His eyes lit up from across the table as he told me, a recent transplant to the city, about a Nashville that once was—his little hometown with a beautiful, neighborly, in-tact Southern culture, all bound together by an intricate social dance. He delighted in vivid memories of neighbors conversing on the street, of little festivals gathering the whole town, and of receptionists calling him “darling,” inviting a playful verbal parry that would turn the strangers into old friends, enchanting even the day’s most mundane chores.

To the uninitiated, courtesy appears to be merely a pleasant social game. But Tom Hibbett, a soft-spoken Nashville native, sees something much more. Courtesy is not mere politeness nor is it an end in itself. It is a complex art, one whose primary purpose is to facilitate human interaction. In so doing, it helps bind together society, transmit culture across generations, respect citizens’ honor, and spawn the development of new ideas—all insights he’s gleaned from seventy-two years of watching the decline of courtesy and culture in one of America’s now most renowned cities.

For two hours I was held, captivated by the old Southerner’s tale, by the softness and gravity, the mystery and righteous indignation, the hope and despair that flickered through his voice. I was intrigued by the power that he ascribed to this lost art, all the while searching within his testimony for insights that could help bind together our emerging movement—an eclectic mix of philosophers, artists, businessmen, outdoorsmen, and everyday citizens that has congregated around America’s cultural-educational crisis, meeting at little outposts scattered across the American heartland, including the very coffee shop at which Tom and I sat.

Discovering Meriwether

It was eight o’clock Wednesday morning. Rush hour traffic was buzzing by outside on Charlotte Pike. The Eight and Roast filled nearly to capacity as our group of six rose to depart, vacating the large center table that we had occupied for the past hour to discuss Gaius Marius, an ancient Roman general. It was the Meriwether Academy‘s weekly ritual: read one chapter of Plutarch’s Lives, each describing the life of a great man from Greek or Roman antiquity, then meet to discuss his life and what we can learn from it today.

I had been working on a follow-up to my initial profile of Meriwether, a Nashville-based men’s group dedicated to reviving the ideal of the American man. Inspired by the strong community that it has built over the past year, having attracted hundreds of men, including a few dozen core members, to its events, I reported on my experience attending the group’s outdoor retreats, formal-dressed philosophy symposium dinners, and Great Books dialogues—all precursors to its ultimate ambition of building a boys’ school centered around classical and outdoor education.

For my follow-up, I was seeking testimonials from men whom the group had positively impacted. Tom, one of the group’s earliest members, volunteered. We sat back down for what was set to be a short interview as the rest of the men departed for work and other obligations.

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Tom’s journey with Meriwether began at this very coffee shop, a short motorcycle ride from his home in West Nashville. “I believe we are neighbors,” said a young man approaching his table and introducing himself one morning. The two were indeed neighbors. They had exchanged friendly non-verbal greetings over the past few weeks, often a nod and a wave as the young man sat atop his balcony, draped with an American flag, while Tom rode his daily motorcycle route below.

That man was Warren Steury, now twenty-nine year old founder of the Meriwether Academy. Exuding the neighborly courteousness of a near-forgotten age, Warren immediately impressed Tom. “This is the kind of person to person neighborliness that I long for,” he said, getting emotional as he both lamented the loss of courtesy in Nashville throughout his lifetime and expressed his admiration for Warren. “I liked him from the start,” “I’m glad I met him,” “he made a very positive impression on me,” Tom went on to say over the course of our conversation.

Warren reignited Tom’s love for the classics. Tom became a regular at Meriwether’s reading group last year, contributing many valuable insights to our conversations. While discussing Thoreau’s beautiful essay “Walking,” he invited us to contrast the American Transcendentalists’ and the American explorers’ views of the frontier, especially the views of Thoreau and Meriwether Lewis, the group’s namesake. While discussing Martin Heidegger’s view of Being (a key philosophical concept), he introduced us to the Japanese philosopher D.T. Suzuki who had a similar perspective. While discussing Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, a book championing a return to classical education, Tom enticed a patron of this coffee shop to join us, noticing that he was discreetly listening in.

Tom also attended several of Meriwether’s philosophy symposium dinners, including two last year featuring Michael Millerman, founder of the Millerman School, to discuss Bloom’s Closing and Leo Strauss’ Natural Right and History, and one this year featuring Mark Anderson, Chair of Belmont University’s Philosophy Department, to discuss ataraxia, a Greek concept meaning spiritual calm.

These unique events have become quite popular in the city. They are now hosted once or twice per month, each usually attracting twenty to forty men. Guests arrive well dressed, often in a jacket and tie. They congregate in a large room with patriotic decor lining its walls and a beautifully set table standing at its center. A short talk by the invited speaker proceeds a long dinner discussion. Guests socialize for an hour before and smoke cigars after the meal.

The dinners follow an intriguing format ascribed to Thomas Jefferson. There is one rule: only one person talks at a time; while he is talking he is given everybody’s full attention (no side conversations allowed). The invited speaker sits at the head of the table and asks leading questions to the group. Jefferson found, as have we, that this format draws out each person’s unique insights and experiences, leading the group to rich and insightful conversations about politics, culture, philosophy, and life.

For Tom, Meriwether is a small island of courtesy in new Nashville. “I’m always struck by the atmosphere of courtesy at Meriwether’s dinners,” he told me. If two people ever find themselves standing near each other before or after the meal, they immediately introduce themselves. There is always natural courteous mixing. Moreover, behind the dinners’ Jeffersonian format, which has helped Meriwether become so popular, Tom sees the fundamental principle of courtesy at work, a point that I will return to later.

“Only at Meriwether can I find these people,” Tom said, reflecting on the value he’s gained from the group. Only here can he find people to have fruitful (or even any) conversations about Strauss, Thoreau, Heidegger, and Plutarch with. “This is what life is all about,” he added. Only here can he find friends whom he can talk about life’s most important questions with.

Tom is excited about Meriwether for another reason. He believes that it can help change our culture. He is inspired by the strong community that it has built over the past year. The group’s success shows that there is a “market for these ideas”—personal responsibility and reconnecting with Western culture—among “upwardly mobile young men”—influential men who are leading families and local cultural and political projects. He sees Meriwether’s message as similar to those of clinical psychiatrist Jordan Peterson and retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, two public figures who have helped many young men, including his son and son-in-law, improve their lives and marriages.

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What exactly is wrong with our culture and how can we fix it? Nobody truly knows. What I’ve found so valuable about Meriwether is that it has brought together men from so many different walks of life, each with a piece of the puzzle.

Tom’s nostalgia for old Nashville and his passionate appreciation of courtesy had become well known among our group. But I was amazed to discover something much deeper that day at the coffee shop. Through a lifetime of watching Nashville transform, Tom had subconsciously developed such an intricate understanding—almost an entire theory—about courtesy and its relationship with culture. This gradually came out during our dialogue. I spent the rest of the rest of the day in West Nashville with my pencil and notebook piecing it together, excited by the prospect of what might emerge.

Four themes came out: what exactly courtesy is and why it is so complex; how courtesy both signals the underlying health of a culture and facilitates its organic development; how courtesy can help Meriwether and our wider cultural-educational movement; and how differing views on courtesy may point to a structural asymmetry in the culture war. The next four sections focus on each of these themes in turn.1

What is Courtesy?

Nashville used to be a small town, Tom told me. Everyone who lived there was from there. It was a genuine community with a shared sense of identity. Everyone shared the same language, literature, history, and religion. They all participated in the same local customs, the most memorable of which was an annual Christmas festival featuring a life-sized nativity scene set outside of the Parthenon in Centennial Park. Throughout the city, men and women dressed well, were physically fit, and acted respectfully.

Everyone understood the unspoken rules—the dance—of courtesy. Strangers would make eye contact and say “hello” to you; neighbors would stop to talk to you on the street; an old man in an oncoming pickup truck would wave to you; the milkman and garbageman knew you and addressed you by name. These were all little things that he had taken for granted that are virtually gone today.

Courtesy, like dancing, is a natural human instinct but it is also a complex art. The old Southerners were all skilled in the art. They would often go well beyond its basic practices to add improvised flourishes to their interactions—as if spinning a partner during a Waltz. Tom delighted in reliving vivid memories of these interactions from his youth. Though he sat across from me, I could have sworn that he was a six year old boy again sitting in his living room on Thanksgiving Day. The seats are all occupied as his grandmother enters. The men do not merely offer her a seat but compete for the honor of giving her one. “Dovey!” one man calls out endearingly, immediately rising and gesturing towards the vacated chair, “please“—enunciating it as if to say “do me the honor”—”have this seat.”

Courtesy was “in the air” in old Nashville. Many were skilled in the art, but his earliest teacher stood well above the rest. “Mother was a master,” he said slowly, with a mysterious sense of admiration and gravity in his voice. “She was gifted from birth,” he insisted. But she also diligently practiced the art of conversation, a subset of the art of courtesy. He painted the picture of a vibrant Southern woman lighting up any social gathering. If she saw someone silent for too long, she’d draw him out with leading questions, often discovering things about him that few others knew. She was always “passing the ball” of conversation, never talking too long nor sitting there silently (which is polite but not courteous). She would soon have the whole room conversing, following her lead, like an expert dancer getting everyone to dance, or at least to try.

She taught him that courtesy, while practically complex, is fundamentally simple. It is about putting the other person first. It is about taking the initiative and inviting him to communicate, telling him that his contributions are important, that his feelings, knowledge, experience, and ideas are genuinely valuable to the conversation. She led him to the insight that courtesy is not an end in itself. Its fundamental purpose is to enable communication—among strangers, neighbors, dinner guests, and even the entire society.

“This is what Meriwether is all about,” he said. By taking the initiative to get young people talking, the group is practicing a basic form of courtesy. Its ritualized practices that aim to further enrich the conversation and involve everyone, primarily its Jeffersonian-style dinners, do so by importing the practices of cultures and people, like Jefferson, to whom courtesy came naturally. Tom hopes that Meriwether, through its men’s events and future boys’ school, will inculcate courtesy among a sizable group of men who will then spread it across society—much as his earliest teacher used to almost single-handedly get an entire room conversing.

Conversation is an essential ingredient of courtesy. But so is courage. A courteous person is not afraid to offend when the situation demands it. He or she must defend his or her honor and not quietly bear insult or injury.

Tom’s mother, the master of courtesy, was also socially courageous. He told me several stories that had helped her win this reputation. One occurred at her retirement party. She had worked for the State of Tennessee as a stenographer for many years. Her boss had often treated her and her coworkers disrespectfully; nobody liked him. At the party, he went to shake her hand, feigning to wish her well. She refused it. “We weren’t friends all these years John. We’re not going to start now,” she told him. Her coworkers idolized her for standing up to him, recognizing her courage in that situation as something that she had embodied throughout her career.

Courtesy and honor take on a much different form among men. Tom told me a story about one of his uncles, set around the 1930’s. His uncle couldn’t find work in Middle Tennessee so he had to move to Chicago to take a job at a factory. There his boss persistently and cruelly ridiculed him for being Southern. He refused to stop. One day, his uncle drew the line. “I’ve had enough of your insults,” he said. He told his boss to meet him in the parking lot after work, for what he thought might escalate into a fatal encounter. His boss didn’t show up that night; but he did lay off the insults the following day (and all days thereafter). Dueling, or the threat of it, among men, in all the forms it has taken throughout history, is courtesy taken to a dangerous extreme.

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So, courtesy is indeed a complex art. It requires a careful blend of optimism, humility, and courage. Optimism, to make you pleasant during social interactions, even to be excited by them. Humility, to put the other person first and invite him to communicate, acknowledging that he might know more than you. Courage, to defend your (or your family’s or nation’s) honor and to say what needs to be said. It is an art whose fundamental principles remain the same but take on a decidedly different character during interactions among men, among women, and between the sexes.

The courteous person is thus nothing like the merely polite person who is favored today—someone who goes through life quietly, who is afraid to offend anyone, and who recognizes no fundamental difference between the sexes.

