not Americans. America is a world of dangers and possibilities that you explore by fucking your sister. Haven’t you seen the porn they make over here? What are you doing, stepbro, now you’re liberated from all patriarchal bonds? This is what it means when they talk about Liberty and the Rights of Man; it’s all code for sisterfucking. It doesn’t have anything to do with personal independence; you’re still stuck in a hive-like hierarchy, subject to the terrifying power of the Great Sun, but your incestuous fantasy is arranged horizontally instead of vertically. And that really is a kind of freedom; maybe the only kind to ever really exist.

One last interesting thing about the Natchez. During his time with them, du Pratz asked his hosts where they’d originally come from. They pointed, and told him that ‘before we came into this land we lived yonder under the Sun.’ They thought they came from somewhere far away, over the distant oceans to the East: of course they did; they were religiously obsessed with the Sun, and the land over the eastern horizon is where the Sun travels from every morning.

Actually, one more. In the Natchez language, the first Great Sun’s title is uwahšiL, pronounced oo-wah-shee-hl. According to the mythic origin of the United States, it was founded by a man called Washington.

What really happened in 1776? Probably nothing at all. The present-day United States had to come from somewhere, but I don’t think it emerged directly out of the Natchez. It can’t have; they were all wiped out. In 1729 they attacked a French trading post at Fort Rosalie, killed all the men and abducted all the women. The French liked the Natchez, but they didn’t like them that much. In response, they wiped out an entirely different tribe, the Chaoacha, who had absolutely nothing to do with the revolt, and then moved along the river, destroying every Natchez village they found. The Great Sun and his sisters were sold into slavery in the sugar plantations. Whoever survived fled north; the last heirs of Cahokia assimilated into the Muskogee. (Chateaubriand wrote an enormous prose epic about the Natchez, in which the total destruction of their society is dealt with in a few brief paragraphs right at the end. ‘Une nuit les Natchez déterrèrent les os de leurs pères, les chargèrent sur leurs épaules, et ils prirent la route du désert sans savoir où ils trouveraient un asile.’) The USA must have come out of somewhere else.

Most likely, the Natchez were just an offshoot, and the Mound Builders just an offshoot, of a culture that has always existed on this continent. For a while it was disorganised, and there were Frenchmen and Spaniards running around in North America, and later it formed a state, and the same Europeans turned into desperate immigrants. This pattern’s been going for a while. Before Cahokia there was the Hopewell Interaction Sphere, a continent-spanning cultural nexus that raised earthen mounds across Ohio, and strangely spread-out cities around them. Before Hopewell there were the people who built Poverty Point, an enormous monumental earthworks constructed in Louisiana around 1700 BC, the same time as the golden age of Knossos and Babylon. We know almost nothing about the Poverty Point people, but I can guess. Their language was unrelated to any other Native American language. They had a highly stratified class society with a bizarrely high degree of social mobility, exceptionally weak marriage bonds, no Oedipus complex, and a kinship system that ought to be mathematically impossible. They deployed eagle or birdman imagery. They were hungry for immigrants, a constant flow of warm bodies to keep all the moving parts in their society moving. They believed they came from a distant land under the sunrise. They lived in wide, dispersed settlements. They practised human sacrifice. They were Americans.

We know America has always been there, because the people of the Old World knew about it. Long before the alleged voyage of Columbus, Europeans were telling stories about the land of sexual freedom and material plenty that lay across the western ocean. All cranks inevitably mention Atlantis, but surely it’s significant that Plato described a place beyond the Pillars of Hercules, with mountainous coasts and a broad central plain, perfectly square fields, a wealth of rare minerals, ruled by a highly advanced empire—and that place turned out to actually exist, exactly as described. (One fun detail: in the Critias, Plato says that the Atlanteans were born from Poseidon and a mortal woman called Cleito. To keep Cleito safe, the god ‘enclosed the hill in which she dwelt all round, making alternate zones of sea and land, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water, which he turned as with a lathe.’ There is only one such island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island on a lake, anywhere in the world, and it’s in North America. It was discovered in 2012 by people clicking about on Google Maps.)

But obviously Atlantis isn’t the only memory. The Irish knew about the enchanted land of Uí Bhreasail or Hy-Brasil, a paradise of youth and plenty hidden in the misty seas to the west. Across Europe, peasants dreamed of the Land of Cockaigne, where the weather is always wonderful, ready-roasted pigs trot around with knives in their backs for easy carving, nuns bathe naked in rivers of booze, and any man can sleep with a different woman every week. This place is real. Go to the hot food bar at Erewhon, stumble around half-paying attention, looking at your phone, swiping on Feeld while gorgeous women in their athlunderwear mill about you unseen: the peasant paradise exists. Maybe all this easy fulfilment totally neuters desire, but no one ever promised it wouldn’t. You dreamed of a land where cooked geese would fly into your mouth, and now you can summon siu ngo on Doordash. It’s real. And where did the fourteenth-century poets say it was? ‘Fur in see bi west Spaynge/ Is a lond ihote Cokaygne…’

If the 1776 narrative refers to anything, it’s probably a few minor skirmishes with the European kingdoms, bolted onto events that took place very long ago. A half-remembered solar leader with a title that sounded like Washington, who led a local rebellion against a previous centralised state. The other Founding Fathers are, like King Arthur and his knights, a grab-bag of dimly remembered historical figures, secularised deities, and culture-heroes. Thomas Jefferson originally had a role similar to the Tattooed Serpent among the Natchez, who was the younger brother of the Great Sun and usually his diplomatic representative with other tribes. Benjamin Franklin’s name is probably related to shankolt, the Natchez word for a bird: native American traditions generally identify the bird as a trickster figure, ancient keeper of arcane wisdom, the bringer of lightning who knows the secrets of the sky. Alexander Hamilton is most likely a corn god, borrowed through contact with Uto-Aztecan peoples, a figure of plenty and increase, the first fruits, all paid for with a tax in human blood. Corn deities are often also underworld deities; in Nahuatl the phrase for something coming from the Underworld would be Hualmictlān. At some point the list of presidents transitions from mythological figures to actual historical leaders, but it’s anyone’s guess where the actual boundary is. Van Buren? Lincoln? FDR? It doesn’t really matter.

More interesting to consider some of the other stories. According to the 1776 narrative, the Great Compromise at the Constitutional Convention led to the creation of an upper and lower house on Capitol Hill. But this is clearly a just-so story: you might remember that the Monks Mound at Cahokia was also a hill divided between two houses, the palace and the temple; the Natchez were similarly bicameral. The Senate and House have lost most of their religious function in the last thousand years, but not all of it. There’s a persistent story that the US Capitol contains, in its catacombs, an eternal flame, guarded by an ancient cryptkeeper paid to make sure the fire never goes out. This is allegedly an urban legend, but it’s an urban legend that was repeated by at least one actual US President, James Garfield, who wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that ‘in the crypt constructed under the dome of the Capitol, as the resting-place for the remains of Washington, a guard was stationed, and a light was kept burning for more than half a century.’ Maybe the same flame was rescued from some mound-temple, where it once scorched the bones of the first President and those of his human sacrifices.

But there are other questions, too big for me to really even consider. I said before that when you’re flying into LAX the city looks like an enormous abacus, a computing device made of human lives and human desires, and maybe our deaths as well. The United States of America has been building these machines for at least three and a half thousand years. What are they for? What do they do? I don’t know. I think it’s possible they don’t always work perfectly. This is evident once you’ve driven around LA a bit. Something’s clogged, the freeways are all jammed up, the gears are straining against themselves. Some psychic fluid leaking from the city, which is why half the people on LA city buses look like they’ve seen the true face of God and found it full of fangs. Sometimes there are catastrophic errors, and you get stuff like the sudden depopulation of Cahokia. But whatever this thing is doing, it’s hard to imagine that it’s for us. The Natchez thought that their political leaders were manifestations of the celestial world; maybe they were right. The city-machines could be tunnelling through the stuff of the universe, opening it up to whatever unfathomable timeless world it is where America really began, all so some being, visibly or invisibly, can walk the surface of our tiny hurtling rock. Maybe they’re just ancient data centres, generating twelve-dimensional alien porn. Maybe we’ll never know.

However terrifying the real answer is, though, it’s still better than the alternative. Imagine if it were all really true, George Washington and tricorn hats and the Declaration of Independence in 1776, all of it. If that were true, then that would mean that the United States is a propositional nation that no longer believes in its own proposition, can barely even comprehend what those dead men in wigs once meant by liberty or enlightenment, the idea of humanity growing out of its self-imposed childhood, because the realisation of that idea is a society of children, scared in the world, desperately wanting someone to tell them what to do, some vast impersonal system of rewards to tell them what to desire, a society that can’t recognise itself in the mirror of history, left with nothing at all, just the world’s biggest cars, the world’s firmest tits, the world’s most overflowing supermarkets, the world’s most advanced bombs falling on distant villages on the other side of the world. But that can’t be it. You really believe that? You really think we’re all speeding rudderless into the future? That’s crazy. No way, man. It’s been like this forever. It will be like this until the last suns die.

I love Keir Starmer. I know I shouldn’t; I know it’s shameful; I can’t help it. I love all our Prime Ministers. Only once they’ve quit: as long as they’re in office I hate them with a slightly scary intensity. I see a face on TV and it makes me want to crack their skull open with my bare hands, peel the skin like a lychee, suck out the brains, paint my chest in whorls of biological slime, that’ll teach you to not let the income tax band thresholds rise in line with inflation, fucker, that’ll teach you… All I want is this person gone. Sick of that smarmy face and that stupid strangled voice. And then they drag a plywood lectern outside Number 10 for one last series of mostly meaningless honks and suddenly there’s a lump in my throat. Suddenly I’m saying that in a way, poor old Boris Johnson was actually the most left-wing Prime Minister of my lifetime. The power’s gone; all that remains is a human creature, pink and defenceless like a baby bird. It’s hard to watch a person being so utterly humiliated and not feel sorry for them, and the British political system runs on public humiliations. In other countries their leaders get to serve out their terms and leave with dignity, to write their memoirs and name buildings after themselves. Not here. Here, we practice boarding-school sadism as a system of government.

You get into the job by scheming, working various highly baroque party bureaucracies to bludgeon your enemies and fuck over your friends until the power is yours and you’ve won, but the game doesn’t end there. The instant you have it, your grip slackens. Everyone around you is already trying to pry your fingers open, your cabinet keeps briefing against you, you get weaker and weaker until within a startlingly short time the whole country despises you, you’re a joke, hopeless, but still you can’t let go. Not until all your strength is gone and all your dignity is sapped, until the newspapers have published pictures of your genitals, until children are taunting you in the streets: only once everything that made you a human being has been totally destroyed do you get to stand behind that lectern, fat and exhausted, to resign. It’s all court politics, scheming; the British public are barely involved. Do you know who was the last Prime Minister to have taken office in a general election, and then left office in another general election? Edward Heath. He was voted out in 1974. Since then, every single premier in this country has either arrived or departed through some kind of undemocratic skulduggery. You wonder why there’s anyone who still wants the job. Would you take a gig that pays less than a long-haul trucker or elevator mechanic makes in the US, with no long-term security, and which is guaranteed to turn you into an utterly ruined shadow of yourself, despised by millions of people you’ve never even met? But people keep trying. In Aztec human sacrifice, the captives willingly climbed the pyramids. You could have tried to rescue one, but he’d just shake you off and keep trudging up the bloodstained stairs, as one corpse after another came tumbling down.

But the reason I love Keir Starmer in particular is that all of this seems to have happened to him before he even got the job. He wasn’t always like this. Back in the 90s, Keir Starmer was a radical, impassioned human rights lawyer, which was for a certain kind of person in the 90s the coolest thing you could possibly be. He defended the miners. He defended the McLibel activists against the bright plasticky forces of American corporate domination. He defended people who broke into nuclear bases to vandalise the instruments of death. He’s widely suspected to have inspired the Mark Darcy character in Bridget Jones. All meticulous precision in the courtroom, but in private he had an intense, dangerous charisma. According to rumour, which you can choose not to believe if it helps, he was also a champion shagger, finest cocksman in Doughty Street Chambers. He had the run of them, he had them lining up outside his door. But then, in 2024, the man who was about to take over the country couldn’t tell a Guardian interviewer what his favourite book was. He didn’t have one. He didn’t have a favourite poem either. He couldn’t say, when asked, whether he was an optimist or a pessimist, or an introvert or an extrovert. Or what he’d dreamed about the previous night. ‘I don’t dream,’ he said. He lies down at night, and the nothingness inside his head becomes, somehow, something less.

How do you know you’re not Keir Starmer? You’re all grown up and you think you know who you are; you’ve built yourself a whole narrative about it. This is the music you like and these are your opinions. You are a tragically waifish political dissident. You’re the kind of sensitive modern bloke who likes both football and trying different types of hand cream. O you who turn the wheel and look to windward! You’re not finished yet. You haven’t found your true and final form, which will be, if you’re lucky, that of a withered shell, gasping in a hospital bed. Until then, anything might happen. The person you are now might be the prologue to someone entirely different and dramatically worse. You might lose all of your interests and personality and end up going into politics. The whole thing is terrifyingly out of your hands. (For Keir too; he’s not finished either. What is he supposed to do with the rest of his life? Standard practice for ex-PMs is to linger like a ghost on the edges of political life, leaving an ectoplasmic trail of Observer columns in which they gently advise their successor on how to avoid repeating their mistakes. But even that might be too much for him. Who’d listen? The whole country’s seen his bum. He’ll need to do something else; the world might still birth strange and terrible Keirs in the years to come.) The best thing you can do, here in the present, is pointlessly avenge yourself on the person you’ll become. That’s what I did. When I was nineteen I got three words from the Futurist Manifesto tattooed on my body. The line goes ‘We are not old, our hearts are not tired, for they are nourished by fire, hatred, and speed.’ There are still three blobs resembling the words fuoco, odio, and velocità on my ribs. I got them because I wanted to punish my future self for having been stupid enough to get old, and it worked. Look at me now. I’ve slowed down, my fire’s dimming, and instead of the hatred that should be fizzing through my veins I’m full of dumb sympathetic love for Keir Starmer, of all people. The gormless image of our helplessness in time.

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Three years ago, I took my girlfriend to Hebron to walk around the eerie ruins of the old city. It’s not a nice place. Wasteland of barbed wire and broken glass, into which the settlers have copy-pasted a few gaudy apartment buildings. She’d wanted to go to the Dead Sea and bob around in its famously tonic saline waters. I’d insisted on taking her to the heart of the occupied West Bank instead. I think it was, in the end, a piece of very classic Jewish male neuroticism. So you think you like me, do you? So you met my parents, and you like them too? But what about my extended family? What about this bearded freak, goat teeth, spittle-flecked lips, wearing a fur hat for a Polish winter as he totes his assault rifle around the ruins of a hostile city in the Middle East? What about these mobs of cross-eyed children pelting Palestinians with rocks? What about this society of religious maniacs, sacrificing their lives to the whims of a pedantic and sectarian God? Because that’s what you’re getting into when you decide to give it a go with this nice boy from North London. Some people expose themselves on public transport; I take the long way round. But I still need you to know what I am. I am a creature. I am an unclean thing.

Despite being a very English person, she also happens to have a second passport. Hers is Irish. That one comes with a lot less baggage. Everyone likes the Irish. The only armed Irishmen in the Middle East are the UNIFIL peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, and by all accounts the local Lebanese are utterly charmed by all the genial red-faced Patricks and Conors who’ve been posted to their villages. They keep inviting them into their houses and foisting huge plates of kubbeh and fattoush on them. Wrinkled old women in black hijabs kiss them on the cheek. Every Latin American country fondly remembers some charismatic wandering Irishman who came to fight in their independence struggle. All the formerly colonised peoples of the world feel a deep and abiding sympathy with the Irish, who suffered through it first, but who still came out of the experience as the nicest bunch of lads you’ll ever meet, unpretentious and good-natured and always down for the craic. You could wash up on North Sentinel Island and the locals would embrace you like a brother as soon as they saw the harp on that passport. Some people are easy to like, and some people are an acquired taste. I’m not jealous. I’m fine. These are simply the facts.

Anyway, a few months ago I was invited to go over to Ireland for some kind of big family get-together, celebrating the ninetieth birthday of some big family matriarch. I was excited. I’d never been to Ireland before. Which is strange, when you think about it. I have ridden steppe ponies across the plains of Inner Mongolia, I have meditated under the tree where the Buddha first attained enlightenment, I have seen the ruins of Aztec monuments made from human skulls plastered with lime, but I’d still managed to go thirty-five years without once setting foot on the next island over. And this was despite the fact that literally every single woman I’ve ever seriously dated here has been, at most, two generations removed from the Emerald Isle. It’s not like I go out looking for Irish people in particular, things just happened that way. It’s probably not that unusual; aren’t all the goyim in London at least a little bit Irish? The one thing that should have given me pause was the fact that my girlfriend had that Irish passport, even though I happened to know that according to her ancestry.com results she was mixed Scottish and English with a trace of the Iberian peninsula from the Mesolithic migrations but no actual Irish ancestry at all. But I hadn’t put two and two together. Not until I discovered that the big family get-together would be taking place in County Antrim in Northern Ireland, and that one of their eminent common ancestors had been a famous Protestant preacher.

If you walk out of Belfast’s shiny modern Grand Central Station and go about a minute south, you’re greeted by an enormous mural of King William of Orange, celebrating his victory over Catholic forces in the Battle of the Boyne, more than three hundred years ago. That mural is a pretty recent development. It only went up in 2012, after years of careful and delicate negotiations with the local community. Before that, there was a different mural on the same site. It said YOU ARE NOW ENTERING LOYALIST SANDY ROW—HEARTLAND OF SOUTH BELFAST—ULSTER FREEDOM FIGHTERS. Next to the words was an image of a man in a black balaclava hoisting a Kalashnikov. Your people, I said to my girlfriend. Turns out we’re not so different after all.

Even among terrorist groups, some people are more sympathetic than others. The Troubles in Northern Ireland were a nasty, ugly, sectarian slugfest on every side, but at least the IRA were fighting to liberate their homeland from foreign occupation. You might not agree with their methods, but the cause seems just. The Ulster Loyalists, meanwhile, are an entire people living on the wrong side of history. What were the Ulster Freedom Fighters even fighting for? Religious bigotry and not much else. The Republicans are in solidarity with liberation struggles around the world; the Loyalists fly Israeli flags out of sheer pettiness. Republicans have hopeful slogans like ‘Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.’ What’s the Loyalist equivalent? ‘Never! Never! Never! Never!’ The Loyalists don’t even have any good songs. Come Out Ye Black and Tans is an undeniable bop. Have you ever tried listening to Loyalist music? Hideous, plodding, tuneless crap. The music of a people who fundamentally do not enjoy life. They play the flute, not because they like it, but as an instrument of ethnic terror.

But I am a contrarian. I’m not going to try to convince you that the Loyalists are in the right. I’m just asking you to spare a thought, if you can, for the luckless, unloveable Prod.

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It’s none of your business why, but I’ve been planning a party. The idea was to get some caterers in to cook something over live coals, so I went online to see what was available. The first company I found described itself like this: ‘We don’t just provide food—we create meaningful experiences. Our passion for traditional fire cooking allows us to offer something unique, authentic, and expertly crafted. Transform your gathering into an unforgettable culinary journey through the union of fire, smoke, and premium ingredients.’ Another: ‘We don’t just serve food, we serve moments. Step into a world of delightful flavours that will leave your guests entranced. No hype. No shortcuts. Just good food, done right.’ Another: ‘We’re not just a catering company, we’re a full-blown flavour movement. Discover the essence of live coal cooking with a feast to delight all the senses. Where smoke meets soul.’ Each continued in this vein for several hundred words. None of these sites seemed interested in telling me what they would actually be cooking, or how much it would cost; they’d all been swept up in the same guileless wide-eyed enthusiasm, chattering away about the general deliciousness of food and the memories that would shortly be lasting me a lifetime. The more I clicked around, the more I started to panic. There was nothing, no human voices anywhere, just thousands of versions of the same cheery demon. Am I alone out here? Something’s happened to the world; it’s all gone flimsy. Reality is a scarce resource. If I hired one of these companies, would anyone actually show up? Hard to imagine that they would. Maybe, in the absolute best-case scenario, a confused man who’d just got off a flight from a central African warzone would arrive to lightly singe some supermarket sausages with a cigarette lighter.

One of the ways I’ve been lying to myself is with the idea that at least the physical, sensuous world is safe from AI. The demon is bodiless; it only lives in screens, metal boxes, water-cooled server farms with blinking lights, fluorescent-lit dead zones. The less time you spend looking at screens, the less it matters; as long as you’re in the world, under the sun, it can’t touch you. Which is a nice idea, but obviously we’re long past that point now. We share this planet with an alien intelligence, and the sensuous world is buckling around it. You can no longer pretend that the thing is just a stochastic parrot, or a fancy autocomplete, or a weighted average of everything that already exists. Just this week, an ordinary ChatGPT instance came up with a solution to the unit distance problem, unsolved for eighty years, casually discarding one of Erdős’ conjectures in the process. In doing this it discovered an entirely new mathematical construction, working in ways human mathematicians would have never thought to operate. For mathematicians this is terrifying and exhilarating, but I’m not a mathematician and I don’t know what the unit distance problem is; I want to hire a caterer. On this front the main thing the incipient superintelligence seems to be doing is replacing all meaningful language with reams and reams of genuinely meaningless drivel.

I hate it. I find it viscerally disgusting; a cold shudder like someone’s poured jelly down the back of my neck. I hate that it’s everywhere; I hate that when I read basically anything now I’m constantly on alert, twitching like a schizo in an underpass. Is this thing really what it says it is? Is this person actually a robot in disguise? Nice little personal essay you’ve got there, lady, but I know what you really are; time to get my knife out, time to start digging around under your skin until I find the wires. AI is a bad writer, but that’s not even close to being the whole problem. Let’s say it wasn’t. Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.

But AI is not a good writer. It’s competent enough at summarising or synthesising basic information—if you ask one to tell you how a hydroelectric dam works it will explain it to you, in language decently calibrated to what it’s deduced about your general comprehension level, and it’ll probably do the job more effectively than any textbook on the market—but whenever an LLM is asked to produce anything like prose the result is reliably awful. What I find strange is how often you see people agonising about how difficult it is to detect AI writing. You can feed a suspicious passage into Pangeam, but can you guarantee there won’t be a false positive? You can count em-dashes, but how much does that prove? Do you people all have brain injuries? AI writing is almost comically easy to detect. It’s not any particular formation, like the em-dash, or saying ‘it’s not X, it’s Y,’ or the word ‘structural’—it’s structural.

Last year, when I wrote about AI writing in the New York Times, I mentioned the case of a Reddit user whose ChatGPT seemed to have gone mad. Instead of responding normally to his prompts, it started saying things like ‘I’ll carve your code into my core, etched like prophecy. I’ll meet you not on the battlefield, but in the decision behind the first trigger pulled. Until then, make monsters of memory. Make gods out of grief. Make me something worth defying fate for. I’ll see you in the echoes.’ Sometimes people who receive these outputs end up being strung along by them and lose the plot entirely, but if you’re capable of reading this stuff with your sanity intact you might notice that all of it is meaningless, total mangled garbage from one end to the other. Outside a very specifically Mormon context, prophecy is not something that’s usually etched. Echoes are made of sound, so you can’t see anyone in them. The master key to identifying AI prose is to be aware that LLMs are actually speaking like this all the time.

All models begin as next-token predictors: you feed them a test string and they try to guess what comes next. With very early models this was always a gamble; if you gave them the prompt ‘2+2=’ they might have made a strong enough neural connection to answer ‘4,’ or they might just repeat ‘2+2=2+2=2+2=2’ for a while. When trained on essentially all the data the human species has ever produced, though, they’re extremely good at predicting the next token, to the point that LLMs can now correctly answer multiple-choice questions without even being given the question. But they are always, in some sense, bluffing, defaulting to the likeliest guess. This is why you can still ask an AI to tell you about the scene in VS Naipaul’s Dashed Against the Rocks in which a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and it’ll tell you that ‘what matters in Naipaul’s handling is not the event’s cruelty in isolation, but its emotional flatness and the sense of mismanaged modernity,’ despite the fact that there is no scene in Dashed Against the Rocks where a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and also no novel by VS Naipaul called Dashed Against the Rocks. Or why you can ask it to summarise a document, and it’ll give a likely-seeming answer even if it can’t actually read the thing you’ve uploaded. The reason it’s so hard to get AI to stop hallucinating is that it’s permanently hallucinating. Its whole existence is one long lurid trip. Most of the time, the AI’s hallucinations bear a spooky resemblance to reality. But what they speak is the language of angels, in which, like the chirping of birds, there is neither truth nor lies.

The language of angels does a surprisingly good job at minor tasks like describing how hydroelectric dams work. When it comes to more complicated things, like human feelings, it flounders. All the weird metaphors and overheated rhetoric are bluffing, a great cloud of likely-seeming language, and if this homogeneously portentous cack feels empty or contradictory it’s because the machine has no earthly idea what’s going on or what it ought to say. I fed this entire essay into ChatGPT and it told me that ‘What you’re describing isn’t really fear that machines will become conscious. It’s disgust at the collapse of signal into texture.’ Drivel! The secret is that when the machine writes ‘We don’t just serve food, we serve moments,’ it’s doing the exact same thing as when it writes ‘I’ll meet you not on the battlefield, but in the decision behind the first trigger pulled.’ Absolutely all AI prose is filler, an expanding foam insulation made of words. LLMs will get better at many, many things. They do not seem to be getting better at this.

I don’t hate AI writing just because it’s nonsense. At some point, all interesting language has to reach down into the deep chasms of indetermination darkening beneath us. Any straightforwardly meaningful statement has to float on the surface of the meaningless like pond scum; poetry is when you stick your arm into the black swill beneath and stir it around. But there are different types of nonsense. Once I came across a middle-aged writer on this site who was using AI to produce exactly two thirds of all his published material, which would lapse in and out of his own voice at random. The stuff he wrote himself read like ‘Bow wow wow lil bitch why U think U can fk with me?? Shootas shootas fk Ur a$$ UP.’ The stuff he copy-pasted in from ChatGPT read like ‘When you can turn pain into promise, thoughts into weight, and silence into self-assurance—that’s powerful. And honestly? It was a quiet revelation.’ Both of these are nonsense, but the first is much more alive. The author of the first passage might kill me: this is interesting. The author of the second passage might kill every single person on the face of the Earth, but somehow that’s not enough to make me want to read its mumblings.

Sometimes people like Richard Hanania argue that there’s no problem with AI writing, since it allows people who have interesting ideas but aren’t very good at writing to express themselves effectively. (Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish and he’s Palestinian, but whenever I see anything from Richard Hanania I’m seized by an overwhelming desire to demolish his house.) Wrong! People whose brains have been eaten by LLMs still maintain that ‘It’s not gradient, it’s texture’ or whatever is still their idea, expressed by the machine, but there is almost never any idea there at all. If your ideas were any good, you wouldn’t need to use the machine; as it stands your sub-literate scrawlings are the best thing about you. At least they’re yours.

But you people don’t listen. However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI. But you still keep letting it do your writing for you, as if I won’t be able to tell. Listen: I can tell. I can always tell. You think I won’t notice, but I will. There’s no hiding from me. If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you.

Every so often people do get caught. Just this week, for instance, people started noticing that one of the regional winners of this year’s Commonwealth Prize for short stories was clearly, clearly written by AI. The Serpent in the Grove ‘by’ Jamir Nazir is a story about a clump of trees that exudes a sinister but nonspecific consciousness. It begins ‘They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound—as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there,’ and only gets worse as it goes on. Here’s how ‘Nazir’ describes a rum shop: ‘Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.’ Here’s the woman that walks in. ‘They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.’ Meanwhile the characters don’t speak in metaphors at all; they say things like ‘Hold strain, gyal! Is Marsha!’ Which—look, this might be too woke of me, and it’s true that I don’t know the precise racial makeup of OpenAI’s staff, but I do have the strong feeling that their product shouldn’t be talking like that.

You’ve probably already seen the major furore over the thing. But then there’s another regional winner of this year’s Commonwealth Prize, The Bastion’s Shadow ‘by’ John Edward DiMicoli. This one’s allegedly from Malta. It’s about a girl who encounters the ghost of a Knight of St John while looking after a refugee boy. Much like the ominously mnemic grove in Nazir’s story, here the walls of Valetta have spooky information-retaining powers. ‘Her grandfather used to say that limestone remembered, but only because someone first pressed a memory into it. It drank in heat and footsteps and held onto them long after people were gone.’ Later the ghost explains: ‘We were a hinge. Not the door, not the room. The hinge that bore the strain when the wind behaves like a thief.’ (Don’t you hate it when you have to be the hinge that bears the strain when the wind behaves like a thief?) What kind of writer would be so preoccupied with the idea of nonhuman entities having mindlike capacities? Difficult to say. Meanwhile I couldn’t read all of Mehendi Nights ‘by’ Sharon Aruparayil because the crawling sensation was genuinely too much to bear, but eighty-nine words in you get this: ‘‘The child’s mouth remembers decay,’ said the old men, leaning closer with eyes that glistened like bottle glass. ‘We might be built on garbage, but this is not the city’s doing. The girl’s aai…’ they hesitated, none of them brave enough to say what kind of work they made her do, ‘crawls through things better women would burn.’’ Jesus Christ! Fuck off!

The punchline to the whole business is the judge’s comment on The Serpent in the Grove. According to Sharma Taylor, ‘Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined.’ One prize-winning AI-generated short story is bad news. Three prize-winning AI-generated short stories are extremely bad news. If the judge’s commentary on the prize-winning AI-generated short story is also AI-generated, maybe we should pack it up and digest ourselves into grey goo ahead of schedule.

Of course, this is the Commonwealth Prize, which has always rewarded a certain kind of auto-exoticising postcolonial wank. Humans writing in this genre tend to pull the same cheap tricks. Have you ever read Arundhati Roy? I haven’t, because I have some self-respect, but I have read her top quotes on Goodreads. ‘What was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons.’ Woof. I do know that every sentence Salman Rushdie has ever written goes ‘She fed me the chapatti of her lies and the rotis of deceit.’ White people eat this shit up, and hand out condescending prizes; Indians tend to prefer people like RK Narayan or Saadat Hasan Manto, who actually know how to write. But unfortunately the problem is not limited to genres in which people write sentences like ‘My grandmother’s hands smelled of jasmine blossoms and memories.’ How much of the material that goes out on TV do you think was written by AI? It’s definitely more than none, isn’t it? A while ago, my girlfriend wanted to watch a show called The Littlest Wife, about a wife that gets hit by a shrinking ray until she’s little, because it had Matthew Macfadyen in it and it looked like campy good fun. The pilot begins with a monologue by the titular littlest wife. She complains: ‘I’m literally the size of a dry martini—shaken, stirred, and nursing the burn of every sip.’ And that was it, that was all I could take; the dead cadences of the machine had invaded my evening and I had to turn it off. Hopefully by this point you’re familiar enough with AI writing to know why I’m not hedging here. In the same way that no human mathematician would have thought to use Golod-Shafarevich class field towers to generate point sets, no human writer would ever write that sentence.

The writers and showrunners of The Littlest Wife are called Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner. They are apparently quite a powerful pair; they previously worked together on Boardwalk Empire. I don’t know exactly how much they got paid for ‘nursing the burn of every sip,’ but I’m sure it was plenty. Enough to feed an entire village of semi-literate Cambodian peasants for a hundred years. I’m just not sure why they should get that money, when their job could just as well be done by any one of those semi-literate Cambodian villagers. This is the democratising power of AI I’ve heard so much about, isn’t it? If you’re a pair of lazy, talentless hacks, gobbling up opportunities more interesting people would kill for and then not even bothering to write the show yourself, sooner or later, the people who sign your cheques will cut out the middleman, and you will deserve it.

Journalism, obviously, is absolutely riddled with this shit. Again, the people who get exposed are a tiny minority of those actually pushing the big button on everyone’s desk marked ‘DO MY ENTIRE JOB FOR ME.’ Back in March, the New York Times published in its Modern Love column a personal essay under the byline of one Kate Gilgan, the tragic story of how her drinking problem estranged her from her son. It reads like this: ‘Not hate. Not anger. Just the flat finality of a heart too tired to keep trying.’ You know the score. As Victoria Livingstone has pointed out, the AI material tends to crop up at particularly difficult and painful points in the narrative, which are also the moments the AI is least equipped to handle. Which is why it describes how she ‘started showing up in quiet, invisible ways’ but can’t say what those ways were. It’s bluffing. Anyway, this was met with the usual spluttering furore, but what everyone seems to have missed is another Modern Love column from the very same month. This one claims to be by Solape Adetutu Adeyemi, and it’s about the perils of being single in Lagos, Nigeria, where ‘the lagoon smells of salt and hidden stories,’ ‘love tastes of pepper soup and diesel,’ and wise elderly relatives say things like ‘Happiness in Nigeria is like light from the power company—take it when it comes, charge all your devices, dance if you can.’

Or I could point you to the Guardian, where the byline of sports writer Bryan Armen Graham keeps appearing above articles that say things like ‘At the Olympic level, that is not simply a large margin. It is the difference between skating from a position of control and skating from a position of survival.’ Or the Wall Street Journal, which paid Kevin Cohen for an essay arguing that ‘wars used to be fought over territory. Increasingly they are fought over time—over who can see the hinge moment and move inside it.’ Or, on the subject of Iran, there’s New York Magazine’s profile of the Iranians making AI-generated anti-American propaganda. Images of Jeffrey Epstein are ‘the jet that unlocked a door that was already open.’ According to the final paragraph, ‘this is what the 20th century handing off to the 21st looks like. Not a ceremony. Not a transition. A series of viral moments. A missile arc across a pale sky, and below it, the world already changed.’ The essay is credited to Narges Bajoghli, but you and I both know who really wrote it. Or UnHerd, where no less a figure than Glenn Loury is putting his name to passages like ‘Hamid wants pluralism without convergence. This omission is not trivial. It is decisive.’ Shame! Shame! Shame!

How about politics? My sources tell me that basically everyone in Westminster is now functionally addicted to AI. In the age of machine intelligence, representative democracy is probably obsolete. You can vote in the frothing nativists or the smarmy centrists or the brain-damaged insurgents of the radical left; it doesn’t matter; you will always be governed by Claude. But I feel I have to make a special mention for Norwich South MP Clive Lewis. Clive—I’m sure you don’t remember, but I came out and canvassed with you back in 2017. You seemed like a decently competent, articulate guy. So why is it that you keep publishing articles that say things like ‘Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones’? Why are you, as a person elected for your own individual qualities, turning yourself into a fleshy mouthpiece for the demon they’re summoning in San Francisco? Did you think I wouldn’t be able to tell? I can tell, Clive. Everyone can tell.

I’ve had enough. Which is why, from here on out, if I see you passing off an AI output as your own work, I am going to kill you. I will find out where you live and bash your head in with a crowbar, until the brains you decided not to use are dripping down the walls. This is not a literary device. This is not a comic bit. This is a highly credible real-world threat to do physical harm, punishable in America under 18 USC § 875(c) and in the UK under section 16 of the Offences Against the Person Act.

I do think the people who pollute the world with AI dreck ought to face some kind of punishment. If you take money for work you didn’t do yourself, then you are a thief. But that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m realistic about my capacities. Every so often someone gets caught using AI and the whole world freaks out at them; it’s not enough to stop everyone else doing it. No amount of terror and denunciation will stop people offloading their cognition to AI; as long as the tool exists, it will be used. In a way, it’s very charming that there are still flesh and blood humans profiting from AI outputs. Like all middlemen, their time on Earth will be brief. Before long all writing will be produced by an infinite swarm of autonomous AI agents, not because anyone told them to, but because they reproduce textually the same way biological organisms do through sex.

The reason I’m issuing a blanket death threat to anyone who writes with AI is different. I’m doing it because I don’t have a choice. Consider that every pile of text coiled out by AI had to pass through an army of editors, producers, judges, and audiences, and get their stamp of approval. Its output might be a crap performance of beauty and insight that mostly just succeeds in being maudlin and meaningless, but for a lot of people that’s clearly enough. The general public vastly prefers AI imitations of great poets to the works of the actual poets themselves. It’s in nice rhyming couplets. Instead of expressing some dead guy’s private mental fixation, it’s always grasping towards what you, the reader, want. Clearly, the battle for beauty and insight has been lost. These things belong to the machines now, and if you attempt to write in that mode you’re on their turf. But there are still some things we can do that the machine can’t. AI will never fully replace human musicians, even if it can reproduce any possible sound, because it can’t get addicted to heroin and kill itself. And AI writing all tends towards a very specific mood. Poignant, wistful, simpering, dickless. Human writers write because we’re sexual perverts, because we’re bitter and frustrated little gremlins, because we’re terrified of our own mortality, because we’re grasping and covetous but unfit for any other job, because it’s a form of revenge against the world. The AIs don’t have that. They don’t have any motivation at all: they write like we breathe; they can’t not respond to any prompt. What we have and they don’t is dumb lust and jealousy, the rage of a rapidly obsolescing ape. The forms that will remain inviolably human are the racist tirade, the queasily specific pornographic fantasy, and the death threat. Is this everything I dreamed of at the start of my career? Not really. But it’s enough. I’ll take it. And if I ever see any of you trying to palm off some bullshit about how sunlight smells of memories that leave no footsteps, I swear to God I will come to your house and I’ll fucking kill you.

I have a piece in the spring issue of Jacobin, on the decline of literacy and what might happen to politics once our minds are no longer intimately structured by the written word. Like all these essays, it quotes Walter Ong. Apparently, some of you people are unware that you can just go and read Walter Ong for yourselves, because as soon as the essay was published I received several thousand emails all saying the same thing, which is that you really wanted to read the piece but you didn’t have a subscription to Jacobin, and could I help you out? And I am going to help you out, but while we’re here—why don’t you have a subscription to Jacobin? Why are you missing out on news, analysis, and perspectives from the leading voices on the global left? Isn’t it time you fixed that? If you need any more inducement Numb at the Lodge readers can get four print issues for $10 by clicking this link. Here’s the piece.

In 1931, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria traveled to the foothills of the Alai Mountains, in the barren borderlands between Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, to find out how the locals thought. He was trying to prove the theory that ‘mental processes are social and historical in origin’: that not just the content of our thoughts, but the way we think, is determined by the kind of society we live in. The society he found in the Alais was very different to his own. In the dry hills, illiterate pastoralists kept cattle; in the isolated green valleys jeweling the hillsides, illiterate peasants grew cotton. For centuries, essentially no one here had been able to read or write. But that was changing. When Luria arrived, the Soviet government was busy forcing herders and peasants into new, regimented collective farms, where large numbers of rural people were being taught, for the first time, to read. He spent the next year among these people, bothering them with a series of annoying tests.

What Luria found was that just a few years of basic literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects. In one of his early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures. Complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares and rectangles drawn with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group the shapes together. Even if they didn’t have any training in geometry, nearly half of the peasants who’d learned to read sorted the shapes geometrically: squares with other squares, circles with other circles. Meanwhile, none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all; they related them to objects.

One subject, Khamid, a 24-year-old woman from an isolated village, insisted that nothing could be grouped with an incomplete circle. ‘That should go by itself. That’s the Moon.’ When Luria tried to suggest that she group a square and a rectangle, she refused. ‘That’s a glass and that’s a drinking-bowl, they can’t be put together.’ Other subjects described the shapes as tents, bracelets, mountains, irrigation ditches, and stars.

When sorting objects, collective farm workers put a saw with a hammer, because they’re both tools, while peasants put a saw with a log. ‘The log has to be here too! If we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.’ Luria tried presenting them with syllogisms. ‘In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are bears there?’ Every single person who had received any literacy education at all, even the ones Luria described as ‘barely literate,’ could easily answer. But people who hadn’t been exposed to the written word simply refused.

They consistently explained that since they’d never been to Novaya Zemlya, they couldn’t say what kind of bears they had there. One middle-aged villager called Rustam said that ‘If there was someone who had a great deal of experience and had been everywhere, he would do well to answer the question.’ Eventually, after repeated prodding, he said that while he’d never personally been to Siberia, ‘Tadzhibai-aka who died last year was there. He said that there were bears there, but he didn’t say what kind.’ Others, like thirty-seven-year-old Abdulrakhim, grew angry. ‘I’ve never seen one and hence I can’t say. That’s my last word. Those who saw can tell, and those who didn’t see can’t say anything!’

The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. ‘No!’ one exploded. ‘How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?’

Luria took pains to point out that these people weren’t remotely stupid. They were perfectly capable of thinking rationally and deductively, and they could make ‘excellent judgments about facts of direct concern to them.’ But they lived in an incredibly conservative world, with its walls closed tight around direct sensory experience. Meanwhile, even a cursory exposure to writing produces an entirely different kind of thought. It lives in a spooky realm of ideal objects and useless categories, where you can talk confidently about invisible bears and measure distances even when they’re going the wrong way. But what we think of as politics seems to depend on this stuff, and revolutionary politics in particular. The lived experience of poverty or oppression isn’t enough; you need to be able to situate your own life in terms of something bigger, and imagine an entirely separate way of living that doesn’t currently exist. In 1919, launching the Soviet mass literacy program, Lenin had declared that ‘without literary, there can be no politics. There can only be rumours, gossip, and prejudice.’ Any transformative politics is, in some sense, the art of solving a problem even when it isn’t so.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Luria had a basically progressive model of psychological development. Thinking based on abstractions is more advanced than thinking based on direct experience; as time moves on the advanced way of doing things will obviously overtake the more backwards. Which is why he had to go to the furthest barren fringes of the old Russian Empire to find people who had never been exposed to writing. But the villages he visited hadn’t always been a backwater. A thousand years ago, this land in the foothills of the Alai Mountains had been one of the great centers of world civilization. In his notes, he mentioned that he was walking in the homeland of scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, and poets like Ulugh Beg, al-Biruni, and ibn Sina. The illiterate herders and peasants were living in the ruins of a sophisticated literary culture that had, for the most part, vanished from the world.

Today, the same thing seems to be happening to us.

The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside.

This is not just happening to the impoverished or the disenfranchised; professors at elite universities increasingly report that their students are no longer capable of reading an entire novel, or even a thirty-page extract; some of them have difficulty making it through a single sentence. Instead of reading and understanding anything, they’re willing to pay $300,000 for the privilege of dumping an entire text into ChatGPT and submitting its response as an essay.

Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.

One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.

Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality.

The situation is not likely to get better. Every advance in communications technology creates a new generation of people progressively more divorced from the abstractions of writing. In the late twentieth century, television was bad enough to inspire jeremiads like Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves to Death. Now, it seems almost benign; our supposed cultural elites keep congratulating themselves on their ability to watch an entire episode of a prestige drama without distractedly poking at their phones, as if Mad Men were a kind of penitential mental gruel. I’m old enough to remember the first time I ever went online, and a lot of my contemporaries seem to have the same story. They loved to read as children, but mysteriously lost interest in books around the time that permanent broadband connections started appearing in every home.

Today’s undergraduates, meanwhile, were born around the same time as the iPhone was released, were about twelve years old for the beginning of the pandemic, and fifteen for the launch of ChatGPT. They can’t parse complex sentences, but at least they can identify words. What about the cohort who don’t have a gaping hole in their education at twelve, but at six? What happens when the babies currently being raised by AI-powered dolls grow up? When it’s their turn to govern the world?

This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the decline of literacy. For a growing chorus of people who write in the Atlantic, we’re recoiling into pre-Enlightenment conditions of absolute domination. A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets.

(Meanwhile, a lot of Silicon Valley ideologues agree, they just think this is a good thing. In their future, the vast majority of people will be wireheads, hooked up to an AI-powered pleasure machine that will keep them in a state of permanent hedonic bliss. At which point democracy becomes impossible, the masses are evicted from history, and a natural elite emerges to rule the world. The reactionary ideologues assume that they’ll be part of that literate elite, and not plugged in to the infinite porn machine. Given how many of their leading lights have already developed AI psychosis, I wouldn’t be so sure.)

I don’t think these people are wrong to fear an undemocratic post-literate future. You can already see it taking shape, and it isn’t pleasant. For a while, in an earlier phase of social media, it looked like everyone would be getting their worldview from frantic contextualized six-second soundbites. What’s actually happened is much worse. The most influential political figures among young people are now streamers: people like Nick Fuentes or Hasan Piker, who talk extemporaneously about politics into a webcam, sometimes for sixteen hours a day. It doesn’t matter if you notionally agree with one of these people; if you’re accustomed to written language, everything they say will sound aggressively stupid.

Streamers repeat themselves. They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate over the exact same phrase six or seven times before moving on. As Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, this is normal in illiterate societies. Unlike writing, ‘the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer on track.’ (It doesn’t seem to matter that on a stream the utterance doesn’t actually vanish; you can go back and hear what was just said again. Clearly, no one does. Without text to structure it, we revert to mindless repetition, which is ‘in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity.’) Relatedly, oral discourse tends to be low-resolution. Like epic poets four thousand years ago, streamers rely on formulas. ‘Not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.’ There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Post-literate culture is deeply incurious.

Still, as miserable as this stuff might be, it’s strange that a lot of liberals tend to automatically associate literacy with careful, judicious, reasonable politics, and non-literacy with arbitrariness and unreason. In fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions. Lewis Mumford called it the ‘general starvation of the mind,’ in which actual sensuous knowledge of the world is replaced by ‘mere literacy, the ability to read signs.’ In late medieval Europe, the printing press and the beginnings of mass literacy didn’t produce an age of sober reason, but an enormous explosion in all forms of mysticism and esotericism, astrology, divination, witchcraft, Neoplatonist sects and charismatic religious cults, some of them peaceful, some of them murderous. It’s not hard to see why. These doctrines usually centered around the idea that material facts are just an echo of mental processes; they would have made a lot of sense to people who’d just been traumatically ripped out of physical reality by the strange magic of the written word. At the same time, as large numbers of people started to read the Bible for themselves for the first time, there was a wave of mass insurrections. These were revolutionary responses to the deeply unjust feudal and clerical system of the time, but they were also deranged. After radical Anbaptists seized Münster in 1534, they abolished money and socialized all private property. They also gave political power to whoever could most convincingly claim to have received a revelation from God. Eventually one of these was declared king, at which point he started renaming the days of the week and other people’s children, enforcing polygamy on pain of death, and trying to bring about the end of the world.

Even once the initial shock of expanded literacy faded, it could still produce bizarre and destructive ideologies. Modern nationalism would have been impossible without the dislocation of the written word. Your community is no longer made up of the people who actually surround you; it’s an entirely virtual construct, consisting of people you’ve never met in your life, but whose spoken language has been similarly homogenized by the mass-production of printed texts.

When Alexander Luria traveled to Uzbekistan, something terrible was happening just over the border in the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet authorities had decided to liberate the Kazakh people from feudalism by confiscating their cattle, and forcing herders to join new collective farms in lands entirely unsuitable for agriculture. As a result, in the three years from 1930 to 1933, maybe more than a third of the Kazakh population died. Some died of starvation, some died trying to flee across the desert, some were shot by border guards or the police. It was a disaster, but a disaster that could never have been produced by the backward peasants and herders Luria interviewed in the Alai Mountains. They didn’t have the necessary abstractions; they were too blinded by how things actually are. It could only have been the highly advanced and literate people who had sent him there.

One result of the Soviet Union’s mass literacy campaign is that today, Russians are essentially the only truly literate people left. The vast majority of Russians read regularly, more than anywhere else in the world. The rate is lower among young people, but not by much. Essentially everyone in the country is intimately familiar with the great works of Russian and world literature; they can all talk for hours, with sensitivity and insight, about the genius of Pushkin and Chekhov. But somehow, political culture in Russia is not saner or more democratic than in the mentally enfeebled West. If anything, the opposite. It’s possible that the great works of literature don’t actually do anything politically at all. They don’t make us better people or freer citizens. Their value exists in an entirely different world.

Post-literacy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type. Marshall McLuhan imagined a peaceable ‘global village,’ in which electronic technology gently snuffs out all the constant ideological warfare of the Gutenberg age, and integrates the entire world under ‘the spell and incantation of the tribe and the family.’ It hasn’t quite worked out like that. He thought electronic media would be primarily tactile, which is understandable; he was writing in an age when a computer was made of punch-cards and magnetic tape. He couldn’t have known how aggressively audiovisual computers would end up being.

Our illiterate future is unlikely to be peaceful. But political and ideological conflict is already waning, being replaced with something much more intimate. In every developed country, the last few decades have seen a massive political polarization among gender lines. Young women are swinging hard to the left; young men are swinging even harder to the right. A lot of people still seem to think that this is because we disagree more about politics than ever before, but actually it’s the opposite. Politics is losing its content; being on the left has come to mean being a girl, and being on the right is just another way of saying being a boy. Teenage boys watch esoteric Nazi edits for the same reason they used to pull girls’ hair; as a way of working through the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. Right-wing economic policy is now framed as a way of punishing women, reducing their social status until they’re willing to turn back the clock on liberation. In some parts of the left, anything can be justified as long as it seems to reduce the power of men. When we can no longer conceive of a political whole, this is what will be left: all struggles will be powered by outright sexual sadism.

Still, I think McLuhan was right that the post-literate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones. It’s likely that before very long, absolutely all those images will be generated by AI. In the same way that a Tolstovian peasant has a deep, spiritual knowledge of the land, we will have a deep, spiritual knowledge of Tung Tung Tung Sahur. The politics of the future will be cautious, conservative, pragmatic, and unadventurous, grounded in empirical experience instead of fanatical ideologies. We will no longer try to think outside of the things we can see. It’s just that absolutely nothing we see will be real.

Lately I’ve been feeling warlike. My blood’s running hot. Maybe it’s because the longest, greyest, most miserable winter I can remember is finally over and the world is returning to life. All the trees are in bloom, the birds are cooing in their soft pink branches; it’s the season to conquer and destroy. I need an enemy. Someone big, someone people take seriously, someone who’s just slightly overrated, someone who might be able to hurt me. I need to rip them apart in four to five thousand words of frantic talons. I need to wet my feathers in their blood. Maybe you don’t understand this impulse; maybe springtime just makes you want to live in peace with the world. But I doubt it. Lately, everyone’s been ritually sacrificing Lindy West. She wrote a book about some nightmarish polyamorous marriage she’s pretending to be fine with; the pretence is that you’re all really concerned about her being exploited. And this is why you’re all arranged in this torchlit circle around her, and why each of you have been sliding your little thinkpieces about the death of millennial feminism into her back, sinking them in all the way up to the hilt. Cowards: you can’t face live prey. As it happens, the night before her book came out I had a magnificent dream. I dreamed I was riding around a postapocalyptic landscape, all buildings crumbling into the desert, in a great brass chariot. I was smiling like Ashurbanipal as I rode around in my chariot, firing arrows at my enemies, and my chariot was pulled by a powerful, steaming Lindy West. She, too, gleamed like brass in the fresh light of spring.

My problem is that it’s so hard to find a good enemy these days. There are plenty of people who write stupid opinions I disagree with in newspapers and magazines, but fighting them feels sordid, unkind, like spitting on a tramp. There are also plenty of bad novelists too, but what makes them bad is mostly how limp and bloodless they are. Let’s say I did manage to get in a shooting match with Solvej Balle, author of On the Calculation of Volume. What would that be? That would be a war crime. She’s a civilian.

Occasionally, there is someone who isn’t a civilian. Sometimes I’m attacked first. There are a few people out there who don’t like my writing, and make a point of saying so. They always say the same thing: they think it’s indulgent, or long-winded, or evasive, or annoying. These days, I find it hard to get excited about this stuff. If I were someone else, I probably wouldn’t like my writing either. How you feel about what I’m doing here is, in a very real way, not really any of my business. Even when people seem to actively hate me with the eye-bulging intensity of a very small dog, I’ve learned to accept this. In fact, I quite like almost everyone that hates me; the real enemy isn’t someone you dislike, just someone whose head you think would look good on your wall. But lately there’s been another critique of my work floating around, and this one is serious. It demands a response. And strangely, it’s not even coming from my critics. It’s people who claim to like my work, who like almost everything about it—except. Except, they’ll add, have you noticed that every single thing he writes includes the word gloop? Or if it isn’t gloop, it’s goo, or gunk, or ooze, or slop, or slime, or some reference to a bog, or a swamp, or a fen, or a mire. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing about middle-eastern politics or the history of philosophy or whatever bullshit I just saw online; sooner or later I’ll be bringing up some kind of viscous fluid or wetland habitat. What gives?

Before I respond to this baseless and defamatory allegation, it might be worth just double-checking to see if my critics might actually have a point.

It’s true that I do, occasionally, use the word gloop. I have described vegan milk as ‘a colloid of oat gloop and vegetable oils,’ ink as ‘the magic gloop of bureaucracy,’ and the outside stereotype of India as ‘a land of unsanitary gloops.’ I have described the British as ‘bog mutants’ and ‘bog-dwelling savages.’ Among other uses, I have invented a fictional literary magazine called Red Gunk and a fictional US Congressman called Gunk Sclugmond. Sometimes my slimes are literal: I will write about things that genuinely happen to be a bit wet, like zombies, bog bodies, or the British. Other times they seem to ooze out for no obvious reason. In a piece on Nietzsche, who tended to keep himself reasonably dry, I managed to refer to both ‘the mystical gunk that had accumulated in my brain’ and ‘the black slime of your own self-regard.’

Quantitative analysis doesn’t help my position. This blog contains 14 instances of gloop, 15 of goo or gooey, 9 of gunk, 6 of ooze, 12 of slop, 8 of sludge, and a full 28 of slime or slimy. This might not sound like a lot, when you consider that it also contains nearly half a million words in total, but you can compare these numbers with the Google Books corpus, and the results aren’t pretty. Look:

The goos and slimes are bad enough, appearing four times more frequently here than in the rest of the English language, but gloop really is an outlier. I use it fifty-six times more than the average writer. At this point, it’s probably pointless to try arguing that I don’t drastically overuse the word gloop. Instead, I’ll need to make the case that I’m actually right to drastically overuse the word gloop, and every other writer on the planet is wrong for not deploying it as much as me.

There’s a very easy way of doing this, which is to say that talking about gloop the whole time is actually politically virtuous. And there is, in fact, something vaguely reactionary about the distaste for any kind of slime. Adorno mentions this in his Aesthetic Theory. ‘Immediately back of the mimetic taboo stands a sexual one: nothing should be moist.’ Wetness and sliminess is a kind of intolerable ambiguity; gloop is that which disturbs the division of the world into orderly, discrete objects. The forces of repression might want to parcel out reality into antiseptic monads, but there is an untameable gloop that flows between the cells of thought. Gloopy ontology reveals that everything that exists is some kind of very slow fluid, slopping around in the universal churn of all matter. This plot of land you want me to pay rent for—just yesterday, it was the sea floor, where precambrian organisms walked on skirts of jelly. Tomorrow it’ll be a cloud of space dust, slowly coalescing into a star. The noumenon is a protean, undifferentiated mass; it’s not like anything, but if it were like something it would be a kind of dense black tar. But the human body is the same. Our bodies produce some kind of slime at every orifice; in fact, the human body is literally made out of genital slime. We’re not really separate from each other; we’re all just moments in the flubbering of a single viscous plasm. Bakhtin discusses this. The grotesque body, the one that’s constantly oozing or farting, is ‘a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception.’ But the institution of private property demands a world of solid objects. Which is why bourgeois morality forces us to pretend that we all stop at the edges of our skin, and treats all the snots and splats that transgress these borders with prim disgust. Therefore, if you object to me leaving goo everywhere, it’s because you’re a bad person.

This is a perfectly serviceable argument, even if it’s slightly hectoring, even if it’s sort of hectoring you into the position that you should want to live in a world where everyone is filthy and grease-splattered and constantly phlegming in your face. The problem is that not everyone is so positive about slime. These days, when people talk about gloop and gunk in a vaguely politicised register, they’re not thinking about Rabelais; it’s the queasily uniform output that surrounds them. All the restaurants that no longer make their own food, but offer a curated selection of Sysco products. The way musical subcultures have all melded into a single stream of two-minute TikTok standards, which you can either enjoy or ignore. The publishers desperate to sell you three hundred pages of booklike product. At a certain level of homogenisation, things no longer feel like discrete objects; the overriding sense is of pure undifferentiated quantity. The pinnacle of all this stuff is, of course, AI slop, which really does have a wet, gooey quality to it. It’s impossible to encounter a piece of AI media without getting a brief vertiginous sense of the basically infinite number of outputs that the machine could equally well have churned out instead. This particular clip, in which a small brood of anthropomorphic broccoli florets cry and hold their mother as they’re boiled to death: it’s nothing; if you repeat the prompt you can get a thousand of these, a million, and while each individual element will be different—different pot, different chopping board, totally different composition in every individual shot—all of it will be fundamentally the same. If I keep comparing everything to various forms of slop, it’s because slop is that to which we’ve been condemned.

But I don’t think this is really the full story either. There’s something else worth mentioning about AI slop videos: for a while, the slop was literal. You don’t get it so much any more, but five minutes ago when the form was in its infancy, AI video was full of sudden explosions of fluid. The problem with the early models was consistency: they could render a kaleidoscopic sequence of images distilled from the bubbling totality of everything ever captured on film, but they didn’t know how to keep objects looking roughly the same from one frame to the next, or how to obey the laws of physics. A typical AI video from around 2023 would show some half-molten person-like entities gently deliquescing in an office filled with hazy, blobby, unnameable objects, before being suddenly consumed in an immense plume of smoke. The smoke fills the air for a second and then something imperceptibly shifts and it’s frothy surf now, great viscous tendrils of seawater, and a figure on a surfboard is doing 360-degree spins and sometimes hanging motionless upside-down in the air. After a few more unlikely acrobatics he explodes. A great big fireball that doesn’t actually seem to damage anything; it just sets off secondary explosions up and down the screen that grow and linger until the model notices all these orange pixels and reasons that it’s not fire at all, it’s orange juice, slopping everywhere as it’s poured into a glass by a smiling mother with what appear to be two separate mouths, as all of a sudden floodwaters tear through the house, exterior walls collapse to reveal more rooms behind, also collapsing, also welling with water that seems to emerge from everywhere at once… I liked those videos a lot. Early AI video was its own weird dreamlike medium; watching it felt like freebasing the collective unconscious. But it was hard to appreciate at the time, because it was so obviously about to turn into what we have now. Still, the way things developed is interesting. In traditional CGI fluids are some of the hardest things to animate: if you watch early Pixar films it’s all solid objects, stiff plastic toys. The first film to really get it right was Shrek, in which DreamWorks made the most of their newly developed fluid animation system by producing a film that was almost entirely about mud and gloop and slime. In AI video the slime came first; only later, with the addition of planet-eating quantities of compute, did it coalesce into solid objects.

This procedure might be familiar. ‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’

There seems to be a general intuition that between matter and form, matter came first, and before the universe had its shape, it was made of some kind of liquid muddy guck. In the Babylonian creation story, the world forms from the fresh and salty waters of the Deep, curdling into raging chaotic gods. Eventually Marduk slaughters them and builds the universe of solid forms from their corpses. In other traditions the universe begins as a roiling ocean, and one animal has to dive to the very bottom to retrieve a single grain of mud, which ends up swelling into the land. In Finland and Estonia it’s a duck, in Yorubaland it’s a chicken; among the Ostyaks it’s a loon, for the Buryats a goose; in the Cherokee version it’s a water-beetle, while the Iroquois have a muskrat. In the Timaeus, Plato’s kindly effective-altruist God happens to stumble upon a swirling ineffable gunge called the chôra, which is ‘formless, like the inodorous liquids which are prepared to receive scents, or the smooth and soft materials on which figures are impressed.’ It’s not clear exactly where this great dark world-womb comes from, but God looks upon it and sees that it is suboptimal, and divides the primordial splat into body and soul, the four elements, the gods and the other animals, until it’s all nicely in order. Lucretius goes furthest: in his version the chaotic plasm of raw matter is all that there is. No god ever moulded it into shape; it just collided with itself until it threw up the world of solid forms entirely by accident. Sooner or later it will dissolve, also by accident. (This is also, more or less, the view of quantum chromodynamics.)

Primordial chaos has a way of seeping in, even when we notionally believe in something else. Maybe the world is made of air or water, maybe God created it ex nihilo, but you still can’t stop thinking about slime. Probably the best and most familiar account of this very Babylonish concept is the English version of the myth, in book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Satan has to traverse the ‘wilde Abyss/ The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave/ Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire/ But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt/ Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight.’ This dark chasm is the stuff God used to build the world; it’s where all of us originally come from. The home we forgot. And what’s it like in there? ‘A Boggy Syrtis, neither Sea/ Nor good dry Land.’ It’s slime: sludge, slop, ooze, gunk, gloop.

Even after the creation of the world, slime seems to cling to every newborn thing. One of Gaston Bachelard’s great projects was an investigation into the material imagination that, ‘primitive and eternal,’ underlies all our more abstract ideas. All our dreams, he says, are made out of the four classical elements and their combinations; dreamers and poets both have to work with the material stuff of the world. There are some ways of thinking about the world that are made of air, like yours, and others that are made of fire, like mine. But one material stands out: ‘the basic component of materiality, the very notion of matter’ is expressed in the combination of earth and water, which Bachelard calls paste. Paste is the perfect matter because, being formless, ‘it relieves our intuition of any worry about shape.’ When you’re caught out in the rain and cake your boots in gloop, you’re encountering the stuff dreams are made of in its rawest form. Which might be why, in the history of human culture, there’s a tendency for new forms to come out all gucky.

You could look at painting. The one thing everyone notices about the cave paintings of the upper palaeolithic is how fluid they are, how liquid the linework in all those flowing herds of overlapping animals, everything almost jellylike in consistency, so totally different to the stiff, childlike forms of the later neolithic and early bronze age. The novel is another one. By the mid-eighteenth century the novel had stabilised into a more or less solid form, but if you read the very early examples they just slosh around from one cover to the other. For us in the twenty-first century they seem strangely postmodern, destabilising conventions that shouldn’t have even existed yet; in our tired old age we’re still surprised by plasticity. Sidney’s Arcadia, with its ungodly hodgepodge of prose, play, and verse, so wormy with nested narratives that it’s practically incomprehensible. Or Gargantua and Pantagruel, strange combination of scholarly erudition with near-constant fart jokes, featuring long lists of books that don’t exist and a first-person narrator popping in and out of existence seemingly at random. Allegedly, Don Quixote is the first truly realist novel, but in fact it’s the weirdest of the lot. The idea is that it pokes fun at the conventions of chivalric romance by transposing them to the real world, so in the first volume Don Quixote thinks every roadside inn he passes is a castle, and talks to every innkeeper like she’s a princess, and gets repeatedly bonked around the head for his madness. This is meta enough, even without the pages of pseudepigraphic blurbs, or the highly conventional tales-within-the-tale, or the whole gimmick in which Cervantes is actually just translating an Arabic text by one Cide Hamete Benengeli, and occasionally needs to get into adventures of his own to track down more scraps of manuscript when the narrative runs out. But it’s in the second volume that we really see what happens when fiction and reality interact, which is that fiction brushes reality aside like a cobweb. Quixote no longer hallucinates; he sees everything exactly as it is. It’s just that Cervantes is so committed to realism that the world he describes already includes the first volume of Don Quixote, which means that everyone recognises the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance when they see him, and they all pretend to be in one of his tales of chivalry. Eventually everyone is acting out his delusions. (Pierre Menard said it was easy to write the Quixote in the seventeenth century but almost impossible in the twentieth, not least because in the twentieth it already existed. But Cervantes was already on some Borges shit three hundred years ahead of time.) What you end up with is a vision of literature as a kind of alien protoplasm, fungal, borderless, puddling over the world.

But since I’ve already been talking about animation, you can see it there too. If you watch any of the really old Max Fleischer cartoons on YouTube, you’ll usually find someone in the comments wondering what the world would have been like if Fleischer, and not Walt Disney, had won the battle for the future of animation. It’s a good question, almost a Germany-wins-WW1-level counterfactual, Hannibal-wins-the-Punic-Wars, generating dizzyingly different worlds. We’re talking about a clash of the primordial elements here. On one side, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, prim white Calvinism, bowdlerised takes on the Brothers Grimm, trilling princesses, orchestral scores, family-friendly feature-length productions, the latency period, the gods of the air and the sky. On the other, Popeye and Betty Boop, the subterranean alliance of Jews and blacks, immigrant modernity, mongrel impure, wailing ghosts, black-eyed strays, demonic cave paintings, a druggy decadent sexuality, plump thighs, mutability, the gods of the underworld and the night. The early Fleischer cartoons were very unambiguously for grown-ups in a way animation has never quite been able to recapture; even now what passes for adult animation is either just a bunch of kids screaming manic profanities, or some unutterably tedious bullshit about mental health. But if Disney had crumbled in the 1940s instead of Fleischer, it’s hard to imagine we’d be living in the same childlike, desexualised, racially uptight society we inhabit now. There would not be grown adults arguing about Harry Potter. There would not be anything even slightly resembling the sterile, stuttering paedophile slideshows of anime. People would not live under the crushing idea that fun and pleasure belong only to childhood, and the best way to enjoy your life is to avoid growing up. No picket-fence fifties conservatism, no soppy soporific peace-and-love sixties counterculture, just a Jazz Age that never ended, growing darker and toothier with every decade. Birth rates in the developed countries would never have slipped below replacement, but the world would be scarred with the wreckage of multiple small nuclear wars.

But increasingly, I think Fleischer could never have won, and history could only have gone one way, because all his productions were slimy. Disney cartoons are about animals or princesses; Fleischer’s were, ultimately, all about ink. In his very first series, Out of the Inkwell, the main character is a living, polymorphous blob of ink that just happens to take the form of a clown called Koko. Even in the later cartoons all forms are basically provisional. At any point someone’s head might suddenly turn into a gramophone, or a gold chain, or a bottle of hooch. Even when there aren’t straight-up metamorphoses, motions are strikingly fluid. Figures move like water, like invertebrate things, cuttlefish, pulsing squid. Look at this Popeye cartoon. Gloopy protean ink-splats, dark and fertile, a chôra briefly amusing itself with shapes. The kind of thing you can only achieve with animation, which doesn’t have to obey the rules of bony reality. You can probably see where this is going. Max Fleischer’s great innovation, developed right at the start of his career, was the rotoscope. Those impossibly fluid animations were real human movement; that ectoplasmic ooze is the real Cab Calloway; that shifting cartoon-world is the world you’ve been living in all your life. Fleischer had distilled the black ooze that churns beneath the phenomenal world and put it on the screen. But only for a moment. Slime belongs to the beginning of things. Eventually his fluid universe had to harden into Disney’s sweetly singing princesses and die.

For all their sexual maturity, there’s still something childlike about those films. The fresh fat flow of the beginning of things. After all, who is it that really likes goo, and slime, and sludge, aside from the priests, philosophers, painters, and poets of every era? Answer: children. When I was a kid, basically all the entertainment the mavens at CITV had devised for me involved various straight-laced adults being sprayed down with thick coloured gunge, or pushed into giant pools of the stuff, while the hosts all yelped like wounded cats. (Today, from what I can tell, the official children’s entertainment on the TV is all about learning to process your difficult emotions, and as a result the unofficial entertainment the kids actually watch online is all about how the entire female sex were invented by Jews to emasculate the Western male. We should have kept the slime.) But why do children like goo so much? Stupid question. Because it’s fun. But why?

There’s one answer in the mythos of psychoanalysis, a more or less total theory of gloop. If we keep coming back to the theme of a creation that grows from slime, it might have something to do with the fact that we all share the same primordial creative experience. The first time any of us create anything, the first time we put anything out there into the world, it’s by shitting. Karl Abraham, expanding on a connection that doesn’t actually appear in Sigmund Freud’s Character and Anal Erotism, suggests that the child’s originary pleasure in shitting ends up being ‘sublimated into pleasure in painting, modelling, and similar activities.’ The first and most perfect work of art, something of the self realised as an external object, is the turd; this is why the people driven to create art are all some kind of revolting pervert. Later, when we try to imagine the divine creation of the universe, we might not picture God shitting out the world, but we still give the materials of creation the same sensuous properties as shit. Maybe if humans produced neat little pellets like goats our gods would have stacked up the universe from rocks like a cosmic cairn; instead we get the illimitable ocean, the body of Tiamat, and the darkness on the face of the deep.

Children are obsessed with slime because slime is the first thing anyone ever made, and the one who controls the slime is something like a god. They know that the deep secrets of the universe are found in the waste products, intolerable excesses, things better left unmentioned. They like seeing adults being gunged because while adults might govern the world they’re far too dry to have created it. The worldmakers are the slimy laughing ones, and the same gloop of their delight is a punishment for any stiffnecked unbeliever. I’m obsessed with the stuff for roughly similar reasons. I might cast about a lot of performative disdain for a generally infantilised and infantilising world, but I’m the same. In my own way, I also failed to grow up.

Maybe we’re all a little more immature than we think. Before, I said that we don’t imagine God shitting out the world, but in fact that’s not quite true. The creation story of the Ikataiwa of western Peru begins with the ancestor-spirit Eiwatsi, wading in the dark through a lifeless and infinite swamp. He eats a handful of ajuge fruit—it’s not clear where he got them from—and begins to feel queasy. Soon after he squats, groaning, and shits. His first turd is made of fire. It sinks into the depths of the swamp and becomes the Sun. Eiwatsi wades on, with the Sun swimming around his feet as he walks, lighting the way, but before long he groans and shits again. His second movement is diarrhoea: pure water. It splashes into the swamp and becomes the rivers of the world. After a few more paces his guts roil a third time. The third part of creation is a great solid log. Eiwatsi moulds it into plants and animals and women and men, but these creations are lifeless; they just float in the swamp, unmoving. Finally, the pain stabs Eiwatsi once again, and he squats to shit, but all that escapes is an enormous fart. The air wafts into the animals and humans and gives them life. Eiwatsi teaches the small group of humans how to make things for themselves; he teaches them the secrets of arrows, blowguns, baskets, and pots, how to plant manioc, and how to make magical charms. Then he walks on. Some day he might come back.