Courtesy and Culture

So, now we know what courtesy is. But how are courtesy and culture related? Courtesy is not something that can be simply “added on” to an existing culture. That is a common misconception, Tom said. Instead, courtesy arises naturally in a healthy, in-tact culture, as it did in old Nashville’s. What excites Tom so much about Meriwether is that it is uniting men around a shared purpose—which is perhaps the most important aspect of any healthy culture. In so doing, it is cultivating the soil from which courtesy can (and has already begun to) arise naturally.

Courtesy blossoms in a healthy culture. But it also dies in a sick one. Tom put it well: “Courtesy is the canary in the coal mine. Once courtesy goes, culture soon follows.” This has been the fate of many cultures, including Nashville’s.

2009 was not the beginning nor the end of Nashville’s discourteous decline. But during this year was a day that Tom Hibbett would never forget. His quiet demeanor shifted as I asked him to retell the story that he had told the group last year.

He was working the counter at the U.S. Post Office, Charlotte Pike branch, a short drive from the Vanderbilt University campus. In walked a well dressed young man, likely a student, talking loudly on his cell phone. He approached the counter. There, Tom greeted him kindly and with a warm smile, a courtesy that he had shown to each of his customers and had expected to be returned. Ignored. “STAMPS!” the young man gruffly demanded, barely even acknowledging Tom, then turning his back, as if to say that Tom were completely subservient to and beneath him.

Tom was first stunned, then infuriated—mortally dishonored. Five hundred years ago in Europe he would have drawn his sword and justly impaled the discourteous churl! Two hundred, in America, the offender would have found himself on the losing end of a pistol duel. Fifty, in Nashville, he would have been run from town as if he had just defecated in the street. But in the decadent 2000’s, all the irate postal worker could do was turn his own back and resign to the break room.

There his blood boiled and he began to ask himself why. Was he over-reacting? No. Did his avenging fury spring from a discourteous origin? Quite the opposite. It was his courteous upbringing itself that demanded he defend his honor. It was his dear mother’s earnest tutelage that had sent “dulce et decōrum est prō patriā morī!“ coursing through his blood. It was his love for his vanishing little hometown that had inspired his mortal passion to defend it. Courtesy is not mere politeness. It is a matter of life and death. It is a warrior’s art, even if our warlike instincts are concealed and suppressed today.

Over the next fifteen years, Nashville, of course, completed its dramatic transformation to a nationally renowned city, complete with all of the ills of a modern metropolis. Tom now lives as a stranger to many of his neighbors, big businesses catering to tourists have drowned out the city’s old Southern charm, and courtesy has nearly vanished. Throughout this transformation, Tom had gained an increasingly deep appreciation for courtesy and for the cultures that still have it. One of them is Japan.

While working at the very same post office at which he encountered the discourteous American student, Tom encountered a Japanese man who embodied the “soul of courtesy.” He had come to send an international package. Throughout this long and complicated process, he listened attentively, followed instructions, and respected Tom as an authority. He followed the first rule of courtesy: put the other person first (assume he knows something that you do not). Although English was not his first language, the Japanese man comprehended nearly everything that Tom had said. Whenever he made a small error or had to ask for a clarification, he would apologize and bow. “I’m in heaven!” Tom exclaimed, recalling the interaction.

He felt an even stronger sense of admiration when he visited Japan. He felt a “reverse culture shock.” Instead of feeling alienated by the foreign culture, he felt an “uncanny sense of belonging,” like a “fish put back in water,” returning to courteous old Nashville. He had taken the trip with some family members to visit his son who was stationed there with the Air Force. The others wanted to “see Japan” by going to tourist sites. But Tom wanted to see everyday Japan, to just be there. While he did spend some time at a famous Buddhist temple, he spent most of his time wandering through Japan’s residential neighborhoods, admiring their compact, tidy houses, and going to grocery stores and little shops, where employees would immediately come towards him smiling and bowing, offering to help.

Courtesy was everywhere in Japan. It did not surprise Tom that the country also has an in-tact culture. Its people have a common language, heritage, religion, and sense of identity. Japan reminded him of what has been lost, but could perhaps arise again, in Nashville.

So, courtesy blossoms in a healthy culture. But does courtesy also shape culture? Yes, Tom said, “there is a two way street between courtesy and culture.” How does courtesy shape culture? It does so both directly and indirectly. Tom paraphrased a beautiful quote by Edmund Burke to illustrate its direct influence. Burke said that nearly imperceptible daily manners shape man more than even the mighty hand of law:

Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.

How does courtesy shape culture indirectly? Tom explained his view. Courtesy enables the mechanism by which culture develops. Culture develops organically and unconsciously among a people. Its language, history, religion, customs, and sense of justice (right versus wrong) develop over centuries through billions of small conversations, interactions, and decisions. Courtesy “greases the wheels” of human communication. It facilitates these small culture-shaping interactions, including interactions between young and old people, which helps transmit culture across generations.

A New Frontier

Tom’s idea—that courtesy aids the bottom-up formation of culture—fascinated me. It set our conversation on a new path. Before, inspired by Tom’s lifetime experience in Nashville, we had focused on the decline of courtesy and culture and how Meriwether might help reverse this trend. Now, inspired by my disappointing experience at university, our attention turned more directly towards the contemporary culture war, specifically to the emerging cultural-educational countermovement (of which Meriwether is a part and to which this Substack is largely dedicated to reporting on). Could Tom’s insights on how courtesy shapes culture help guide the evolution of our emerging movement?

I told Tom about the movement. Beginning in the late 2010’s, people began leaving academia (and other mainstream institutions), partly due to their militant promotion of DEI and censorship of dissenting voices. They set out on a new frontier. They gradually began connecting online and forming small groups. They launched experimental cultural and educational projects, including ideologically diverse online schools, civic organizations (like Meriwether), conference circuits, and rural resorts dedicated to connecting groups in person. While the movement lacks an explicit telos, many broadly aim to revitalize American (and Western) culture by building strong grassroots communities and promoting robust intellectual discourse, especially on issues neglected or suppressed in academia.2

The movement is currently not well connected, which is perhaps its biggest problem. As a grassroots effort, it lacks an institutional superstructure and a common meeting ground (like a campus). It is composed not just of “intellectuals” but of people from all walks of life, who don’t typically meet in society. Many of them are scattered across the American heartland, not centralized in big city power centers. They are largely connected online and have only recently begun connecting in person. (Meriwether is one of the few groups that primarily meets in person.)

Could courtesy help bind together our scattered movement? If courtesy enables the key mechanism of bottom-up cultural evolution, as Tom suggested, might it also facilitate the evolution of our emerging subculture and its competing body of knowledge? Might it facilitate the key conversations and interactions that connect our people? That unearth our unarticulated knowledge, insights, skills, and spirit? That discover how they all fit together into a coherent counterculture and guide its evolution?

Our movement is quickly discovering that in-person events have a certain magic, connecting people more deeply than online networking ever could. Might the deliberate practice of a social art like courtesy make these events even better? Might it establish a “warmer” environment conducive to forming deeper connections? Could the movement’s active experimentation with rituals and practices, like Jeffersonian dinners, help establish such an environment? Could clarifying the movement’s purpose help do so?3

I am often amazed by the rich ideas that come out at our events (which do not come out online). People often have important knowledge that they don’t even know about, like Tom’s rich doctrine on courtesy and culture that our coffee shop dialogue uncovered. Groups oriented around a loose theme often possess a coherent but unarticulated structure, as my article analyzing a Doomer Optimism conference at the Wagon Box Inn in rural Wyoming brought out, weaving together speeches on farming, education, technology, disaster preparation, local politics, and the Machine. One of the main goals of my writing has been to articulate the unconscious but coherent body of knowledge that is emerging within our movement as a whole.

Could courtesy help draw out the knowledge scattered among our people necessary for this project to succeed? I was reminded of Tom’s first rule of courtesy—put the other person first and invite him to communicate, not out of mere politeness but out of the genuine belief that he might know more than you—and of his testimony that his mother, the master of courtesy, would often discover things about people in conversation that few others knew. What knowledge might this lost art help our community discover?

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Having discussed how courtesy could help strengthen our movement internally (by better connecting our people and unearthing their unarticulated knowledge), we turned to discussing how courtesy might help our movement gain wider support. One key problem is that many potential allies are not thinking about the culture war directly. They don’t see our long-term vision. Might the environment that we cultivate better attract them? Might a courteous environment—where everyone dresses well and invites others to communicate (as at Meriwether’s events)—signal the health of our underlying subculture? If they experience this at our events, might they come to believe that our intellectual projects will ultimately yield something good?

Regarding our educational projects, we might win more support by showing that we are raising the next generation to be respectful than that we are teaching them the great books. This is something that the public can immediately see and benefit from. This is especially important today given the unruly reputation of many students in college towns. Shouldn’t education be ennobling? Shouldn’t studying the great books help you live well? Shouldn’t a community devoted to humanity’s highest ideals visibly reflect its most basic ones? Shouldn’t the community benefit the surrounding population? The public must surely wonder this.4

A Conflict of Visions

Tom was excited to learn that there was a movement beyond Meriwether and that his insights might help it address some of its key problems. Our discussion on the culture war then shifted focus from its practical aspects to its deeper underpinnings: two views of the world, each with a distinct code of manners, underlie the conflict.

Tom’s description of culture forming in a bottom-up fashion (through billions of little interactions, facilitated by courtesy), reminded me of an idea that I had heard before, first from Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, a book that I had read while trying to make sense of the chaos that had been erupting all around me at university in the mid 2010’s.5 Two basic worldviews underlie the contemporary culture war. They differ primarily in their views on how social order arises and on the nature and distribution of knowledge. Each worldview gives rise to different beliefs on politics, gender, law, tradition, the economy, and other (important but) surface-level issues.

“Morally anointed intellectual elites” are on one side. They believe that social order arises in a top-down fashion, deliberately designed by humans. They often support centralized economic and social planning to achieve high-sounding aims, such as “social justice” or “racial equity.” What knowledge is needed to order society? They believe it is the rational, articulated knowledge of “experts” concentrated within established institutions, especially intellectuals within universities. They view the masses as morally and intellectually inferior (possessing little valuable knowledge), tradition as a mere convention (not inherently valuable). They are infatuated with their ideas, regardless of their empirical results. Consequently, they have been a disaster for many societies, including our own.

People on the other side (our side) hold opposing views on these fundamental questions. They believe that social order arises in a bottom-up fashion, through many small interactions that are not centrally controlled. “Free markets, judicial restraint, reliance on decisions and traditions growing out of the experience of the many—rather than the presumptions of an elite few—are so important to [them].” They believe that rationality is important but not more so than the unconscious part of the human psyche. They believe that knowledge is often unarticulated; that it is dispersed throughout society, among people from all walks of life; that it is encoded in people’s behaviors and in society’s evolved customs.

Tom said that he was also a fan of Sowell and cited some other works that speak to this dichotomy, including Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.6 He said that the two worldviews roughly map on to philosophical rationalism and empiricism. He relayed an intriguing image from Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy in which empiricism is portrayed as an upright pyramid—reasoning from a firm base of many facts up to a modest conclusion—and rationalism as an inverted pyramid—reasoning from a single logical principle (the pyramid’s tip on the ground) up to a broad conclusion. The former is stable, the latter is not.7

Might the two worldviews demand two distinct codes of manners? Tom was intrigued by my question. I explained my thinking. Courtesy was “in the air” in old Nashville while political correctness dominated university. Courtesy facilitates conversation while political correctness stifles it. These two communities roughly map on to the two worldviews discussed above. How might different aspects of each worldview—regarding social order, knowledge dispersion, the nature of culture, and activist structure—inform an adherent's view of manners?