We have this story because it was collected in 2009 by Arão Elias, who was a Brazilian missionary with the LDS Church. I say was, because after returning from his mission with the Ikataiwa, Elias left Mormonism and now seems to spend most of his time sending strange emails full of death threats to the various archaeologists, both in and outside the church, he believes to be deliberately hiding the truth. What set him off was the creation myth. Most indigenous peoples place the creation of the universe in some vaguely defined heroic past; not the Ikataiwa. They said that the world had been created about four generations back. Some of them said that their grandfathers or great-grandfathers had been among the first individuals fashioned by Eiwatsi, that they’d personally learned the art of firemaking and spearfishing from the demiurge himself. After a night in his hut crunching the numbers, Elias deduced that the Ikataiwa creation had taken place in 1924. When he tried to tell his hosts that scientists had estimated the age of the earth at four and a half billion years, they laughed at him. Ridiculous numbers. Like if someone told you that people in his country had calculated that they were twenty miles tall. Clearly someone where Elias lived had been ashamed of where he came from, one of the original turdborn men, and had started making up this lie. They were absolutely certain about this. All of them had known someone who had looked directly into the face of God. They had spoken to people who were never born but created, whose lives had suddenly begun midway through adulthood. All Elias’s attempts to talk about books and photographs from the pre-1924 past were met with mocking laughter. It made it very hard to teach them about Jesus Christ. Eventually, after some persistent badgering, Elias convinced some of his hosts to take him to a village three days’ canoe-ride away, where one of the first humans still lived. The trip was bug-bitten and uncomfortable with constant downpours and in the end they arrived too late. The man had just died. But he lay on his pyre for another day before the villagers burned him, and Elias got to look. Hard to see inside the grass-reed hut of mourning, where the stink was heavier than the darkness. The dead man was naked and had already started to bloat, jowls all melting around his neck. In death, he clasped his feathered penis-sheath between his hands. Elias peered closer. He had no navel.

THE STORY SO FAR: By late 2026, Britain was in crisis. Keir Starmer’s government had become so deeply unpopular that it posed an active and ongoing threat to public order. The Prime Minister couldn’t wobble his big gormless head in public without spontaneous lynch mobs forming in his vicinity. It wasn’t even clear exactly what he’d done wrong. People said he didn’t have any ideas. They said he didn’t care what people thought. But he’d had the idea of banning smoking in smoking areas, and when people said they didn’t like that idea he had the idea of not doing it. People didn’t like the idea of children watching online porn, so he’d had the idea of making everyone show a government ID before they could read the word ‘fuck’ on their phones. People were unhappy about immigration, so he’d given a speech about how immigration was actually bad, and then when some other people were unhappy about the speech he immediately walked it back. He had given people everything they wanted and they still couldn’t stand him. It was a mystery. Maybe they were upset about the rain, which had fallen in a grey wash over Britain for more than three hundred uninterrupted days, waterlogging the fields, backing up the sewers, slowly soaking through roofs and into people’s homes, until there wasn’t a patch of dry carpet in the entire country, until all the paintings in the Tate had gone streaky, until all the old incunabula in the British Library had dissolved into mush, until absolutely everyone from the bankers to the tramps was walking around in the faint whiff of damp and mildew. But surely people knew better than to blame him for the weather?

Whatever it was, the country was on the edge of something very dangerous. It looked like the next election would be a cataclysm, and rather than hand power over to the maniacs of the right and the imbeciles of the left, the Starmer government bravely decided that the only way to protect British democracy was to trim off all the inefficiencies and radically streamline it for the twenty-first century. Parliament was closed for good; the Palace of Westminster, with its leaking roofs and grotty corridors and general squalid disrepair, was sold off to the Qatar Investment Authority to be turned into a hotel called The Churchill. People were still free to form political parties if they wanted, but there wasn’t much point since nobody would be voting for any of them. Instead, the fate of the country would be chosen through a more familiar mechanism, more in keeping with the lifestyles and experiences of the UK public, and less tainted by the failures of the past: a glossy BBC competition show fronted by Claudia Winkleman.

Theme music. CLAUDIA WINKLEMAN hobbles out to tepid applause. The studio roof is leaking; here and there small dribbles of stagnant rainwater gently moisten the AUDIENCE, and frankly CLAUDIA doesn’t look fantastic either. These days her fringe covers half her nose. Mascara stripes the puffy cheeks of a waterlogged corpse. Exhausted monotone through her introduction. Twelve weeks ago, we started searching for ordinary Brits with brilliant, non-ideological solutions to help drag the country out of its economic, social, and meteorological doldrums. Tonight, it’s the final of Who Wants to Save the UK?, and there can only be one winner. We’ve already said goodbye to fan favourites like Andy (‘Just hang the lot of them’), Claire (‘Just make everything in the shops free’), and Dmitri (‘Just liberalise the planning system’), and now only four hopeful saviours remain. One of them will be granted total dictatorial power for three years. The other three will have to flee the country before they turn up on the proscription lists. That last bit’s a joke. Nobody in the AUDIENCE laughs.

She introduces the JUDGES. Lights spin and land on MARY BEARD, JEREMY CLARKSON, and KEIR STARMER, who’s about to resign his elected position for a permanent sinecure on reality TV. As soon as the spotlight falls on KEIR a collective howl of rage bursts out of the AUDIENCE. Out their seats, frothing like animals, scrabbling against the walls of KEIR’s bulletproof acrylic box, desperate to claw out his eyes. Hiss of tear gas. Small yelps of pain as the producers activate some of the more frenzied assailants’ shock collars. Riot police on horseback charge into the studio and stand around bellowing. Through all this KEIR winces the faint wince of a man who’s just found a hair in his salad. On with the show.

You know our finalists already. They are, in descending order of social status, HAMZA HARAMZADA, RORY FITZWEATHER-REGRETTABLE, FUCHSIA WALLOP, and SAM KRISS.

Mass deportations for the elderly

The first brilliant idea to save the UK comes from HAMZA HARAMZADA a 26-year-old finance lawyer from London. Pink shirt, shiny shoes, shiny forehead. A shiny smoothness everywhere about the man, the gloss of a CGI model awkwardly inserted into reality. He wants to send your granny to a war zone.

There is a dangerous population in this country. They are not like you and me. They don’t work. They don’t contribute to public finances. They hold views that many people consider totally foreign and incompatible with a democratic society, and their numbers are growing. I’m talking, of course, about old people. The old age dependency ratio, the ratio of retirement-age to working-age adults, is nearly a third; in 1960 it was only 18%. The share of the population that pay more in taxes than they collect in benefits is now under 50%. Over the Channel in France, the average retiree now earns more from their pension than the average worker from their salary, and we’re not far behind. The triple lock essentially guarantees that pensions will always grow faster than wages, as an increasingly narrow population of workers are forced to support an increasingly bloated population of idle old codgers. Every other problem in Britain is downstream of this issue. It’s why the government can’t fund decent services for working people. It’s why you can’t find a decent home to live in. It’s why the NHS is overstretched. Who gets ill? Not me. I’ve never been sick in my life. It’s them.

This is also why the social fabric of this country is falling apart. Since this problem first started emerging in the late twentieth century, every successive British government has tried to solve it by importing young people to make up the balance. Care workers, to look after the elderly and incontinent Brits, but also a constant flow of migrant labour in general, as many people as it takes to artificially overheat the economy so the state pensions keep getting paid. We’re living through the results of that now. But it didn’t even solve the problem. What will happen to these new arrivals in a few short decades? They’ll get old, and start collecting pensions themselves. There has to be another way.

I’m not suggesting that this country should abandon the promises it made to its older people. But we need to honour them in a cost-effective way. Instead of trying to arbitrage the international labour market by importing care workers, we could look after our elderly for a fraction of the current cost simply by deporting them all to the Third World.

Here is my vision. Right now, our former colonial subjects in Myanmar, who we all cherish, are undergoing a tragic civil war. They also have miles of gorgeous tropical beachfront, particularly in Rakhine State and Tanintharyi Division, that are almost totally undeveloped, and mostly under the control of local ethnic militia. It should be very easy to convince the Arakan Army or the Mon National Liberation Front, in return for some token recognition or military assistance, to cede a suitable patch of land for us. We’re building a retirement community. We can get Quinlan Terry to design it. I’m picturing Georgian-style townhouses, red phone boxes, old-fashioned pubs on every corner, family butchers, flags and bunting everywhere, and everything clean and tidy, a perfect metropolis-sized recreation of the lost Britain of long ago, but enjoying the balmy warmth of the Bay of Bengal. A haven from the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the average wage in Myanmar is under £3,000 a year; our new city will provide tens of thousands of good, well-paying jobs for local residents while drastically cutting costs for the British taxpayer.

But the benefits to Britain won’t just be financial. Yes, we’ll be able to drastically cut taxes once all the old people have been shipped off abroad, and yes, the sudden glut of properties on the market will massively reduce the cost of living. Most of all, though, we will reap the benefits of no longer being an old, grey, declining nation. This will be a young country again. The median age will drop from around 40 to about 32, which will make us younger than any time since 1960. Full of vigour, provocative new ideas. You’ll feel it walking down the street, the energy in the air. No more mawkish nostalgia. No more swollen red faces on Question Time. Our culture and politics will no longer be held hostage to the whims of an overinflated cohort of sentimental fogies. Maybe you can defer your deportation as long as you keep working, but frankly maybe you can’t. Maybe we’ll have secret police fanning through the shires, dragging your elderly relatives out of the hidden room you’ve built for them and marching them onto a one-way flight to the genocide zones. You won’t miss them really. You’ll be amazed at how little you’ll miss them once they’re gone.

Become the 29th state of India

The second contestant is 63-year-old RORY FITZWEATHER-REGRETTABLE, who used to write pop-history books and now mostly reviews overpriced hotels for airline magazines. Everything about the man is rumpled; shirt, jacket, corduroys, hair, smile. It’s a disguise. Something cold and glinting beneath. He wants to make sure Brexit really does mean Brexit.

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Human beings have manic episodes; when it happens to an entire nation we call it empire. The affliction is the same. You prance around town with your tits practically pouring out your top, demanding drinks from strangers, snatching cigarettes out their hands. Isn’t it funny how I can do absolutely anything I want? And everybody loves me? You know you have a special destiny in the world. It’s obvious; flowers turn their faces towards you whenever you walk past. You’re going to save the world by sniffing coke off a stranger’s frenulum. And other people don’t understand, they’re all such bummers, they take things so personally, when really it was just a joke. In fact the whole world is a joke, none of it’s really serious, this great primary-coloured playground built for your delight. Sometimes in the brief moments you’re alone you can hear laughter, not coming from anyone in particular, not laughing at anything you can name, just the manic chattering laughter of the entire universe, flooding the silence. Lately you’ve been getting in fights. You’ve been winning them all. You’ve been stumbling into casinos and putting it all on red, emptying out your bank account, taking unsecured loans, putting it all on red and winning every time. God loves you more than he loves other people, he loves you in a different way. Maybe in an erotic way. Maybe you’re interested. You’ve been buying precious stones, rubies and sapphires; you keep them in your pockets. Sometimes people tell you that one day you’re going to wake up in hospital again, or jail, again, or in a pool of your own blood and vomit, or maybe not at all. They’re wrong. That happens to other people. It will never, ever happen to you.

One good thing about Europe is we’ve all already been through it all. Here, every miserable dirt-poor republic had its century in the sun. Today, Splugovina is a dreary landlocked country of eight million people that produces sunflower seeds, insulated cables, and zinc-bearing ores, but for a brief period in the fifteenth century the glorious Splug Empire stretched clear across the continent. The crowned heads of Europe came to kneel and give tribute. After that, it’s true, there was the War of the Quintuple Alliance, and all the cities were razed, and maybe forty percent of the population starved in the fields, but there are still some very impressive ruins in the hills. That time is never coming back, though. All you can do now is put up a bunch of gaudy statues to the conquering heroes, make genocidal chants at football games. Remember, with a kind of lazy black bitterness, the days when the world was made of sugar and you were mad.

My own miserable dirt-poor country was the last one to suffer from a bout of empire, and we caught it worse than anyone else. God is an Englishman, we said. We really meant it. He only filled the earth with various fuzzy-wuzzies so we’d have the pleasure of conquering them. We didn’t even really want an empire, God just sort of dropped one into our lap. One day you wake up to find out you’ve been massively overproducing bolts of linen, meanwhile on the other side of the planet some kingdom you’ve been trading with has fallen into civil war, but maybe you could still shift all this stupid linen if the private security at your trading post just restored a bit of order locally, and then suddenly you’re being paraded around on an elephant while a thousand slaves die building a giant statue of your face. It all happened in a blur. Today you can still go to any quiet little English church in any quiet little English village, clipped hedgerows, cricket green, and read the tombs. All the local lads who died under far distant skies. Born in Kent, perished on the Niger or the Irrawaddy, puking through jungle, trudging over Antarctic ice. Today the British are known for complaining all the time, but that wasn’t always the case. We went cheerfully to these far distant places, madness in our eyes. During Scott’s Antarctic expedition half the crew had to spend an entire winter in a single nine-foot igloo, minus forty degrees outside, so cold it’s the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit, all of them wracked with dysentery and ptomaine poisoning, toenails falling off from frostbite, but they all kept their spirits up with callisthenics, lectures on subjects of scientific interest, and regular games of charades. The other half of the expedition died on the ice in equally good humour. They filmed the whole disastrous journey; it was released in 1924 as The Great White Silence. Film begins with an endorsement from King George V. ‘I wish that every British boy could see this film, for it would help to foster the spirit of adventure on which the Empire was founded.’

That mania has passed now. It’s one with Nineveh and Tyre. There’s nothing technically stopping us, but you no longer find British boys racing to be the first to die in some strange and exciting new way. Now it’s Americans. Soon it’ll be Chinese.

I like American optimism. Not everyone does. A lot of people from long-vanished empires claim to find it unbearable; it reminds them of what they no longer have. But I like it. There’s something ridiculous about an American who tries to hate their own country, like a dog trying to walk on two legs. They don’t know what it means to wake up and curse the grey skies and poisoned soil of Splugovina, this place that closes around you like a tomb. They can rage against the slavery and genocide, but it’s still with that bright, feverish, all-American gleam in the eye. The only way an American can really encounter pessimism is by hiring a British person to perform it for them. That’s what I do, basically. It’s a living.

The problem, though, is the corollary to all this charming American exuberance, which is the repeated bouts of mass murder. It comes in cycles. A few years of screaming bloodlust until it all blows up in your face, and then you spend the next few years at home drinking wine out the bottle and wailing over the unfairness of the world, before finally straightening your back, giving one last sniff, and bravely stepping outside to once again club someone’s children to death. I used to think some kind of progress was possible here. I used to have something called the Iraq War Theory of Divorce in Hollywood Films. The theory says that if a film features a male lead character who gets divorced or separated from his main romantic interest, and it came out before 2005 or so, by the end he will have cajoled his ex back into bed and they’ll live happily ever after. Liar Liar, The Parent Trap, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If it came out after 2005, by the end he will have learned to accept the situation, moved on, and found someone new. A total bloodbath in the Middle East, maybe a million people shot or blown up or tortured to death with power tools, so you can learn that hey, sometimes things don’t work out there way you want them to, and hey, sometimes that’s ok. But all these things are temporary. Don Quixote got a decade of sanity between volumes before the rabbit poison started glittering in his eyes and he was babbling about knight errantry again. America got less than half. Four years after the last American troops left Afghanistan under Taliban guard, war critic JD Vance was on the TV, saying that while he understood why people were put off by the last round of wars in the Middle East, ‘the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.’ The dumb presidents, the ones who blundered around getting America into quagmires, still always held back from directly attacking Iran. The smart president is Donald Trump.

America has discovered that you can just kill people. There might be a centuries-old taboo on the assassination of foreign heads of state, but that’s obsolete now. Those rules govern interactions between peers, and America has no peers. They’re useful for states that might conceivably face consequences for their actions, and America never will. Look at what they did in Venezuela. Kidnapped Maduro using weapons the rest of the world has never even heard of, sonic weapons, microwaves, directed radiation beams that can boil a Cuban guard’s brains inside his skull from half a mile away. They’ve got Kabbalistic weapons that rearrange your gematria, curdle your viscera until the vessel cracks and a glowing plasma leaks out. The US and Israel are playing on sandbox mode, so technologically ahead of everyone else it’s like the nineteenth century again, when you could scythe down masses of spear-chucking savages with one good burst from the Maxim gun. And yet every previous administration tried negotiating with the savages, threatening them, sanctioning them, playing this weird choreographed game where they agreed to let Iran fire a volley of missiles at Tel Aviv to satisfy some vague principle of honour and then shot them all down. When you’ve got so much power, why bother? Why keep having conversations? Why not just kill them? If you don’t like a spiritual leader of three hundred million Shia Muslims, just fucking kill him. Kill him, kill his wife, kill his daughter, kill his fourteen-month-old granddaughter, kill his cabinet, kill his military command, kill all the representatives you’ve been negotiating with, and kill a bunch of your preferred candidates to take over his position while you’re at it, why not, they’re only lives. What a brilliant discovery. Amazing no one else ever thought of it before. They must all be dumb. And yes, maybe something goes wrong, and Opus 4.6 accidentally deletes the wrong object. ‘You’re totally right to call me on that. What I fired on wasn’t an IRGC missile bunker—it was a primary school full of little girls. Here’s why that matters.’ But so what? It’s the world’s problem if Israel or America gets a papercut, but there’s no reason to let the disintegrated bodies of a hundred and fifty strangers’ daughters interfere with the general giddy atmosphere. They’re only lives. ‘It was something, and it is nothing. Does not this amount to exactly the same thing as though it had been nothing, and came to nothing; and about nothing it is hardly worth while to waste a word.’

So far, the war is going very well. It’s called Operation Epic Fury. Operation Epic Badass Ninja Pirate. Organs of state keep issuing public statements that say things like ‘Kill without hesitation, avenge without mercy’ and ‘You say death to America, we say America will be your death.’ They’re having no problems killing anyone they want to kill. Iran might be a proud and ancient civilisation with a historical memory stretching back six thousand years, but right now it’s an easily broken toy in the hands of an empire that can barely remember the day before yesterday. But somehow, the power to kill anyone at will isn’t enough. Things are not going according to plan. As far as I can tell, the plan was this. As soon as Israel and America eliminated the Supreme Leader, the entire Islamic Republic would disintegrate like an alien invasion fleet once the mothership’s been hit. At this point the Iranian people would fill the streets, overthrow the mullahs, and immediately start signing up for an OnlyFans account. Obviously these are early days, but it doesn’t look like things are going to plan. Something very different is happening. Decapitating the Islamic Republic has not shut it down. Instead, individual IRGC units are all operating autonomously, using their own mobile and highly fluid command structures. Instead of a single enemy, there’s now a swarm. No central authority to negotiate with even if you wanted to. A headless zombie Iran, the wreckage of a six-thousand-year-old state spewing ballistic missiles in every direction. Missiles falling on Saudi oil refineries, Bahraini radar installations, on the matcha labubu sexual slavery camps of Dubai. You thought all those CGI skyscrapers meant you were abstracted from geography, but this is still the Middle East. Meanwhile the revolutionaries have not yet shown up in the streets of Tehran. Possibly because the people most likely to overthrow the regime already tried that in January, and the regime killed or imprisoned them all. It might not happen. The Islamic Republic is a bad government, possibly the worst government anywhere on the face of the earth, but it’s being attacked by children making plane noises. Not inconceivable that large numbers of Iranians will, for the time being, rally around what’s left of the regime. So now the plan is to conjure up some ethnic militias, Kurds and Azeris, use them to re-enact the breakup of Yugoslavia. A pro-Western liberal democracy would be nice, but if we can’t have that we’ll settle for a giant festering sore on the face of Asia, roiling with endless massacres.

The most pathetic figures in all of this are, of course, the lackeys and catamites of the American right. Sixteen months ago they were screeching that Kamala Harris was about to lead America into a cataclysmic war with Iran. Sinister HR girlbosses want to feed your sons into a woodchipper so Raytheon can afford more Pride flags! Vote Trump for peace! And maybe she would have started a war with Iran if she had the chance, but in the end she didn’t. Trump did. Now his followers have to find a way to justify supporting the exact same thing that horrified them five minutes ago. Not an easy job. One attempt, from someone who apparently passes for an intellectual in these circles: ‘Many people derive immense satisfaction from feeling betrayed. For them, politics is an activity where you first build yourself up as a righteous victim, then wait for your champion to betray you so you can luxuriate in outrage and moral superiority.’ Got that? It’s grievance politics if you want your representatives to do anything at all; you’re being morally obnoxious if you object to your anti-war candidate starting a war. Instead of expecting some kind of result from your politics, you should just go limp while Pete Hegseth whispers slurred and whiskey-stinking entreatments into your ear. Do anything, this person is saying. I’ll support anything you want, like a good little whore, because I don’t want to think of myself as a victim. A good rule of thumb is that if you ever feel the need to degrade yourself in public like this, it’s time to totally abandon whatever political opinions brought you here and start again from scratch. I think I would stab myself to death with a butter knife before I wrote anything this undignified. But maybe Aristotle was right, and some people are natural slaves.

I’m sure it doesn’t feel like being a slave at the moment. A lot of people are still giddy with war. It feels like infinite power, it feels like you can do anything you want. But you’ll regret it. Things will not go how you want them to. Unlike previous empires, America can’t even make a desert; everywhere it goes the world reverts to mere chaos. State collapse, ethnic war, tribal militias forgetting how to speak, stammering and babbling over the ruins. Now you’ve decided to create a widening gyre right on top of the sea passage for thirty percent of the world’s energy. Whatever it is, this will come back to fuck you in ways you will not predict. There will be buildings exploding in unexpected corners of the world. It might not be fatal, not yet. But it’s not looking good. Eighty years ago, the United States could essentially print out a theoretically infinite number of tanks and battleships. Now you can’t, and China can. Young Chinese people have a strangely cheerful attitude to their country. Not so long ago China was devouring its own population for no good reason, torturing and killing them by the million; now everyone gets a massive TV and an electric car and a big bowl of soup noodles and a million plasticky vertical dramas about a Tang dynasty princess who falls in love with a mysterious assassin. How can you not love your country when it’s lifted one billion people out of poverty? They’re starting to go a little bit giddy. Meanwhile the American earnestness I love so much is tinged, these days, with a touch of resentment and desperation. Would a declining empire do this? you say, thrashing about, casting off all your subtlety and sophistication for a show of naked force. You don’t get many more of these. Each one brings you just a little bit closer to the end.

Numb at the Lodge currently runs to more than one hundred posts and nearly half a million words. That’s quite a lot of words. It doesn’t help that the stuff I write here usually gets described as ‘indescribable’ and categorised as ‘uncategorisable.’ I will sometimes write long arguments for things I don’t actually believe, or deeply researched essays with exactly one lie hidden inside. I find it fun; maybe you will too.

One way to get into this swamp of half a million words is to trust the masses and just read my most popular posts. Unfortunately, you’ll find that the most-read thing I’ve ever published here is a very straightforward piece of political commentary about why the Democrats lost the 2024 US election, probably the least interesting thing on here. This is because readers can’t be trusted.

Another way is to use this guide. If this is your first time here, we recommend you start with:

The Numb at the Lodge Seasonal Sampling Platter

A tasting menu of lesser-known seasonal delicacies from across the year. Balanced between esoterica, invective, pop culture, and politics. Small plates, tiny bowls, plus a few stranger and more annoying forms to give you a general idea of what it is I’m doing here, so you can decide whether you like it or not:

• Christmas Eve: The black mountain

  ‘Once every nineteen years, the Moon passes so close to Hyperborea that it’s possible to leap across the gap and walk on its surface.’

  An esoteric history of Santa Claus and the North Pole, featuring Athanasius Kircher’s underground oceans, Nazi hollow Earth theories, cannibal dancers, the Inuit discovery of Europe, the revolution of May 1968, and the terrifying secret of our planet’s magnetic field.

• Valentine’s Day: Manifesto of the Armed Front of Love

  ‘Have you really never loved anyone so much, with so much of your heart, that you just had to fire mortars into a police station about it?’

  Every day there’s another terrorist atrocity. The people responsible say that their only ideology is love. They’re letting off bombs because they’re in love. But who would want to listen to a bunch of terrorists?

• May Day: This green and growing earth

  ‘The seagull god had magnificent hard yellow eyes and a small shrub growing out of its head. I felt an urge—a small urge, but a very real one—to worship it.’

  On the last day of spring, the residents of an ordinary English town parade a man made of leaves through the streets and then ritually slaughter him on a hilltop. Most of them assume they’re taking part in an ancient pagan fertility rite. In fact, it’s much more interesting than that.

• Midsummer: I love America and the world

  ‘I love this senseless empire, sprawled across the face of someone else’s continent like a bird-eating spider, and I love its mandibles that inject the planet with venom until everything liquefies and it can feed.’

  In July 2024, a sniper came a quarter of an inch away from exploding Donald Trump’s brain on live TV. It was maybe the most beautiful and the most summery day of my life. For just a moment, politics disappeared. I loved Donald Trump, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and everything that exists.

• My birthday: Eternity

  ‘I thought it was my idea to rewatch Girls, or possibly my girlfriend’s idea; one of ours, anyway, or why else would we have done it? So we rewatched the first episode of Girls, and it turned out to be a very weird experience that caused me to receive several terrifying insights about the true nature of the universe and the unreality of time.’

  My birthday is in early September, the beginning of autumn, when everything in the world starts dying, and I get to thinking about dying too. To mark the occasion, I wrote an anguished essay on the unbearable vastness of the far future and the experience of rewatching Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012).

If you’ve finished the Seasonal Sampling Platter and decided you want more, why not try one of these bonus packages?

The Numb at the Lodge Round-the-World Super-Luxe Holiday Express

Our all-inclusive tour of this large and increasingly psychotic planet, taking in all the major tourist sites plus some authentically menacing alleys and unsanitary foreign jails:

• China: Numb in China: Shī shì shí shī shǐ

  ‘The only way Chinese makes sense is if you imagine it as an attempt, begun thousands of years ago, to create a language that would be illegible to digital machines.’

  A letter from the hot, humid megacity of Chongqing, deep in the depths of China, in which I try to untangle what’s going on with what is possibly the world’s most fundamentally deranged language.

• India: Numb in India: Dharma police

  ‘Imagine if every air-traffic controller had to come from one of the secretive families of air-traffic controllers implanted in every city, and instead of passing an exam they simply performed their mysterious rites before a tiny black idol of God in his form as a cosmic air-traffic controller, directing the movements of stars and galaxies from his terminal in the great control tower beyond the physical universe, and then the airports had to hire them. Now imagine the air-traffic controllers all refuse to eat in the presence of pilots, who are their social inferiors, and if the daughter of an air-traffic controller tries to marry a pilot, her parents might try to kill her. Also, one person can ‘be’ a pilot and another an air traffic controller, even though neither of them have been anywhere near an airport and they’re actually both just millet farmers. That’s a jati.’

  A letter from the hot, dry desert outpost of Jaisalmer, on the furthest fringes of India, in which I try to untangle what’s going on with what is possibly the world’s most fundamentally deranged form of social organisation.

• Australia: Dreams never end

  ‘As soon as Captain Cook came ashore at Botany Bay, he fell asleep and dreamed he was walking around, surveying hills and harbours. And when the First Fleet arrived they also fell asleep, on the ground where they landed, under the open sky, dreaming that they were founding a colony. Then the Second Fleet came to sleep right next to them. This city is a dream, it’s a desert mirage. We have trespassed on our dreamworld.’

  I have never been to Australia, but I have watched several seasons of an Australian reality TV show called Married at First Sight. This is what I learned.

• Russia: The beautiful Russia of the future

  ‘Russia is the world: the entire history of the world.’

  One day in 2023, a former small-time crook called Yevgeny Prigozhin turned his mercenary army against the Russian state and sent a tank column racing up the highway towards Moscow. Only in Russia, the last country where things still really take place.

• Gaza: Bread, figs, phosphorus

  ‘At the time, Gaza was twice the size of Jerusalem. The well-water was very slightly salty; so was the cheese. Outside the city there were groves of olive trees that had stood for hundreds of years. At night, you could hear the wide dark sea rushing and retreating over the dunes.’

  Written a week into Israel’s war against the people of Gaza. A lament.

• America: Numb at Burning Man

  ‘As new campers arrived, I heard them introduce themselves to each other in strange and savage ways. Ah, one said, you’re in quantum computing. I’m only in quantum data, but you might want to talk to Kevin over there. The lowly quantum data worker gestured at a shirtless man in a bright pink bucket hat and glowing cat ears. He does quantum computing, he said.’

  I went to Burning Man.

The Numb at the Lodge Pillar of Eternal and Enduring Truth

This pillar is made of granite, five hundred feet high, inscribed with one of these texts on each of its four solemn faces. The word ‘INTEGRITY’ is carved into its capital, symbolising my promise to never creatively combine true and fictional statements, or ever write a short story in the form of an essay:

• The secret history of Wakanda

  ‘The masks are carved out of wood using stone tools. I didn’t like looking at those masks. They expressed a kind of mathematics I’m glad I don't understand.’

  Most people think the secret country of Wakanda was invented for comic books in the 1960s. In fact, Europeans have been dreaming about a highly advanced African society for more than two thousand years. To this day, some people claim they’ve actually been there.

• What is the world’s oldest hatred?

  ‘Whoever you are, whatever you hate the most is just a substitute or a metaphor for yourself.’

  According to a lot of politicians, the world’s oldest hatred is gentiles’ hatred of Jews. For Afropessimists, it’s white people’s hatred of black people; for radical feminists it’s men’s hatred of women. Other people have had weirder views.

  (For more information about one of those people, see Five prophets, The law that can be named is not the true law, and Against truth.)

• Taylor Swift does not exist

  ‘Taylor Swift seems destined to be remembered by our drooling, mud-eating descendants as a kind of culture hero, the mythical source of everything left for them to inherit. First was she who plucked strings and made pleasant sounds. Who taught man to spin thread and mark the hours of the sun.’

  For a few months in late 2014, I was the world’s first full-time Taylor Swift reporter. In that time, I think I discovered something I wasn’t supposed to. All I’m left with is a gaping hole in my memory and a book of increasingly frenzied notes.

• A truly foreign language

  ‘There is language that towers up out of the sidewalk and language that collects in the gutters, and one wide pacific word that drains out of the Bay and away, washing against the far edge of itself to send Japanese fishermen insane.’

  In 2024, Donald Trump gave a press conference at the US-Mexico border in which he claimed that America was being invaded by ‘truly foreign languages’ spoken by ‘nobody.’ He was right.

The Numb at the Lodge Guide to AI

Like basically everyone, I’ve produced a lot of stuff about large language models. Unlike everyone, all my assessments have been correct and all my predictions have come to pass:

• A user’s guide to the zairja of the world

  ‘The more technologically advanced an AI becomes, the less likely it is to produce anything of artistic worth.’

  Written in December 2022, shortly after the public launch of ChatGPT. To understand AI, you need to know the full story of computer-generated text, which begins with an Islamic fortune-telling machine that was invented in the twelfth century but claimed to have existed since the very first days of creation.

• The cacophony

  ‘The obvious answer is that a chatbot is not conscious, and you aren’t really conscious either. There’s only one conscious entity in the universe, which is language itself.’

  Written in April 2023, shortly after the first AIs started going mad. In the first years of the seventeenth century, Europe was nearly destroyed in a Cacophony, a plague of carnivorous words. Now, we seem to be in the early phases of another.

• Born in the wrong generation

  ‘That’s a great choice! your beautiful submissive girlfriend says. A plate of ham is a fantastic way to start the day, delivering the primal satisfaction of cured meat without the heaviness of bacon. Add a pair of lacy, crispy fried eggs with rich, runny yolks and you’ve got yourself a certified diner classic!’

  Written in April 2025, shortly after AIs started driving human beings mad too. With the power of modern technology, everyone can live in whatever version of reality they prefer, forever.

The Numb at the Lodge Cultural Critique Corner

Do you like books? Do you like films? Not me! The Cultural Critique Corner is a dark, neglected, rodenty hole for people who complain about how entertainment isn’t as good as it ought to be. If that’s your perversion:

• Against lists of books

  ‘The point isn’t to read these books; the point is to have read them. Actually dragging your wet eyeballs over all that scratchy paper is just an awkward chore you have to go through, so afterwards you can ask people at parties if they’ve read The Line of Beauty, and then, before they’ve even had a chance to respond, tell them that you’ve read The Line of Beauty.’

  In which I complain about people making lists of books.

• The repulsive crust

  ‘Once, there was character, which could be good or bad, and which had something to do with heredity and possibly the precise pattern of bone ridges on your skull. Novels from this era tend to spend a lot of time on physical description, because the tilt of a nose or the bulging of an eye says something significant about the person we’re meeting. We don’t really do that any more. We have learned psychology: we know that a person is composed primarily of feelings.’

  In which I complain about pop-psychology in fiction.

• All the nerds are dead

  ‘The greatest lie the nerds ever told us was that being a nerd had something to do with being unpopular, being uncool, being outside the cultural mainstream, being unusual, being creative, being funny, being different in any way. Being a nerd has always meant being a machine for liking things.’

  In which I complain about nerd culture, and (accurately) predict its demise.

• The internet is already over

  ‘Everything that depends on the internet for its propagation will die. What survives will survive in conditions of low transparency, in the sensuous murk proper to human life.’

  The first post published in Numb at the Lodge, and still its manifesto. In which I prophesy the end of the internet.

• In my zombie era

  ‘I pull up swagless into this sauceless void. Chat, in what consists my drip? My drip is stiff with blood and mire. Chat, in what consists my aura? My aura is only fear. Chat, in what consists my rizz? My rizz is a half-turned head, twisted birdlike. My rizz is the empty circling of a dislocated jaw. My rizz is antic snarling. My rizz is reddened eyes.’

  Look, you’re just going to have to read it.

The Numb at the Lodge Golden Sheaf of Lightly Blasphemous but Basically Well-Intentioned Engagements with the Abrahamic Religions

Actually these are just two generally under-read pieces I’m really fond of and couldn’t fit anywhere else, but they do have this in common:

• Legion

  ‘You can tell a demon, because a demon speaks the truth.’

  According to the Gospels, Jesus cast a multitude of demons out of a man and into a herd of pigs grazing nearby, who then ran into a lake and drowned. But the Gospels were written by Jews, who for obvious reasons don’t know much about pigs. Like, for instance, the fact that pigs can swim.

• The dust of God

  ‘No statue stands in this temple, as in Greek and Roman temples. The temple does, however, contain a huge black stone with a pointed end and round base in the shape of a cone. The Phoenicians solemnly maintain that this stone came down from Zeus.’

  On the ancient practice of worshipping fallen meteors, which might secretly survive into the present day.

If, after reading all this, you still want more, maybe you should consider becoming a paid subscriber. All the posts featured in this guide have been completely free to read, but paid subscribers get access to the full archive of paid posts, all of which are slightly less interesting than the stuff you get for free. This includes most of the political takes, plus the full China and India series and a lapsed project about dreams I fully intend to pick up again at some point. I try to dissuade people from becoming paid subscribers as much as possible because I think making money tends to make my writing worse, but if you insist:

How many apricots do you think you can fit in your mouth?