How would things look in the bottom-up worldview (as I outlined in the previous section)? If social order arises through many small interactions, you’d value courtesy for facilitating them. If knowledge is dispersed across society, among people from all walks of life, you’d value courtesy as a way to gather that knowledge; you’d invite others to communicate out of the genuine belief that they might know more than you. If culture develops organically, you’d value courtesy for cultivating that shared identity. If grassroots organizing is the key to social change, you’d value courtesy for helping connect and organize citizen allies.

How would things look in the top-down worldview? If social order is designed, it doesn’t require facilitating interactions among citizens. If knowledge is concentrated among “experts,” you wouldn’t invite the others to communicate but would instead value political correctness for silencing their noise and (apparently) exposing their intellectual inferiority. If a multicultural pseudo-culture—comprised of peoples indifferent or hostile to one another—must be established, you’d value political correctness for silencing serious communication among groups, which inevitably leads to conflict. If large institutions are the key to social change, you don’t need to connect the citizenry since the essential change-makers are gathered under one roof and set into well-defined career roles.

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We did not ultimately arrive at an answer to my question. But we did arrive at an intriguing hypothesis. There might be a fundamental asymmetry in the culture war that our movement has not yet fully understood or leveraged. Might the art of courtesy empower “us”—citizens from all walks of life engaged in the bottom-up formation of knowledge and American culture—more than “them”—”experts” within established institutions (especially intellectuals within universities) engaged in the top-down creation of knowledge and dissemination of multiculturalism? Might this social art organize our grassroots efforts much as a bureaucratic hierarchy organizes theirs?

Might our worldview demand that we purse different long-term goals? Are we ultimately destined to create parallel (pro-American) academic institutions? Or must the organizations that we build play a fundamentally different role in shaping American culture and interacting with American life?

What I find so fascinating about Meriwether (and the other experimental groups in our movement) is that they provide a vehicle for investigating these questions. What will Meriwether evolve into? A men’s civic organization? A boys’ school? An outpost connecting our movement’s independent scholars?8 Something that connects patriotic men from all walks of life? That brings together aspects of the human soul that have been separated in modernity? That blends this all together into a new American culture and a new model of the American man?

Winning the Culture War

My quest for the seeds of a new American culture has taken me throughout the American heartland and twice to Europe. One bright June morning in 2026, it took me to a humble West Nashville coffee shop. There I met an old Southern man whose tale I could not choose but hear.

Never before have I met a man as passionate about courtesy as Tom Hibbett, nor do I think I ever will again. This I thought as we concluded our discussion, closing out some loose threads and walking out of the coffee shop together. Tom made me think about this lost Southern art more deeply than I ever could have imagined. Courtesy played a crucial role in Nashville’s past. What role might it play in America’s future?

What social code will ultimately come to define Meriwether? Might it meld the spirit of old Southern courtesy with that of our new American patriotism? Might Nashville be uniquely positioned to facilitate this synthesis?

Whatever road we take, we must always remember what Tom taught us about courtesy. Courtesy is not mere politeness nor is it weakness. It is a warrior’s art, intimately bound to honor. It is a noble art, embodied by great men like Thomas Jefferson. It is a gentleman’s art, practiced by previous generations of men superior in many ways to our generation’s own. It is a philosopher’s art, facilitating dialogue and inquiry. It is a patriot’s art, binding together citizens and transmitting culture across generations.

It is a social code that we should be proud to embody. It is one that we can confidently take with us as we confront the contemporary culture—whether the decadence and debauchery that dominates entertainment or the militant political correctness that dominates academia. It is one that will serve us well as explorers on the cultural-educational frontier opened wide before us, connecting us firmly with tradition yet propelling us forward into the bright unknown.

The Meriwether Academy hosted three engaging symposium dinners featuring Mark Anderson, Chair of Belmont’s Philosophy Department, this year. Each focused on a different aspect of Western philosophy, how it can help us understand our contemporary cultural crisis, and how it can help us improve our personal lives (including its limits of doing so).

These dinners have become quite popular in Nashville. Meriwether has now hosted a dozen of them, connecting the group with nearly as many excellent speakers.1 Each now usually attracts thirty to forty men, up from the dozen or so that they had attracted last year when the group was just getting started. These dinners are just one of the group’s diverse set of event offerings for men, which also include outdoor retreats and coffee shop dialogues on books about great men from Ancient and American history.

I’ve been to nearly all of Meriwether’s symposium dinners and other events. I’m consistently impressed by the quality of the events; by the quality of men and speakers that they attract; and by the energy that has grown around the group’s larger mission, which is to build a boys’ school centered around classical and outdoor education, aiming to properly raise up the next generation of American men. Warren Steury, founder of the organization, always does an excellent job hosting these events and has inspired so many men with his vision.

The dinners always have beautiful aesthetics. Guests arrive well dressed, often in a jacket and tie, and congregate in a large room, decorated tastefully with American flags, large pictures of the Founding Fathers, and busts of old Roman statesmen. At the center of the room, a horse-shoe shaped table is fashioned from a dozen or so smaller rectangular ones. The table is beautifully set: tall burning candles, corked bottles of red wine, and platters of bread and butter are interspersed among thirty perfectly spaced white plates, each set with bronze-plated silverware alongside a pen, a notebook stamped with the Meriwether logo, and a plastic-wrapped cigar. Guests mingle for an hour before dinner and smoke cigars after it.

The dinners follow an intriguing format ascribed to Thomas Jefferson. There is one rule: only one person talks at a time, and while he is talking he is given everybody’s undivided attention (no side conversations allowed). The featured guest sits at the head of the table and asks leading questions to the group. Jefferson found, as have we, that this format draws out each person’s unique insights and experiences, leading the group to rich and insightful conversations about politics, culture, philosophy, and life.

Mark Anderson has led three dinner discussions this year. The first, in January, titled “Reason and the Will”, discussed the Western philosophical tradition, from Plato to Nietzsche. The second, in March, titled “Being or Becoming?” analyzed the history of Western philosophy through the lens of these two philosophical concepts. The third, last night, titled “The Tranquility of Order” focused on the Greek concept ataraxia, interpreted to mean spiritual calm, and actually argued that traditional common sense wisdom is more valuable than deep philosophy in helping achieve personal happiness.

This article is about Anderson’s second event, fully titled “Being or Becoming? The Great Predicament of Modern Man.” Anderson’s presentation was based on his book A Concise History of Western Philosophy, which was one of the best short (150 page) introductions to Western philosophy that I have ever read. (I am currently planning to write articles on several of Meriwether’s other events that I’ve been to, including Anderson’s other two dinners, which will be published on this Substack in the coming months.)

So what did we discuss with Mark Anderson during dinner in March?

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Our Cultural Crisis

Our group is concerned with many things in modern culture. Some concerns that men voiced during dinner include: militant progressivism, anti-Americanism, tearing our Founding Fathers down, tearing statues down, rioting, censorship, technology rotting our brains, technology dominating our lives so much we can’t escape it, sexual degeneracy, attacks on masculinity, confusion among the genders, transgenderism, and the normalization of bodily mutilation.

Many men in Meriwether are starting young families. They are worried and ask themselves: Where can my children grow up safely? Where can they lead normal lives? Is there a future for them? One man with a three year old daughter went so far as to say that he feels like we are living in the Kali Yuga, the end times or dark ages in Buddhist mythology. But he has hope that if we all band together we can positively direct our future, which is why he came to Meriwether that night.

It is tempting to blame bad politics, declining educational standards, and technology for many of these cultural problems. These are indeed important causes but they are only surface level, Anderson told us.

Underlying all of this is the problem of nihilism. Nihilism pervades our age. Everything seems meaningless. Some people see no reason to go on living. Others, in the name of radical freedom, claim they can do anything with their lives and bodies. Nothing is true or right, there is just your opinion and mine. Our culture is just our preference, foreign ones theirs. Neither is inherently better. All things change. Nothing is worth preserving.

How did we Get Here?

Nihilism didn’t come from nowhere. It was deeply influenced by the modern philosophy of Nietzsche (whom Anderson wrote his PhD thesis on). What underlies Nietzsche’s philosophy? What trajectory of philosophical thought led to his?

Anderson wrote a book, A Concise History of Western Philosophy, which helps explain this. This excellent short book really helped me get a holistic grasp of Western thought as I’ve been learning philosophy myself over the past few years. (I’ve also been studying with a number of independent online schools, including one that took us on trips to Athens and Italy).

Western philosophy, for Anderson, can be understood as a tension between two concepts: Being (represented by Plato) and Becoming (by Nietzsche). Each concept is shorthand for a set of interwoven concepts. In his book, he put it this way:

“’Being’ suggests immateriality, eternity, order, the really real, and the objective knowledge of truth, goodness, and beauty. ‘Becoming’ evokes corporeality, ephemerality, change, the perspectival, and the subjectivity or relativism of all cognition.”

Anderson took us through thousands of years of philosophy that led us here—an impressive fifteen minute speech! In ancient times, with Plato and Aristotle (in the 300’s BC), Being dominated philosophical thought. Augustine (in the 400’s) was a Platonist who solved the problem of essences (what gives reality intelligibility). Medieval philosophers, like Aquinas (in the 1200’s), refined ancient insights, synergizing them with Christianity.

In modern times, however, Becoming gradually took hold. Descartes (in the 1600’s) came along and subjected belief to radical doubt: we don’t really have access to the external world, we only have ideas about it. Kant (in the 1700’s) radicalized this subjectivism: we have no reason to believe that what our minds are doing is true. Nietzsche (in the 1800’s), adopting this worldview, said we are free to construct reality in our heads.

So, the ancient world was objectivist and common sense, the dominion of Being. The modern world is subjectivist, the dominion of Becoming. This is what led to modern nihilism, influenced primarily by Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Dinner Discussion

After Anderson’s short lecture, we lined up to fill our dinner plates buffet style with chicken, mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables, mac and cheese, corn bread, and other Southern food from a classic Nashville restaurant. We sat back down and started to eat, as Warren told us the rules for the Jeffersonian-style dinner discussion, which Anderson was to lead.

Anderson asked anyone with simple questions to go first. Too often people with complex or esoteric questions raise their hands first and it bogs the conversation down. (This is a great practice that we should adopt more widely.)

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What does “God is dead” mean? Most of the men in Meriwether are Christian and many took issue with Nietzsche’s proclamation.2 “God is dead,” Anderson told us, is not merely an atheistic proclamation. It means something much deeper. By God Nietzsche really means Being. He means that there is no intelligibility built into reality that man can truly know.

How does Thomas Jefferson fit into the history of Western philosophy? One attendee, a self-identified American exceptionalist, wondered why no American philosophers were discussed. Anderson said that Jefferson was a great thinker and statesman but, although he studied philosophy, he did not greatly influence it. Nor did any of the other American Founding Fathers.

How has Nietzsche influenced American culture? Anderson said that his influence is implicit in the dominance of Becoming today. Nietzsche was also a big influence on H.L. Menken who had written an early book on him and had mentioned him in many articles. Menken himself was a highly influential American journalist in early 1900s who coined terms like “Bible Belt” and “Monkey Trial.” Finally, Nietzsche is also promoted heavily in pop culture today.

Is transgenderism caused by radical subjectivism? Anderson said that it is a rejection of nature (Being). It is a result of the post-modern culture, the ethos: “Who’s to say what’s right and wrong?” Is Christianity a solution to this crisis? It could be. But in practice, many Christians (even those at Christian universities like Belmont) adopt subjectivist views because they grew up in a post-modern culture.

Philosophy and Life

How should we approach our reading of the great books? How can they actually help us in our lives?

Anderson shared some personal stories and struggles. He said that he was sitting in his office one day with a bookshelf full of philosophy texts that he had spent a lifetime mastering. They discussed the deepest questions about human life and even about existence itself. But they didn’t help him. Instead, he found greater help in simpler books about dealing with grief and struggle written for the general public.

This is something I have often seen from scholarly people attracted to our movement—and I think it points to what our movement might uniquely be able to offer. Academic institutions have failed to show how the great books can really shape our lives. Groups like Meriwether are sincerely asking these questions. They recognize the importance of molding a man holistically, and that the failure to do so is perhaps the central error of contemporary education.