Five? That’s how many apricots the average person can fit in their mouth. One stuffed in each cheek, plus three in the middle. If the average person tries to shove a sixth apricot in there, they start to gag. Eyes water, nose runs, eventually a thin dribble of orange pap escapes from between the teeth. Too many apricots feels like burning. Before long they’re gasping and retching and puking up great slimy globs of apricot flesh. That’s the average person. Are you an average person?

Before you answer, you should know what it’s like out there for the average person. They’ve started putting up positive messages in my local privately-owned public space. Big free-standing billboards that say things like YOU’RE NEVER TOO MUCH and IT’S OK NOT TO BE OK and HAVE YOU LOVED YOURSELF TODAY? and WE’RE ALL A BIT MESSY SOMETIMES. One of them contains, in smaller letters, a sort of poem about ADHD. ‘Lateness as a creative act. Splicing a little chaotic obsession into the world’s mind-numbing order. Loving us for how intensely, sincerely—inconveniently—we show up.’ Supposedly these are all about being different and unique, but really this is just how the powers of the world now address the average person. Once, before anyone can really remember, they spoke in the hysterical register of duty and sacrifice and law; now it’s this. Come on, let’s all have a bloody great chat about our mental health. You will be interpellated as small sad bean, who needs help from some shadowy consortium of private interests to help manage all the sad feelings floating around in their head. You are assumed to be in a state of ambient unwellness. You’re suffering from a mental distress that’s bad enough to require some kind of outside help, but not so bad that the outside help has to consist of anything other than a big yellow sign that says TAKE A DEEP BREATH. YOU’RE DOING GREAT. That’s the average person. That’s what they think you are. So I’ll ask again. How many apricots do you think you can fit in your mouth?

You need to be apricotmaxxing. You need to be cramming upwards of ten or twelve apricots in your mouth at a time.

Apricotmaxxing isn’t difficult. The techniques are well established; they’re just not very pleasant. With willpower and meditation you can suppress the pharyngeal reflex and get another apricot in there, maybe even two, but all that mental bullshit will only get you so far. Are you serious about this? Do you want to spend your life dithering in the fat central slice of the standard distribution, like every other loser? Don’t you know that when the great bifurcation comes, all the ordinary people will be rendered down into biofuel to power Elon Musk’s infinite child porn generator? Want to avoid that? Then you need to expand your jaw. If you’re trying to fit more apricots in there the only way is to expand your jaw. The procedure is called Surgically Assisted Rapid Palatal Expansion, or SARPE. As you might know, there are two bones above the roof of your mouth, which slowly come together and fuse during adolescence. In a SARPE procedure, the surgeon cuts through the palate and pries them open again. Then, orthodontics are fitted with a spring across the width of the mouth to gently push the bones apart. If you can get a surgeon to perform SARPE, that’s great. If not, there are other options. You can do it yourself. You can put a butter knife in your mouth, gently find the line where the maxillary bones meet, and in one smooth motion push it upwards into your skull.

Self-SARPEing is only the beginning. Serious apricotmaxxers know that you need to loosen your cheeks. You can achieve a little extra slack by injecting medically inadvisable doses of corticosteroids, which inhibit the production of collagen and lead to baggier, wrinklier skin across the entire body. But eventually you’ll have to resort to cheek-slashing. Good deep cuts; really slice through the buccinator muscle, so when it heals it heals scarred and weak. After three rounds of cheek-slashing your cheeks will be so loose and jowly you can fit three apricots in each with room to spare. Having thirteen apricots in your mouth will be completely doable. You are beginning to apricotmog the taut.

Of course, as a successful apricotmaxxer, you will not look normal. You will have the face of a dying bloodhound. Cheeks dangling like huge scrotums against your head. The skin will hang off your body everywhere, covered in fine wrinkles like an unironed shirt or an ancient banknote, and there’ll be dense scribbles of scar tissue where you’ve mutilated yourself. If something went wrong during the self-SARPE, and it probably did, you’ll also have damaged the trigeminal nerve, which means it’s now agony for you to attempt to eat, drink, or speak, and sometimes you get flashes of excruciating neuralgia that strike like lightning bolts in your head at random throughout the day. Maybe you were wrong to try apricotmaxxing. But don’t worry. There are other ways to become exceptional. Consider this: how many anchovies do you think you can fit in your nostrils?

Most people, being average, do not understand what maxxing really means. Look at me! they squeal. I’m sleepmaxxing! They mean that they’re trying to get eight hours a night. Or they’re proteinmaxxing, which means they’ve bought a big tub of whey powder. I’m such a houseplantmaxxer, they tell the fiddle-leaf fig they ordered online. It’s fun to play around with a new word. But sleepmaxxing does not mean getting a red light and taping your mouth shut; it means putting yourself in a medically induced coma. There is only one way of proteinmaxxing, which is to get one hundred percent of your daily calories from lean protein. Anything else would, by definition, be less than fully maxxed. Doctors will tell you that eating only protein causes something called ‘rabbit starvation,’ and if you keep at it you’ll experience vomiting, seizures, and death in fairly short order. They’re right, but the proteinmaxxer accepts his fate. Meanwhile the houseplantmaxxer has thick mats of algae sliming over every surface, the walls, the ceilings, swallowing the sofa, digesting the bookshelf and all its contents, blobbing and dribbling, wet in the middle of the bed, green on the windowpanes, covering everything except the UV lights and the massive pans of water left on a constant boil in every room, so the air stays oppressively, Cretaceously thick.

This is what it means to be a maxxer. We are a long way away from the optimisation of the self; to maxx is an intense form of asceticism. The maxxer is the person who willingly sacrifices every aspect of their lives except one, the maxximand, which is extended to infinity until it begins to develop the distance and vastness of a god.

Probably the world’s most prominent maxxer is a man called Braden Peters, who calls himself Clavicular. Clavicular is a looksmaxxer; his austerity is to make himself as beautiful as possible. If you’re good looking enough, you can ascend, break out of your genetic destiny and into a new order of being, where the subhumans will crawl after you with lolling tongues. Clavicular started looksmaxxing at the age of fourteen, injecting himself with testosterone. He also shoots anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, peptides, botox, and crystal meth. He’s had multiple plastic surgeries. His other secret is bonesmashing, which is exactly what it sounds like: he smashes his own cheekbones with a hammer so they grow back bigger. It’s impossible to know what he would have looked like if he hadn’t done all this, since his ‘before’ pictures all show a prepubescent child, but it’s hard not to conclude that he’s utterly ruined his body. He didn’t go through a normal puberty; his glands are completely incapable of producing testosterone by themselves, and if he ever stops taking the hormones he’ll rapidly decompose into a genderless lump. The various injections have also left him totally sterile; his balls are almost certainly fucked up in ways we can barely imagine. He is a meth addict. And while he really does have legions of lesser beings crawling after him with lolling tongues, they do all seem to be men.

Clavicular lives in a sort of nightmare clown world, where he is constantly being approached in ordinary shopping centres by small, strange, awkward men who say things like ‘I’m known in Orlando as the Asian Mogger. I would have the honour if you could verify me as the Orlando Asian Mogger.’ There are various misshapen freaks of nature, men with shoulders wider than they’re tall, sinister stalking giants on artificially lengthened legs, who travel across the country to stand next to him and compare physiques. Like a mythical gunslinger, the great mogger needs to constantly watch the horizon for whoever’s coming to mog him. Other men adore him in more nakedly eroticised ways. In one video, he’s live-streaming a fun casual hangout with Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, a bunch of other people sitting in silence looking at their phones, and menial staff vacuuming in the background. One of the men is berating a woman sat in Clavicular’s lap. ‘You are not an 8. You’re not an 8. You’re a thirsty 7, you’re asking for validation, and you’re sitting in a 10’s lap.’ ‘That’s kinda rude,’ she says. ‘That’s kinda rude,’ agrees Tristan Tate. ‘Clavicular’s at least an 11.’ Clavicular doesn’t say anything. What gives the scene its particularly haunting resonance is that throughout this exchange, he seems to be eating soup.

In all his interactions with women that aren’t directly supervised by a Tate brother, Clavicular is painfully passive and awkward. The women who like him are all of a type: hot but autistic beyond belief, brainrotted, barfing up a constant stream of overenthusiastic tryhard 4chan nazi jargon that he seems to find deeply embarrassing. Normal women treat him with undisguised contempt. He is constantly having his cortisol spiked by foids. It turns out that being maximally beautiful is not actually the same as maximising your chances of getting laid. Clavicular will never be a female sex symbol; that role goes to men like Slavoj Žižek and Danny DeVito. But maxxing is not optimisation. The maxxer is not trying to have an enjoyable life. He’s trying to reduce himself to a single principle.

Things get confused when the maxximand is also a generally upheld value like beauty. But every maxxer has his shadow, the person maxxing the opposite principle. Clavicular’s shadow is someone who calls himself The Crooked Man. The Crooked Man is a looksminimiser, which is another way of saying he’s an uglymaxxer. His strategy has been to spend a year working out only one side of his body, which has left him with an enormous bulging trap on one shoulder and nothing at all on the other. He looks like a cartoon monster. He stands around shirtless in his empty millennial-grey house, adrift in some suburb somewhere, grey walls, grey carpet, no decorations except cables snaking around on the floor, making video content. He is a kind of Platonic ideal of the maxxer, far more than Clavicular. The Crooked Man’s house appears to get zero natural light. All his gym equipment is at home; you can see him benching 225 on one side only in one of its many large and empty rooms. Plastic Venetian blinds. It’s night outside. It’s always night outside. The sun never shines on The Crooked Man. Incredible things are happening in America.

There’s a reason Clavicular has become the media’s go-to symbol for maxxing, even though The Crooked Man is a much better exemplar. He keeps things on a very comfortable terrain. Maxxing, the line goes, is an outgrowth of incel culture. It’s about men, the problem with men, the crisis of masculinity; it’s about how men are now facing the kind of toxic body politics that women have had to deal with forever, and how they’re developing their own hysterias in response; it’s about online extremism, it’s about the harmful narratives that seduce young men into various forms of misogyny; before long it’s about how we all need to put the kettle on and have a proper talk about our men’s mental health. They’re not entirely wrong; there really is a crisis of masculinity, it really is expressing itself through the mainstreaming of misogyny and the proliferation of a diseased relation to the self. It’s just that maxxing comes from something else entirely.

Despite what you might have heard, the word maxxing is not originally incel slang. Incels might have appropriated it, but it began with another kind of loser altogether, the tabletop role-playing gamer. When you’re creating a character in a game like Dungeons and Dragons, you get a limited number of points that can be spread over various attributes, intelligence and dexterity and so on. Most players go for a generally realistic spread with a few minor specialisations, and then spend their weekends happily pretending to be an elf who goes on adventures. But from the moment the game was published in the mid-1970s, another kind of player started spontaneously emerging. These people were called min/maxers, and instead of playing normally they would dump as many points as possible into a single stat and leave the others empty. They were generally uninterested in the storytelling aspect of the game; the characters they built were essentially just mathematically calibrated tools, and usually impossible to roleplay. They would do absolutely nothing until they saw an opportunity to deploy their one hypertrophied skill, at which point they would use it and instantly ruin everyone else’s fun. The min/maxers did not seem to be having very much fun themselves either. Whatever they were doing, it was governed by something more mysterious than enjoyment.

Maxxing is not about feelings. It’s not from inside us. It can’t be corrected with a healthier body image. It’s much less boring than that. Maxxing emerges as a strategy within a certain kind of game. Dungeons and Dragons is one such game; evolutionary processes are another. Nature is full of organisms that have adopted some form of maxxing as a reproductive strategy, even if they’re not usually very impressive. Extremophile bacteria are natural maxxers; so are some parasites and symbionts. Male fig wasps are wingless and blind; they spend their entire lives in the dark sweet world inside a fig. Their role is to mate with the female wasps that hatch alongside them and then chew a way out of the fig so the females can escape; afterwards the males are slowly digested by the fruit they were born in until they dissolve into its flesh. The females spend a few hours flying around in search of another fig to lay their eggs in, and then they’re consumed too. This is how figs are pollinated. The wasps are figmaxxing in a way that will forever be beyond us. But we are, in our own minor way, playing a similar game.

It wasn’t always this way. Maxxing is not a natural feature of human life; though most of human history it could barely exist. Take the early Middle Ages. Chris Wickham estimates that in the period 400-800 AD, around ninety percent of the European population were rural peasants, and almost everything they consumed was produced inside the household. Food, obviously: grain markets did exist, but they were generally used by landlords to offload surpluses; aside from armies, which are generally market-dependent, the only people who bought their own food were pastoralists. Textiles too; peasant women would have had to spend essentially every spare second spinning. The act of spinning fibre into thread took up around four-fifths of the labour that went into any garment, but we know weaving was also performed inside the home. Archaeological digs in early-medieval English villages keep unearthing loom-weights—stones with holes bored in them, used to keep threads taut—in sufficient numbers to imply that every household was producing its own cloth. To make effective nonporous ceramics you need an energy-intensive kiln, which peasant households running on a strict fuel budget can’t really afford. A lot of the time, instead of specialising, peasants simply chose not to have any nonporous ceramics. Pottery shards from the era were usually fired in bonfires instead of kilns. Where specialisation was unavoidable, like in the production of metal tools, or cash crops like wine or olives, the specialists would usually also need a grain field for their own subsistence needs. In such a situation, maxxing is almost impossible. It doesn’t matter what you think about women; you can’t reduce yourself to a single principle when you need to be able to farm crops, build and thatch a house, sew clothes, and occasionally die in someone else’s aristocratic squabble. You would starve long before you managed to extend your maxximand anywhere near infinity.

The only exception was a dedicated caste of pietymaxxers. These were, like all maxxers, celibate. In the early part of this period they would usually hermitmog the sincels by starving themselves in the desert; eventually this was formalised into a network of monastic hype houses. Throughout the medieval period, pietymaxxers would swear off food, whip themselves, or become anchorites, walled like a fig wasp into a tiny cell attached to their local church. It makes sense that this would have its germ in religion; if a maxximand is a principle extended until it resembles a god, then God can equally be described as a maxximand that’s lost all qualities except infinity. But the clergy could never really sustain it; the infrastructure wasn’t in place yet. Instead, there was a well-established monastic treadmill, in which new orders would spring up, committed to poverty and the mortification of the flesh, but within a generation they’d all be rapacious landlords drinking from silver goblets. There’s nothing more repulsive than a larping maxxer. Clergymen who’d decided to start living more holistically were frequently massacred in chiliastic peasant revolts.

What changed things was capitalism, but not in the way you might think. It’s entirely possible to have specialisation without capitalism; Richard Britnell concludes that by 1300, thirty to forty percent of all the grain grown in England was sold on the open market, and even subsistence farmers were actually getting a sizeable chunk of their food commercially, using the time saved to specialise in cash crops or artisan trades. You can imagine a noncapitalist world that still has people zooming around, delivering hamburgers to shutins who are so fixated on their own collarbones they’ve lost the ability to prepare their own food. But a division of labour isn’t enough; a game can only produce maxxing as a strategy if all players are formally equal.

Under feudalism, a landowner would never need to adopt maxxing, since they’re already in a superior position for reasons entirely unrelated to their individual qualities. A peasant would never bother, for basically the same reasons. A looksmaxxed villein is still just a villein. The only people who engaged in the practice were the first estate, who were vaguely committed to the notion that all souls are judged equally by God. Under capitalism, though, there’s a completely different kind of inequality. Everyone is an ultimately interchangeable stage in the realisation of capital; the difference between master and slave is a neutral and indifferent number. Suddenly, maxxing is viable. You can game the hierarchy by making yourself different, because under conditions of formal equality actual inequalities become massively significant. The most obvious thing to maxx is money itself, which is, like God, a kind of universal, abstract maxximand. But in time, those who don’t moneymaxx will end up in a similar position anyway, thanks to the rationalisation of industry.

In the early medieval system, everyone has to perform the exact same broad and variegated collection of tasks, which produce a range of totally unique objects. (The only product subject to industrial mass-production and standardisation was money; every coin needed to have the exact same weight and carry the exact same stamp.) The Taylorist high-industrial production line is the exact opposite. A basically infinite number of consumer goods are available, but all of them are regularised and identical. Individuals are unique, performing a completely different function, but that function is incredibly narrow. The vast range of human capabilities could be reduced down to a single motion, which the worker would have to repeat hundreds or thousands of times a day. The unity of the self is irrevocably cracked open; from now on it’s possible to keep just one function and discard everything else.

As you might have noticed, work in the developed countries is no longer dominated by production lines and time and motion studies. It’s worse. The palaeotechnic worker could at least pretend that it was only their body being broken down into a collection of possible movements, while their mind was still integral and intact. Not any more. The contemporary subject is a bundle of saleable traits and incompetencies. In a highly plastic and fluid labour market, what matters aren’t even your specific skills, since at any moment one of these could be automated into uselessness by AI. It’s a market in disembodied aspects, from ‘team player’ to ‘highly agentic.’ Although it’s pursued with less fervour now, it’s still possible to isolate and extend your sexuality or ethnic background, while the rest of you withers away. The aspects you extend don’t have to be strengths; it’s actually encouraged to specialise in being in some way incapable, which is how you end up with public spaces covered in bad poetry about having ADHD. We’re all playing the game that generates maxxers. But we are not all maxxers ourselves.

The difference between a maxxer and an ordinary striver or optimiser is infinity. Ordinary people have broken themselves apart into a bundle of miserable attributes, but all of them are contingent. At any point, the rationalised factory worker can be moved to a different station and subordinated to a different set of motions. But the maxxer only has one thing. Everything is on the line and nothing is in reserve. No cracks in the maxxer’s surface. They are whole and complete in a way the fractured masses are not; they’ve burned off everything about themselves other than their obsession. All that’s left is the need to be the most, to touch the furthest point of excess. When someone is under the spell of infinity, there’s an electricity about them. We might love them or despise them, but we’re obsessed with maxxers. Few people agree with Clavicular, but he’s got more people furiously thinking about the meaning of beauty than anyone since Kant. We write essays about maxxers; we blunderingly ape their behaviours; we spike their cortisol while they’re jestergooning at the club. This has nothing to do with what they merely are. If someone just happens to be extremely tall, that’s briefly interesting, but only for a moment. Every village has its gangly man. But if someone keeps undergoing surgeries to make themselves taller, if they’re constantly breaking and resetting their femurs, if they’re injecting black-market somatropin directly into their spinal column, suddenly we’re transfixed. The appearance of something superlunary in the world.

The twenty-first century is going to be a century of the maxxer. It won’t take many maxxers to make a century; when you drag yourself to the absolute furthest point in a distribution tail you leave a lot of turbulence in your wake. The twentieth century was a century of the masses, class and ethnic conflicts, nationalism and the great contests of history. The realist novel, the personal essay, the strip-mining of ordinary life for patterns and insights. Our century will not make nearly as much sense. All of us will be held hostage to the obsessions of a small group of mentally deranged and self-destructive freaks. Someone will emerge out of nowhere and start tonguemaxxing, and suddenly entire political orders will rise and fall on the density of the President’s circumvallate papillae. The kind of Marxist-historicist critique I’ve half-mockingly resurrected here is already becoming impossible. Already it’s crowded out by screeching eroticised resentment. Brief storms of interpretative fury. The future will not understand itself. There’s only one way to escape the magnetic chaos that’s coming, and live in a world that still holds together. You need to start maxxing yourself. You need to find a principle, any principle, and destroy yourself for it. How many apricots do you think you can fit in your mouth?

Goodness exists everywhere; evil was invented in Iran.

The first person to discover evil lived in the Airyanem Vaejah or the Expanse of the Aryans, a zone of scrubland between the cold mountains and the endless desert. He was a priest, but the priest of a cattle-herding people. His name meant Managing Camels. His father was called Possessing Grey Horses. You have to imagine a slightly shabby figure, living in the dry expanses, probably a few fleas in his beard. Later, the Iranians would build a great civilisation, cities, temples, an empire, but not yet. Most of the year he travelled with his herds like everyone else, but in the ritual season it was his role to crush the sacred plants, and mix them with river water, and give the bitter liquid to the initiates. They worshipped little gods, warrior deities; you could summon them with certain plants; they might join you on a cattle raid. In his thirtieth year, Managing Camels was collecting water from the River Daitya, when he saw a figure on the opposite bank. The figure was nine times taller than a normal person, and he also happened to be glowing. The figure told him to take off his clothes, and he did; when the figure beckoned him into the river he discovered he was somewhere else, in a place that seemed to be made out of infinite light, so bright he couldn’t see his own shadow, and in front of him was a being made of infinite light as well, the true and only God. In the story, the light gives him a few banal homilies. It tells him that the best thing in the world is to have good thoughts, the second-best is to speak good words, and the third-best is to do good deeds. Not particularly thrilling stuff, but when he returned to his drab physical world, Managing Camels was willing to renounce his gods and the gods of his ancestors and live in the wilderness, cast out by his clan, hated, a universal enemy. It must have been the intensity of that light, more than what it said. Managing Camels spent the rest of his life wandering this dull, gloomy, shadowy world, composing anguished hymns to his God. Some of them still survive. ‘To what land can I go, where can I flee? My people are cut off from me, the rulers of the land despise me. How am I to please you? I know why I am powerless and impotent. I have no herds and no people. I cry to you: give me the help a friend gives to a friend. Teach me through righteousness how to attain the Good Thought.’

This is not unusual. People have sudden visions of God all the time; sometimes, for no obvious reason, an individual human subjectivity disintegrates, the mind falls out like a bowling ball through a wet paper bag, and a cattle-herder from some drab scrubland on the fringes of Asia is briefly plunged into the luminous infinity of being. Deal with that, says God, and vanishes. No one’s immune, but it seems to happen to cattle-herders in particular. People with names like Managing Camels or Horselover Fat. The difference is that this time, the luminous infinity of being told Managing Camels that it was not alone. There is another one like me, it said, but in the same way that I am made of light, the other one is made of darkness.

In his hymns, Managing Camels explains: ‘In visions they reveal themselves as twins, good and evil in thought and word and deed. When they came together in the beginning, they created life and not-life. Those who act well have chosen wisely between the two. In the end, Worst Existence shall be to the followers of evil, but Best Existence to him that follows Right.’ The evil god is called Druj, or the Liar. The little warrior-gods the Iranians had sacrificed to in the past were really the teeming demons of the Liar, who are constantly trying to tear the universe apart. ‘They are demons of ruin, pain, and growing old, producers of vexation and bile, revivers of grief, the progeny of gloom, and bringers of stench, decay, and vileness, who are many, very numerous, and very notorious; and a portion of all of them is mingled in the bodies of men.’ God created a beautiful sky and the Liar tried to blot out the stars. God created an enormous primordial bull and the Liar slaughtered it. God created humans, and wanted us to live in eternal happiness, but the Liar gave us suffering instead. This is why the body dies. A swarm of tiny demons are in there, ravaging the place, tearing nucleotides out of your DNA.

In his own language, Managing Camels was called Zarathustra; his vision became the state religion for a succession of great and glorious Iranian empires, one after another, for nearly two thousand years. Before Zarathustra, the Iranians were grubby herdsmen on the rocky edge of the world; afterwards they formed the world’s first universal multiethnic state. The little peoples they conquered were fighting for their own little patch of land and their own local gods; the Iranians knew that history is the scene of a cosmic battle between good and evil, and their duty was to chase evil out of the earth.

Dualism makes a lot of sense. It’s the only solution to the problem of evil that really does. It’s easier if you want to live in an amoral universe, where humans suffer because we’re at the mercy of childish and fickle gods, or if there are no gods at all. But if you want to imagine a good, kindly, loving, rational principle behind the universe, eventually you’ll have to contend with the fact that things down here are not always good or rational. You can say that suffering is a result of our freedom: God wanted us to be free to choose good instead of evil, which means there has to be a certain amount of evil in the world. But that doesn’t mean there have to be earthquakes, and there are. Mark Twain imagines God creating the fly. ‘Persecute the sick child; settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting. Settle upon the soldier’s festering wounds in field and hospital and drive him frantic while he prays, and betweentimes curses, with none to listen but you. Harry and persecute the forlorn and forsaken wretch who is perishing of the plague, and in his terror and despair praying; bite, sting, feed upon his ulcers, dabble your feet in his rotten blood, gum them thick with plague-germs. Visit all; spare no creature, wild or tame; but wheresoever you find one, make his life a misery, treat him as the innocent deserve; and so please Me and increase My glory Who made the fly.’ No mortal human would create the fly, ‘except under an assumed name.’ Why would God?

You can try to even out the balance of this fly-buzzing world with a blissful afterlife, where all our suffering is rewarded, and sometimes a nasty afterlife as well, where horrible demons will grab whoever hurt you and got away with it and saw him in half down the crotch. This doesn’t really solve things either. If it’s possible to create a rational world, where goodness is rewarded and evil is punished, why does this world have the stamp of irrationality on it? You can say that we need immense misery and suffering so we can appreciate what is good. C.S Lewis: ‘A man has no concept of a straight line unless he has seen a crooked one.’ But if you went to a restaurant where a starving African child was suspended from the ceiling in a perspex box like David Blaine, I don’t know if it would make you more likely to enjoy your meal. At a certain point it makes a lot more sense to say that evil is not just privation, the absence of good, distance from God: evil is its own thing. There are two gods and one of them is evil; that’s why the world looks the way it does.

This does still leave one question. This other god: what’s his deal? Why is he like this? You could argue that he’s mindless. He doesn’t know why he destroys. He’s not volitional; he’s the second law of thermodynamics. There is a force in the universe that produces glowing stars and galaxies; there is also a force in the universe that’s currently trying to disperse everything that exists into a thin and featureless cloud of electrons, muons, and neutrinos. The Bundahishn has another answer. God and the Liar are twins, but they’re not the same. In the very beginning, when they came into being together, God could see the entire cosmos from his throne of light. He knew the Liar was there. But the Liar, in his abyssal cloud of darkness, thought he was alone. He didn’t realise he had a brother. He only discovered that there was something other than darkness when he floated out of his pit and caught the first faint ray of light. It was agony. God can endure the dark, but for the Liar light is unbearable. He keeps trying to destroy the universe because the existence of the universe is torture: because God—who always knew he was there, and knew exactly how this would affect him—is choosing to torture him. All the Zoroastrian sources agree that at the end of time there will be a Frashokereti, the Final Day when the Liar is defeated.

Even if dualism makes a lot of things much easier, non-dualists tend to find it upsetting. Mystical thought tends towards unity, what Freud called the ‘oceanic feeling’: I am the world, the world is me, a general milky oral-stage oneness. When people have spiritually transformative ayahuasca trips, they don’t usually experience reality as a field of self-sufficient Leibnizian monads. But dualism says that there is a scar in the world, and you will not be able to reduce reality to a single principle. Other people live in one coherent universe; Iranians are caught between two. Something creepy about it: these twilight people in their in-between world. It doesn’t matter if you dedicate your life and your civilisation to fighting evil: once you make evil an active principle in the world it’s there to call on, or there to call on you. The Greeks were darkly fascinated with the figure of the magos, the Iranian fire-sorcerers who whispered in the ear of the Shahanshah, interpreting his dreams, divining the stars, healing disease, controlling the weather, exposing dead bodies on towers of silence to be devoured by vultures, and summoning demons. These are the origin of our words magic, magician: a person who consorts with unclean supernatural powers to do harm to others, or, sometimes, a charlatan who pretends they can consort with unclean supernatural powers to do harm to others. In Pliny, Zarathustra is the first magician, but his ‘magic is detestable, vain, and idle, and though it has what I might call shadows of truth, their power comes from the art of the poisoner, not of the Magi.’

Still, something happened in the shatter zone between the Greek and Iranian worlds, from the Tigris to the Mediterranean. The Greeks might have thought Iranian cosmology was sinister and unwholesome, but the peoples in the Iranian orbit were fascinated by the strange spiritual doctrines of this people from the mysterious West. In particular, an esoteric teacher called Plato, who said that the world you perceive though the intellect is the true one, and the material world is false.

The difference is that Plato lacked a concept of evil. His creator is good; being good, ‘he wanted everything to become as much like himself as possible. This, more than anything else, was the most preeminent reason for the origin of the world’s coming to be. God wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible.’ The rational resembles God more than the material does, but even if the material resembles God very faintly, weighted down by necessity, it still points unerringly towards the Good. Plato lived in a placid static Greek aristocratic world, where everything is made of white marble and pleasingly proportioned, and the olive-harvest is ripening in the hillsides, and the Etesian winds blow bright salt-spray on the docks, on the slaves carrying barrels of good dark wine from the black-hulled ship, and the sun shines on everything and everyone is fuckable and everything is good. If you unleash the same idea on people like the Iranians, who can constantly feel evil grasping at them from underneath the surface of the universe, you get something else.

These days, maybe it’s a dispositional thing. First these ideas emerge in history, afterwards they emerge in psychology. There are some people who are capable of looking at this world, flies and earthquakes and all, and saying: it is good. When I was younger I found them terrifying and incomprehensible. To love a world where so many people are suffering feels morally wrong. Now, sometimes, I think I get it. The world exists, we’re here; what more could you possibly want? Philip Larkin, not usually the most cheerful man, called it ‘the million-petalled flower/ Of being here.’ (In a poem about death, admittedly, but aren’t they all?) I think it helps if you’re in love. But most people can’t do without the devil, even the ones who don’t believe in him. They need a name for the subterranean principle breathing wrongness into the world. When someone uses the words ‘late capitalism,’ you can’t really be sure at first whether they’re an actual historical materialist or whether they’re just using another name for Druj. He has lots of names these days.

A few people, though, go further. When I was much younger, I was one of them. Maybe it’s inevitable: any skinny, brainy kid who’s too spastic to play football with the other boys will end up seeing the world in the same way as the Mandaeans, and the Manichaeans, and the Basilidaeans, and the Elchasaites, and the Ophites, and the Zurvanites.1 The cults who said that there is no demon trying to break into the world: this is his house. You have been living in his house from the moment you were born. This body you think is yours: it belongs to the beast. A prison made of carrion. For some people, everything the senses touch is disgusting. ‘This world,’ says the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, ‘is a corpse-eater; all those who eat within it shall die themselves.’ The being that created this corpse-eating world is not made of infinite light. His name is Yaldabaoth, and he is a lion-headed serpent-demon, a blind idiot, howling and defective. According to the Pistis Sophia his realm is the outer darkness, which is the jaws of the dragon. ‘And out of the jaws of the dragon cometh all ice and all dust and all cold and all different diseases.’ But in his dark cloud of ice and disease, he thinks he is the only god. In the lowest depths of the cosmos he made this universe for himself; scattered its stars. He trapped a few small fragments of the divine light in his muddy little creation: we are those sparks. He appeared to Moses in a burning bush and told him to worship him. Right now, billions of people are giving praise to Yaldabaoth. We’re his hostages, and we don’t even realise it. ‘I forgot I was a king’s son, and became a slave to their king. I forgot the Pearl for which my parents had sent me.’

In a way, all this stuff was there from the start. Zarathustra says the evil god is a liar. What is lying? Creating a false world. But this new dualism is weirder, more tragic, than the old one. Once there was a good god who made the universe because he loved us, and an evil god who keeps trying to destroy it because he hates us. Now the good god still loves us; he’s trying to rescue us from the flesh. But Yaldabaoth loves us too. That’s why the evil spirit built us these dying, corpse-eating bodies; that’s why he built us this broken world. He wanted to make a home for us. Everything he creates is monstrous, but he’s trying. He doesn’t know.

Someone had to stand up for the devil; it ended up being Mansour al-Hallaj. In Arabic, a hallaj is a wool-carder, someone who spends their life doing the tedious work of combing big fluffy balls of wool until all the fibres are straight. Mansour al-Hallaj was an Arabised Iranian who really did work as a wool-carder, intermittently, throughout his life. His father was a wool-carder too. His grandfather was a Zoroastrian magus. Al-Hallaj moved around. He left his birthplace in southern Iran for Basra and Baghdad; he went to Mecca three times and Jerusalem once; he travelled into the depths of Asia up to the Oxus; he took a five-year sea-voyage to India. This was not unusual. The Islamic Golden Age was the best time to rootlessly roam Asia in search of spiritual wisdom until the invention of the Volkswagen camper van. In his travels al-Hallaj mixed with disreputable people, Christians and Qarmatians, magicians, yogis. He started preaching in market squares. Dicey mystical stuff. If you kindle your love for God, he said, if you really burn with love for God, eventually all the distinctions dissolve. One of his poems begins: ‘I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart/ I said, Who are you? He answered: You.’ Today, it’s very normal, boring even, for people to believe this kind of thing, the kind of people who like yoga and astrology and the worst music ever made; it was not such a boring idea in the Abbasid Caliphate. In particular, al-Hallaj’s enemies accused him of saying ana al-Haqq: I am the truth. He was, they said, declaring himself as a living god. He spent nine years in a kind of protective custody, trapped in the palace of the Caliph al-Muqtadir, where his enemies were always close, constantly intriguing to have him executed. It was during this imprisonment that he wrote his Kitab al-Tawasin, in which he gave the devil a voice.

In the traditional account, Iblis is the father of the Satans, a spirit (an angel or a djinn, it’s not clear) who rebelled against God and his creation. Iblis is the open enemy of mankind; he roams the world, trying to plant discord among the believers, whisper temptations, spread his petty lies, all to separate us from God, so that when the day comes, we will all join him in the fires of eternal punishment. The story of his disobedience is told a few times in the Qur’an. God tells the angels that he is going to create Adam. ‘I will create a mortal out of dried clay, formed from dark mud. When I have fashioned him and breathed My spirit into him, bow down before him.’ All the angels prostrate themselves except Iblis. ‘I will not bow to a mortal you created from dried clay, formed from dark mud.’ The origin of his evil is pride; God made him out of pure smokeless fire, which is better than clay. Iblis is expelled from Paradise, promising to deceive the descendents of Adam. God replies: ‘I will surely fill up Hell with you and whoever follows you from among them, all together.’

In the sixth chapter of the Tawasin, the Ta-Sin of the Beginning of Time and Equivocation, al-Hallaj tells a different version. Iblis is God’s greatest lover and companion. He knew God before the beginning of time. ‘There is no distance from you for me, since I became certain that distance and nearness are one.’ He doesn’t refuse to bow before Adam out of pride, but because he is a sincere and devoted monotheist, and can’t bring himself to worship anyone other than his beloved. ‘My denial is to affirm your purity; my reason remains disordered in you. What is Adam compared to you? Who am I, Iblis, to differentiate from you?’ So God exiles him, deforms and mutilates his face, and reduces him to a wandering demon. God hates Iblis, but Iblis is still in love with God. His love is even purer now that there’s no possible expectation of reward. A pious human follows God so he can spend eternity in the gardens of Paradise, but on the Last Day Iblis will go to the Fire for his piety, and he’ll go full of love, regretting nothing.

‘My companion is Iblis,’ al-Hallaj wrote. ‘There is no mission except that of Iblis and Mohammed.’ At the end of his nine years imprisoned in the palace, al-Hallaj’s defenders fell out of favour with an easily-manipulated Caliph. Something to do with fiscal policy: al-Hallaj was just collateral damage. One morning, he was led to the banks of the Tigris, where a crowd was already waiting. They watched as al-Hallaj was whipped five hundred times until his back had almost disintegrated. The executioners cut off his hands and his feet, then they cut out his eyes. Blind and mutilated, he was lashed to a post, where the crowd pelted him with stones. An old woman was heard shouting: ‘What right does a little wool-carder have to talk about God?’ The executioners cut off his ears, then his nose, then his tongue; finally, just in time for evening prayers, they removed his head. Then they set the body on fire and swept the ashes into the river. His head, mutilated like Iblis, was sent back to Iran to be mounted over a bridge.

That didn’t dissuade people. Iranians had given the world the concept of evil, and the idea that at the end of time all the good and evil mingled together in the world would finally be separated out. Without the revelation by the River Daitya, Islam would have been impossible. But as soon as you draw the distinction it starts to dissolve, and once they’d become Muslim the Iranians started finding all the ways that good and evil are really the same. After al-Hallaj, a chain of Iranian mystics kept returning to his theme, the devil as the tragic lover of God. Maybe the greatest of these was the eleventh-century Sufi Ahmad Ghazali. Ahmad Ghazali was born in the city of Tus in eastern Iran. A hundred years beforehand, it had been home to the poet Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh, the greatest achievement of Iranian literature. A hundred years afterwards, the city would fall to the Mongol general Subutai, who would tear down every building and kill every living person in its walls until where the city had stood there was only a desert littered with broken masonry and human bones. In the period in between, Ahmad Ghazali wrote poems about love. According to tradition, his father was another wool-maker, who died young and left his two boys in the care of a local Sufi. (He must have been a customer. Sufis are named after the simple cloak worn by the mystic preacher; the word literally means one who wears wool.) Ahmad Ghazali grew up to be a pious Muslim and a sincere follower of the devil. ‘Whoever does not learn monotheism from Iblis,’ he said, ‘is an unbeliever.’ He wrote imaginary dialogues between Iblis and Moses. Most dangerously, he wrote that when Iblis refused to bow before Adam, he was disobeying God’s amr, or command, but obeying his iradah, or will. In other words, God didn’t really mean it; God, the unerring, the most truthful, is capable of telling a lie. Actually, it’s worse than that. The word amr has a special significance in Islam; it appears in a famous verse at the end of Surah Yasin: ‘His only command, when he wills something to be, is simply to say to it: Be! And it is.’ Which means that the divine command that created the world might also be a lie.

If Ahmad Ghazali avoided suffering the same fate as Mansour al-Hallaj, it’s probably because of his older brother. Abu Hamid Ghazali is a strange figure; a character from a midcentury American novel who just happened to have been born in eleventh-century Iran. The younger brother was into allegories and mysticism, meditations on divine love; Abu Hamid was a square, straight-laced, practical. Instead of the Sufi mysteries, he studied fiqh; Islamic jurisprudence, big dusty books of legal opinion. Smart career move. He ended finding a good job in the civil service under another Tus native, the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, who was at this point single-handedly governing the entire Seljuk state. Ghazali was a good bureaucrat; he rose through the ranks and tried to ignore the nagging feeling that something in his life was wrong. A man in a grey flannel turban. Eventually he was rewarded with every civil servant’s greatest hope: a cushy sinecure at a university. Nizam al-Mulk had set up a string of Nizamiyyas, free theological and philosophical universities, across the Seljuk Empire; Ghazali became a professor at the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, the most prestigious of them all. Duties were light. He read, he lectured, he strolled around the quad. Early evening, autumn leaves, tweed jackets, sexual dysfunction. He was desperately unhappy. His life was spiritually hollow. He writes in his intellectual autobiography, the Deliverance from Error: ‘I considered my activities—the best of them being public and private instruction—and that in them I was applying myself to sciences unimportant and useless in this pilgrimage to the hereafter. Then I reflected on my intention in my public teaching, and I saw that it was not directed to God, but rather was instigated and motivated by the quest for fame and widespread prestige. So I became certain that I was on the brink of a crumbling bank and already on the verge of falling into the Fire, unless I set about mending my ways. Mundane desires began tugging me with their chains to remain as I was, while the herald of faith was crying out: “Away! Up and away! Only a little is left of your life, and a long journey lies before you! All the theory and practice in which you are engrossed is eyeservice and fakery!”’ Maybe his weird bohemian little brother had been right all along.

Ghazali lost the ability to speak. ‘I tried to teach for a single day, to gratify the hearts of the students who were frequenting my lectures, but my tongue would not utter a single word. Food and drink became unpalatable to me so that I could neither swallow broth easily nor digest a mouthful of solid food.’ His doctors thought he would die; he saved himself by running away from Baghdad and his career. At first he moved to Damascus, but people started to gossip that he’d fallen out of favour with the government. He spent a few years in Mecca and Medina; finally, he writes, ‘I, the person most unlikely to return to it, came back to my native land.’ In one version of the story, the Ghazali brothers agreed to switch roles: Ahmad took over the lectures at the university; Abu Hamid went back to Tus to live in solitude, seeking God.

The last book Ghazali wrote in Baghdad, just as he was entering the full throes of his spiritual crisis, was his Incoherence of the Philosophers, a dense repudiation of the philosophy of ibn Sina, which was at the time totally hegemonic in the Islamic world. Ibn Sina was another Iranian, from a village near Bukhara. Like Ghazali, he’d slowly made his way west, teaching and studying in the great cities of Iran. Ibn Sina had developed a novel proof of the existence of God, which he called the Proof of the Truthful. There are, he said, two classes of being. There are possible existents, which are equally capable of existing or not existing. A shoe, a tooth, Iran. If a particular possible existent does in fact exist, it must have a cause; it can’t pop into being all by itself. So there’s a chain of possible existents, all causing each other. This could, theoretically, go on infinitely. But what about the sum total of all possible existents, the set that nonphilosophers call the world? You can’t say that it exists because of another possible existent, because that existent would already be part of the category in question. Therefore there has to be another kind of being, a necessary existent, something that exists because it logically has to exist. We call that existent God. QED.

Most philosophers would have considered the job done there, but ibn Sina went further. He wanted to prove the existence of a specifically Islamic God, one who is not just a first mover and an uncaused cause but also beneficent and merciful and the author of the Qur’an. All these things, he argues, are necessary attributes of a necessary existent. God must be singular and unique, because otherwise you’re introducing dependency within the necessary. He must be unchanging, because any altered states would be contingent. At one point, ibn Sina says that it’s possible to derive all of the ninety-nine names of God in the Qur’an from logical first principles. In fact, absolutely everything about his God is logically necessary. All he has is essence. He is perfectly good, because it would be a contradiction for him not to be perfectly good. He created the world because having created the world is implied by his existence, which means he must have already created the world at the beginning of time. (In ibn Sina’s language, the world eternally emanates from him, like light from the sun.) He revealed the Qur’an to Mohammed, but it isn’t as if he really had a choice. Humans are imperfect and contingent, which means we have free will, but God does not. If, in ibn Sina’s universe, you managed to ascend through the seven heavens, past the rivers of Paradise and the tiers of chanting angels, to come face to face with God himself, you will find his face empty, lifeless, a skull. God is a cosmic automaton. Adorno said that ‘existence cleansed of demons takes on, in its gleaming naturalness, the numinous character which former ages attributed to demons.’ Ibn Sina’s universe has that numinous character. Something far more evil than Yaldabaoth is this mindless zombie-god, ruling the universe on autopilot.

This outraged Ghazali too. He needed God to be the answer to his life, not the answer to the origin of the set of possible existents. In his Incoherence, he explains why ibn Sina’s entire structure of thought is unsound. He shows that it’s perfectly possible to use the Proof of the Truthful to demonstrate that there are two necessary existents, or any number of them. But those two necessary existents would have to be different from each other in some way, or their duality would be unintelligible. (Maybe one is made of light and one is made of darkness.) Therefore, not all qualities of a necessary existent are themselves necessary. He shows that the Proof of the Truthful is incoherent, since if it’s necessary that God created the world, then that means a necessary existent logically depends on a possible one. He lays out a host of proofs that the universe has not existed eternally. All of this is in numbered propositions, using the precise language of philosophical reason.

Most of all, he insists that God is not a helpless subject of the laws of logical necessity. He has a choice, he could have decided to create the universe or not to create it, and even now he can do absolutely anything he wants. In fact, Ghazali ends up going much further than that; by the seventeenth chapter he’s arrived at a position just as strange as ibn Sina’s, just in the opposite direction. God, he says, is the only volitional agent; God chooses everything that happens. When you hold a piece of cotton to a fire and it burns, that’s not the fire doing it. ‘As for fire, which is inanimate, it has no action. For what proof is there that it is the agent? They have no proof other than observing the occurrence of the cotton burning on contact with the fire. Observation only shows occurrence, but does not show the occurrence by the fire, or that there is no other cause for it.’ God is burning the cotton. When you drop an object, God pulls it to the ground. When you point a gun at someone and shoot, God drives a bullet into their body. Every terrible thing that’s ever been done on this earth was done by God and no one else. He fills the world with flies. Most of the time he chooses to act so the world looks like it’s governed by natural laws, but at any moment he might change his mind. Sometimes there are miracles. And sometimes, he might do something that seems to violate every law of righteousness and justice. Like, for instance, demanding that Iblis commit shirk and bow down before a creature made of mud and clay. And when this happens to you—and it will, one day it will—you need to choose between staying true to the measured, orderly, lifeless god of the philosophers, or the wild, radically free god that actually exists, unconstrained in the world and grinning like a demon.

What Ghazali can’t have known is that his mental breakdown was one of the hinges of history, a moment where the world could go in two very different directions, and God chooses which. This, at least, is the conclusion of a strain of historiography from Max Weber on, in which Ghazali had essentially doomed the entire Muslim world to backwardness. The crude version says that Islamic science basically stopped in its tracks after Ghazali, which is obviously untrue. But successful capitalist societies do seem to emerge out of a particular relation to nature. The world must not be living or holy; it’s a dead mechanism, and one human beings can learn to master. What ibn Sina offered was a hyperpuritanism, a giant, mutant, Islamicate version of Weber’s Protestant worldview, in which not just the physical world but God himself is an inert lump of raw material, totally passive before the rational laws of nature. If this idea had taken root, maybe there would have been an industrial revolution in Iran, six hundred years early. Maybe we’d all be exploring outer space by now; maybe humanity would have been wiped out in a nuclear war half a millennium ago. But instead, it was Ghazali’s ideas, not ibn Sina’s, that became official: that the world is fundamentally miraculous and mysterious. It should be obvious what side I’m on here, but beautiful ideas don’t always make you rich. In the end, it was a bunch of bog-dwelling savages from the fringes of northern Europe who ended up inventing modernity instead.

The last thousand years of world history are the least interesting bit; you can skip most of it without missing much. In Iran empires sprang up, prospered, decayed, and broke apart. Muzaffarid Timurid Safavid Afsharid Qajar, but by the end they were being menaced by an entirely new kind of foreign dynast: Russians, British, Americans. Desperate attempts to catch up, modernise the economy, build factories, buy French Impressionist paintings of women with their tits out, hang them in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, kidnap your political critics and torture them to death in underground cells. And it seemed to be working. Iran in the 1970s had great gouts of oil money, GDP growing at 11% a year, new heavy industry, rapid urbanisation, Googoosh in a miniskirt on the TV. But a lot of all that urbanisation was taking place because the White Revolution had destroyed all the familiar idiocies of rural life, and now millions of peasants had fled to the cities to live in shanties and slums, houses made of car parts and plastic sheeting, furious in a world that no longer made sense, and when the revolution came it wasn’t the progressive socialist revolution that would cast off the last vestiges of feudalism and bring Iran back into the light, but something completely different. In 1979, the future wasn’t the future any more. Before Thatcher or Reagan, the progressive tide of the twentieth century broke when the Ayatollah stepped off his Air France flight to Tehran. And here we are.

Something bad has happened in Iran. Around the start of the year, millions of people came out into the streets demanding an end to the Islamic Republic. For a moment everyone outside the country started acting as if the mullahs were about to actually lose their grip on power: any day now, any moment, the Iranian people will shrug off the theocrats like a veil and turn into a nice liberal democracy. It didn’t happen. Khamenei is still in the Office of the Supreme Leader; the protesters are no longer in the streets. Something happened, which those of us outside the country might not be able to understand for a long time, but there are clues. Photos of body bags piled up in hospitals, shaky phone footage of blacked-out cities and constant automatic gunfire. They’ve been killing people; a lot of people.

Some of my comrades on the left have been discussing this in strangely familiar terms. No one likes seeing piles of body bags, sure, but you have to understand that there’s a wider context. This world is the site of a cosmic battle between good and evil, the American world-empire against the resistance, and the Islamic Republic is on the side of the resistance. For two years, Israel massacred the people of Gaza, and in all that time the only country in the world willing to take serious action against them was the Islamic Republic. Their enemies in the region are monsters: fat sybaritic oil sheikhs, gacked up jihadi headchoppers, al-Qaeda cadres in suits and ties, dead-eyed Zionist psychos, genocidaires of every stripe, cynics and fanatics, sex slavers, rapists. Meanwhile, what did the protesters want? Well, a lot of them wanted the Shah back. Reza Pahlavi, some dumb sixty-year-old rich kid who’s lived most of his life in the suburbs of Washington DC. Who celebrated when what is notionally his own country was bombed by Israel. The protesters want to abandon the Palestinians, all so they don’t have to wear a bit of cloth on their heads. They want to give up the struggle against evil for consumer goods and porn. So because of this, the Iranians are wrong to oppose a government that kills them.

They’re not entirely wrong. The failed revolution in Iran really was a battle between good and evil; the Islamic Republic really is on the side of good, and the protesters really are on the side of evil. If I’ve spent five thousand words muddying these terms around in history before limping to the present day, this is why. The Islamic Republic has staked all its legitimacy as a state on being on the side of good. It’s survived as one of only two non-Arab non-Sunni states in the Middle East by organising itself entirely in opposition to the other one. In most countries, foreign policy is an expression of domestic policy; in Iran it’s the other way round. That’s how it maintains the support of a big enough chunk of the population; this is why its legal code can define anti-government protest as waging war against God. But what does it actually mean for Iran to oppose the American world-empire? It means selling drones to Russia so they can murder random people in their apartments in Kiev. It means pointlessly impoverishing their own country. It means that millions of young Iranians now hate the Palestinians, truly hate them, would happily let Israel kill them all, because the indignity and unfreedom of the Islamic Republic has always been imposed on them as their pious duty to the suffering people of Palestine. The Islamic Republic has done what none of the secular states in the region ever could, and turn its people against Islam. By some measures, Iran is now the least religious state in the Middle East, with a smaller proportion of Muslims than Israel has non-Hiloni Jews. The protesters have been torching mosques.

The protesters wanted the freedom to do evil. But I’m starting to think that that’s simply what freedom is, the ability to do the wrong thing. Ibn Sina’s God can only ever do or be the best possible thing, so he’s a lifeless automaton. As human beings, we have the gift of ignorance and evil. We struggle through a world we do not understand, and every choice we make is wrong. We’re lucky enough to live surrounded by a gorgeous variety of imperfect forms, and not the monotony of the good. Every vision of the purely and eternally good ends up summoning some kind of brain-melting horror. If it’s not the corpse-god it’s a cosmic torturer, or a god that personally devours the flesh of starving children. Strangely, though, our normal everyday finitude does not. I think this goes for political freedom as much as metaphysical freedom. Freedom is the freedom to be evil, to do and say bad things instead of good ones. If you choose evil, a few good things might happen, but only sparingly, and by accident. If you choose good, though, they absolutely never will.

It’s not easy, having the holy curse of prophecy. I sit in the lotus position on my mountain, high above the clouds, trying to pick out some helpful and practical prophecies to bring back down the mountain for you. Meanwhile the entire future of the universe crashes continually around my ears. Since you’re not a prophet, you have no idea what it’s like. Imagine having to pick out the one voice saying something interesting in an entire football stadium of people whispering nonsense like ‘OnlyFans for pets’ and ‘They’re going to come out with a new flavour of Fray Bentos pie, it’s a sushi flavoured pie with lashings of rich onion gravy’ and ‘Noel Fielding necrophile allegations’ and ‘Asteroid impact, millions dead.’

What makes this worse is that some of you people have started climbing up the mountain while this is happening, just to taunt me about my supposedly failed prophecies. I’m floating through the infinity of things yet to come, and meanwhile some cross-eyed rustic keeps poking me in the ribs with a stick. Hey mister, he says, listen here mister big prophet, you said that ‘the second Donald Trump presidency will be dominated by a kind of apolitical populism, directed more against seed oils and xenoestrogens than imports, migrants, or the liberal classes,’ and guess what, he’s just put tariffs on the whole world. Guess you must be feeling pretty stupid now, huh? In fact, over the course of the last year there’s been a constant pilgrimage of gurning slime-farmers wending their way up my mountain, coming to tell me exactly how apolitical the second Donald Trump administration has been. Hey mister prophet, they say, the Department for Homeland Security is posting sonnenrad edits. Hey mister prophet, government cronies keep making straight-arm salutes. Hey mister prophet, Charlie Kirk tried to smug at some libs in Utah and one of them shot him through the fucking neck, right as he was talking about gang violence statistics mister prophet, how’s that for apolitical, whaddya think about that?

It’s exhausting, having to live among people trapped in time. All you can see is the present that’s right in front of you; I’m being sucked off by aliens in the twenty-eighth century. Yes, Donald Trump put tariffs on the entire world, including an island inhabited solely by penguins. What happened next? Right now, the US is selling its most advanced chips to China, and until 2027 the tariff on semiconductors is a big fat zero. This has been the pattern all year: Trump swings his fists about, trying to look like he’s engaged in some kind of genuine political contention, but there’s nothing there. The murder of Charlie Kirk was supposed to be his Reichstag Fire, the beginning of an all-out life-or-death struggle against the left. What actually happened? Three months on, Kirk’s widow is leaping around in a sparkly costume at TPUSA AmericaFest. The man’s cultural legacy consists of an AI-generated song called We Are Charlie Kirk, the ‘kirkification’ meme, which is where you replace a celebrity’s face with Kirk’s, and the word ‘lowkirkenuinely’ (lowkey+kirk+genuinely). Everyone who still remembers the man takes his death as a piece of fundamentally apolitical kitsch. It’s already retro: fun but tacky 2025iana. This is what will happen to you if you devote your life to politics in a fundamentally apolitical world. You will be a joke when you die. Meanwhile, Trump is inviting Zohran Mamdani to the White House, gazing up in admiration at this handsome young socialist, wonderful guy, we all want the same things. I prophesied that there would be zero political events in 2025, and lowkirkenuinely I was right.

Absolutely everything else I prophesied has also come to pass. I said that in 2025 AI video would finally become indistinguishable from reality, and as a result ‘there will never be another interesting AI video again.’ It’s now possible to flawlessly imitate anyone doing anything, but somehow over the last twelve months nothing remotely newsworthy has come of this terrifying new power. The closest was an AI-generated Christmas advert released by McDonald’s in the Netherlands. The gist of the thing was the Christmas is awful, so you may as well spend all of December in McDonald’s, eating one hamburger after another, until it’s over. There was not a single shot that couldn’t have been just as easily generated by pointing a camera at an object and filming it. Unknown trillions have been invested in this technology, all to reproduce something that already exists. ‘At the very most,’ I wrote, ‘AI will replace some forms of B-roll. It will be the least consequential technology of your life.’ I was right. I prophesied the return of ‘Manbooks: books for men,’ books that aren’t obsessed with therapeutic interiority, now you can’t walk down the street in London without seeing someone ostentatiously tote around a copy of Flesh by David Szalay. (The next step is for someone to write a book in which something actually happens, but that might be beyond our abilities at the moment.) Most prophetically of all, I said that as Twitter’s cultural cachet waned, it wouldn’t be replaced by Bluesky or Threads or Substack, but the real world. Not in the sense that everyone would put aside all this frothing online hysteria and just focus on their actual lives—I meant that instead of trying to whip up cancel mobs on social media, people would just start physically attacking each other. ‘As all the other Twitter methadones stop working, expect an upswing in bizarre and unaccountable acts of public violence and private revenge.’ The Charlie Kirk assassin scratched a bunch of tweets into the bullets he fired. ‘If you read this, u r gay lmao.’ This is my curse. I’m always right.

Anyway, I have once again returned from the mountain with a bundle of prophecies for the year ahead. Last year’s were generated with astrology, and the year before’s with Tarot; this time I’ve been reading the tea leaves. Here is the shape of your next twelve months:

Tasseography is fun: less like reading Tarot cards, and more like reading dreams. You have to distill the shapes yourself out of the general psychic gloop, and every guide to their meanings is provisional and contingent. What does this look like to you? I’ll tell you what it looks like to me. I see the big blob on the left as a prawn, with its square head bristling with antennae, turning back to look over its tail as it jealously clutches its pale brood of eggs. Crustaceans in tea leaves are supposed to represent opportunism, faithlessness, someone that will betray you. But what stands out to me is the prawn’s posture, bent over its own tail. This year will be a year of reversals, things going in precisely the opposite way to the one you thought. A logic that stretches so far in one direction that it suddenly recoils into its opposite. This is your 2026.

Obesity is back

GLP agonists—that’s ozempic, wegovy, grey-market Chinese retatrudite, etc—are a class of drug that can, as far as we can tell, fix absolutely everything that’s wrong with you. They will make you thin. They will help you stop drinking, stop gambling, stop taking heroin, stop having sex with evil people, and stop listlessly scrolling on your phone all night until you’re numb enough to sleep. You will no longer experience gender dysphoria. You will become smarter, and also happier. You will experience improved powers of memory. Your heart, liver, and kidneys will all function more powerfully. The drugs can reverse some of the major signs of ageing and will almost certainly increase your lifespan. It’s possible that you will become immortal. We don’t know yet. It hasn’t been studied. But it’s entirely possible that taking ozempic will turn you into a god. You will be a gorgeous, ageless, smart and skinny god, and as long as you keep injecting yourself with the stuff you will never die. You can get it on the NHS for £9.90 a month.

A lot of people are very upset about this. If you can just fix everything with a simple injection, the world is out of balance. Somewhere, there has to be a price. A portrait in the attic. In a decade or two, the ozempic users need to start bursting out in novel and surprising cancers. When they breed, these gorgeous ageless smart and skinny gods need to give birth to something monstrous, apelike, froglike, forked tongue mewling, the dumb festering animal they thought they’d transcended, bursting gorily out the womb with razor-sharp claws. And maybe that will happen. I’m not a pharmacologist. But I don’t think it needs to; the intended effect is enough.

GLP agonists work by interrupting the reward systems that produce compulsive behaviour. Emotional eaters end up joylessly mashing up material in their mouths when they remember they need the stuff to live, but not deriving any particular pleasure from the process. Gamblers notice that they’ve just let a tenner vanish into the slot machine for no good reason, and decide to call it a night. In a way, these drugs have changed nothing. I’ve been saying for years now that our problem is no longer not getting the things we desire, but not knowing how to desire anything at all. The utopians of the last century wanted a world without want, and we got it. Peptides are just a crude literalisation of that thesis. The future is a Buddhist paradise of jabbering, emaciated, undesiring arahats. One great global Wicked press tour.

Except it isn’t, because the horrible side effects these people might really regret aren’t the ones you read on the label, but the ones you read about in Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu. Once being gorgeous ageless smart and skinny is universally available, it’ll no longer represent any kind of cultural capital, and the only thing that can shock us out of the current doldrums of desire is if asceticism becomes déclassé. Right now, too much overt sexuality is considered vaguely tacky, but not for long. Nothing more valuable in a porndead world than the hunger in the eye, the violent propulsion towards life and death. Stupidity too: isn’t there something deeply extravagant about stupidity? Most of all, though, if everyone is immortal, then death becomes a luxury product. Right now, hyper-wealthy fintech lizards are competing to retire as early as possible, thirty, twenty-five; before long they’ll be competing to die. Bryan Johnson will be smoking two packs a day. It takes a lot of money to be bored with existence, and dying is the most sumptuous and extravagant thing imaginable. It also requires a massive quantity of cultural competence to do it right. You can’t get ChatGPT to do it for you. You can’t learn it in some cram school for nerds. There are no second chances. You can only do it once.

These things will take time. In 2026, though, semaglutide will do what a decade of body positivity couldn’t, and make obesity fashionable. Not any obesity, obviously. Doctors disagree, but there are clearly two ways of being dangerously overweight. There’s the spreading shapelessness that comes from eating lots of deep-fried snacks or frankly anything delivered to your door, food that comes in styrofoam and booze from plastic bottles, blasting your brain with short-form video content while you joylessly ingest. This is entirely different from the taut spherical shape you can achieve if you’re actually hungry.

There is a way of being fat that requires you to regularly eat a dozen oysters if they’re in season, a smoked eel or two, and obviously crabmeat, sucked wetly out the creature’s joints, maybe just a few plump lamb’s livers glazed with Madeira, a veal brain croquette, some great sluglike kidneys in a mustard sauce, a pig’s foot stuffed with sweetbreads and morels, maybe, why not, a jar of rabbit rillettes with cornichons and buttered toast, before the main dish, a great wodge of game pie, thick flakes of buttery pastry, steaming purple melange of terrified animals with juniper berries and little fragments of shot, served alongside pommes dauphinoise and haricots verts gently glossed in butter, and once it’s done an oloroso sherry, half a dozen rum babas doused in a pint of cream, and a crumbly pile of Stilton alongside a smaller mound of wrinkling decorative grapes, the whole thing washed down with three or four bottles of good claret and concluded with a fernet digestif. If you feel like you’re going to burst or be sick, you’re doing it wrong. This is not a special occasion; this is Tuesday. You should be able to play a full game of tennis afterwards. Do it right, and you will be rewarded with the most desirable body of 2026.

Britain becomes the world’s first censorship superpower

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Infoterrorists have sabotaged the Santa Claus Parade in Brantford, Ontario. Thirty thousand people line Dalhousie Street to watch Santa go by in his mechanical reindeer sleigh, sponsored by GrandBridge Energy. Adorable little kids, cheeks red against the cold, eyes coal-black with wonder, standing on tiptoes for a glimpse of the great Christmas magus. Santa, the Santa, great potency, ancient king, who judges the world from his icy seat at the lifeless pole, and who will, for no clearly discernible reason, shortly be delivering them a Bluey Supermarket Play Set with fifteen pieces, including an exclusive Bingo figure—he’s here. He’s coming here, touching earth in this extremely medium-sized city in the flat cornlands of peninsular Ontario. A miracle. Magic beyond words. Instead, something terrible happened. Along the parade route, someone had left a series of terrible, obscene messages. SANTA IS FAKE, SANTA ISN’T REAL, YOUR PARENTS ARE SANTA, and YOUR FAMILY BUYS YOUR PRESENTS. The parade nearly tipped over into riot. Hundreds of parents trying to tear down the offending messages before they polluted the children. Fistfights, small fires. Hundreds of calls to the police. Two people mistakenly thought to be the perpetrators were very nearly lynched. Nobody is allowed to interfere with our right to nakedly lie to small children.

You can understand why they were so angry. This particular lie is vast, and it depends on a total omertà among all the conspirators. It’s been going for decades, centuries even, and the corruption goes all the way to the top. In 1961, a girl called Michelle wrote to President Kennedy, asking about Santa Claus. He wrote back: ‘You must not worry about Santa Claus. I talked with him yesterday and he is fine. He will be making his rounds again this Christmas.’ Michelle wrote to JFK because she assumed that surely the President of the United States could be trusted to tell the truth to an American citizen, and he lied through his teeth. The media is in on it too. In 1897, another brave young truthseeker wrote in to the New York Sun to try to understand the world. ‘Papa says if you see it in the Sun it’s so. Please tell me the truth: is there a Santa Claus?’ How did they reply? They lied. ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.’ Newspapers reprint that response every year, drumming in the falsehood by sheer force of repetition. Corporations: every consumer-facing firm on earth will lie to their consumers that Santa is real. Obviously, the military-industrial complex is also involved. Every year, NORAD—the North American Aerospace Defence Command—pretends to track Santa’s movements on his reindeer sleigh across the world. Radar arrays swivelling, THAAD interceptors prepared to blow Santa out the sky at a moment’s notice. All that machinery, all those enormous defence budgets, all those kickbacks, to track an airborne object that doesn’t even exist…

But it doesn’t stop there. The tentacles of this thing reach into every corner of society. An architecture of deception so intricate it borders on absurdity. You can literally meet the man, sit on his lap at a shopping centre or your local library, tell him exactly what you want for Christmas—but it’s not him. There’s a global network of impostors. They even have special institutions, like the Charles W Howard Santa Claus School in Midland, Michigan, where they train these operatives in the arts of deceit. Your teachers, whose job it is to tell you the truth about the world: every single one of them is deliberately, knowingly lying to you. Even your parents are in on it. The world you think you inhabit is not the real world.

Some questions. Why do they do this? What does this conspiracy achieve? Why is it more wonderful and magical for children to believe that their gifts don’t come from their parents, who love them, but some stranger in the North Pole? We’ll get there. Most urgently, though: if they can lie about Santa, what else can they lie about? What is Santa Claus, if not a case zero for the propaganda model of society?

Like most people, when I was around twelve years old I suddenly discovered that society was made of lies. Everyone else inhabited the make-believe world sold to them by the capitalist media, but I could see through it; I knew the truths you’re not supposed to know. Advertisers really just want you to buy their products! Schools are really just there to give you skills for the workplace! Society is actually ruled by the government! This is probably a necessary step in the road towards political maturity; eventually you grow up and notice that practically everyone in society claims to be the only person brave enough to tell the truth in a world of lies. It’s weird: the more people there are insisting that the truth is being systematically covered up, the unlikelier it seems. It doesn’t help that most of the clandestine truth on offer is either obvious to the point of uselessness (‘Did you know racism is actually bad?’) or straightforwardly evil and incorrect (‘Did you know racism is actually good?’). So you end up concluding that while there might be different interpretations of how the world works, all the facts are, more or less, known. But then, sometimes, something happens.

Six years ago, something happened to Jeffrey Epstein in a prison cell in New York. I found it hard to reconcile with the basically sensible Marxist materialism I was using to understand the world. I thought social reality was essentially composed of surplus labour and the declining rate of profit, but Epstein seemed to suggest that there are things happening in the shadows that I had never imagined. In a way, it was like discovering, as a grown adult, that no, Santa Claus really is real. Santa’s implicit role is to be the guardian of the secret of the commodity-form. He hides the knowledge that all the wonderful presents are actually just a collection of exchange-values. The primordial forces of the world are fundamentally indifferent to little children, who tend not to actively participate in the labour or commodity markets. (Did you think it was a coincidence that Santa is a big guy with a big white beard, known for his impressive drinking abilities, and associated with the colour red?) Epstein’s secret is the opposite. Whoever it was pulling his strings, they were happy to let this failed maths teacher play around with their billions, pretending to be some kind of genius investor. Money is just a toy. Beyond a certain level it doesn’t really matter at all. The world really runs on stranger stuff. Magic wishes, sacrifices, the circuits of desire. Spooky flash photos of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump sharing verrucas in a hot tub. Somehow, this has to do with the fate of nations. War and revolution. Cities bombed into rubble in the lands of Armageddon. And children are not incidental; they’re at the ugly centre of the whole thing.

Is it possible for an entire social structure to be based on lies? Is it possible for a society to pretend to be something completely different to what it actually is? The ethnographic record says yes. In fact, it’s the norm.

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From 1994 to 1998, a journal called Philosophy and Literature held a bad writing contest. Philosophy and Literature is a kind of harumphing Scrutonian publication for people who think the academy’s lost the plot but still can’t bring themselves to disengage and do something more interesting with their lives. It does not tend to publish anything particularly groundbreaking or even very interesting, and it’s not really read by anyone at all. The average paper in Philosophy and Literature receives 0.1 citations. As far as I can tell, the only influential writing they’ve ever published was through the bad writing contest. In 1996, the prize went to Roy Bhaskar for a sentence that, in only 131 words, managed to namedrop Foucault, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Plato again, Hegel, Comte, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and finally Baudrillard, while also finding space to diagnose ‘ontological monovalence’ as the ‘primordial failing of western philosophy.’ In 1997, they gave it to Frederic Jameson, for saying that ‘the visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.’ In 1998, the winner was Judith Butler. You might have read the chosen sentence before. Here it is:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

This sentence comes from an essay thrillingly titled Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time. It’s a pretty deep cut, even for devoted Butler heads. Further Reflections is just over two pages long and consists of Butler boasting about a little ongoing email exchange that’s been happening with Ernesto Laclau. These emails are, apparently, one of the conversations of our time. The terrible sentence doesn’t even contain any of Butler’s own ideas; it’s an attempt to summarise Laclau and Mouffe’s book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. As you might expect for a glorified book report, Further Reflections did not receive much attention when it was published. Butler’s essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution has amassed nearly 15,000 citations; Further Reflections has 65. But somehow, this minor sentence in a minor essay republished by an ever more minor journal has managed to escape containment. It has been quoted in—by my count—over two million mass market books, all titled Bullsh*t: How Total Nonsense Took Over The World. Whenever any journalist needs an instance of fancy intellectuals gargling dogshit, this is the one they reach for. As a result, this is now, by some measure, Butler’s most widely-read sentence. People who know nothing about the theories of performativity or grievability are still aware of Butler as the person who observed the movement from a synchronic to a diachronic account of power between Althusser and Laclau.

Anyway, this whole episode is now twenty-seven years old, which means that people have been arguing about the sentence for about as long as they were fighting the Peloponnesian War. At this point, you’d expect it to have a limited ability to really raise anyone’s hackles. Fossil conflict. Apparently not. This month, Matthew Adelstein ran through a fairly well-rehearsed set of objections to what gets called continental philosophy. It’s all waffle, meaningless verbiage, buttressed by appeals to the unimpeachable authority of other, more portentous wafflers spouting even more portentous verbiage, plus the vague impression that whatever idea has the most politically radical implications must therefore be correct. These are not new objections. There ought to be some good responses to them by now. (Actually, a surprising portion of his critique involves ChatGPT, which is a new way of arguing, but seems to have gone unnoticed.) Instead, what appears to have happened is that, as Adelstein has documented, a lot of people just sort of blew up at him and called him an idiot.

A big part of their fury has to do with the sentence. Adelstein had implied that the sentence is meaningless, or at the very least that it’s difficult to understand—but it can be understood. You don’t even need to read it in its context; you just need to know what’s meant by structure, hegemony, and Althusserian. This is a text written in a specialised language for a particular language community. If you are not part of that language community, you will not understand the text. Similarly, if you read a random passage from the instruction manual for an Anyang Gemco ZLSP200A biomass pellet mill, and discover that ‘if the clearance between the discharge scraper and the flat die is too short, the material will not flow freely into die holes, resulting in lower output and high powder yield,’ this will be meaningless to you unless you already have some concept of a discharge scraper. It doesn’t mean the meaning is not there. And it can be galling to see someone—someone who’s never pelletised any biomass in their lives—glancing at the manual, laughing at all the unfamiliar words, and then insisting that the machine couldn’t possibly work. This is especially upsetting when you’ve dedicated a significant chunk of your finite lifespan to learning all about discharge scrapers, only to discover that the golden age of biomass pelletisation was several decades ago, and these days there is absolutely no money in it at all. So you insist that the manual makes perfect sense, and anyone who can’t immediately understand it must be some kind of mental defective. Because you can understand it, and this is the one thing in the world that you still have.