Following this point, Warren formally concluded the dinner discussion. The table would soon disperse to begin informally socializing. But before we rose something incredible happened. Warren announced that he would donate some of the dinner’s proceeds to good cause. Did anyone know someone in need?

One attendee volunteered. His friend, a veteran and father, had called him recently, depressed and lost, even contemplating suicide. He saw no purpose in life, felt no one cared, and struggled financially. The group unanimously agreed to the nomination and Warren sent him a check. The nominating attendee thanked the table, saying that it would help his friend financially and, more importantly, show him that other men actually cared.

Imagine this replicated across the country, in hundreds of American cities every week: groups of men gathering to gain wisdom, improve themselves, and our country; experts leading deep discussion on Western philosophy and culture; and the group reaching out to lift up struggling friends and members of the local community.

What effect would that have on America? What will ultimately come of our movement? Will it be a new educational paradigm, educational curriculum, cultural rituals and practices, or way of life? A new connection between citizens and among aspects of the human soul that have been unduly separated by current institutions?

How to Grow our Movement

It was great to connect with Mark Anderson, to finally find a professor in Nashville who shares the group’s vision. It was inspiring: there might be other professors within institutions who are looking to help cultural organizations like Meriwether grow and thrive.

How can we connect with them? What would motivate them? Anderson told me three things. First, and most importantly, the attendees want to be here and are excited to learn; most students at university are not. Second, attendees here are older and have more life experience. This gives them more depth in discussing philosophical concepts and the wisdom to assess their practical value. Finally, these events are fun and exciting. They are something that many professors would enjoy going to and speaking at.

Our movement has identified a unique demographic. A new kind of student, lifelong learners with a civic duty and mission, is emerging. They are learning on their own and at groups like Meriwether. And they have ambitions to educate their children in a similar way. How can we leverage this insight?

One thing that came to my mind: I think our movement will create a growing demand for books like Anderson’s. Short, digestible books on philosophy (or Western culture) that do not dumb it down. He told me that he wished that some of his colleagues, who are experts on philosophers like Aquinas, for example, would write books in a similar fashion. They have a lot of knowledge to share but write books that are too long and narrowly directed towards scholars. I think this would be very valuable for our movement, something that we should pursue in the coming years.

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This was another excellent Meriwether event! I’m consistently impressed by the quality of men and speakers that the group’s events attract. There is a real hunger for this kind of knowledge and community. I’ve become friends with many of the men that I’ve met here. I’m very grateful to have this group so close to where I live in Nashville.

Thanks to Warren for putting this all together and to Mark Anderson for speaking. I’m looking forward to further collaborations between them and am excited to see what this group, and the wider grassroots cultural-educational movement that I have been writing about, will evolve into.

Originally published on March 6, 2026 in The Pamphleteer.

It was an interesting week. I learned how to slaughter a hog at a farm in Dickson. I attended a Jeffersonian-style symposium dinner featuring the Chair of Belmont’s philosophy department. And I woke up early one morning to discuss the life of Poplicola, an ancient Roman aristocrat, with a small group of men in a West Nashville coffee shop.

These three events were eclectic but not random. They were all hosted by the Meriwether Academy, a new Nashville-based men’s group dedicated to reviving the ideal of the American man. How can we become better men today? How can we improve ourselves, our families, our communities, and, ultimately, our nation? What can we learn from the great men of our ancient and American past—such as the group’s namesake, Meriwether Lewis, famed explorer of the American frontier—to guide us on our journeys?

These are the questions that guide Meriwether Academy and many of the men like me who have come to its events. I met Warren Steury, twenty-eight year old founder of the organization, last year at a Pamphleteer event, which, inspired by recent successes in Oakland, advocated “robust civic engagement from ordinary citizens” in Nashville politics.

At this time, Meriwether was just getting started. I was inspired by Steury’s vision, which, beyond hosting men’s events, includes founding a school for boys dedicated to classical and outdoor education—something like a cross between Plato’s Academy and the Boy Scouts, as he puts it.

I’ve been regularly attending Meriwether events over the past year. I’ve been impressed with their variety and quality, and with how the group has grown over this short time. The three events that I attended this week are representative of the three types of events that the group hosts.

First, quarterly outdoor retreats, where about a dozen men gather in a countryside home for a weekend. Each retreat has a theme. Some are focused on developing outdoor skills, such as the past weekend’s hog slaughtering, at which we also discussed the alienation of modern American man from nature and the importance of honoring the lives of the animals that we eat.

Other retreats are structured more like small conferences, featuring long talks interwoven with recreational outdoor activities, like canoeing. Some talks discuss the lives of great men from American history, including Founding Fathers, Civil War generals, American Transcendentalists, and Meriwether Lewis, whom we discussed while visiting his Burial Monument in Hohenwald. Other talks feature men giving practical advice, often sharing adversities that they’ve faced, such as struggling to control their desires or failing as fathers, and how they overcame them.

Food and dining are central elements of the retreats. Each retreat serves delicious farm fresh food, most sourced locally from Fairfax Farms in Dickson. For breakfast we eat sausage and eggs; for dinner, pork chops or steak. The dinners follow a format that Thomas Jefferson used at his dinner parties. There is one rule: only one person talks at a time. When someone is talking, he has everybody’s attention. One designated person guides the discussion by posing questions to the group like, “What does it mean to be an American today?” Jefferson found, as have we, that this format allows the group to have one unified, high quality, intellectually stimulating conversation. This, in contrast to the banter of small groups that characterizes typical dinner conversations.

In addition to outdoor retreats, Meriwether hosts monthly philosophy dinner symposiums in the city, each following this Jeffersonian format. This week’s guest was Belmont professor Mark Anderson. Western philosophy has been driven, he explained, by the battle between two philosophical concepts: being (represented by Plato) and becoming (represented by Nietzsche). We spent nearly three hours asking him questions and discussing the practical implications of this philosophical debate. In particular, how the suppression of being today partially explains the ills of modern society.

Last year, Meriwether hosted Michael Millerman, founder of the online Millerman School, for several symposiums. Millerman discussed Leo Strauss’ What is Political Philosophy?, helping us understand ancient and modern political philosophy, and Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, helping us understand the virtues of classical education and what has gone wrong today.

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Finally, Meriwether’s weekly study club discussions each gather half a dozen men in a coffee shop to discuss an assigned reading. Last year, the group sampled a variety of texts, including the inaugural addresses of Teddy Roosevelt, George Washington, and other American presidents; Pericles’ funeral oration; the Declaration of Independence, which we were challenged to memorize; Emerson’s “Self Reliance”; and, my favorite, Thoreau’s beautiful and insightful essay “Walking.”

This year, the group has undertaken a more directed study, electing to read all forty-six chapters of Plutarch’s Lives. Each week focuses on a single chapter, which tells the story of a great man from Greek or Roman antiquity, such as this week’s reading on Poplicola. Alex Petkas, expert classicist and Cost of Glory founder, is slated to speak at a symposium dinner on Plutarch next month.

A cultural-intellectual renaissance is beginning in America. It is happening offline. It is happening outside of New York, Washington D.C., and Silicon Valley. It is happening outside of mainstream academic and political institutions. It is happening in Nashville and other small cities throughout the American heartland. It is happening through grassroots efforts like Meriwether, pioneering a cultural vision, and The Pamphleteer, networking local activists to advance cultural and political projects.

Over the past few years, I’ve traveled the country connecting with dozens of similar groups. I’ve reported in-depth on some of them on my Substack. These articles, and others planned throughout this year, may form the basis for a book that will map out this emerging, decentralized movement: What unites the groups? What differentiates them? What long-term impact might the movement have?

The groups are united around a broad vision surrounding education, modernity, and culture. Most champion classical, human-centered, education; reconnecting with nature and building local community, away from the digital world; and cultivating a deeper, more authentic American patriotism. But each group is genuinely unique.

Each is animated by a specific concern, as Meriwether is with educating young American men. Each is articulating their concern and experimenting with small scale solutions. And most are grounded in a different physical place. The collection of groups, I believe, has the potential to grow into a powerful force. I envision a future with groups in hundreds of cities across America, each expert in a specific issue, each modeling solutions for larger-scale changes, and each helping to build a national activist network capable of implementing them.

If this vision speaks to you, get involved. We need to grow each group. If you are in Nashville, join Meriwether. Come to a study club meeting, a symposium dinner, or an outdoor retreat. We need more groups throughout the country. If there are none in your area, start one. Organize it around your most pressing concerns. Ground it in your city’s unique history or state’s natural beauty. Look to Meriwether and Nashville as examples. We need to network the groups. Reach out to other groups. Share your insights and best practices. Collaborate on events, connect your members, and make plans for larger projects. We need skilled allies to help implement them. Connect with local entrepreneurs, businessmen, farmers, politicians, professors, and internet-based scholars and activists aligned with the vision. If you have other ideas, reach out to me, and let’s discuss.

Something big is happening in America. And it’s coming from an unlikely source. As one of the readers of this article’s draft put it: “They’re cutting up pigs in Nashville. But it’s a sign that a new day may be dawning in America.”

The Halkyon Guild is an online philosophy school led by Johannes Niederhauser, a European philosopher who left academia after completing his PhD to found the Guild. The school teaches courses on foundational philosophical texts and on important contemporary topics, such as the essence of modern technology, viewed through a philosophical lens. I’ve studied with Halkyon online for several years. In September 2024, I attended its first in-person event, in Athens. Last October, I attended its second, in Naples, and then visited Rome on my own for a few days. This article reports on these trips and then reflects on Halkyon in the context of my animating socio-political concerns.

These concerns, as I’ve written about previously, center around the disintegration of our culture and educational institutions, which I witnessed first hand during graduate school for computer science in the 2010’s. They include: increasingly regular political violence and censorship; the complicity of our universities in instigating this chaos; their failure to cultivate a community of thinkers capable of mitigating it; and the degradation of the meaning of human life, particularly our seemingly inescapable domination by high technology, potentially culminating in transhumanism. These concerns animated me to exit mainstream academic and professional institutions, to begin studying the great books of the Western canon, and to join the emerging, loosely connected movement of independent scholars, creatives, and activists similarly (though distinctly) critical of academia and modernity.

It was this journey that led me to Europe for the only two times in my life. I accepted Niederhauser’s invitations to Athens and Naples with enthusiastic curiosity. What might the ancient Greek thinkers—the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—and the medieval to modern Italians—Dante, Machiavelli, Vico, Bruno, and Croce—be able to teach me about modernity? The places too might have something to teach me. How might Athens, cradle of Western civilization, site of the dramatic life and death of the great Socrates, reorient my lifelong journey? What might I learn from seeing the world-historic sites in Naples and from visiting Italy, homeland of my ancestors? What might contemporary Europe have to teach me about America? How might these trips complement my explorations of the American heartland?

This article about Halkyon is one of a collection I’ve written, each reporting on and then reflecting upon my experience engaging with a single group in the movement. Each article has two aims. First, to advocate a group I’ve found valuable to potential students. Second, to help understand and advance the movement. The movement is nascent and largely unknown. It is decentralized and entrepreneurial. Its groups are politically, religiously, and ideologically diverse. Each group has unique insights into certain core problems of modernity and possible solutions. Each is confronting similar challenges associated with geographic isolation and lacking institutional support. Each is addressing them with innovative pedagogical practices, business models, modes of intellectual inquiry, and ways of building community, both on- and offline. Collectively, the articles aim to showcase best practices that can be adopted throughout the movement and to unearth principles that can be used to guide its intellectual and communal development as it advances beyond its experimental beginnings.

This article thus proceeds as follows. The first section discusses the Athens event, reporting on our group’s philosophical dialogues and then on our explorations of the city and its ancient sites. The second section reports on my trip to Italy in a similar manner. The third reflects on the trips in the context of the wider movement. Elaborating on the sketch above, it first discusses Halkyon’s educational vision, shedding light on how the movement’s independent schools are evolving, and then examines the community that is evolving within the movement, asking how we should guide its development going forward.