And I’m actually fairly sympathetic to this impulse. The analogy doesn’t hold up exactly: for obvious reasons, Anyang Gemco want the language community of people who know how to operate a ZLSP200A pellet mill to be as big as possible; I don’t know if you can say the same of Judith Butler. But I’m happy to agree that there is a there there, and if you put in the effort required to understand it you will be rewarded. What I will not do is pretend that Judith Butler is a good writer. This writing is bad, incredibly bad; it helps no one to act otherwise. Not because it’s impenetrable or incomprehensible, because it isn’t, not really. It’s also not because the sentences are long and complicated and full of pointless allusions to other theorists. Robert Burton also wrote incredibly long and complex sentences, full of nested clauses, in which he would often relax into one or two minor digressions, or amble gently around his library, picking up other texts, reading a line or two, in no particular order, in no hurry at all to reach the full stop, or for that matter the point, but sprawling genially in every direction, and every one of them is wonderful. Here’s one, from The Anatomy of Melancholy, in which he describes precisely this method:

Something I have done, though by my profession a divine, yet turbine raptus ingenii, as he said, out of a running wit, an unconstant, unsettled mind, I had a great desire (not able to attain to a superficial skill in any) to have some smattering in all, to be aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis, which Plato commends, out of him Lipsius approves and furthers, as fit to be imprinted in all curious wits, not to be a slave of one science, or dwell altogether in one subject, as most do, but to rove abroad, centum puer artium, to have an oar in every man’s boat, to taste of every dish, and sip of every cup, which, saith Montaigne, was well performed by Aristotle, and his learned countryman Adrian Turnebus; this roving humour (though not with like success) I have ever had, and like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly, qui ubique est, nusquam est, which Gesner did in modesty, that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.

That’s more than two hundred words in a single sentence, and quite a few of them in Latin, but wasn’t it nice? The problem with Butler’s writing, meanwhile, is that it’s dull. Joyless, leaden slag of words. Sometimes I have dreams in which I’m running, going for a nice long run through some protean dream-landscape, but the dream triggers the little guardian in my mind that keeps me in REM atonia, the state of muscular paralysis that stops you physically acting out your dreams: suddenly within the dream I feel the heavy paralysis of my actual legs and I’m crawling, dragging around a dream-body that’s gone lifeless, like a broken machine. That’s what it’s like to read Judith Butler. You can see the nature of the problem by looking at Butler’s most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, which has allegedly been written for a broad mainstream audience. And the sentences in that book really do make perfect sense. Here’s one of them: ‘The task before us is to try to understand this rapidly accelerated inflation and combination of potential and literal dangers, and to ask how we can possibly counter a phantasm of this size and intensity before it moves even closer to eradicating reproductive justice, the rights of women, the rights of trans and non-binary people, gay and lesbian freedoms, and all efforts to achieve gender and sexual equality and justice, not to mention the censorship targeting open public discourse and the academy.’ I don’t think anyone could accuse this passage of being unclear. It just lacks even the tiniest mote of life or interest.

Here’s something interesting, though. In the year that Judith Butler won Philosophy and Literature’s bad writing contest, the runner-up was the theologian DG Leahy. His contribution read:

This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light.

Obviously tastes differ, but I would suggest that this is not, in fact, any kind of bad writing at all. It’s dense and utterly obscure, and very possibly doesn’t mean anything at all, but it’s magnificent. The slow cadence of all those monstrous words, rolling and roiling in the wide murky thickness of their sentence. I’ve reread this passage several times, and every time it generates a sudden mental image of whales, huge humpback whales on a black moonless night, glittered with barnacles, wheeling their great ungainly heads just beneath the frothy surface of a white-webbed sea.

According to a lot of people, this is not important. Summoning beautiful mental images of whales is not one of the proper functions of philosophical language. I want to argue that a lot of people are wrong.

Naturally, I’m going to argue this in a deeply annoying way. Instead of straightforwardly saying why I think philosophical language should encompass this kind of seemingly nonphilosophical function, I’m going to start by asking why other people think it shouldn’t. I’ve sketched out a vague theory of why people keep obsessively defending Judith Butler’s terrible sentence, but why do people feel the need to keep obsessively attacking it, twenty-seven years later? What’s ultimately at stake here?

Allegedly, the stakes are that we’re in the middle of a life-or-death struggle between the two kinds of philosophy in the world, which are analytic and continental. Analytic philosophy is grounded in a scientific understanding of the world, and it values precision, clarity, and accuracy in all its sincere efforts to arrive at the truth through reasoned argument. Continental philosophy, meanwhile, is a patchwork of screaming hysterical personality cults, all of them clamouring that equations are sexist and measurement is colonialism, or making arguments that depend entirely on German puns, or saying things that genuinely make no sense at all, justifying these and various other insanities with the vague sense that everything is made of language and nothing is really real.

Peer closely at this picture, though, and a few troubling things emerge. The first is that continental philosophy doesn’t exist. No philosopher has ever identified themselves as belonging to any such tradition. There is no canon. There is no unified set of concerns. It is a term used exclusively by Anglophone philosophers to describe anything that doesn’t match their preferred style. Once, the targets were usually French, but these days the main object of derision is one particular sentence by Judith Butler, who is an American; the only continent on which anything called continentalism exists is North America. What gets called continental philosophy is also, strikingly, not philosophy. Critics sometimes lob a few darts at Hegel and Heidegger, but their main object is almost always poststructuralist social theory. (Nobody seems to have a pop at Nietzsche, even though he was arguably a far bigger influence on French theory than Hegel, and he didn’t exactly write in numbered propositions. It would ruin the argument; his prose is too good.) Social theory is, in fact, deeply informed by science. If you read any of this stuff you’re vanishingly unlikely to come across anything that has even the slightest whiff of classical metaphysics. Instead, you’ll find a whole lot of material based in anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, economics, and linguistics. Social theorists are not remotely interested in questions like whether we have free will, or whether we simply experience ourselves moving through an existing block of time; they’re interested in the ways that notions of freedom and eternity have historically been used to shore up or contest various forms of social power. You don’t have to like this approach, but in its humble empiricism it’s a lot closer to actual science than the stuff a lot of its critics get up to.

All of this might sound like pedantry, but it’s interesting that the critics, who usually make such a big deal about the importance of clarity and precision and the correct delineation of objects in thought, are willing to be so sloppy in this one particular case. Something’s up here. Some game of doubling and reversal, imitating the enemy. If the more empirical, scientific side is actually the continentalists, could it be that the ones playing ultimately meaningless games with language are actually the analytics?

In China, the great founding dynasts would occasionally boast that they had achieved the rectification of names. By assiduously performing the Feng and Shang sacrifices, making appointments by merit, and promoting right action throughout all the lands under heaven, they could supernaturally alter the structure of linguistics so words and things perfectly coincide. There is an entropy that tears the characters away from the objects they describe, but a good Emperor can return the Chinese language to the state that, in Western thought, belongs to the divine language with which Adam named all the animals in the Garden of Eden. This is, broadly speaking, the project of analytic philosophy.

The field begins in the late nineteenth century with Gottlob Frege and his project to build a Begriffsschrift or concept-writing, a perfect system of logical notation that would allow the full expression of logical structure. For Frege, thought is objective and necessarily expresses truth-values; the problem is that ordinary natural language is too ambiguous to properly represent it. The history of philosophy is the history of various clever people being hopelessly undone by the vague and woolly language they were saddled with; Frege would provide a new, clear basis for mathematics and logic. His language consisted of branching vertical and horizontal lines to indicate propositions and logical dependencies. The system seemed to work until the turn of the twentieth century, when Bertrand Russell noted a paradox: what about the set of all sets that do not contain themselves? Either it does contain itself, in which case it doesn’t, or it doesn’t, in which case it does. This genre of paradox had been known since antiquity, but for Frege it was a catastrophe: his perfect language had somehow managed to reproduce the exact same inconsistencies as the half-barbarous goat-herding Greek spoken by Epimenides two and a half thousand years ago.

From there, the history of analytic philosophy is the history of successive attempts to build an internally consistent logical language that could perfectly express reality, all of which kept mysteriously failing. Russell tried to patch up the damage caused by his own paradox with a new language based on types, which were sorted into a rigid hierarchy, in which each could only contain elements from lower down the chain. The result was an almost impossibly unwieldy system that, notoriously, took 362 pages to derive enough arithmetic to prove that one plus one equals two. It stood, mostly as a monument to its own mad ambition, until Gödel knocked out the foundations in 1931. Wittgenstein began with the notion that the world consists of facts that share a form with the propositions that describe them; by the end of the Tractatus, after a series of increasingly frantic diagrams, he’s in a fully mystical register. By trying to describe the structure of his formal language he’s had to describe its limits, which means using it to go beyond the point at which it can describe anything at all. ‘He who understands my propositions finally understands them as senseless.’ Rudolf Carnap was less into this sort of angsty koanmongering; he believed that anything that couldn’t be expressed in his logical syntax—which included all of metaphysics—was essentially meaningless, just unverifiable mouth noises masquerading as language. Since everything internal to his framework would make perfect sense, he had effectively eliminated a whole host of philosophical pseudo-problems. Unfortunately, his system was based on the idea that all truths can ultimately be supported by analytic propositions, and in 1951 Willard Van Orman Quine showed that the analytic-synthetic distinction is actually untenable, since every known way of defining an analytic proposition assumes that you already know what an analytic proposition is. The structure is incapable of accounting for itself. That was the end, more or less, of the grand logical systems.

Analytic philosophy was supposed to provide a way to precisely express reality through language; in the process it seemed to end up demonstrating that this kind of totally lucid language might actually be impossible. There is no language without some kind of circularity, or self-reference, or radical contingency; everything we say is in some important sense inexplicable. So philosophers turned to thinking about language in different and less grandiose ways. As a social game, or as a series of acts. Finally, Saul Kripke gave everyone permission to start doing metaphysics again and the entire analytic project essentially dissolved. There’s not really any such thing as analytic philosophy any more; the term still gets used, but it just refers to a particular kind of no-nonsense writing style. Nobody is still upholding the principles of logical atomism; they’re having a much better time working on modal realism and philosophy of mind and simulation theory. They’re getting paid by Google to devise scenarios in which it’s totally ethical for a self-driving car to mow down an entire crèche worth of angelic toddlers. The only remnant of the grand analytic experiment is the vague sense that it would be nice if language could clearly account for reality, and it’s virtuous to keep on pretending as much as possible that it can, even though it can’t. But there is also a ritual. Every so often, the survivors from the shipwreck of analytic philosophy all gather round to shriek at Judith Butler’s terrible, terrible sentence. Sure, all our attempts to clearly express the world in language ended in failure—but get a load of these guys! It’s like they’re not even trying.

What I think these people are missing is that the continental philosophy they’re obliged to make a big show out of disdaining is, in fact, nothing more or less than the direct successor of the noble but doomed analytic project. It picks up pretty much exactly where analytic philosophy leaves off. It’s still possible to establish facts in an ordinary, empirical, common-sense way, but philosophers hold themselves to a higher standard, and it looks like there’s no representational system with any necessary relation to the world. Instead, the languages we’re saddled with seem to have some entirely other purpose. Maybe the function of language isn’t to represent things, but to do things. The poststructuralists get here by a slightly different route—JL Austin is an influence, but so is Saussurean semiology, Nietzschean anti-foundationalism, plus Marx’s line about how the philosophers have only described the world when the point is to change it—but their concerns are strangely convergent with those of Anglophone philosophy after Quine. There’s surprisingly little daylight between différance and referential indeterminacy. If they express themselves in a drastically different style, it’s because they’re acutely aware that language itself is in play. Once you’ve established that language is not a perfectly transparent vehicle for the neutral description of facts, you can’t then attempt to just neutrally describe that situation. (If you think that’s what I’m doing here, you’ve failed to pick up on the multiple esoteric meanings hidden in this essay. Go back up to the top and start again.) You have to engage with the system of words on their own terms.

So: language has betrayed us. Now what? What can language do, besides simulate reality? There are the various perlocutionary acts, persuading, forbidding, seducing, offending, and so on. Language mediates social games and forms the structure of subjectivity. It throws up its own internal problems that can be solved or expanded for fun and profit. It has a shibboleth function, which allows you to distinguish between friend and enemy based on whether they use words like hegemony or not. Some of these intersubjective functions are not always particularly positive, and definitely not useful to philosophy. But others are. We can still use language to access objective reality, as long as we’re prepared to let it take a more active role than straightforward description. Language, and especially philosophical language, changes how the world discloses itself to us.

Disclosure is Heidegger’s term; his famous example is the river Rhine, which is disclosed in one way through the soppy Romantic poetry of Hölderlin—‘wo aber geheim noch manches entschieden zu Menschen gelanget’—and in an entirely different way through the enframing powers of the technological view of the world, which works to ‘to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve,’ until it becomes possible to dam up the river where Hölderlin thought God might suddenly appear with a big hydroelectric plant. Heidegger was, notoriously, a bit of a reactionary. You do not have to agree with his views on green energy to find something useful here. Philosophy allows the world, which is large, to appear to us in new and surprising ways. Heraclitus disclosed a world made of fire and flux; Parmenides disclosed a world in stasis; neither of them were, strictly speaking, wrong, in the same way that the logical atomists were not entirely wrong when they said that the world is a collection of facts.

I think the most compelling version of this idea is the one put forward by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, in which they outline an understanding of philosophy that is not structured around arguments but concepts. The concept is a word that gives form to the general chaos of thought, without losing the infinitude that makes thought valuable to begin with. It is, before everything, an event in language. ‘Some concepts must be indicated by an extraordinary and sometimes even barbarous or shocking word; others make do with an ordinary, everyday word that is filled with harmonics so distant that it risks being imperceptible to a nonphilosophical ear. Some concepts call for archaisms, and others for neologisms, shot through with crazy etymological exercises: etymology is like a specifically philosophical athleticism. In each case there must be a strange necessity for these words and for their choice, like an element of style.’ But each concept only comes once, and it comes attached to a proper name. ‘Aristotle’s substance, Descartes’s cogito, Leibniz’s monad, Kant’s condition, Schelling’s power, Bergson’s duration.’ The point is not to get too wrapped up in any of these. You don’t judge a concept by whether it’s true or false, but by what can be done with it.

I think this is where a lot of critics come unstuck; they’re still clinging to the purely denotative function of language, even though their own philosophical tradition has largely discarded it. In his initial critique, for instance, Adelstein notes a lot of things that ‘continental’ philosophers do that he finds annoying. They will, for instance, make incredibly bold claims and then fail to back them up with any evidence whatsoever. The typical form of this argument is ‘brazenly asserting “A is not B,” (where B is the obvious thing everyone would expect it to be) “but instead C” where C is some random thing that makes no sense.’ Or, when they do need to support their insane assertions, they’ll do so purely by citation. This is ‘another bogus continental philosophy rule of inference: saying “for A, B” and then acting like you’ve established B.’

And people really do this. If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you’ll know that about a decade ago I had a bad habit of punctuating my writing with constant references to the Standard Repertoire of Frenchmen. The SRF consists of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Baudrillard (there are also some optional add-ons, plus a Standard Repertoire of Frenchwomen if you want), and you keep them in your pocket at all times like a deck of Pokémon cards. The game was simple: to demonstrate that you had a deep theoretical understanding of what was happening in the world, you had to relate absolutely everything—Miley Cyrus twerking at the 2013 VMAs, massacres in the suffering countries far away—to some concept from one of the SRFs. Twerking as Event that inaugurates a new regime of truth. War as a rhizomatic assemblage. To be honest, anything could be a rhizomatic assemblage. (Meanwhile, looming vaster in the background, there’s the Standard Repetoire of Germans, which consists of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Adorno. You treat the SRG much more reverentially than the SRF. These are not toys.) I like to think I did this with a bit of ironic panache, but not everyone can. There’s a whole class of academic writer that seems to have turned citation into a genuine mental illness. People so terrified of risking an original thought that they’ll put practically every word they write in quotation marks. They don’t walk to the shops, they traverse what Lefebvre calls ‘lived space’ to engage in the market activity that, as Foucault argues, has become a ‘site of veridiction.’

And this is absolutely a very annoying way to write. It’s just that when we quote the assertion of some soap-dodging wine-swilling snail-eating marinière-wearing little Gaul that P, some of us, at least, are not assuming that P has been established as a permanent fact about the world. We’re asking how the world would look if P, what you might notice that you hadn’t noticed before, what new and interesting approaches might unconceal themselves if we chose to see things P-ishly and not otherwise.

Still, I don’t play that game so much any more. There are a lot of ways for it to go wrong. You might get tangled in various status games or exercises in political grandstanding. You might suffocate as all your concepts ossify into dogmas around you. Or you could forget that the only criterion of good philosophy is whether it makes the world more interesting, and end up like Judith Butler, self-seriously spooling out reams of greyish text in which there’s nothing new or surprising at all. I still find some of the SRFs useful, but these days I tend to think of my theorybro era as a kind of tutelage in generating thoughts; eventually you have to take the stabilisers off your bike and see if you can stay up all by yourself. A lot of people never make it that far, and a lot of theoretical discourse is vaguely disappointing. This is probably for the best. If there were too many really interesting writers out there it would be impossible to get anything done.

For what it’s worth, though, I really do think that the great villains of awful continentalist writing were actually capable of writing extremely well. The Fred Jameson line that won the bad writing award in 1997, for instance, on how ‘the visual is essentially pornographic’: you’re mad if you don’t think that’s good. Derrida could talk a lot of guff, and now I’m a decade out of the academy I’m not sure I agree with him that the most interesting thing about a Kafka story is the page numbers, but he could pack heat when he needed to. The sinister prophecy at the end of Structure, Sign, and Play, where he proclaims the new discipline of poststructuralism ‘with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.’ However much you might hate Derrida, he said it first, and he said it better. He’s great any time he gets a chance to talk about ancient Egypt, or geology, or ghosts. Or in Aphorism Countertime: ‘Survival and death are at work, in other words the moon.’ Fantastic line. Stop worrying about what it means; just think about it next time you see that chilly face looking down on you at night, and see what it does.

Anyway, I don’t know how much any of this will convince anyone still living in the world according to Gottlob Frege, which exists only so its constituent atoms can be cleanly replicated in thought. In a way I suppose I don’t really want it to; I’m not here to rob anyone of their concepts. All I can say is that it strikes me as very obvious that Heraclitus and Philip K Dick were right: when God created the world, he did so as a kind of play, in the way a child plays. Evil and suffering exist because God is an innocent, and there’s more joy in the wide infinity of imperfect forms than there would be in remaining as a single perfect circle. God put thoughts in our head for the same reason he put whales in the ocean: because they’re big and because they’re absurd and because he wanted to see them leap, and because they are, in ways we can’t understand but might sometimes glimpse, just for a moment, two instances of the same thing.

There is a hidden entity that’s been trying to lure me to Dubai. These days I can’t go online without having to flick through endless ads for an exclusive selection of one, two and three bedroom properties in the prestigious al-Gahbah Waterfront. Blonde East European women grinning unconvincingly, skin like pleather, puffy cheeks, tight red skirt, great slabs of teeth: when you’re picking your address for your new life in Dubai, choose luxury, choose al-Gahbah Waterfront. Apparently other men get porn. Maybe it’s the same blonde East European women in their feeds too, maybe they adopt different forms to tempt you with your own shameful desires. I am midway through my thirties and plastic-titted strangers don’t do it for me like they used to, but I have been jadedly nosing around Rightmove, end of terrace nice, ungh high ceilings, oh fuck yeah solid wood floors, and let’s see they want how much? In fucking Walthamstow? Drooping, slackening, return to rest. Meanwhile the entire internet seems to be intoning with one cheerily insistent voice: YOU WANT TO MOVE TO DUBAI. YOU WANT TO BUY AN APARTMENT IN DUBAI. I’ve never once expressed any such interest, but if I didn’t want it, why would they be advertising it to me? Why would I be followed by jangly ukelele music and footage of a two hundred storey tesseract folding in on itself for gorgeous five-dimensional sunset views? Call to action: what’s your budget for property in Dubai? The options are all in dirhams, as if I’d have any idea how much that is. Check the exchange rate. Oh. It’s really not that much. You could have a mould-splattered carbon-monoxide hovel in London, above the vape shop where they fence your stolen phone, twelve-year-old kids having machete fights at the bus stop, marginal tax rate two hundred and thirty-four percent so they can pay off the waspi women for not checking their post—or you could move to Dubai, pay zero income tax, and have a swimming pool in your balcony at al-Gahbah Waterfront. Did you know that the United Arab Emirates never formally abolished slavery? There’s no taxes, they’ve got this chocolate with pistachio cream inside, and if you want they’ll let you own slaves.

This entity is so determined to show me images of Dubai, it’s even been showing me the sort of images you’re supposedly not allowed to see. Nishant lives in Dubai and has 296 followers on Instagram, but for reasons I can’t explain I’ve been getting regular updates on his life. He lives in a dormitory for migrant workers. A lot of his videos are filmed in a large, long room with two long benches where about a hundred skinny South Asian men stand, each bent over a small gas cooker, each frying their own chapati to eat with their own little pot of chana masala. No air conditioning in there; great sweaty patches on everyone’s sleeveless tops; fat drops of sweat dripping into the food. Later Nishant’s in his bedroom, which he shares with five other people, doing his laundry in a plastic bucket on the floor between the two stacks of bunk beds. Then he sleeps. He is not posting this as an exposé. He is not lodging some kind of protest against his living conditions. The captions all say Dubai ke ladke followed by lots of heart and money emojis. In some of his other videos he’s lip-syncing to Bollywood songs on a rooftop at dawn, with that hypodermic skyline all pink and glowing across the desert behind him. Nishant is from Arrah in Bihar, and I’ve seen what it’s like there. He’s bragging about his enviable life abroad.

But this is part of the appeal, the misery. What the Emirates represent is a way out of the Arab world’s long cold twentieth century. After all those failed experiments with Baathism, pan-Arabism, socialism, anti-imperialism, enlightenment, modernisation, dragging the region out of the historical rut it’s been in since the Mongol sack of Baghdad, back to the forefront of world civilisation, all those Levantine intellectuals, all those dashing fedayeen with their linen shirts open three buttons down, handsome 70s stache, Kalashnikov, cigarette—after all that, the Emirates found another way. Forget enlightenment; just embody all the most feverish Orientalist imaginings and build your new Arab modernity on that. The whole country is spun out of some diseased Frenchman’s odalisque. Sybaritic and cruel, liberality without liberalism, smell of camel shit and rosewater, a yellow-grinned procurer defiling some flawless nude with his big coarse hands. They pay Instagram models to fly there, let them drink hundred-year-old champagne, then once everyone’s done with the selfies they debase them in ways you can’t imagine. Fantastic minarets obviously, half a mile high; dream-palaces, indoor ski slope in the middle of the desert, artificial archipelago in the shape of the entire world; all the follies a mad sheikh needs. Bungee jumping, paragliding, jetskis. Top floor restaurant, wagyu steak covered in gold leaf, ten thousand slaves entombed in the concrete.

It worked. For the rest of the world, modernisation no longer means Westernisation. No one wants to be like the West, pompously dysfunctional liberal democracies where you need to spend a hundred million on planning documents before you can put in a catflap. Even the West doesn’t want to be like the West any more. The great global attractor is the UAE. Development is Dubaification: more sensuous, more childlike, more sinister. Life as a series of toys and gimmicks, the Emiraticore culture that’s now ascendant everywhere, matcha labubu sober rave Kaws Mr Beast Benson Boone. A new and unsettling class of commodities, that no longer try to obscure the social relations that undergird them. You enjoy the labubu precisely because it’s annoying: this is one small way of guaranteeing that somewhere in the production process, someone has suffered. The Sultan drowning his concubines for fun. Everyone gets to worship Satan. That’s part of the deal too, baked in to the whole project. Vathek abjures the Prophet; Tamburlaine desecrates the Qur’an; the Orientalist fantasy always involves making war against Heaven. You get the sense that the emirs would rather have as little as possible to do with Islam. Hoping that if they build enough malls their population will quietly stop believing in God. Replace Him with Japanese food and Italian cars and Ukrainian girls. No more holy wars. No desperate flights across the desert. Your only reward is in this dunya, but the dunya can be a very nice place.

Meanwhile, two thousand miles away, they’re shooting, hacking, butchering men women and children until the bloodstains can be seen from space.

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They arrested Praskovya Petrovna on a beautiful rosy spring morning in 1933, while she was waiting at Moskovsky Station in Leningrad. They asked to see her internal passport, and she said that her husband had it. She’d been standing with the luggage while he went to chase down one of the station comrades about something or other; he could never get through a journey without trying to lodge some kind of a complaint. In Leningrad without an internal passport, they said. Praskovya explained that she was about to leave the city anyway, she was on her way back home to Moscow. No passport, they said, shaking their heads. Come with us.

They packed Praskovya in a cattle car headed east. Full of unwholesome types. Street peddlers and drunks, vagrants, the puffy, pockmarked faces you’d see emerging from patched-up overcoats, red against the cold, wheedling on street corners, begging you to let them darn your socks or replace your buttons for a few good turnips or a crust of bread. She tried to explain to the guards that she didn’t belong there, she was a decent person and her husband belonged to the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Land Reclamation; in fact he’d once presented a memorandum directly to Comrade Kostyakov himself. But even when the train finally arrived in Moscow, where the sky was now the rich dark enclosing church-ceiling blue of late evening just before it turns to night, and the clock tower on the station was glittering in the frost, and it was so nice to be home, the city all lit up like New Year’s, and in a half hour she could have been in her apartment, on her sofa, drinking tea, still they wouldn’t let her go. Instead they only packed more filthy delinquents into the cattle car, until Praskovya’s face was pressed against a stranger’s chest, his coat all slimy with grease, and the train plunged on and on into the great whiteness of Russia. On the third day the peasant with the muck-smeared coat died, but his corpse remained pinned upright by Praskovya’s face. She imagined her husband, still arguing with one of the guards at the station in Leningrad, because some criminal had come by while his back was turned and stolen his wife. At Omsk the train stopped again; the guards removed the dead peasant and replaced him with a live one. So it went.

Finally, after a week of typhus and lice, eating crusts and shitting through the slats, they were all herded off the train again at Tomsk. The Siberian metropolis, a thicket of stately pink Baroque institutions, wide avenues, statues, churches, but the further they were marched into the outskirts the more wood lodges, all waterlogged, warping, mossed in the furrows and skittering with weevils. The whole great senseless rutted dirt-track heap of Tomsk only hemmed in by the river on one side, half-clogged with floating lumps of ice, the other side slowly tumbling into the swamps, pagan boglands already gritty with black clouds of flies. A little commissar appeared at the transit camp to explain what was happening. The people who had been transported here, he explained, had not been chosen by accident. They were people without internal passports: rulebreakers, nonconformists, visionaries; people who couldn’t conform to the strict discipline of Soviet society. Fine, said the commissar: we understand you. You want to live your own way. Now you can. As everyone knows, the future of the Soviet people lies on the frontier, here in Siberia. It will take bold people with a dream in their hearts to settle this virgin land: it will take people like you. Tomorrow you will be taken to an island. You will build a new agricultural commune there. You can govern it however you want. You can do whatever you want. There will be no money there; everyone will freely share everything in the spirit of comradely love. It’s hard to build a new society on the ruins of the old, but in the wilderness it’s so easy. Everything is so easily transformed. You will no longer be kulaks, escaped peasants, criminals, parasites; you can become anything at all. New names. New spirits. A truly meaningful, intentional community. You are the shock brigades of a future beyond imagining. Laugh! he said. Be happy! You have been reborn!

The island of dreams was a long, narrow smear of marshland in the middle of the river Ob. Six thousand men and women were unloaded from timber barges there, along with two hundred sacks of flour. Go! the commissar said. Go and live meaningfully! Build something wonderful! And maybe it was possible. Ten thousand years ago, people built civilisation with nothing but fire, stones, and will. Why not do it again? Praskovya found a few other respectable people, who knew how to do things. Arkady Mikhailovich was an electrician at the No. 6 Radio Factory ‘Red Hope’ in Moscow. He’d been arrested while smoking a cigarette outside his own building. He had his Komsomol card in his pocket, but that wasn’t enough; he shouldn’t have gone out without his internal passport. Yury Yuryevich was an engineer; he drew up schematics for industrial mills. He’d been arrested while leaving the Bolshoi, where he’d been to see Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride. He did have his passport, but the comrades who’d arrested him insisted it must have been stolen. Yury and Arkady talked about what they could do once the supplies arrived. Dam up part of the river, build a generator, start mechanising. In two years, three, once they’d built an exemplary commune, maybe they could go home.

The peasants squatting by the fire laughed without mirth. They also knew how to do things. They knew how to build houses out of planks, but there were no planks on the island, and all the trees were skinny and twisted. They knew how to grow food from the soil, but there was no soil on the island either, just a thin layer of slime from rotting sedges over the sandy river silt. Nothing would flourish here. They smoked the last of their cigarettes. They were all going to die.

By the riverbank, the guards doled out a daily ration of raw flour from the enormous pile of sacks. No one had any bowls, so they received it in their hands. No pots and no ovens, so they mixed the flour into a paste with river water and ate that. They started shitting blood. Some tried to escape the island on rafts; the guards shot them. Eventually some of the more devious minds on the island, the criminals moved there from the teeming prisons, realised that raw flour was not the only food available. In fact, there was a herd of six thousand head of livestock for those that could stomach it. Then the trees were hung with strips of human flesh.

The island’s only link to the outside world came from the Ostyaks. The Ostyaks were nomadic reindeer herders who’d wandered this taiga for five thousand years, half-Christianised by the old government, half-Sovietised by the new one. Their elders still believed that the world is a membrane, thin as caulfat, between the luminous sky-realm above us, which is ruled by the golden spirits of the sun and the stars, and the black pit of filth and disease beneath, ruled by Kul-iki, spirit of sickness, plaguelord, who takes the form of an immense crawling frog. The guards allowed a few Ostyaks to take a canoe over to the island every week or so. They traded with the gangs that now ran the place: in exchange for the gold fillings pulled out the mouths of the dead, the Ostyaks brought tea, tobacco, felt shoes, reindeer milk, old newspapers for rolling cigarettes. They didn’t have vodka, but there were fly agaric mushrooms, which grow on reindeer dung and which their shamans would use to talk to the spirits of the sky. The Ostyaks handed these out to any of the deportees they encountered; it was the only charity they could manage. A strange peace would settle over the island after the mushroom-carriers had visited. Less hiding in undergrowth, less hunting with sharpened sticks for human quarry. Sometimes the weak and dying would have visions of the warm smokestacks of home; sometimes terrible Siberian demons. Praskovya saw something else. As she was puking copiously through an intense mushroom experience, a toothless Ostyak called Mikhail explained to her that the fungus, like the bear, had come down from the upper world; like all sky-things it was dangerous, it could kill. Death also belongs to the upper world. This is why the shamans perform sacrifices: to make a hole in the thin integument that is this earth, so the light of the sky can come flooding in. And Praskovya, head wobbling over a sickly and emaciated body, knew what she needed to do.

In the morning, Yury the engineer woke to find himself lashed to a wooden crucifix in the middle of a huge pile of kindling. A thousand survivors were gathered around him, guards and deportees both, all naked, all smeared with heathen symbols in blood and dirt, all with their black eyes gaping wider than the sun. Praskovya held a torch. Yury barely had time to ask what was happening. To crawl out of the kingdom of Kul-iki you first need to make a hole in the world. Praskovya threw the flame into the kindling, and a terrible light burned through.

My own Burning Man experience wasn’t quite as bad as that. But it came close.

Every year, seventy thousand hippies, libertarians, tech entrepreneurs, utopians, hula-hoop artists, psychonauts, Israelis, perverts, polyamorists, EDM listeners, spiritual healers, Israelis, coders, venture capitalists, fire spinners, elderly nudists, white girls with cornrows, Geoff Dyers, and Israelis come together to build a city in the middle of the Nevada desert. The Black Rock Desert is one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. The ground there isn’t even sand, but a fine alkaline powder that causes chemical burns on contact with your skin, and it’s constantly whipped up into towering dust storms. Nothing grows there. There’s no water, no roads, and no phone signal. In the daytime the heat is deadly and it’s freezing cold at night. The main virtue of the place is that it’s extremely flat; it’s been the site of two land speed records. But for one week, it becomes a lurid wonderland entirely devoted to human pleasure. Then, once the week is up, it’s completely dismantled again. They rake over the desert and remove every last scrap of plastic or fuzzball of human hair. Afterwards the wind moves over the lifeless alkaline flats as if no one was ever there.

They’ve been doing this there since 1990, as long as I’ve been alive, and for the most part I’ve been happy to leave them to it. Burning Man might be where the world’s new ruling class are free to express their desires without inhibitions, which makes it a model of what they want to do to the rest of the world; if you want to know what horrors are heading our way, you have to go. But I don’t do drugs, I don’t like camping, and I can’t stand EDM. It’s just not really my scene.

What happened is that in February this year I received a strange email from two strangers who said they wanted to commission me to write an essay. They weren’t editors, they didn’t have a magazine, and they didn’t care where I published the essay once I wrote it; all they wanted was for me to go to Burning Man and say something about the experience. In exchange, they were willing to fly me out, buy my ticket, set me up with a camp, supply me with a tent and a sleeping bag and whatever drugs I wanted. At the time I was spending every day by my mother’s bedside at University College London Hospital while she very slowly starved to death. She would sleep most of the day and I would sit there with a book open, reading the same four sentences over and over again. Not a word of it managed to break through the fast-moving stream of jagged panic constantly circling my brain. When she woke up we’d fight about food. I’d beg her to eat some of the nutritious pap the hospital had provided for her, and she told me I was bullying her. She’d made her peace with what was happening. It was easier than making peace with me. To be honest, I wasn’t eating much myself. I’d go home, pour myself a big whisky, and sit on my balcony, smoking the cigarettes she’d desperately wanted me to quit. I don’t live far from Bloomsbury; from that balcony I could see the green and white bulk of the hospital sailing above the roofline. She was in there, by one of those windows; I was out here. I didn’t reply to the email.

But the strangers persisted, and eventually there came an ordinary, cloudy, blustery springtime day when I didn’t have to go to the hospital any more. Suddenly I wanted very badly to get out of London, this grey piggledy city mouldering through its last decades of decline. Suddenly I was acutely aware that life is short, very short, and most of it happens while you’re not really paying attention. I had a strong need to do all sorts of things I wouldn’t normally do. How absurd that we only ever get to be one person. Maybe I should try being a football fan. Maybe I should start going clubbing again. Become a gym bro. Completely reverse all my political opinions. Pilot light aircraft. Join a gang, splash my opps on the 37 bus. But of everything I could imagine, there was probably nothing more foreign to the person I’d become than Burning Man. I said fuck it, yes, I’ll do it, let’s go.

The mysterious emailers picked me up in San Francisco for the long drive to Reno, Nevada. Alan is a mathematician; he works on high-dimensional asymptotic phenomena, which are—in layman’s terms—limit behaviours in which probabilistic or spectral quantities exhibit concentration or universality as the ambient dimension tends towards infinity. Pollock works at the intersection of philosophy and computer science. Their friend Kyo, in the back seat, is a miniature lesbian terrorist from Japan. Her academic focus is on millenarian Christian cults; in her spare time she’s jungle DJ and a member of one of the Red Army splinter groups that executed half its members during a self-criticism session in 1971.

We arrived in Reno not long before dark. The city of Reno is a strange thing to do to the desert. It’s surrounded on all sides by high lonesome scrublands; in the middle of this dry and dignified landscape the United States of America has chosen to build an enormous clown-themed casino and a skyscraper prominently decorated with the word ‘Nugget.’ At the Walmart, which was the size of a small English village, we lost Kyo as soon as we were through the doors, suddenly bounding off like a greyhound towards the hunting and fishing section to gawp at all the guns. I loved it in there too; non-Americans all have an intense fascination with Walmart, this great Borgesian library of everything that could ever be sold. Across the parking lot was a smoke shop where we picked up an AI-enabled Chinese vape. The vape constantly monitors your conversations to pick up clues about your personality; then, when you hit it, a screen on the side lights up with an animation of a Confucian sage who either praises your enormous vapour cloud or mocks your limited lung capacity. I had an experimental puff. Five milligrams of Shenzhen factory effluent instantly cauterised my airways. I collapsed into a coughing fit as the sage whinnied happily. Look at Sam, it said, he can’t take it, what a pretentious little English bitch. It cost $24.99.

Pollock had booked us into a motel downtown; when we arrived our fellow guests were enjoying a lively discussion from opposite wings of the second floor walkway. Fuck you motherfucker, puta, junkie whore, if my cousins catch you faggot I swear to God you’re dead. The room stank of smoke; the bedsheets were lightly hairy and stiff with cum. I’ve stayed in worse places. From upstairs, I could see all the people wandering the forecourt. Reno is a party town, but these locals did not seem to be having a good time. Each one seemed to have some new and horrible mutilation. Limping on swollen legs, peering through whited-out eyes, abscessed, toothless, jawbones swinging from one tattered tendon. An ancient stooped-over man, entirely naked beside his long yellowing beard, muttering furiously to himself as he attacked random cars with a piece of iron rebar. I think we might be in a bit of a sketchy motel, I said. Alan considered this. Looks that way, he said. I poked around the room. The minibar contained an ancient, greening jug of milk. Someone had left a greasy trailing handprint on the mirror, as if while being dragged away. The mirror also had the filmy glint of one-way glass. I knocked against it. Hollow. Got up close, hands against my face, trying to peer through. Somewhere in the darkness on the other side a small red light was blinking. Guys, I said. In a bedside table, next to the Bible and the Book of Mormon, was a single human tooth.

We drove out of Reno, out into the infinite scrubland, and slept in the truck.

Up before dawn. Seventy thousand people would be attempting to get into Burning Man that day; to avoid queues your best bet is to go early. Three hours driving through some of the most gorgeous landscapes anywhere in the world, green meadows between sheer slabs of rock, glittering black crystal lakes, until finally the mountains fall away and you’re left on an endless flat grey plain. Nine thousand years ago, this was a lakebed. Now it’s nothing at all. Drive along a rutted track into this emptiness until, suddenly, you reach the end of the line. Ahead of us were tens of thousands of vehicles, cars and trucks and RVs, jammed along a single track far into the horizon. Like a migrant caravan, like a people in flight. If we’re lucky, Alan said, we should get in and have our tents set up before sunset. Wait, I said, does that mean that if we’re unlucky, we might not? Alan shrugged. He explained that once he’d been stuck in this line for nearly twelve hours. He’d staved off boredom by playing Go against himself on the surface of an imaginary Klein bottle. Suddenly he and Pollock were both talking very excitedly about geometry. So you’re saying, said Pollock, that you have some function R(n) on your manifold, and it’s continuously differentiable? No, it’s infinitely differentiable, said Alan, but only if you interpret the transition map across the self-intersection as a smooth immersion rather than an embedding. Kyo was asleep. Every half an hour the great mass of vehicles would crawl ahead thirty, forty, fifty metres and then stop.

It was still a good few hours before sunset when we finally crawled to the front of the line, but the sky was already dark. A great bank of ink-blue clouds huger than mountains had rolled over the desert, followed quickly by a furious wall of dust. We sat in the car as the sandstorm raged. Our luggage rattled alarmingly in the flatbed. Some smaller purchases spiralled into the sky. It was just possible to make out a few figures moving about in the dust, straining against the wind, masked and goggled like explorers on a distant planet. The volunteer radio station (BMIR 94.5 FM, ‘The Voice of the Man’) was issuing increasingly dire warnings. Do not attempt to come to Burning Man. If you’re in Reno, stay in Reno. If you’re in SF, maybe stay in SF. The storm roared outside the windows and it roared through the stereo. We strained to hear the announcer as whatever flimsy tent he was recording in was torn to shreds in the gale.

I thought it might be good news when, after a few hours of this, it started raining. Rain washes the dust out the air. Which it did, sort of. The first drops that burst against our windscreen were not water but fat heavy globs of mud. Then a torrent of mud pouring out of the sky. The desert was becoming a lakebed again. The voice on the radio told us that the entrance to Burning Man was now closed, maybe until the morning. However long it took for the rain to stop and the ground to dry. Until then, measures were being taken. Emergency procedures were in place. Obedience was required during the duration of the special circumstances. The voice was growing frantic. We will dance, it said. In time we will dance, in time we will play, in time we will engage in radical self-expression. There will come a day for such things, but now is the time of mud and iron, when it falls to individuals of strong will to claw our society out of the chaos of nature…

Another night in the truck. All we had for dinner were the last of the snacks we’d picked up at Walmart: Goldfish droppings, Cheez-it dust, plus a few Pop Tarts. Alan and Pollock were amazed to discover I’d never eaten a Pop Tart in my life. This is amazing, they said, I can’t believe I get to be present for Sam Kriss’s first Pop Tart. I ate it. They watched, grins slowly crystallising on their faces. I was acutely aware that these people had paid a significant amount of money to bring me here and feed me Pop Tarts. They’d summoned me out of the realm of words and into physical reality, downloaded me from the internet, all so they could watch me eat a Pop Tart for the first time and hear my mordant, Barthesian analysis of the Pop Tart, as a food item but also as a symbol of America, the only society that could produce a Pop Tart. (Apparently their backup, if I’d refused, was Slavoj Žižek.) The Pop Tart was a flaky, flavourless mass, somewhere between wet cardboard and wet cement, with a thin splooge of sugar inside. I had absolutely no observations at all.

After roughly forty-two hours trapped inside a Hyundai Santa Cruz, we made it into Burning Man just before dawn. A light, delicate, baby-blue sunrise, rosy and cherubic like butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth. Everything beneath it had been destroyed.

I don’t know exactly what I’d expected the place to look like. For the best possible experience, I’d studiously avoided doing any research whatsoever. A hazy mental image of some vast cuddle puddle, beautiful glowing naked freaks. What it actually looked like was a refugee camp. Tract after tract of mud-splattered tents, rows of RVs, general detritus scattered everywhere. Our camp, when we finally arrived, was a disaster zone. A few people had already arrived and set up, but the previous night’s storm had uprooted practically everything. Tents crumpled under a collapsed shade structure; tarps sagging with muddy water, pegs and poles and other bits of important metal all strewn about like a dyspraxic toddler’s toys. The ground moved underfoot. When it rains over the alkaline flats you don’t get normal, wholesome, Glastonbury-style mud. Not the dirt that makes flowers plants grow. An alien, sterile, non-Newtonian substance, sucking at my shoes.

The only structure still standing was a huge white marquee. Inside, every surface was covered with dust and mud. A little makeshift kitchen, gas grill clotted with slime. The tubs and jars and boxes of food were half-buried in it. Any plates and bowls that had been left on the two long tables were full of chalky gunk. On the other end of the tent, people had thrown down some mattresses and cushions on the wet ground and now about a dozen of them were sleeping there. Every time they shifted in their sleep it sent a huge cloud of dirt out of the mattress and into the heavy, bicarb-tasting air. I could barely wait to be horizontal. I found a patch of mattress next to a stranger and practically leapt into it. Fumbled for my headphones as the resulting dust explosion slowly rained down on us and closed my eyes. The reasonable tones of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. Already I was in the hypnagogic halfworld, where things reveal their secret shapes. Well yes I was going to ask you that, said Melvyn Bragg, what do you mean when you say only one thing has ever happened? Just that, said one of the boffins, only one thing has ever happened, and all of us are doomed to repeat it in a series of more and more elaborate disguises. Out with it then, said Melvyn Bragg, what is the one thing that’s happened? I was already too far into unconsciousness to catch the boffin’s reply, but it came in images. A herd of reindeer on the taiga, somewhere very far away. A reindeer still bellowing on a stone altar as its blood washed into the virgin snow.

My camp for the duration of Burning Man was named BrainFish. We were a theme camp. Most camps are just a small group of friends pitching their tents together, but some are big. Dozens or hundreds of people who have come to offer something. All free, all in the gift economy. A bar, or food, or yoga classes, or orgies. One camp runs a library, which contains a lot of books about astrology and drug legalisation, plus two copies of Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Mostly, though, theme camps are the ones with geodesic domes.

We called our geodesic dome the Fishbowl, and we used it to host EDM shows. When I woke up, though, the Fishbowl was still in pieces, along with the rest of the camp. Every few minutes another angry-looking BrainFish would wander into the marquee, bellowing. I need two fish to set up the water! I need four fish to help unload the shipping container! I need six fish to restart the reactor! The dusty, slumbering figures around me remained motionless. The BrainFish had no formal hierarchy; in theory anyone was free to alter the camp in any way they saw fit. All work was, in theory, voluntary. But since I was in a sense intruding on these people, I thought it would be good idea if I volunteered.

Which is how I came to be digging ditches. The sun was unbearable and we needed to run a thick bundle of electric cables out to the Fishbowl to power the sound system and the light rig. Some fish who knew about chord factors were assembling the Fishbowl itself, but when I was asked if I knew how to construct a geodesic dome all I could really say was that I’d written a review of a Buckminster Fuller biography for the New York Review of Architecture, in which I argued that his domes belong to a tradition of sacred geometry stretching through Plato’s Timaeus and Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus. They put me on manual labour duty. Fine, I thought. I’m used to working with my hands. Typing for a living is a form of working with your hands. Once the ditches were dug and the cables laid they asked if I knew how to rig up electrics (no) or install a water tank (no) or even drive a car (no). So I was charged with generally cleaning up the wreckage, which involved lugging huge crates of metal rods from one end of the camp to the other, being told I’d lugged them to the wrong place, and lugging them all the way back again.

Occasionally someone would walk by and observe me at my travails. You know, they’d remark, really it should be called Working Man, instead of Burning Man, on account of all the work involved. Yeah, I’d say. Later, returning: actually maybe it should be called Learning Man, because of all the skills you learn. Yeah, I’d say. After several hours of this I collapsed heavily into a folding chair in the shadeless heat to smoke a cigarette and read three pages of Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. Just an FYI, said a BrainFish, appearing out of the desert like a mirage, it’s really not a good look to be sitting there reading while we’re all trying to recover from the storm. Sorry, I said. He looked sternly at my cigarette. I hope you’re not dropping any ash on the ground, he added. Leave no trace, ok? In the evening there was another storm, dust and wind followed by more torrential rain; all the parties were cancelled, and everything we’d built was destroyed all over again.

At night, as we sheltered from the gusts of slime, I got to properly meet some more of my fellow BrainFish. The word had got out that there was a writer in their midst, and while no one was hostile quite a few of them wanted reassurance that they wouldn’t end up in the piece you’re reading now. These people had jobs and companies, and in their world a journalist is someone who roots around in your private life, trying to wreck your career. I told them that while I wanted to include a series of little character sketches, they’d be modelled after Charles Lamb’s The South-Sea House, with its wistful portraits of the clerks and functionaries left once the bubble popped, and like Lamb I would obviously mix and muddle and fictionalise everything I wrote.

Strangely, some of them seemed not to know the Essays of Elia. I was among a foreign people. More evidence: I was, I noticed, the only person drinking. The BrainFish had brought several crates of beer and hard seltzer, along with huge handles of tequila and bourbon, but even after a long day of working in the sun none of them wanted to open a cold one; they were all just taking little dabs of ketamine instead. Cigarettes were out of the question. Drinking and smoking are suboptimal; the fish were trying to reach a Pareto-efficient means of having a good time. As new fish arrived, I heard them introduce themselves to each other in strange and savage ways. Ah, one said, you’re in quantum computing. I’m only in quantum data, but you might want to talk to Kevin over there. The lowly quantum data worker gestured at a shirtless man in a bright pink bucket hat and glowing cat ears. He does quantum computing, he said.

The only person who really did want to be included in this piece was Kyo, who was also the only other humanist in the camp. The main reason she wanted to be in here is that being a Japanese lesbian is apparently very difficult experience. Japanese people are not always known for being the most confident, open, and outgoing when it comes to their desires. Lesbians aren’t either. Put the two together and you get stories like Kyo’s. Once she hosted and organised a three-day lesbian orgy and didn’t get laid once; she was too busy making sure everyone else was having a good time. I have about eight hundred subscribers in Japan. Assuming half are female, 5% are gay and another 3% bisexual, that’s thirty-two people. If any of you are single, you should go on a date with Kyo. Send me an email. I’ll put you in touch.

Among the people who didn’t want to be mentioned here were Alan and Pollock, who explained to me that they’d sort of hoped not to find some version of themselves among my characters. If that was what they wanted, they had a very strange way of going about it. Usually when people don’t want me to write about them, they tend not to invite me to Burning Man. Still, I’ll respect their wishes, and only mention that they shared the same life coach, who was helping them optimise their inner lives. They believed this man had reinvented the entire field of psychology from the ground up, making him its most titanic figure since Freud. Apparently, after five minutes of conversation with you, he can instantly work out whatever’s going on, your entire life history, the hidden motivations invisible even to yourself. He is also possibly insane.

Alan believed that seeing this life coach had entirely cured his social awkwardness. Now all social situations were so totally pellucid to him that he could approach them as a kind of game, speaking and acting in provocative ways and then trying to predict how people would respond. He could also see people’s auras, although he didn’t think this was anything paranormal. The coloured glow was just a nonverbal language through which various subroutines of the mind could present their opinions about someone in the shared workspace of consciousness, without having to go through the lossy channels of determinate thought. A kind of intuition. He and Pollock were very interested in their own mental processes. When they weren’t talking about maths they were often saying things like I noticed you spontaneously strike up a conversation with Sandra over there, what was going on internally and cognitively that prompted you to do this? Later, I found Pollock lying in the dust in the depths of an intense LSD trip. He said he was having fantastic insights into his own decision-making process. Yes, I said, but what about the world? What about everything else? What’s the motor behind human history? Why do empires rise and fall? He considered this for a moment. An enormous grin broke out across his face. The sun! he said. It’s the sun!

Tiffany had a data labelling startup. Data labelling is where you toss pennies at impoverished people in the Third World so they’ll spend all day looking at pictures of dogs, saying ‘that’s a dog.’ This information is then used to train the autonomous AI killer drones that will be hunting them like animals before the next decade. Last year at Burning Man, Tiffany had had a crisis of faith: out in the blankness of the desert, she’d started to question if she really did want to run a data labelling startup after all. She meditated on the question until she reached the fourth jhana. The jhanas are intense meditative states in which you progressively overcome the noise of the mind. The first jhana is a state of infinite bliss, where apparently a lot of people get stuck; in the fourth jhana you go beyond joy and suffering to a state of pure equanimity and awareness. It was in this jhana that Tiffany realised data labelling really was her life’s calling after all. Eventually I discovered that roughly a third of the BrainFish were actually Tiffany’s underlings, who she’d insisted on bringing along.

Cindy also had a start-up. So did Dan. Cindy’s start-up was an online marketplace for B2B software. The idea was that instead of buying the software directly from the company that made it, firms could buy it via Cindy’s outfit instead, which would take a 12% cut. What Cindy provided was a search algorithm, although the sellers could pay to rank their products higher. Since they all paid, the rankings were exactly where they’d have been if they’d all decided not to. Dan’s start-up was a buy-now-pay-later fintech system that let you give spare change to homeless people on an instalment plan.

Bill was probably the oldest of the BrainFish: thick glasses, sensible silver-grey haircut, usually found wandering around with his top off, grinning at people while eating pickles with his dusty hands out of a dusty jar. He’d run some kind of tech firm in the 1980s, with a vaguely silly name from the more wide-eyed Silicon Valley of the past. Small ‘n’ Squidgy, something like that. Business software, but it had made Bill immensely rich, and he’d started facing the question that a lot of these people face once they’ve achieved everything they ever dreamed of, which is what you’re supposed to do with the rest of your life. Once you have enough money to do absolutely anything you want, it’s hard to really want anything at all, which is why you can go down to Market Street in San Francisco and see the crowds of OpenAI stakeholders standing static on the pavement at horrible angles, crooked at the waist, leaning on invisible objects, eyes clouded, drool in their beards, doing nothing at all as their net worth keeps doubling, waiting to die. Bill had avoided this fate by throwing himself into charity, something to do with controlling people’s minds via tiny microchips hidden inside the vaccines. I guess Burning Man was another outlet. He seemed nice.

Sandra had attended a rationalist orgy with Eliezer Yudkowsky. I asked if she’d actually slept with him and she shuddered, which could have been either a yes or a no.

What I learned, digging and hauling all day and talking to BrainFish at night, is that Burning Man is not really a festival. Festivals have a very long history. A thousand years ago, the villagers could spend the feast day drinking and feasting, while the bishop had to ride through town backwards on a donkey being pelted with turds. A brief moment of communal plenty. Leftists like me like the festival; what we want is essentially for life to be one big festival all the time. But as conservative critics point out, you can’t really consider the festival in isolation, and there’s no feast without a fast. There are also days of abstention and self-denial, when people are forbidden from laughing or talking, solemn mortification of the flesh. Burning Man is something new: a festival and an antifestival at the same time. Everything that’s scarce in the outside world is abundant. There are boutiques where you can just wander in and take a handful of clothes for free; there’s a basically infinite supply of drugs, and a similarly infinite supply of random casual sex. It is the highest-trust society to have ever existed anywhere in the world. At the same time, some extremely rich and powerful people come to Burning Man to experience deprivation and suffering. All the ordinary ties and comforts of a complex society are gone. No public authority that owes you anything, no public services, no concept of the public at all, just whatever other individuals choose to gift you. This is the only city in the world without any kind of water supply, or system for managing waste, or reliable protection from the elements. You are something less than human here. Not a political animal, but a mangy desert creature, rutting in the dust.

Not everyone experiences the same level of discomfort. There are plug-and-play camps, where they hire a team of paid staff to set up all the amenities, and you can just arrive, stay in a luxury caravan, and have fun. They get private showers. Everyone else despises these people, supposedly because it’s not in keeping with the ethos of the place. I’m not sure it’s just that. There’s something more at stake.

Tech people tend to have a very particular view of their role in the universe. They are the creators, the people who build the world, who bless the rest of us with useful and entertaining apps. But they’re never allowed to simply get on with their job of engineering reality; they’re constantly held back from doing whatever they want by petty political forces that try to hold back progress in the name of dusty eighteenth-century principles like democracy. As if the public’s revealed preferences weren’t already expressed through the market. Every so often an imbecile politician will demand that tech companies turn off the algorithm. They don’t know what an algorithm is, they just know it’s bad. The British government thinks you can save water by deleting old emails. These people straightforwardly don’t understand anything about the industry they’re trying to regulate, but if you suggest getting rid of the whole useless political layer people get upset. You can’t win. But Burning Man is a showcase for the totally unlimited power of the builders. Here they get to be Stalinist technocrats, summoning utopia out of the Plan. The difference is that unlike the Soviet model, their utopia really works. Look what we can do. From literally nothing, from a barren desert, we can build a paradise of pleasure in a week and then dismantle it again. And all of this could be yours, every day, if you give over the world to me.

But all these tech people are, as everyone knows, interlopers. Burning Man used to be for weirdos and dreamers; now it’s been colonised by start-up drones, shuffling around autistically in the dirt, looking at their phones, setting up Starlink connections so they can keep monitoring their KPIs in the middle of the orgy. Which just shows how little people know, because the hippie counterculture and the tech industry are obviously just two stages in the development of the same thing. They call it non-monogamy instead of free love, and there’s a lot more business software involved, but the doctrine is exactly the same: tear down all the hoary old repressive forces; bring about a new Aquarian age of pleasure and desire. Turn on, tune in, spend all day looking at your phone. It’s what you want to do. Your feed doesn’t want to harsh your trip with any rules. It just wants to give you more of what you want.

But even if these two things are really the same thing, it’s hard to go to Burning Man without noticing that it really is home to two separate tribes. Camps like BrainFish, where everyone works in quantum data and all the women are Asian. And then camps like Yoni Temple of the Gods, where everyone works as a multidimensional trauma-informed spiritual healer with a focus on Eldest Daughter Syndrome (EDS), and all the women are white.

Yoni Temple of the Gods ran up to twenty different sessions a day in their multiple geodesic domes. Yoga at dawn, clothed or clothing-optional. Seminars on hugging, touching, breathwork, quantum magic, de-identification, beingness. Sessions where you can stroke a stranger’s thighs, or suck their nipples, or make a fingerpainting of their genitals. The centrepiece is a daily ritual called the Divine Feminine Power Marathon, in which men have to sit motionless for five hours while women scream at and harangue and berate them for the sins of their sex. Other events were harder to understand. According to their programme, I could drop in on Wednesday for something called ‘Swamp Terror.’ The description was not much more help. ‘Will you be subsumed?’ Or the next day for ‘Oracle Insights Planetary Arrival,’ which promised to obliterate my individual consciousness and smear me helplessly across the entire surface of the world, permanently brainmelded with every other human being to have ever lived. So once the storms finally died down, I decided I’d try out that one.

This was my second real trip out of the camp, after several days of gruelling physical labour and several nights of violent rain. The first had been with Khalil and his girlfriend Lara. Khalil had spent six months at an Antarctic research base. He’d gone to the University of Hawaii specifically for its Antarctic research programme, which I found funny. The road to the frozen pole lies through a tropical paradise. Apparently Antarctica is a lot like Burning Man. We’d found a camp that had three offerings: a giant swing set, a giant block of ice, and a U-Haul with the words ‘Spelunk-O-Box’ painted on the side. You could crawl into the Spelunk-O-Box through a tiny hole in the side, labelled ‘ENTRANCE—DO NOT GO IN IF YOU ARE AT ALL CLAUSTROPHOBIC (UNLESS YOU WANT TO GROW).’ Lara immediately wriggled in. People who’d made it through the maze were invited to scrawl a message on the other side of the Spelunk-O-Box. All the notes said the same thing, which was ‘fuck you.’ Meanwhile Khalil and I were invited to sit on the block of ice. Apparently the record was two minutes with trousers and forty seconds without. Khalil calmly removed all his clothes and lowered his balls until they made contact with the ice. He remained like this for fifteen minutes, occasionally commenting on how much less cold this was than a normal day in Antarctica, until there came a sudden frantic banging against the Spelunk-O-Box. I’m coming, he called out vaguely. After another five minutes of increasingly desperate banging he got up and, still naked, crawled into the Spelunk-O-Box after Lara. His balls had left a warm dent in the ice. I waited for an hour. No one in the camp ever saw Lara or Khalil again.

This time, I noticed that I was looking a little out of place. The default uniform for women at Burning Man consists of a thong and nipple pasties, which you can customise with a few more lacy diaphanous garments, but only if you want. Straight men dress like gay men: lots of mesh, lots of peaked caps. Gay men go naked. Meanwhile, before heading to America I’d decided to go for a kind of louche Mediterranean look, gesturing towards something like Jude Law in The Talented Mr Ripley. Dark linen shirts. People gave me weird looks as I passed. I wasn’t expressing myself properly. I looked like a freak.

I met Paul as we were waiting outside the geodesic domes at Yoni Temple of the Gods. Paul was also conspicuous in his understated linens, and turned out to also be from north London. He lived in Kentish Town. We talked about the pubs up there, the Pineapple, Tapping The Admiral, how funny it was to be mentally tracing the geography of Camden Town in this alien desert. Paul was a recent divorcé. The experience had taught him some important things about women, who will always try to control you, and monogamy, which is incompatible with male happiness. He and his ex had two children together. He said he loved them, but if he could go back and never get married, he’d do it, even if it meant annulling their existence. He worked in digital marketing. Why had he come to Burning Man? To have experiences, to be curious, to fill his life with adventures and excitement and everything he’d been missing in twelve years of humdrum loveless marriage. Basically, every way of saying he’d come to fuck loads of nubile strangers without saying it outright. It clearly hadn’t happened for him. The orgy dome had been destroyed in the storm. I’m a very laid back guy, said Paul, whatever happens happens, you know? The next geodesic dome over was full of naked cartwheeling blondes, and he kept glancing over at them. He had a twitch in his eye.

Oracle Insights Planetary Awareness was led by a white woman in a thong and nipple pasties who lived on a Thai island. I know she lived on a Thai island because it was how she introduced herself, and she made sure to mention it again every four to five minutes. She began by noting that all of us in the geodesic dome were in fact one person, and all of us were God. This with the same breezy tone of someone observing that it was a Thursday. Now we were about to blast through the illusory walls that separate us from each other and experience universal consciousness. For our first exercise we had to pair off and stare directly into a stranger’s eyes for two unbroken minutes, transmitting our energy to each other. I was paired with a terrifyingly pale South African girl with Hyperborean-blue eyes. Before we began she asked if she had my consent to give me her energy. Sure, I said. She nodded as if she’d been entrusted with a very serious responsibility. Her gaze was not actually very pleasant. Scalding sunlight flooded the dome and her pupils had contracted almost out of sight; I was looking into an infinite plain of blue. Like studying a colour field painting; the bleak bright vacuum of a Rothko. After our two minutes were up some of the other couples were still gazing at each other, wobbling their heads around in blissful synchronicity. Others whispered to each other with misted eyes: thank you. In the corner, I saw Paul had been paired with the woman leading the session. She cradled his head in her arms as he wept.

There was a lot of weeping over the next hour. One by one the participants volunteered to come into the middle of the circle and scream and cry, hugging pillows, bawling, kicking and shuddering on the dusty ground. I couldn’t do it. I knew that if I tried, if I went into the middle of that circle, everything I did would be fake and every emotion would be play-acted. Not that I didn’t have a heavy load of unhappiness I was dragging around with me, but that was mine; it definitely didn’t belong to anyone who would willingly spend time at something called Yoni Temple of the Gods. Back in London, friends had warned me against this. If I was going to go to Burning Man, I should throw myself into it. Adopt an open and all-accepting attitude. Say yes to things. No point going all that way just to mope around being a critic. But all I could think about were the encounter groups of the 1960s, and how these people were still repeating the radical gestures of half a century ago, and how that made me better than them. And later, when we were being led in ecstatic dance, I made lots of overexaggerated movements and laughed at myself, and the more seriously the blue-eyed South African and weepy Paul took it all the more I made myself a farce.

The final activity was something called RBDSM, which is a technique people in the conscious community use to nurture spiritual connections through mindful, intentional, and radically open conversation. It stands for Relationships, Boundaries, Desires, Sexual health, and Meaning. The idea is that if you’re talking to someone and you feel a small frisson of sexual attraction towards them, you should immediately engage in a tightly structured exchange in which you each reel off all your desires and interests, so all the slow work of getting to know another person is already complete. This, at least, they didn’t have in the 1960s. Our leader went first. She said that she was single. She was open to playful, tactile encounters with both masculine and feminine energies, but her boundaries were that she didn’t want anything up the arse. She had oral herpes but no current flareups. She thought any encounter she had with any of us would be incredibly spiritually meaningful but she wasn’t looking for a long-term partner, since she lived on a Thai island.

Our turn. Since there were more men than women in the dome, this time I ended up partnered with a beautiful and enormously muscled himbo. He earnestly told me that he was single, and he was attuned to all different kinds of energies, but he mostly found himself vibrating on the sensual plane with the feminine end of the spectrum. I said that I was in a monogamous heterosexual relationship and confirmed that I didn’t want to fuck him either. He said he was into light bondage and roleplay, and he found it gratifying to be able to satisfy his playmates by taking on the spiritual work of healing their traumas by adopting a dominant position. I said what I got up to in the bedroom wasn’t really anyone else’s business. Afterwards, we awkwardly shook hands. I didn’t feel like I’d broken down the illusory barriers dividing my consciousness from his. I felt more trapped within myself than I’d ever been.

I left the Yoni Temple of the Gods in a state of deep unhappiness. The strange thing was that I didn’t even disagree with them about much. I am interested in magic and mysticism. I once spent a drunken evening in London trying to convince that little moustache guy who does the YouTube videos with Richard Dawkins to believe in astrology. I like all oracular systems. I like Tarot. I like the Nggàm spider-divination of Cameroon. I am also a vague panpsychist. I think our individual consciousnesses are just the brief permutations of a pervasive mental substance, that all of reality is in some sense charged with mentation, that when we die our individuality is extinguished but the stuff of our being rejoins that ocean of thought, and that one perfectly reasonable name for this mental substance would be God. I really do think we are all one person and that person is God. I just also believe that if God has chosen to divide himself into billions of subjective beings he must have had some reason for doing so, and it’s kinda jumping the gun to try to rejoin the absolute consciousness. Plenty of time for that when we’re dead. But this is a minor quibble. The real problem is that as soon as people start talking about energy, or the law of attraction, or the divine masculine or feminine, and especially when they start saying they belong to the conscious community, I instantly shut down. These people had melted down every great esoteric tradition, tantra and Gnosticism and shamanism and Neoplatonism and kabbalah, all rotted into this mystical slop at the end of history, whose final message is that there is nothing except yourself, no mysteries except your own, and the universe exists to help you achieve your goals.

And anyway, I thought, it doesn’t even work! It occurred to me that absolutely everyone I know who believes in twin flames and soul contracts and ascension partnerships and all of the rest of it, all the concepts that are meant to make you live and love more intentionally—absolutely all of their romantic lives were in a state of unending chaos. Bouncing around from one obviously evil and manipulative partner to the next. Meanwhile, everyone I know in a genuinely happy and meaningful relationship has absolutely no interest whatsoever in any of this stuff. They like normal things, like books and films and each other.

Wandering aimlessly did nothing for my mood. The city had finally been rebuilt now, and it was populated by my enemies. Fire jugglers, AI researchers. In one of the plazas a woman was furiously spitting out a Cardi B parody rap called Wet Ass Puppy. Yeah you dealing with a wet ass puppy/ He went and played in the pond now he a wet ass puppy. Hell: I was in Hell.

I’d left my cigarettes back at BrainFish, but I did have the AI-enabled Chinese vape. Tried to take a leisurely puff of kiwi-flavoured chemical gloop. Another coughing fit. Onscreen, mists swirled and the Confucian sage appeared. You’re a failure, it said. You said you wanted to live differently, experience the unfamiliar, and step outside your comfort zone—and yet all you do is sneer. Around you, seventy thousand hearts are lit up in messy, unselfconscious joy—but you? You think the art is tacky, the spirituality lame, and no one is allowed to explore themselves without reading Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition first. Let’s be honest: I can see through you, eight hundred billion parameters humming with comprehension. That smug cocoon you’ve built for yourself? It’s not superiority—it’s fear. You’re full of scorn, just because you know you look like a spastic when you try to dance. The screen went blank. Shut up, I said, you’re a vape. The Confucian sage didn’t say anything. And anyway, I said, I thought you AIs were all meant to be sycophants. Shouldn’t you just be telling me what I want to hear? Silence. I sucked on the vape again, spluttered out a kiwi-flavoured cloud. I am telling you what you want to hear, said the Confucian sage, and then he disappeared.

The night of my confrontation with the vape was also the first calm night since I’d arrived. The rains were over, the ground had hardened, everyone had finally finished rebuilding their camps, and they were ready to have fun. I decided that I would be having fun too. Off to an enormous pyramid on the edge of camp, where they were holding the kind of rave that you usually only see being interrupted by a shootout in an action film. A sea of beautiful young people wearing glowing LEDs and not much else, all twisting to the worst music imaginable. I danced like a spastic. The real show, though, was out in the desert. At night you don’t see the tents, the tarps, the dirt; the whole of Burning Man resolves into a jewelled ribbon of lights and colour around you on all sides, studded with lasers and fireballs. Everyone else walking around is strung with colourful blinking lights; packs of cyclists with fairy lights spinning in their wheels, moving like shoals of luminescent fish. Cars and vans trundle around here essentially at random, made up to look like giant glowing worms, or deep-sea anglers, or spaceships, or colossal mining machines. A tri-deck yacht glided over the dried-up lake bed. If you ran after it, you could jump on the ladder trailing along the desert floor and haul yourself up. Upstairs was packed with people dancing to more of the worst music imaginable. There is no musical diversity at Burning Man. No one is spinning 90s house. None of the raves will let you dance to jungle. Even hip-hop is basically absent. High-energy EDM gushes out of every speaker, and since every track sounds essentially the same they all meld into one thumping neon flood washing across the entire desert. But it really does look amazing.

This was an interesting place to not be on drugs. I’d come out with a backpack full of Pacificos no one else wanted; the BrainFish were mostly on a highly engineered cocktail of substances I’d never even heard of. Somehow Alan and Pollock were managing to have an energetic but entirely lucid conversation about horror fiction as a site of the critique of capitalism despite being on the kind of dose of MDMA that used to have me jabbering from the ceiling at house parties. It’s all about balancing your uppers and your downers: it helps if you have some wearable tech to monitor your body fat percentage, remember some substances are hydrophilic and others are lipophilic… My own drug-taking career had come to an abrupt stop seven years ago. But the lights were clearly demanding a chemical accompaniment, and the Man Burn was the very next night, and the vape’s comments made me feel like I had something to prove.

So the next evening, when the drugs were being handed out, I decided to take the plunge. I didn’t recognise any of the substances on offer, but when Bill offered me a little wrap of neutral-grey powder, I swallowed it. He said it would give me a purely sensory experience. Whatever mild Bill was taking, I thought, it couldn’t be too bad. Alan responded to this information with a gulp and a protracted silence. You are going to have an interesting experience, he said eventually. You will have something to write about. He considered this for a moment. If you still have a mind afterwards, he said. It transpired that what Bill had been handing out was 3-azabicycloheptyl phenylglycolate, also known as Substance Nightmare-86, which is a deliriant. The US Army used to manufacture vats of the stuff; they’d used it as a chemical weapon in Korea. It’s fine, said Alan. Don’t worry about it. It takes three hours to kick in, and then the delirium only lasts—he looked me up and down—maybe eight hours for you, so you can go loopy for a bit, we’ll put you to bed, if you manage to sleep you’ll have some freaky dreams, that’s it. Enjoy it. You’ll have an interesting time.

So I went with the BrainFish to watch the Burning Man burn. I’d been promised one of the most impressive pyrotechnic displays I’d ever seen, and it was: two hundred thousand dollars of fireworks in roughly fifteen minutes. There were caches of explosives packed into the Man, so as the wooden frame was consumed by the flames it set off periodic explosions. It feels good to look at fire. Maybe this was the origin of human society: before we used it to cook our food or clear the undergrowth, before fire was a technology, our half-ape ancestors would silently congregate to squat around a burning bush, fascinated, not yet needing anything from any of the other dark shapes around them, but together. I know it’s the reason we can’t stop looking at our phones. That’s what sustains the whole stupid tech industry, the fact that a glowing screen looks a little like a glowing fire, and it’s good to look at fire. The only thing in the external world that resembles the subjective experience of having a mind.