This article’s title (including its subtitle) has two meanings. It refers to the trips’ locations: Athens, the ancient world, and Naples, originally named Neapolis, meaning new polis, or new city. It also means that only a “new polis“ can save the West, interpreted in two related ways. First, that our emerging movement is a new polis, a new “city” formed from cultural-intellectual refugees from mainstream institutions and big city power centers. Second, that its central task is to lay the intellectual foundations for a new socio-political order in the West, a new “polis“ free from the worst ills of modernity. It is for this task that we must turn to the great thinkers of our ancient and early modern past.

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Halkyon in Athens

In September 2024, I joined Niederhauser and about a dozen other students for Halkyon in Athens, the Guild’s first in-person event. Prior to the event, Niederhauser had assigned readings from ancient Greek texts including: Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic; Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics; Homer’s Iliad; Heraclitus’ Fragments; and Parmenides’ “On Nature.” Each night, we met at Niederhauser’s rented flat, which had a clear view of the beautifully lit Parthenon, for light snacks and—inspired by the ancient Greeks—an ample supply of wine, which facilitated a long dialogue on one of the assigned texts. On most afternoons, Niederhauser led us on tours of ancient sites, stopping at some of them to lead a short discussion on a relevant text. We spent most of the informal portion of the trip together exploring modern Athens, often talking late into the night at the city’s popular restaurants and bars. The first subsection below reports on our philosophical dialogues, the second on my travels through Athens with the Halkyon group.

Dialogues with the Ancients

Niederhauser opened the event on the first night with a toast. He thanked us all for coming to Athens. He said that it was his dream to have a school of his own which our participation in this event—as Halkyon’s first in-person event—was helping bring to life. The students here (in Athens and in Halkyon more broadly) are here because they are in love with philosophy and learning. They have no need for external rewards like degrees, prestige, or career advancement. These perverse incentives have led to the deterioration of authentic philosophical inquiry in modern academia, which largely fails to recognize the texts of the great thinkers of the past as living works that speak to us today—works that speak to our deepest concerns, that help us understand who we are as human beings and how we should live our lives. Niederhauser left academia to found Halkyon in part to help revive this kind of inquiry.

He began each night’s dialogue with a short speech on one of the assigned texts, intended not as a lecture but rather as a seed for further discussion that students would actively participate in and shape. He discovered through teaching in this way online that students often take discussions in directions that he never would have anticipated. This is one reason why he loves teaching and believes that dialogue (with the right students) is such a powerful educational method. Moreover, dialogue lies at the heart of philosophy: reason is dialectical; dialectic creates tension that raises the discussion to a higher level; philosophy is not only discursive but inherently argumentative; the Greeks embraced and were playful with disagreements and contradictions that arose. But contrary attitudes dominate today: people want every question to be resolved immediately to an answer—one that can be easily “looked up” on Wikipedia—and universities want every lecture to deliver a predefined “learning outcome” to each student.

Each night, we sought to rekindle a dialogue with the ancients, a severed connection that our presence in Athens persistently reminded us of. How did the ancients see the world differently from us? How can they help us understand the essence of modernity and the scientific mindset that dominates our age? How can they help us see the phenomena of the natural world more clearly and not become entrapped in abstractions, such as those created by the digital world? How can we genuinely read and truly understand their ancient texts?

For this task, the modern philosopher Martin Heidegger was seen as an essential guide. His phenomenological approach unearthed profound insights into the essence of language, thinking, being, truth, metaphysics, and other ideas central to Greek philosophy. Phenomenology teaches us to be in “dialogue” with phenomena. We should not presume, for example, that we can immediately grasp what something even as familiar as a “jug“ truly is. Instead, we should pause, question it, and let its essence shine forth, aiming to grasp it at a deeper level. Similarly, we should not presume that we can immediately grasp a text of Plato’s, and we should be especially aware of how its modern interpretations may conceal its essence from us.

On the first night, we discussed Socrates’ purported dialogue with Diotima in Plato’s Symposium. Their dialogue illuminates two crucial aspects of philosophy that have been forgotten today. First, that philosophy, the love of wisdom, is erotic and intimately related to the divine. Second, that philosophical inquiry into phenomena necessarily dwells in the “in between.” Diotima teaches Socrates about Eros. She rejects his initial view that Eros is a god who is beautiful and good. Socrates presumes that Eros must then be ugly and bad. She chastises him for “compelling” the beautiful to its opposing pole, of presuming that nothing exists between beautiful and ugly. She further explains that Eros is not a god but a daemon, occupying the space between gods and mortals, playing the crucial role of facilitating conversation among them and binding together the whole. Moreover, Eros philosophizes: “For wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Eros is love in regard to the beautiful; and so Eros is—necessarily—a philosopher; and as a philosopher he is between being wise and being without understanding.”1

We discussed the importance of embracing the “in between” today. Philosophy collapses when we lapse into one answer or another, as occurs in political dialectic between opposing sides today. More subtly, modern technology conceals the “in between”: it pulls us into the degenerate realm of the known (as with “looking up” answers online), and hence stifles creativity. It is easy to be on either side of a debate but hard to be in the “in between”; it is easy to demand an answer but hard to truly embrace the question in all of its mystery and apparent contradictions. We as thinkers today must relearn the art of this embrace from the ancient Greeks.

On the second night, we discussed the famous cave allegory from Plato’s Republic, focusing on the concepts of ascent and descent. The allegory envisions prisoners chained in a cave, trapped since birth in a false reality created by shadows cast on its wall. One day, one of the prisoners is unchained, dragged up out of the cave, and shown the world of real objects illuminated by the sun, which he gradually begins to see clearly. When he descends back into the cave, he is not celebrated but rather mocked and threatened by the other prisoners, for now being unable to see the shadows clearly. The allegory symbolizes the perennial tension between the philosopher and the political community. It symbolizes the philosopher’s spiritual-philosophical ascent from the opinions of his city (the shadows in the cave in which he was born) to knowledge of the good (the sun), and his subsequent descent back to the city to attempt to educate it and order it to attain the good.

Our discussion focused on how modernity, particularly the Enlightenment, distorted two of the allegory’s key questions and teachings. First: What is the philosopher’s responsibility to society? The Enlightenment sought to eradicate prejudice by instituting universal education, erroneously believing that the cave’s shadows could be eradicated—that it is possible to create a world in which the sun is always shining. It also forgot that there is pain in returning to the cave: the philosopher is happier outside and must be forced to go back down, to dwell among the prisoners, and to set the city in order. Second: What is the good? The Enlightenment introduced the notion of “values” and the authority of scientific measure and quantification. While the telos of ancient politics was to order the polis to attain the good, the telos of modern politics is to order the state to optimize some utilitarian metric—such as GDP or, ideally, some all-encompassing “happiness index”—a degenerate form of the good.

On the third night, we discussed Heraclitus’ Fragments, incorporating elements from Homer’s Iliad into the discussion. The dialogue focused on the intimate relationship between language, being, and divinity. Heraclitus is most famous for two fragments. First: “You cannot step into the same river twice.” While often taken as a mere articulation of material fact (that the river’s flow consistently brings new water), the fragment highlights a much deeper danger inherent in language. The very act of speaking inextricably unifies and differentiates things. It makes things that are not the same the same, collapsing them into oneness, collapsing particulars into universals, such as a particular tree into a universal “tree.” Second: “War is father of all and king of all.” War is not just fighting but also a paradox of being and language. It inherently differentiates—dividing people into sides, differentiating individuals into roles, and singling out one as a leader—but, conversely, it involves the many acting as one. Illustrative of this paradox is Hector’s being absorbed into war in the Iliad, his personal wishes being dissolved into those of his group, the Trojans, fighting other groups.

Unlike the ancient Greeks, we largely fail to recognize the intricacies and dangers of language today. The information age presumes—even demands—that everything be named and classified. Individual things are coerced into categories, like human beings into demographic groups, so that they can be reasoned about cleanly. Erroneous conclusions are viewed merely as model errors, demanding refined categories, not as evidence of the fundamental dangers of naming, as Heraclitus understood. Moreover, in our age, language bears an inferior relationship to reality. It is seen merely as a tool used to represent reality, one that operates by composing arbitrary symbols obeying man made rules. But for the Greeks, language was intimately bound to being and even had divine origin, evident, for example, in the Iliad‘s opening line: “Sing to me of the man, Muse[.]” These richer understandings of language were recovered by some moderns, primarily Heidegger and Hölderlin, who poeticized: “the most dangerous of goods, language, has been given to man [by the gods.]”

The fourth and final night focused on Parmenides’ poem On Nature. One of the students, a poet himself, read the work aloud, set against the backdrop of the beautifully lit Parthenon from Niederhauser’s balcony. The performative reading exemplified a point we discussed later: poetry in contrast to prose is meant to be experienced, not merely read, to draw the hearer away from appearances and towards the truth. In the poem, Parmenides narrates his enchanting journey to receive a divine revelation. He is carried “far from the beaten track of men” on a chariot drawn by “wise steeds” and tended by “immortal charioteers.” He encounters a series of divine women. First, daughters of the Sun, maidens who guide his way. Second, Avenging Justice, who, persuaded by the maidens, opens “mighty doors” blocking his path through the “gates of the ways of Night and Day.” Finally, beyond the gates, a goddess who, convinced that “right and justice” had sent him, “greeted [him] kindly” and spoke of two ways of inquiry: the way of Truth—the eternal, unchanging nature of reality—and the way of doxa—human opinion, mere seeming, what mortals incorrectly believe to be true.

Guided by Heidegger’s interpretation, we discussed Parmenides’ many profound insights into being—how it relates with thought, nothingness, and becoming—and into spoken language. Regarding the relationship between being and thought, we focused on one of his goddess’ revelations: “For thou canst not know what is not—that is impossible—nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.” Whereas metaphysics attempted to establish a unity of being and thought, Parmenides (a pre-metaphysical thinker) recognized that they are related more deeply: they belong together. They are not two separate things that must be fitted together, as if attempting to unify our “mental model” of the world with reality, but are instead essentially identical and inseparable—much as being and Dasein (man, the thinker) are inseparable for Heidegger. Overall, Parmenides was seen to provide many insights that have been concealed over the course of Western philosophy, thus providing a unique path to understanding how modernity came to be and, speaking with Heidegger, insight into how to inaugurate a new beginning to philosophy.

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Exploring Athens with Halkyon

This was my first trip to Europe, as it was for most of the other American attendees. I might have never visited the continent in my life had it not been for Halkyon. I generally look down upon popular tourism and I would not have thought that seeing the ancient sites in Athens would have been valuable to my intellectual mission had a group I respected not organized the trip. Attending the event changed my mind in some important ways. This subsection discusses my experience touring the ancient sites, meeting the Halkyon group in person, and seeing Europe for the first time.

I landed in Athens and found my place in the city center with a few hours to spare before the event. I wandered the surrounding area, forming my first impressions of the city and of Europe. It was a familiar yet foreign world. I didn’t speak the language at all. I had never felt so isolated, being unable to speak to anyone around me, or, when I tried, forcing them to speak to me—an uninvited American tourist in their homeland—in broken English. Everything was smaller there. Their narrow roads were trafficked by tiny cars (not a single SUV in sight), lined with little shops and convenience stores, and overlooked by the narrow balconies of simple box-shaped homes. The city was busy but not overwhelming, with spacious outdoor squares, themselves lined with cafes and restaurants, placed every few blocks. Modern life moved along with little regard for the ancient civilization that once stood right there, a point confirmed by my waiter at lunch who, seeing a copy of Plato’s Sophist that I had bought at a nearby bookstore, directed our conversation towards philosophy and expressed disappointment that most of his fellow Greeks had never even read the authors who had made their little island famous to the world.

That night, I walked to Niederhauser’s apartment for our group’s dialogue on Plato’s Symposium. It was here that I began to discover the people behind the faces that I had seen on screen for years. About half of the students were from America, half from Europe. Most were professionals in their twenties and thirties, many of whom, like me, did remote work, which allowed them to attend this event. Among them were: an American software developer whose deep knowledge of world history enriched nearly every conversation; a German SAT tutor whose sudden interest in Kant had inspired him to join Halkyon; a Mexican software developer who came bearing Mezcal; an American PhD student studying Latin and the classics; a German translator of English legal documents; an American traveler infatuated with Schopenhauer; an English crypto developer with a passionate interest in poetry; and two Los Angeles based entrepreneurs determined to find the most “happening” spots in Athens for our all male group to go to, succeeding, if at nothing else, at sustaining Eros as prominent theme of discussion throughout the event.

After the dialogue, we departed for the nearby bars, where we wound up talking all night. Everyone genuinely liked each other, Niederhauser observed, relieving some concerns that he had had about hosting the event. We decided to spend nearly the entire informal portion of the trip together, developing a camaraderie over those four days much stronger than anything that had developed over years online. We had many outdoor dinners together and spent each night as we had the first, exploring the city’s popular cafes, lounges, and bars. These fun and friendly excursions were interwoven with engaging discussions on life, beauty, business, politics, philosophy, and many other topics, drawing from the group’s diverse interests and experiences. Being immersed in our own world of good conversation for four days, particularly on topics that would not arise online or in formal classes, was one of the most valuable aspects of the trip, a point I will return to shortly.

Most afternoons, Niederhauser led us on tours of ancient sites. We toured the Parthenon, bringing to life the building that I had seen countless times in photographs; the Ancient Agora of Athens, the central square of the ancient city, on which many temples, monuments, and other buildings still stand; Aristotle’s Lyceum, stopping at its periphery to discuss the famous passage on friendship from his Nicomachean Ethics; and Socrates’ (alleged) prison cell2, which was the site I had most wanted to see, partly to honor the life of the man who had first inspired me to study philosophy. At other times, we broke up into small groups and saw other sites as we traversed modern Athens. We watched the sun set with locals and tourists atop the Areopagus; we went down to the Piraeus, the Athenian port and Socrates’ destination at the beginning of the Republic, to depart for Aegina, the nearest of Greece’s many scenic islands; and we attended a concert featuring beautiful Greek opera music in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, an ancient amphitheater at the base of the Acropolis.

It was incredible to see sites over two thousand years old, much older than anything we have in America. Even more, to participate in them during daily life: to attend a concert in the Odeon or to look up at the Parthenon, built atop the Acropolis, meaning “high city,” during our trip through Syntagma Square, the center of modern city life. It made the ancient world feel more real, less like a mere backdrop for stories that I had read in history and philosophy books. But did seeing the sites help me understand philosophy any better? Did standing atop the Areopagus enrich my reading of its account in the Phaedrus? Did seeing Socrates’ prison cell help me understand any of his many beautiful lines in the Phaedo, set there on the day of his death? Did I “go down to the Piraeus” in the same way that Socrates made his descent at the beginning of the Republic? Did Aristotle’s Lyceum help me understand the Nicomachean Ethics‘ teaching on friendship?

It was not philosophy but the philosophers—as people and as a community—that the sites helped me understand. The great Greek philosophers were mortal men like us. They were not doing something completely beyond our capacities, as it often seems while reading their words that have been immortalized in our canon. And while they were singular thinkers, they did not think alone. They were surrounded by students and close friends with whom they discussed their deepest concerns about life and their day, much as we had gathered to do in Athens. It was surreal to imagine Aristotle and his students congregating exactly where we had at his Lyceum two thousand years ago, or to imagine Socrates discussing life and the soul with his friends in his prison cell. Further, to recognize that it was Socrates’ intimate relationship with his student Plato, who spent his whole life writing about his beloved teacher unjustly killed there, that forever changed the Western world. The Greeks provide an aspirational but not unattainable model for our movement today: a small community of thinkers and close friends, confronting the political persecutions and degenerate intellectual culture of their day, not aiming to, but perhaps believing they may be capable of, changing the course of history.

Earlier, I said that our group had many interesting conversations while exploring Athens. Some of our most thought provoking ones centered around America, Europe, and the cultural crisis in the West. Prior to the event, I hadn’t viewed America and Europe as so different. I saw them as two components of a united West, one that we, in our movement, had a special role to play in saving (a vision that I articulated in this article’s introduction). Most other students, though sharing some of these sentiments, were not motivated primarily by a grand vision to save the West. Instead, most seemed simply to want to learn philosophy and to have open discussions on important contemporary topics free from the progressive censorship and persecution that dominates our culture, especially academia. Surprisingly, many European students viewed militant DEI culture as something born in America and exported to Europe, largely the geopolitical machinations of a global empire. But from my view as an American, the influence had appeared to work in the opposite direction. Progressives advanced this culture in America by demanding that we become more like the secular and culturally enlightened Europeans. Most prominently, that we must open our borders to the world and promote foreign languages, especially Spanish, domestically so that we become multilingual like them.

These conversations, especially on my first trip to Europe, raised important questions for me about the relationship between America and Europe. Are we truly one united West? Or do we have fundamentally different destinies? If so, what are the philosophical roots of this divide? Does each continent confront modernity in a fundamentally different way? Regarding our movement: What unites and divides its European and American elements? How will each evolve differently? Will each orient its thinking towards different contemporary problems or turn to different thinkers of the past? What can we learn from each other? I return to some of these questions in the final section of this article which discusses Halkyon’s relationship to the other, mostly American, groups within the movement. There, I see Halkyon’s unique character as deriving in part from its European roots, inspiring its deep investigations of a wide variety of European philosophers, including many underappreciated ones, such as those that we studied the following year in Italy.

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Napoli: Paradise of the Devils

In October 2025, our group reconvened in Naples (with several new students attending and several not returning). Napoli: Paradise of the Devils, Halkyon’s second in-person event, focused primarily on medieval and early modern Italian texts: Dante’s Inferno (1321), Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), Giordano Bruno’s On the Shadows of Ideas (1582), Giambatista Vico’s New Science (1725), and Benedetto Croce’s “Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves Christians” (1949). Each night, we met at Niederhauser’s rented flat in Centro Storico, Naples’ historic district, for a long dialogue on one of these texts. On most afternoons, we saw famous archaeological sites and artistic masterpieces, including the ruins of Pompeii, Caravaggio’s painting The Seven Works of Mercy, and Sanmartino’s sculpture The Veiled Christ. After the Halkyon event, I visited Rome on my own for a few days where I saw many other sites and masterpieces, including the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel. The first subsection below discusses our philosophical dialogues, the second my travels through Naples and Rome.

An Italian Modernity

Niederhauser opened the event again with a toast, this time to “The Devil’s Paradise”—an old nickname for Naples, apparently referring to the city’s contrasting elements of vice and beauty. More pertinently, the city’s original name was Neapolis, meaning new polis (new city), in Greek. Niederhauser had called us to Naples to discuss the meaning of modernity, what the Germans call Neuzeit, meaning “new time,” signifying that the modern world has broken from the ancient world in some fundamental way. The view of modernity that dominates today, he argued, has not sufficiently taken Italian thinkers into account. Our goal in Naples was thus to learn about these thinkers and to explore how they might help us understand the modern world and chart a new course forward.

More precisely, we have inherited a Franco-German interpretation of modernity, one beginning with Descartes’ Enlightenment rationalism and culminating in twentieth-century postmodernism, originated by French thinkers influenced by Heidegger, like Deleuze and Derrida. Cartesian rationalism initiated a trajectory of thought that aimed to ground existence in abstract systems of thought divorced from real world phenomena. This is seen perhaps most strikingly in Leibniz’s Monadology and in the French postmodernists’ “deconstruction” of history. Practically, modernity is dominated by the need to find a measure—the view that only what can be quantified and measured truly exists, that calculation and optimization are the only ways that man can truly interact with reality. Everything in the natural world is thus turned into a “resource,” standing ready for man’s calculated manipulation and consumption. Even man himself is turned into a resource—a “human resource”—standing ready to serve other demands, such as profit maximization in some industry. Heidegger calls this Gestelle, or Enframing, the essence of modern technology. Ultimately, the Franco-German trajectory of thought has led to a world in which we have access to everything on demand but do not truly understand anything, resulting in the nihilism that dominates our age.

Niederhauser posited that there might be another modernity, an Italian modernity, one beginning with Dante, writing centuries before the Enlightenment, and Vico, explicitly responding to it. The Italian modernity does not “feed into” nor must it be “synthesized with” the Franco-German modernity. It represents an entirely different trajectory of thought, one not rooted in Cartesian self-reflexivity (captured succinctly by the maxim “I think, therefore I am”), in which the human subject serves as the ground of knowledge and certainty. Ultimately, it is a philosophy of contingency rather than certainty: focused on the whole cosmos rather than man, grounded in nature and divine providence rather than abstract idealism, rooted in poetry and myth rather than rational tract, and aiming simply to guide our path forward rather than to precisely control our future. How does this Italian modernity speak to us today? How does it differ from the dominant understanding of modernity that we have inherited? How can it help us chart a new course forward to escape modern nihilism? Our dialogues each night in Naples focused on these questions.

On the first night, Niederhauser led a discussion on Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy (1321). Dante, the main character in his own work, begins a journey towards a divine light on a distant mountaintop. He is unable to get there directly; instead he must first descend, guided by the Roman poet Virgil, through the many levels of Hell. There, he encounters historic men, from Greek and Roman antiquity and from then-recent Italian history, being punished for a variety of increasingly grave sins. Contrary to Cartesian self-certainty, Dante teaches that we must “abandon all hope” and die a spiritual death; we must wander through the dark forest and embrace uncertainty; we must pass through Hell to get to Heaven; and we must grasp the lowest to ascend to the highest. Contrary to Cartesian self-reflection, Dante’s work is a reflection not on man himself but on man’s role in the cosmos and on the entirety of human existence.

Although Dante, born in medieval times, is not technically a modern thinker, he greatly influenced modern Italian language and thought. Moreover, he serves as a crucial link between the ancient and modern world, actively synthesizing ancient characters into his work, addressing important philosophical conflicts such as whether the universe is created or eternal, and addressing the theological crisis of the ancients: that their gods do not care for them. His response is that the Christian God does care for His followers and that He gave them a crucial role to play in the cosmos. The posited Italian modernity, possessing Dante as a formidable link between the ancient and modern world, thus stands in stark contrast to the Franco-German modernity, which is typically viewed as a sharp and deliberate break with the ancient past.

Following the discussion led by Niederhauser, one of the students presented a talk of his own titled “Dante’s Doctrine of Joy,” which analyzed the Divine Comedy holistically. It argued that for Dante, love, not reason, is the fundamental principle of the universe. Through reason, Dante attains only a lesser salvation, guided by the wise poet Virgil through Hell; but through love, Dante attains full salvation, guided by his beloved Beatrice through Heaven. For Dante, human life, despite its immense suffering, is fundamentally worthwhile and joyous. This is why he didn’t view his work as a tragedy and couldn’t help but call it the Divine Comedy. The implication, it seems, is that modern rationalism can at best provide a lesser salvation of man, but that Dante (and other Italian thinkers influenced by him) can help guide us towards a more holistic salvation, one that accounts for and affirms the entirety of human life.