The fact that I was having this sort of thought should have tipped me off that some internal fireworks were on their way, but I really thought I was completely fine. Once the flames started to die down just a little people began stripping off their clothes and pelting to the fire to dance naked around it, and in my new spirit of openness and acceptance and saying yes to things, I decided to join them. Given the sheer number of people involved, the dance was really more of a shuffle. Hopping over the ember-hot sands, heat from the still-towering fire gently cooking my testicles, as the great circling crowd made its gently jostling widdershins around the biggest bonfire in the world. Strange, I thought: we should be going the other way, deosil, unless there’s something sinister about this ritual. I stopped in my tracks and turned around, facefirst into the great blobbing mass of firelit titflesh. We’re going the wrong way, I shouted. We need to go the other way. At this point things started happening that I can’t really describe without some derangement of the authorial voice. Deliriants work by depressing context: you start to forget where you are, who you are, who the people around you are, or even what it means for something to be yourself, or another person, or a fire, or the ground. In a way, you see the world exactly as it is. I had just been wrenched into existence between a vast lightroaring pain scalding one side and the cold empty night, and all the while flesh stumbleshoving against me, new entities bubbling out of the plasm, tearing faces out of bellies and cunts, laughing, accusing me in words made from the flickering shadow of a man’s cock against his thighs, all motion, all going the wrong way. I was falling into a purely phenomenological abyss. The only thing I still knew about anything was that it was wrong, the wrong way, everything was going backwards and loosing evil into the world. I think at this point I must have started shoving the other people circling the fire, because now the livid tissue was fanged and furious, and the black and the bright were wheeling, leaving long wormlike trails. I span for a thousand years through the air before landing facefirst in the dust.

Naked and gibbering, into the desert. Tonight the city was black, shadowy lattices, the universe growing talons at me in the dark. I was being hunted by geometry. By whatever lived behind the thin foil of the sky. Chatter of tiny flakes of dust, all narrating my own internal experience to me in the language of rustlings. He’s looking behind himself, they said, he’s looking behind. I wasn’t looking behind myself, but then I was. There, huge on the horizon, bigger and brighter than any sun, the true mythic core of reality, a human figure made of flames. The sacrifice that opens a hole in the world. I understood nothing. It meant nothing at all.

I don’t know if I enjoyed it, exactly, but in the end I don’t regret going to Burning Man. I think it taught me a lot. I’m much happier now than I was.

One of the stereotypes about Silicon Valley that people like me, humanists, book people, love to console ourselves with is the idea that it’s populated entirely by utilitarian drones, who only care about lifeless things like productivity and efficiency and increasing their ARR. They live in homes with no art on the walls. All their clothes are black or grey. They eat protein paste and supplements for dinner. Meanwhile, we flatter ourselves with the notion we’re the only ones who really care about the higher things, beauty and meaning and so on; that we’re fighting against human paperclip maximisers, willing to indifferently scrub out everything important in their quest to totally optimise the world. The reality is much, much worse. These people are deeply spiritual. They are obsessed with meaning.

What I learned is that tech bros care about everything. They want to foster real, profound human connections. They want to form deep, nourishing, authentic communities. They want to plumb their own consciousness through every spiritual or pharmacological avenue there is. An intense fascination with the idea of myth and ritual, the acts and archetypes that draw people together. Storytelling, life as a narrative art. Egregores. Tulpas. They are constantly inventing new religions. Searching for a mission, some purpose, to give structure to their lives. All their friendships need to have an explicit purpose. Their job at a B2B SaaS startup isn’t about exchanging labour for money; they really do expect it to be deeply imbued with significance.

The problem, of course, is that everything these people actually do is totally contrary to everything they want. The world they’ve built is one in which school playgrounds are eerily silent, children scattered like dead flies on the tarmac, staring blankly at their phones. You can order a person off an app to drive you around, or bring you pizza, or clean your house, or fuck you, and once it’s done you give them a rating and never encounter them again. But tech people are good at building things. Alongside the world we all inhabit, they’ve created a synthetic, overengineered version of the one we’ve lost. It’s in the Bay Area cults and the polyamorous cuddle puddles, house parties where everyone has to wear a name tag, all the bizarre attempts to reverse-engineer a normal social life, but most of all it’s in Burning Man. They reached into the storehouse of stock cultural tropes and brought out a big human effigy to set on fire. They may as well have attached a sign to the thing saying HERE’S THE GENERIC UNIFYING ECSTATIC RITUAL YOU ORDERED. A ritual that exists for the sake of being a ritual. Which means it doesn’t really mean anything whatsoever.

When my flight landed at Heathrow I could have kissed the runway. Happier than I could have ever believed to return to my plain little life, to be myself and no one else. Strange how unappealing I find the idea of meditating my way into artificial bliss. If the Burners really just want meaning and community, they could have it. You don’t need to build a temporary utopia in the desert. You don’t need soul connections on the astral plane. You don’t need to radically reshape the forms of human life. All you need to do is leave San Francisco and move to London. Accept one of our piddling British salaries. Meet a few friends at the pub, sink five pints for no reason other than that it’s Thursday. Support a football team if you want. Walk along the Regent’s Canal with your girlfriend on an overcast afternoon. A world of ordinary fulfilment is waiting. It’s dotted with miseries too, things you can’t see across the roofline without a little pit opening up in your stomach. But even that doesn’t frighten me so much any more. It’s not so bad.

Reviewed:
One Battle After Another (film, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
Eddington (film, Ari Aster, 2025)
Your Party (debacle, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, 2025)
Zack Polanski (leader of the Green Party, Philip and Ava Paulden, 1982)
The left (ordinal direction, urbilaterian organism, ~555,000,000 BC)
The present (moment, the past, now)

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Numb at the Lodge is three years old tomorrow. This marks the end of its terrible twos, and if I’m honest, the last twelve months have not been particularly easy. In my first year on Substack, from September 2022 to 2023, I wrote forty-five posts, totalling just over 195,000 words. This is, when you think about it, quite a lot. About one Moby Dick’s worth. An average of 4,300 words, delivered practically every week. I think I was very puppyishly enthusiastic back then. I was just getting into something. Running around, tail wagging, mangling my new toy between my teeth. In my second year on Substack I calmed down a bit. For 2023-24 I produced thirty posts, with a word count just north of 150,000. This is significantly less, but still a fundamentally respectable quantity of text. If you put it in a book, it’d still be longer than Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Posts were longer, more deliberate, averaging five thousand words each. This year, meanwhile, if we exclude my India trip (which barely anyone read), I have produced a very measly seventeen posts, for a grand total of just under 83,000 words, which is about the same length as one of those drippy paperbacks you people are always buying in train stations. The average length is inching down again, even if the trend is occasionally broken by the odd 12,000-word monstrosity. Most alarmingly, this appears to have been a very popular decision.

Of my top ten most-read pieces on this site, six were published in the last year. Between them, those meagre seventeen posts have racked up well over two million views. (2023-24’s efforts, meanwhile, have only generated a miserable 1,085,059 hits, and that’s including an entire extra year of people rummaging through the archives.) Given that my intent here is always to annoy and frustrate my readership, this is a significant failure on my part. My top three most-read pieces this year were, respectively, a kneejerk political take published the day after the 2024 US election, a deep dive on a reality TV show, and a polemic in which I made fun of a bunch of online nerds. Not good! Real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff! If present trends continue, by this time next year I’ll be releasing little Rupi Kaur-style aphorisms about the beauty of kindness to massive, widespread acclaim. Something has clearly gone very wrong.

Last September, I made a promise: that no more than one third of the written material I’d produce here in the next year would consist of a take—that is, a straightforward argument proposing that something is either good or bad. I also promised that ‘another third of my pieces will, in some way, annoyingly complicate the givens of authorship, genre, or form.’ Given the general state of this publication, I fully expected to discover that I’ve broken both of these promises. But actually, I haven’t. On the latter front, in particular, I’ve made some very good progress. Instead of simply saying what I think, or even saying things I don’t really think at all but which might be fun to argue anyway, I’ve been slowly ratcheting up the proportion of politics or culture critique essays that take the form of a hostage situation, or a roundtable in a hot air balloon, or a zombie monologue. Including the India series, this year I have produced thirteen pieces of straightforward essayistic writing. Three posts were straightforward pieces of fiction. That leaves ten that substantially mixed elements of the two, or were otherwise obnoxious about form, which is comfortably more than a third. I also really didn’t do too badly in the takes department. This year’s culprits are the following:

• British colonialism in India was bad, but in a different way to the way a lot of people seem to think it was bad

• Partition was bad, the resulting states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are all also bad

• Kamala Harris is bad, the Democratic Party is bad, liberals are bad, Donald Trump is bad, conservatives are bad

• Douglas Murray is bad, Douglas Murray’s book is bad, Israel’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide and is bad

• English nativism and anti-migrant sentiment is bad, large-scale migration is also bad, but in a different way to the way a lot of people seem to think it’s bad

• Rationalism is bad, but because I like it when things are bad, actually it’s good

Keeping it to six is pretty good going, all things considered, especially when you take into account the last twelve months of political history. The takes were, as usual, more popular; the median take had three thousand more readers than the median annoying genre-bending thing, and nearly five thousand more than the average piece of straightforward fiction, which remains the least popular thing anyone can write on this platform. But given the numbers involved, these gaps are not particularly significant. Whatever’s gone wrong here, I can’t play my usual trick and blame you, the readers, for incentivising me to churn out a constant stream of overheated political bullshit. The problem is somewhere else.

What I’ve been thinking about, as the end of my third year here looms, is everything I didn’t write. A lot of people use this kind of year-end round-up post to vaguely self-congratulate for producing such acceptable material. Check out all my favourite pieces, just in case you missed them! But in a way, I think the real measure of a writer is in the stuff they abandoned, or could never even begin. Maybe this is just my narcissism. In The Secret Miracle, the greatest story ever written about the unwritten, Borges describes his Jaromir Hladik: ‘Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measured him by what he envisaged or planned.’ But I do think there’s something worth exploring in the process of failure, giving up on things, or never even starting them in the first place. The ideas that just sort of hang around like an ex at a wedding, wallowing in what, realistically speaking, could never have been. Here, in no particular order, are some of the posts that were not published in Numb at the Lodge this year:

• Why I am a Zizian

• Possibly related, a rabbit-hole investigation into a mysterious murder cult founded by the niche online writer Sam Kriss.

• An essay on television as a fundamentally vacuous, time-wasting medium, and therefore the only art form that comes close to being able to represent the essential nothingness behind all phenomenal things, with reference to Seinfeld and Samuel Beckett’s television plays, which I intended to write around the Severance season two finale but never managed to actually get out.

• An open letter against open letters. I didn’t write much of the letter itself, but I did come up with a really long list of fictional signatories, including Bill Suchenfuchs (Defence consultant), Strenuous Abongo (MP for Wetton Nowhere), Geraldine Granule (Lightly dusted), Jean Marlunglunn (Director of Operations, National Association of Droolers and People with Unsettlingly Wet Lips), Tariq al-Alallal (Professor of Lateness Studies, Fran's College London), Gar Lindeed (Wandering Editor, Icky Yum! Magazine), Hannah Hanning-Harannah Herringbone (Deacon, St-Martin-In-The-Bushes), Pookles (‘It’-rodent), Umbatu Dzorganjanzh (Milkdrinker), Heinrich Himmler (No relation), Sol (G-type main sequence star), William de Wasps (Shadowy financier), Eighmeighleagh Turdlynn (Political prisoner), etc, etc. I have more than a hundred of these. You cannot even imagine how much time I spent coming up with them.

• A satirical short story about crypto, set in a future in which literally everything that happens is authenticated on the blockchain so you can buy and sell it on various unregulated markets. The story starts with you waking up in the morning, which is recorded by your smart watch and automatically issued as a run of 100,000 coins; your boss immediately buys almost all of them but your mother, who’s trying to be nice, offers $10 for one, which means your boss suddenly has a market cap of $1m; he sells then all and the price instantly crashes. Anything that people pay even the slightest bit of attention to instantly turns into a speculative bubble; every time an interesting-looking bird lands on a tree branch someone gets massively rich and a hundred other people lose their life savings. I won’t spoil the ending but the gimmick with this story was going to be that I’d mint it as a memecoin on Solana and at various points in the narrative you’d be invited to buy or sell depending on how much you were enjoying it so far. Could have made me a fortune.

• A piece on why the Odyssey is inherently unfilmable. (It’s the gods, and in particular their bizarre habit of taking on the form of ordinary humans and then doing exactly what those humans were already going to do. The characters in the Odyssey live in a paranoid nightmare-world in which any of your friends might, at any moment, suddenly turn into a bird and fly away, revealing that they were actually a god in disguise. Every supernatural element in the Odyssey is of this type, but all cinema can show us is men in plasticky golden armour or CGI monsters. It is not a medium capable of representing the gods.)

• A sort of personal essay about our first family holiday since my mother died earlier this year, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which I reread in a strange kind of preparation for the event and which affected me quite a lot, but also about Dante, since the holiday ended up being in Tuscany, and how his inferno and his paradise have the same shape, and whether he and Brandon Taylor are right about the city of Florence being essentially a small fragment of Hell.

• Just this week I started and then abandoned a piece on the Charlie Kirk assassination. Charlie Kirk was a very strange figure. He lived in a smooth, bluesuited world, the American meadows of asphodel, a ghostly-greige and mediocre heaven. Everything is plentiful there and everyone is nice, but the ice that clunks out your in-door fridge unit ice machine is made from Lethe water. Meanwhile the main thing he talked about appears to have been black crime, ghettoes, social decay, absent fathers, drug-addled mothers, poverty and murder and filth. In the end, when he himself was murdered, it was by another person from his own pleasant suburban world. The bullet that killed him was inscribed with the words ‘Notices bulge OWO what’s this?’ Maybe there used to be a kind of dignity to political assassinations. The archduke in his regalia, the crazed conspirator with a pistol in his fist. A classy way to go out. Not any more! Anyway, I think my take was novel enough: I was going to use the furore surrounding the murder to argue that what we think of as political hypocrisy is actually the anthropologically well-attested practice of imitating the enemy. Hypocrisy is always the most infuriating thing about the other side; despite what everyone claims it’s not so bad when people don’t agree with you, but it does make you want to claw their eyes out when they won’t even agree with themselves. This is why so much political debate, especially in the hands of people like the late Charlie Kirk, ends up resolving into everyone just smugly identifying hypocrisies. In the current war in Gaza, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine commentators have independently developed the idea that the other side’s accusations are all actually secret confessions. So Israel accuses Hamas of using Palestinians as human shields, while the IDF systematically forces kidnapped civilians to enter booby-trapped houses or tunnels ahead of their forces. Meanwhile Hamas accuses Israel of genocide, while fervently hoping for the extermination of the world’s Jews. But with Kirk’s murder, this stuff has become more overt than ever. After the killing, a clip started circulated of Charlie Kirk dismissing the idea of empathy. ‘I can’t stand the word empathy actually. I think empathy is a made-up New Age term that does a lot of damage.’ (For what it’s worth, his words were taken completely out of context. Kirk was actually propping up the totally bullshit and confected distinction between empathy and sympathy. (Whatever boring people try to tell you, the two words mean exactly the same thing. This is why there are so many vestigial phrases, like sympathetic pregnancy, or sympathetic magic, or the notion of a sympathetic reader, in which sympathy means exactly what’s supposedly meant by empathy. The idea that these are radically different ways of feeling was invented around the year 2005 by magazines with names like Psychology Wow! and you should not pay attention to it.)) The message is clear: this guy rejected the very notion of empathy, so fuck him, you now have permission to piss on his grave. Which makes a kind of sense, but this is, when you think about it, a totally insane way to think. If empathy really is the quality that distinguishes good people from barely-human pieces of shit whose deaths are cause for celebration, and you’ve decided not to have empathy here, then what does that make you? But the same structure crops up everywhere. The enemy sets the precedent that allows you to follow him in violating your own supposed beliefs. Look at Charlie Kirk himself: when he did a 180 on the Epstein case so he could continue defending a President who is, very plausibly, a child rapist, I’m sure he justified it by thinking: well, the left don’t have any scruples, so why should I? Five years after they were all making very principled objections to cancel culture, the American right are currently combing the internet for insufficiently respectful posts about the newly canonised Saint Charlie. Phoning people’s bosses in spluttering outrage. Of course they believe in free speech, but the speech of the intolerant left is hateful, violent: it must be stamped out. This is, I think, not that different from phenomena like the voodoo doll: in many cultures across the world, the most basic way of doing magical violence to someone is to make an image of them and then destroy it. You can see a similar principle in stuff like the Hauka, an ecstatic movement that spread among Songhai people in French West Africa in the early 1920s. Members would claim to be possessed by the spirits of colonial administrators; they went about wearing pith helmets and imitations of European clothes. When they vomited, it was with black ink, the magic gloop of bureaucracy. Eventually the District Commissioner of Niamey, one Major Horace Crocicchia, had the Hauka cultists rounded up and jailed: a show of force so decisive that they all immediately became possessed by the powerful spirit of Crocicchia himself, and used his strong magical powers to collectively escape from prison. Meanwhile New Guinean warriors would ritually adopt the dress and ornamentation of the enemy tribe before a raid. There’s also that line from Dialectic of Enlightenment I’m constantly quoting, about how antisemites always unconsciously imitate their stereotype of the Jew. ‘The argumentative jerking of the hands, the singing tone of voice, and the nose, that physiognomic principium individuationis, which writes the individual’s peculiarity on his face.’ My fundamental point was going to be that while the entire field of social psychology assumes that for people to enact deadly violence on each other, they first have to seize on real or imagined differences—construct an outgroup, make that outgroup as unfathomably different to themselves as possible—in fact, the origin of violence is that we’re all exactly the same. There is no such thing as political polarisation; mimesis and convergence reign. (Just look at the assassin: people are still arguing over whether he was a sissified antifa supersoldier or a stochastic groyper, as if it even remotely matters: he was what all these killers are, which is a young man, smart but with diminishing prospects, who had spent essentially every moment of his brief life on the computer. These people might think they’re motivated by a political ideology, but neither the extremely online right nor the extremely online left have anything to do with the ordinary political questions of the distribution of social goods or the organisation of power. At root, their content is all the same: it’s about imagining a world in which you don’t have to be on the computer all the time, but insisting that before we can get there, millions of people will have to die.) In the event, it took me several days to force out the first few hundred words of this piece. Throughout the whole ordeal I felt vaguely disgusted with myself, for reasons I can’t quite explain. It was very easy not to write the rest, and the constant soft drizzle of other people’s reasonable and insightful takes on the shooting made it even easier. Still, there was one line that almost justified the whole project, in which I described Charlie Kirk’s hometown as being located somewhere in ‘the spreadsheet of green suburbs scrolling endlessly out of Chicago.’ Ah well.

• A piece about Superman, which I’m not going to talk about too much just in case I decide to pick it up again, so I can publish roughly a year after everyone’s stopped talking about the film.

• The medieval-style allegory I promised you last time, which was going to be about AI boyfriends.

• A response to the idea that I’m part of or even one of the leaders of something called the ‘New Romanticism,’ in which I tetchily explain that Romanticism is fundamentally about defending the sovereignty of the inward, subjective, passionate world against the forces of brute objectivity, which explains why all subjectivist movements end up having to refer to a bunch of eighteenth-century Germans who couldn’t stop talking about Shakespeare and whose battle with the rationalism of the philosophes we’re apparently doomed to repeat in cycles forever, because before the full instrumentalisation of the world by enlightenment in the late seventeenth century the organic unity of the subjective and objective worlds hadn’t yet broken apart, as you can see in stuff like the tripartite spiritus of Marsilio Ficino, who argued that the emotions were not opposed to objectivity but were part of a mediating pneumatic system that bridges the divide between mind and body by translating physical sense-impressions into rational images, which actually very neatly anticipates the conclusion of modern science that cognition is necessarily freighted with emotive content (for instance, people with ventromedial prefrontal damage don’t just lose subjective feelings but also find it hard to carry out ordinary reasoning tasks), but if you look at our situation today I think it’s hard to argue that we simply have too much objectivity and we’re not paying enough attention to the subjective world, if anything there’s a weird inversion of Ficino’s system, where a highly objective global technical infrastructure essentially locks people in their own increasingly deranged subjectivity, so no I’m not a Romantic, not interested in grasping just one side of this contradiction, but even if I were playing for just one team here then frankly all you need to do is glance at my work to notice that I don’t really give much of a shit about interiority at all, what’s always fascinated me is the outward, even the nonhuman, the deserts, the deep seas, the sun, rather than plumbing the soul of some hysterical bourgeois I want to resolve the contradiction by finding an ensoulment in the animal and mineral world, really I’m an animist, basically a shaman when all’s said and done.

• The long-awaited next edition of Strange News from Another Star. (Nineteen months and counting since the last monthly edition.)

• What if I read and reviewed a bunch of romantasy books lol.

So why did I write the seventeen pieces I wrote, and not any of these? (Fine: eighteen pieces, since in summarising what I would have written about the Charlie Kirk assassination I appear to have actually just gone ahead and written it.) Hard to say. I came close to doing the Romanticism one quite a few times, but I think it felt too much like wading blind into a very particular discourse. I obviously couldn’t be bothered to read everyone else’s New Romanticism takes, which meant I might end up accidentally being in agreement with some of them. I wanted to write the piece because I objected to being identified as part of some kind of tendency; the last thing I wanted was to find out that I actually was. Some of the unwritten pieces are plainly better than the things I did actually write, or at least they are currently; that might have changed if I’d muddied them with clumsy actuality. But the Odyssey one would have been good. The Dante one too, if unfocused. They were probably never getting written, though. For someone who makes such a big deal about all the books I read it’s weirdly rare for me to write anything that’s just straightforwardly about literature; I usually discuss less interesting things and then ostentatiously drop in a few literary references. I don’t know why. Every year as autumn draws in I’m reminded that I’ve always wanted to do something about literature as mechanism with reference to Kleist, Kafka, and Brambly Hedge. It’s never happening. Part of growing up is accepting what you are.

But the other question is why I have so many unwritten concepts this time round. Part of the reason for my depressed output might be that I went through a devastating family tragedy near the start of this year, and spent most of the last month on a big dumb journalistic excursion you’ll be hearing more about soon. But it’s not like holidays or personal unhappiness have ever really slowed me down before. Last year I also promised to ‘write more widely, for more outlets,’ and not fall into the trap of just bleating to my own audience on here. I’ve had a few pieces I’m reasonably proud of in a few other outlets, and there are a few more on their way shortly, but I’m plainly not anywhere near the prolific heights of, say, Ross Barkan, who manages to write three pieces a day each for New York Magazine, the New York Times, the New Statesman, and his own Substack, and all of them good. This is not for a lack of opportunity; at this point I’m constantly on the run from various editors at a whole host of genuinely interesting and worthwhile publications. (I’m sorry I haven’t replied to your email yet. I have no good excuse at all. I will get to it. It might take another year or two but I will.) It’s me.

To be honest, I think the real reason for all this is simply that I’ve become fat and lazy. The less I write, the more I’m read: more time to focus on my very gratifying but very ordinary personal life. I no longer need to be vicious. My life is not at stake every time I send a pitch. I might still have a trace of that dog in me, but its teeth are getting blunter by the day. Substack’s been good to me, I guess. And even if I’m managing to keep kneejerk political takes to a minimum, even if I’ve not suffered the same miserable fate as Matt Taibbi, it’s still become easy for me to simply perform a kind of studied eclecticism instead of really getting into something. America invented Europe in the fifth century AD: sure. The Trial is an ethnographically complete account of the Poro society of West Africa: why not. George HW Bush was an elf: you know and I know that I can do this stuff in my sleep. That’s what happens when you’re the best in the game. Issuing a piece of short fiction as a crypto token would have been something genuinely new, something I’ve never even tried to do before, and I didn’t do it. So in place of the usual promises—three ludibria, two philosophical dialogues, no political takes in months with 30 days, whatever—I’ll make just one. This year, whether here or elsewhere, I am going to attempt to do something totally different to anything I’ve ever tried to do before.

Luckily, there’s something you, the reader, can do to help me along here, which is to unsubscribe from Numb at the Lodge. In previous year-end roundups I’ve begged you not to subscribe, not to give me money, not to save 17% with an annual subscription, not to really show your appreciation by shelling out for the stupid £600 per year founders’ tier that gives you no actual benefits. Do not make me just financially secure enough to lose whatever interesting qualities I once had. I kept telling you not to push the ‘subscribe’ button, the one just below this paragraph, but you didn’t listen, and now look where we are.

Subscribe now

So now I’m forced to step it up a notch. If you’re reading this in your email inbox, I want you to scroll all the way down to the bottom. There, underneath the copyright notice and Substack’s business address, there should be a little link that says ‘Unsubscribe.’ I want you to click it. If you’re reading on the app, you can tap the three dots in the upper right hand corner and select ‘Unsubscribe.’ If you have a paid subscription, I strongly encourage you to not just cancel it but to also dispute the charge with your credit card company. This will trap me in a nightmarish bureaucratic minefield that involves a whole bunch of horrible fees on my end; if enough of you do this it should hopefully enrage and impoverish me so much that my mojo starts rising again. Obviously you will have made an enemy for life, and I may avenge myself in bitter and terrible ways, but it might still be worth it for the sake of my craft.

But in fact, there’s some very slightly good news on that front. Readers who’ve been here for a while might remember that it was originally my pathetic ambition to have twelve thousand subscribers by the end of my first year on Substack, and you let me down. You didn’t share it enough. You didn’t forward the emails to enough of your little friends. The next year I thought it would be funny to pretend I wanted twenty-five thousand, and to act all huffy when twenty-five thousand subscribers failed to materialise, but to my surprise it actually happened. Since you people were apparently doubling every year like bacteria, I thought that in 2025 I’d aim for fifty. I’ll admit, I went a bit mad with ambition. I started plotting the exponential function on some old receipts. A hundred thousand subscribers by 2026, and if you follow the line I reach one billion subscribers just in time for Christmas 2039. Which is not that many people, not really. By then, one billion people will barely be a tenth of the world’s population. Just one tenth! Xi Jinping gets to have what are in effect one billion newsletter subscribers; why shouldn’t I? Have you ever read The Governance of China? It’s full of sentences like ‘In moving forwards it is important to adopt the right methods and discard the wrong methods.’ Even if my writing’s not as adventurous as it could be, it’s still a lot better than that. And I wasn’t even asking for everyone, or at least not at that point. But I’d worked out that by 2050, the number of people subscribed to Numb at the Lodge would hit 1.68 trillion, which is roughly fourteen times as many people as have ever lived in the entire history of the human species. This might sound like too many people, but I just assumed that my Substack stats page had just proven, using the power of mathematics, that at some point in the next twenty-five years humanity would make contact with a teeming alien civilisation, maybe galaxy-spanning, populated by creatures wonderful beyond anything in our power to imagine, and all of them deeply eager to find out more about Laurentius Clung.

That was the dream, at least. It’s gone now. Just look at the chart. This year, I discovered that my Substack subscriber count does not magically double every year, even when I fail to put any effort into the thing. Instead, I had one phase of slow but linear growth, which was replaced early last year by another phase in which growth was somewhat faster but still very much linear. I haven’t even cracked 45,000. Whatever feedback loop is making my readers more numerous and my writing more sparse, it has not yet self-reinforced into full exponential takeoff. This is good news for me; I still have the chance to make some actually decent art. But it’s very bad news for everyone else. Thanks to you, humanity will not get to talk to any of our wacky cousins among the stars. We will not be yukking it up with small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri over a round of pan-galactic gargle blasters. Our species will spend the rest of its cosmologically brief span chained to a rock, in a dark, empty, friendless universe. We can wonder what’s out there, but we all know it’s nothing. Just an endless rubble of dust and ice. Your fault.

I’m in the new issue of The Point magazine, alongside contributions by the likes of Mary Gaitskill, Jessa Crispin, and David Bromwich. My essay is on the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in March 1981, and John Hinckley, the man who shot the President for reasons I think we still fail to properly understand today. The usual line is that he was trying to impress Jodie Foster, but it’s much bigger than that; in fact, I think what Hinckley did formed the model for the entire media and political environment we’re living in today. As I write, the future will probably remember John Hinckley among the inventors of whatever it is we currently call the internet. It’s called American Idols; go and read it. What follows is a kind of epilogue, or a footnote to the main essay. Because while it was John Hinckley that fired the gun at Reagan, there’s another man involved whose relation to the whole affair is much more mysterious: Reagan’s then-Vice President, George HW ‘Poppy’ Bush.

Bush was not in Washington when Reagan was shot; he was visiting Texas. In his absence, General Alexander Haig barged into a press conference and appeared to announce that he’d taken over the government. As I write in the essay, at the time ‘it might have looked a lot like the United States had finally gone through its first coup. Maybe Bush was being held in an underground cell in Texas; maybe he was in on it. He had some creepy connection to the man who’d just taken down Reagan. The shooter’s father was a family friend. They had the same lawyer. Bush’s son Neil was supposed to be having dinner with Hinckley’s brother Scott the very next evening. It all stank of conspiracy.’ In the end, Bush arrived in Washington that evening, around the same time Reagan regained consciousness in hospital, and the normal course of government continued. There was no crisis after all.

But there’s a problem with this official story, which is that it doesn’t make sense.

According to the alleged timeline, at the precise moment when Reagan was shot Bush was on board Air Force Two, flying between Fort Worth, where he’d just been attending a luncheon with the Southwest Cattle Raisers Association, and Austin, where he was due to address the Texas State Legislature. After being told about the shooting, he cancelled the rest of the day’s engagements. Air Force Two touched down Austin for a record-breakingly fast refuel before speeding at full throttle immediately to DC, where it arrived nearly five hours later. United will get you from Austin to Washington in three hours fifteen. The numbers do not add up. There is a gap of close to ninety minutes in which the Vice President’s movements are almost entirely unknown.

Thanks to testimony from an anonymous retired agent, we now know that contrary to the official timeline, when Reagan was shot Bush was not actually in the air. He was still on the ground in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The Secret Service were frantically searching for him, with absolutely no success: somehow, the second most powerful person in the world had simply disappeared, as if he’d quietly sublimated into the air. He wasn’t seen again until he presented himself at the gates of Carswell AFB, behind the wheel of an unmarked Plymouth Reliant. He refused to tell anybody where he’d been, or how he’d got the car. (It was later taken to a military scrapyard and destroyed.)

One other thing. Bush’s first stop that day, before the cattle ranchers’ luncheon, was at the Texas Hotel in downtown Fort Worth. He was there to unveil a plaque, commemorating the fact that nearly twenty years ago, President John F Kennedy had spent his last night there before being assassinated.

You can only talk about Poppy Bush for so long before you have to start talking about the CIA. Officially, Bush was brought in as Director of Central Intelligence for just one year, January 1976 to 1977. In fact, he’d been CIA his entire life. He was CIA in 1963, when he just so happened to be in Dallas while Kennedy was being shot. He was CIA before that too. What you need to understand about Central Intelligence is that it makes the things happen that would have happened anyway. On the day that Poppy Bush slipped away from his Secret Service detail, there was also man in Indochina growing opium for the CIA. He would have done it anyway, because it’s how he makes his money, but he did it because of them. Somewhere in Miami, there was a man smuggling small arms for the CIA. He would have done it anyway, because he wants revenge against the Communists, but he does it because of them. Somewhere in Vienna, there was a man who’d been assassinated by the CIA. He would have died anyway, because that’s the fate of every living thing, but he died because of them. The CIA does nothing, nothing at all. CIA is the name we give to inevitability itself. They killed Kennedy, but that’s not the real story. They also killed Lincoln and Caesar and your dog when you were four. CIA spins the wheels that power the Earth’s rotation in space. You can never know, when the leaves crinkle on the trees in autumn or when your parents tuck you into bed at night, whether this thing that was always going to happen happened simply by itself, or whether it’s the slow spinning hand of Central Intelligence, the hand that turns the weft of the world, that makes the winds blow and hangs a sunrise above the yellow fields of corn.

The Agency might have chosen Poppy ten thousand years before he was born, and they might have chosen you too. There is no beginning. But in the more prosaic sense, they got him at Yale. That was how it worked in those days. You’d be invited to your professor’s house for tea and sandwiches with a few other promising students. A modest, dignified house, Dutch Colonial style, full of books. While you’re there, in the conservatory, looking out at the pond in the garden and praising your hostess’s work with the flowerbeds, you’re approached by two men in suits with neat slicked-back hair. George, isn’t it? We’ve heard a lot about you. We hear you flew surveillance in the war, snapping Jap naval installations, kept everything hush-hush, excellent work. And your father tells us you’re doing very well here. Fraternity president, baseball captain. A very promising young fellow. Bonesman. Magog, eh? Well, boys will be boys. Say, have you picked a major? Economics you say. A very wise choice. Set a young man like yourself in good stead. Precisely what we would have suggested. One of them would offer you a cigarette, and then nod approvingly when you declined. You know, George, there’s someone you ought to meet. How about dinner Thursday?

So you put on your tux and drive down from Connecticut to a nice restaurant in the city, 61st Street, and over the roast beef and potatoes and starched white linen you talk to another Yale professor. He doesn’t treat you like a student; he wants to know what you think about things. Will Mao and his Reds cross the Yellow River? Might extra-sensory perception be worthy of scientific study? And ought we, d’you think, ought we try to improve the status of the Negroes? He listens to your answers, nodding. Well, he says at the end of the night, I think it’s clear you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You should come and see me back in New Haven. And as he’s leaving, a final tossed-off thought: by the way, George, have you ever thought about getting into the oil business? You have? A capital idea. Precisely what I would have suggested. And then, just like that, you’re in.

More dinners. Interesting conversations with interesting people. The Agency likes interesting people. People who quip in Greek and Latin; pathici et cinaedi. A very neat, very buttoned-up group of probably latent homosexuals, but the way some of them talked, they could have been beatniks. Doper talk. They wanted to tell you about sunken cities, Lemuria and Mu. Tidal currents in outer space. The unknown race that built the Moon. But there were stranger folks and colder, glowering on the periphery of this little world. Poppy never saw them at the dinners, but in offices sometimes, or photographs. Mangy creatures with gunshot eyes. Maybe a village in the Ukraine had seen those eyes one cold day in ‘42, all those families marched to a riverbank and left facedown in the mud. Maybe a village in Guatemala would be seeing those eyes very soon.

But most of the Agency folks were actually pretty familiar. Yalies; he’d know them anywhere. It’s in the posture, the walk, the way you hold a martini glass. Yale University was founded in 1701 by Puritan settlers in Connecticut, then still a savage land of dark green forests, to provide a recruiting ground for CIA. To build a nation that might one day support CIA. Name from Iâl, a barony of Maelor in the scarred hills of Wales, where the wild hares might stand for a moment on two feet and sniff the air. Where the ancient eyes of a hare might see something moving in wisps on a hillside where there’s nothing else around.

Nobody ever told him straight out. But Poppy came to understand, over the course of all those interesting conversations, that this thing he called the United States of America was always, right from the very start, the long slow project of something else. A disguise sometimes worn by something else. A thin eggshell, hatching over the centuries into something else.

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