The second night focused on Giambatista Vico’s New Science (1725), a fascinating work that is not widely read today. Vico, responding to the Enlightenment rationalism emerging in his day, aimed to create a new science for comprehensively understanding human affairs. His book’s cover image (shown below), a copy of which we passed around to discuss, depicts dozens of meticulously chosen symbols, representing God, metaphysics, poetry, divine providence, nature, and various civic institutions. The image summarizes his work’s philosophical system, the symbols representing the various ways that man has sought to understand the world thus far. A prominent but narrow beam of light shines down from above, which we interpreted to mean that reason can only partially illuminate the truth. For Vico, human wisdom takes many forms. In one intriguing passage, he contrasts the rational wisdom of philosophers (both ancient and modern) with the “poetic wisdom” of the ancient (pagan) founders of political regimes. These founders possessed superior senses, allowing them to engage more deeply with nature, and superior imaginative powers, inspiring their poetry, through which they expressed a “poetic metaphysics”—a coherent, though not rational, understanding of God, nature, human minds, and our social world.3

Vico’s project is one of incredible breadth and ambition. It is unlike anything that scholars take up today, Niederhauser noted. As he put it: Vico’s work melds together the factical-historical with ideal philosophy and uses that to guide us through the dark forest before us. Human events are shaped by unpredictable factors, not solely by (predictable) rational laws. There is no way to fully light the future; the future is always a dark forest. But it is one which we can intelligently guide our way through via a holistic account of human affairs. As I discuss later, I believe that we today are in need precisely of a (modern) holistic account of human affairs. Can Vico’s work provide inspiration for such a project? Are scholars in our movement, operating outside of mainstream institutions, the ones to take it up?

The third night focused on Giordano Bruno’s On the Shadows of Ideas & The Art of Memory (1582). The work, as its title suggests, has two aims. First, it enhances classical Memory Palace systems for memorizing long lists of items. In these systems, each item is associated with a familiar place, such as a location in one’s house, and a striking, easily remembered image.4 Bruno presents a novel method for generating many such images by combining simple parts to form complex scenes, such as: “A man sitting at a table while his wife is in labor, attended by two midwives.” Second, it explains Bruno’s view of ultimate reality and how the human mind can comprehend it. He gives a Neoplatonic account: Truth emanates from the light of God and universal Ideas (or Ideal forms); their shadows are particular forms in the natural world; their shadows in turn are our cognitive representations of them.5 Truth (or ultimate reality) is thus accessible, albeit imperfectly and indirectly, to one who is able to clearly “see” and reason about the shadows of Ideas that have been sequentially impressed upon his mind. It is primarily for this task, not for utilitarian information recall, that Bruno designed his art of memory. The art, he claims, strengthens the mind, helping it hold still and hence more clearly “see” the impressed shadows.6

Bruno, like Vico, is not widely read today. Our group discussed several ways that his thought is relevant to contemporary concerns. First, Bruno’s Neoplatonic ambition was critiqued. It was linked to technologists’ ambition today of creating an “AI god,” particularly, the popular belief that LLMs will lead to AGI. Bruno attempts to ascend from the shadows of Ideas cast on the human mind up to ultimate reality. LLMs attempt to ascend from an even further indirection of shadows—statistical patterns in large text databases, themselves shadows of human cognition—up to a degenerate form of ultimate reality—God as mere intelligence. Second, Bruno was influential to many modern thinkers who laid the philosophical foundations for our times. He was one of the first, for example, to not only propose the idea of a decentralized, infinite universe—one not geo- nor heliocentric, nor created by God at a specific time—but also to draw out the profound philosophical implications of this cosmology. In particular, that man loses his privileged place in the cosmos, which some students argued was the seed of modern nihilism.

Later that night, we briefly discussed Machiavelli’s Prince (1532) and its relevance to contemporary politics. Machiavelli, casually interpreted, advocates realpolitik: he articulates many realistic yet unpleasant difficulties that rulers of principalities encounter, enumerates possible ways to deal with them, and advocates or opposes each choice guided not by a priori moral commitments or abstract ideals but instead by historical examples of what actually works to maintain political power. He upholds, for example, the ingenious maneuvering of Cesare Borgia that reduced his crime-ridden principality to peace and obedience to his rule. Borgia employed another man to mitigate the crime by enacting cruel punishments, like tortures and public executions, a strategy that, while effective, incidentally bred hatred. To quell the people’s hatred and win its loyalty, Borgia had the man killed and his body, split in two, displayed in the town square.7 Regarding Machiavelli’s contemporary relevance, many students interpreted his teachings as advocating the raw pursuit of power, with some attempting to draw parallels to contemporary geopolitics, critiquing American foreign policy as unmoored from the nation’s founding ideals, a view that some European students had presented in Athens, as I touched on earlier.

On the fourth and final night, we discussed Benedetto Croce’s 1949 essay “Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves Christian.”8 “Our thought inevitably works on the lines laid down by Christianity,” Croce writes. “We are forever struggling to mediate between bitter opposites”—morals and expediency, liberty and authority, heaven and earth—navigating social tensions that reflect a characteristically Christian understanding of man and his inner struggles. But we are not merely the intellectual heirs to an antiquated Christian worldview. Instead, “we feel ourselves literally children of Christianity,” the inexorable heirs to the greatest revolution in human history, one initiated by Jesus but that (necessarily) unfolded historically, advanced by humanists, theological reformers, philosophers, and other “workers in the Lord’s vineyard,” one that we today have a unique role to play in advancing. The decline in religious enthusiasm today, Croce councils, is perhaps “less a death than a hidden and protected seed which will germinate and throw out new shoots,” a process that we must tend by cultivating the fire of Christian sentiment.

While I do not, in fact, call myself a Christian, I found Croce’s work insightful. It would be interesting, for example, to compare his view that the decline of Christianity today is only apparent, perhaps even a necessary stage leading to its expansive growth, with Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God. Croce’s work also reminds us that philosophers, who are often viewed as rational enemies of Christianity today, once played a crucial role in advancing it, and leads us to wonder if they may do so again in the future. The work provided a nice conclusion to our investigation of Italian modernity. Might the Italian trajectory of modern thought be uniquely capable of synthesizing Christianity? If so, why? Is it due to its intellectual roots beginning with Dante? Or perhaps to the country’s unique history with Rome and the Catholic Church? More broadly, the work leads us to ask how we today are inextricably bound to what has come before us.

My Italian Journey

My ancestors fled a country seeking economic opportunity. I fled economic opportunity seeking a country. America, the land my ancestors came to, the land I grew up in with my siblings and cousins, around grandma’s pizza and swimming pool on New York summer afternoons, would never again be my home. This, I was promised at university. It was the prospect of this terrible fate that animated me to flee institutional comfort and set out on a lifelong cultural-intellectual journey through the great books and in search of a community that could ultimately help me escape it. It was this journey that, for seven short days in October 2025, led me for the first time to Italy, the land my ancestors had left one hundred years ago.

I landed in Naples the night before the Halkyon event and took a taxi to Centro Storico, the city’s historical center. Dodging speeding mopeds and compact cars barely narrow enough to fit through its main street, I walked among the crowd of locals on their way to the little shops, restaurants, and convenience stores that lined it. I cobbled together enough Italian from my middle- and high-school classes to get directions to Vico Giganti, the “avenue of the giants,” and find my way to building number quaranta sei, my home for the next four days. From there, I departed to meet Niederhauser and several other students for dinner where we recollected our adventures from the previous year’s trip to Athens as well as the friends we had made there, many of whom would be joining us the following day.

As in Athens, we spent nearly all of our time together. Each night, we had dinner, sampling Naples’ famous pizza and other delicious food, dialogued on one of the assigned texts at Niederhauser’s apartment, and then set out to explore the city’s popular bars, where we often wound up talking late into the night. We had many valuable conversations including several that centered on the purpose and future of our movement, particularly its relationship with academia and how to build community among our geographically isolated students and teachers, as I will discuss in the next section.

Each afternoon, we toured sites in and around the city. It was genuinely shocking to see so many incredible sites packed into such a small area. Centro Storico alone was covered with dozens of small cathedrals and churches, two of which showcased beautiful works of Catholic art centered around a world famous masterpiece. One was Michelangelo Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy, a 1607 painting that seamlessly blended together seven related but distinct scenes, each dramatically depicting an act of Christian compassion, such as sheltering the homeless. The other was Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ, a 1753 marble sculpture portraying Christ lying dead, covered by an almost impossibly thin veil. It was surrounded by other impressive sculptures, including my favorite, Francesco Queirolo’s Disillusion, portraying a scene containing a man caught in an intricately woven fisherman’s net, which I was amazed could be cut from a single piece of marble and rendered so precisely, down to the finest grooves in its rope.

On two afternoons, we ventured outside of Centro Storico. On one, we took a train to other side of the city to see the Castel Sant’Elmo, a large medieval fortress equipped with canons at its entrance and parapets cut for archers encircling its top level, around which we were able to walk and see the Gulf of Naples and much of the city. The other afternoon, three other students and I took a taxi to Pompeii. The ancient city, buried in hot ash from a volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. and excavated in recent centuries, was one of the most incredible sites I’ve ever seen. The remains, preserved in remarkable detail, gave me the haunting feeling that I was walking through the city exactly as it had been on that fateful day: its stone streets still bore the imprints of iron-covered carts’ wheels that had driven over them; houses comprising entire neighborhoods still stood; paintings covering their interior walls had retained their vibrant colors; and citizens’ bodies, helplessly-posed in their final moments of life, had been frozen forever in plaster casts.9

Unlike in Athens, the sites that we saw in Naples were not directly related to the philosophical texts that we had read for the event. So what did I gain from seeing them? Seeing the artistic masterpieces, especially Disillusion, inspired me as a writer, emboldening my pursuit of the craft and the slowly developed precision that it demands, something nearly lost in our chaotic age, demanding, by contrast, that we “publish or perish” in academia or compete for attention online. This incredible sculpture was possible only because the artist had devoted seven years of his life to it, and decades before to mastering his craft. Its defining feature, the intricately woven fisherman’s net, epitomized the relentless pursuit of precision: not only was the finished work rendered in remarkable detail, but the degree of care required to bring it into being, the net being fragile and mistakes impossible to undo in marble, was a constraint I couldn’t imagine working under, as I rewrite endlessly.

After the Halkyon event in Naples, I took a train to Rome, where I had rented a place in the city center for a few days. An intricately illustrated map of the city that came with the place would serve as my sole guide for the next few days. (I threw out my smartphone years ago.) It felt incredible to set out each day with no plans, obligations, or technological distractions, aiming only to cover as much ground as possible, picking a place on the map, walking there, getting lost, taking intentional digressions, and discovering hidden gems, before finally finding my way again.

Rome was the perfect city to get lost in. Within just a few hours, I stumbled upon the Pantheon, a dome-topped church covered with Catholic paintings and sculptures; the Area Sacra, a small courtyard containing temple ruins; a small church in which a concert featuring beautiful Italian opera music by candlelight was hosted; and the Trevi Fountain, the largest of the city’s many impressive fountains, each centered in a busy piazza and adorned with intricately carved marble statues of gods, angels, winged horses, and other mythical creatures. On another afternoon, I wandered into a botanical garden at the edge of the city; a small museum housing a meticulously pieced together stone-carved map of the ancient city; and the Roman Forum, the center of ancient city life, now a vast expanse of ruins of temples, ornate arches, and other ancient relics.

Next to the Forum stood the Colosseum, an architectural masterpiece, beautifully structured and intricately designed, worn but not broken by time, imposing itself—the haunting echo of a lost empire—on my casual walks through the city, reminding me of my civilization’s mortality and, of course, of my own. I toured the amphitheater that afternoon. Looking down from the rafters upon its central arena, I couldn’t help but envision lives being brutally ended down there and imagining the tourists standing next me as ancient spectators vulgarly cheering it on. While the Colosseum is often valorized as a symbol of martial virtues like courage and toughness, it did not strike me as a good or honorable place, not one that we should look to in our struggle to counteract the cowardice and weakness that threatens our civilization today.

Surprisingly, as I am not a Christian, it was the Vatican Museum that most impressed me in Rome. The museum, spanning a massive network of buildings, housed many incredible works of art and ancient relics: beautiful Renaissance-era paintings that covered entire rooms, massive colored rugs woven to depict Jesus and other religious figures that lined a long hallway, ancient Roman pottery and sculptures scattered across indoor and outdoor exhibits, and several world-historic works of art. The most inspiring was Rafael’s School of Athens, the painting of ancient Greek philosophers that has become a nearly universal symbol of philosophy itself, as it was particularly relevant to this trip and to my intellectual mission.

The most thought-provoking work was Michelangelo’s masterpiece painting covering the Sistine Chapel,10 at which I stayed for more than two hours viewing and contemplating, gradually beginning to grasp the work itself as well as the many underappreciated factors in its creation and preservation. It was a unique experience to not just see a great work of art but to be completely surrounded by it. Looking up at the fingers of God and Adam touching, a depiction I had seen countless times in photographs, I couldn’t help but envision Michelangelo right above my head five hundred years ago bringing it to life, famously taking four years to complete the ceiling and temporarily sacrificing his eye sight to do so. The unlikely conditions under which I stood there also came to light: between the artist and me stood an unbroken chain of men stretching across centuries, preserving and protecting his work through wars, political upheavals, natural decay, disasters, and would-be vandals and connivers of every sort.

This realization was inspired not only by Michelangelo’s work but by the shocking behavior of my fellow spectators. In the holy Chapel, it was forbidden to talk or take pictures, a regulation that few respected and many brazenly transgressed. Herds of grown adults and senior citizens continuously trampled through, garishly lifting their smartphones into the air to steal pictures of the ceiling, ducking into the crowd and doing so to avoid being caught, holding their phones at waist-level in selfie-mode to grab the shots and giggling at their stealth transgressions, and, if caught, mocking with their friends the security guards who spent their time doing little more than desperately threatening transgressors with expulsion and sounding “Silenzio! Silence please!” over the loud speaker every five minutes to quell the voices that refused to even whisper.

It was the first time not only that I had been surrounded by a great work but that I had truly watched the many view one. It was an indictment of our culture: worse than being unable to produce great works, it is unable to even produce worthy spectators. The Chapel to them was not a work to admire or aspire to; it was merely a famous object and a smattering of pretty colors on the ceiling, two forces compelling them to capture its image and share it online—an act of techno-piety that chapel authorities had no right to interfere with. As writers and artists today, we often want to have large audiences, on social media and elsewhere, to feel like we are having an influence, one that will hopefully last even after we are gone. But would we really want such an audience if we knew that our work would be consumed in this way? What would Michelangelo think if he could have seen the chapel that day?

Our movement today to combat the degradation of high culture must carefully consider its relationship with the many. While the Greeks may have been right that the many cannot be made wise, they should at least be made to respect great works (of both art and philosophy) or else be aggressively barred from participating in them. As we exit academic institutions, we must not degenerate into an isolated intellectual subculture. We must instead build a strong community of scholars, artists, and civic allies who will thoughtfully engage with great works, provide an environment conducive to the production and display of new works, and strive to subdue the vulgarity in the wider culture that threatens our important mission.

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The Fate of Western Civilization

The previous two sections discussed my trips to Athens and Italy. This section discusses Halkyon in the context of our wider movement, focusing first on its educational and then on its communal development. The first subsection, drawing on discussions with Niederhauser and other students at the events, discusses Halkyon’s educational vision, shedding light on two key aspects of our movement. First, its relationship with academia: What went wrong in academia? Why is our movement necessary? Is it in competition with or doing something fundamentally different from academia? Second, how its entrepreneurial schools are evolving: How are they teaching? What principles motivate them? What challenges are they facing? How can they be improved?

The second subsection, drawing on my experience with Halkyon and other groups, describes movement, its historical evolution, and the factors influencing its deeper communal development. As I see it, a new “polis“ is forming: a vibrant cultural-intellectual community, operating largely outside of mainstream institutions and big city power centers, that is dedicated, in both scholarly and civic capacities, to confronting the ills of modernity and discovering a more authentically human way of life. This emerging community, I believe, is necessary to address the cultural and educational crisis threatening the West. I sketch out this vision as well as how Halkyon’s philosophical investigations of modernity might fit into this project.

Authentic Philosophical Inquiry

In Athens, Niederhauser said that he had founded Halkyon to help revive authentic philosophical inquiry, which has deteriorated in academia. In Naples, he discussed his educational vision further. He emphasized that he does not have a strictly negative view of academia, that he believes there are still some scholars doing good work there. He rejected the view, held by many critics of academia, that its core problems are political. If the universities were put under conservative leadership, in an attempt to mitigate DEI persecutions and progressive bias in scholarship, they would still have the same fundamental problems, which are structural and bureaucratic.

Founding Halkyon has allowed him to overcome some of these problems. University professors must “publish or perish,” while he can write what and when he pleases. Most university students are motivated by degrees and career advancement, while most Halkyon students are motivated by their love of philosophy and learning. Professors pretend that they are free from market demands but in practice must treat students like customers and “make the customer happy”; ironically, although Halkyon technically has customers, not students, he is able to run his classes more freely. In academia, scholars are often pigeonholed into a specialty early in their careers; a Heidegger scholar, for example, is rarely given the opportunity to teach Dante, as he did in Naples. Academics have little flexibility in choosing where they live, but his online school has allowed him to live and travel where he pleases. Many professors do not have amicable relationships with their PhD students, but he is friends with many Halkyon students, a dynamic that facilitated these memorable trips.

While independent schools have many advantages, Niederhauser rejected the view, held by some in our movement, that they will one day come to replace universities. To do so, he argued, they would have to become institutions themselves, but would then suffer the same problems. Instead, these schools should remain independent and work to influence the thinking within existing institutions. During dinner on the final night in Naples, a Halkyon student, who is currently pursuing a philosophy PhD at a prestigious English university, expressed a complementary view. He does not believe that independent schools and established universities are in competition but rather that each provides something unique. Graduate school allows him to consistently share his work with his peers, soliciting their critiques, and to teach undergraduate classes, honing his understanding of fundamental texts. Halkyon, on the other hand, provides exposure to ideas that are unfashionable or suppressed in academia, access to unique educational experiences, such as our Athens and Naples trips, and the excitement of being part of a nascent educational movement, one that we have the power to shape and innovate within over the coming decades.

We discussed several ways that independent schools could be improved, particularly through adopting a hybrid digital-in-person paradigm. Relationships between students are often sparked at annual in-person events but they also often fade when people go home. Schools should connect students online throughout the year, perhaps by hosting weekly reading groups or organizing collaborative projects, as many graduate schools do. Additionally, the event model pioneered in Athens and Naples could be extended in interesting ways. Rather than cramming all textual discussions into four days (in addition to our site seeing), we could host preliminary seminars online in the weeks leading up to the event. This would introduce students to the texts, give them time to reread sections that came up during the discussions, and allow their initial ideas to ruminate and develop over weeks. This would facilitate deeper conversations at the event and perhaps inspire students to prepare short presentations for it.

How else can independent schools in our movement be improved? Halkyon’s events were the first that I had attended with a group that I had studied with extensively online beforehand. They thus provided a unique opportunity for me to directly compare the value of the group’s pedagogical practices—particularly, dialogue and close reading—in both online and in-person settings. I first describe what I see as the principles motivating these practices and then compare my experiences with them in each setting.11

Halkyon’s pedagogical practices are motivated, in my view, by its overarching goal of reviving authentic philosophical inquiry. Dialogue, as Niederhauser discussed in Athens, contrasting the practice with that of academic lecture, allows the group’s discussions to go in unpredictable directions, often yielding unique insights and fruitful directions for future thinking. Dialogue is also central to the Greeks’ conception of philosophy, of wrestling with contradictions that arise and enriching our understanding of fundamental questions, rather than demanding immediate answers as many do today. Close reading, on the other hand, focuses detailed attention on primary texts, aiming to truly understand the thinking process of great philosophers, as I discussed in my essay for Halkyon’s Being and Time course. Academia today too often trains students who have barely read Kant, for example, but know what is fashionable to cite and to say about him. Close reading is also motivated by Niederhauser’s belief that English philosophical scholarship has been distorted by crude translations of key terms, like Heidegger’s Gestelle (Enframing) or Plato’s dikaiosune (justice), and that his insight, as a native German speaker who also speaks some Greek, guides students to a more accurate understanding of key passages.

Both practices (dialogue and close reading) were better in person but for different reasons. The in-person dialogues felt more alive. We met as fellow travelers, at a mutual friend’s (temporary) home, sitting in a circle, seeing each other’s actual faces and bodies—not as strangers on a Zoom call, alone in our rooms, eyes fixated perpetually forward on collages of digital faces and avatars. The conversation flowed much better. It was easier to interject an idea or to see the spark of one in someone else. Our demanding three hour dialogues were eased by breaks for food, drink, and lighter conversation. We were immersed in our own world for four days. Our dialogues and informal discussions (as we explored the city) blended together into one long, continuous conversation, as opposed to many isolated ones scattered across weeks. Being part of a larger trip also made the dialogues feel more important. I was inspired to more actively listen, take notes, and write this detailed article about them—to better understand the discussions myself and to relay our groups’ insights to others who may be able to learn from or build off of them. During this process, however, I sometimes had trouble summarizing a dialogue’s central thread of thought or the key ideas of its seed text, as the discussions often did traverse so many paths. I think that the practice could be improved by allocating time at the end for the group to summarize and reflect on the dialogue.

Our close reading of a passage from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Athens (the only one we did on either trip) was one of the most valuable short educational exercises I’ve ever done. We broke off into groups of two and dissected the passage line by line, interpreting each sentence and key word, comparing our different translations and resulting interpretations, asking each other questions about the text, working through them together, and comparing our annotations on the page: How did my partner mark the text while reading it beforehand? What was important to him? What did he underline and write? Did I “star” the same quotes as he did?—How exactly is he reading? Perhaps I found this exercise so valuable for two reasons. First, going through the text with another person—especially in person, with a pencil and book in hand, immersed in the actual phenomenon of reading—helped me become a more precise reader, which is one of my main goals. Second, studying alone is isolating. Here, I finally had a teammate to work with: a kindred spirit, someone who diligently reads these books in his home as I do in mine on the other side of the world, someone who also felt called to travel to Athens, and further called to intensely focus on this one page with me.

The need to form stronger community is, in my view, the biggest problem facing our movement. It has repeatedly come to the fore during my investigations of the movement, as it has here, analyzing Halkyon’s pedagogical practices. It is also implicit in Niederhauser’s conception of authentic philosophical inquiry—of studying the great books to understand who we are as human beings and how we should live our lives—which embodies deeply human, hence communal, rather than purely scholarly concerns. The next subsection examines the community that is evolving within our movement and asks how we should guide its development forward.

A New Polis

The movement began in the late 2010’s, animated broadly by two opposing sentiments. Negatively, that academia had stifled intellectual inquiry via its aggressive embrace of DEI dogmas and its stultifying “publish or perish” ethos. Positively, that the internet and social media had enabled new business opportunities and ways for independent scholars to distribute their work and influence culture. From these forces, a new community emerged. Disaffected academics formed online groups and schools, of various ideological, religious, and political orientations. They include: The Halkyon Guild, emphasizing Greek and German philosophy; the Millerman School, political philosophy; Theory Underground, critical theory; The Cost of Glory and The Paideia Institute, ancient Greek and Roman history; and Indie Scholars, long-form independent writing. They taught to new kinds of student: not primarily young adults pursuing degrees full-time but rather lifelong learners, many with full-time jobs or families, supplementing their self-studies with rigorous online courses and writing programs.

This movement away from academia was paralleled (primarily, to my knowledge, in America) by a grassroots civic movement similarly concerned about education, modernity, and culture. It aims to form good citizens and authentic human beings: well-read in the great books, competent in political discourse, skilled with their hands, at home in nature (away from modern technology), and actively working to improve their local communities, which are often far from big city power centers. It too formed online groups then began connecting in person. The groups include: Meriwether Academy in Nashville, hosting men’s philosophy symposiums and outdoor retreats, with aspirations to build a boys’ school; The Savage Collective in Pittsburgh, run by a philosophy professor and a mechanic; Doomer Optimism and The Delphica Society, gathering activists from across the Western world for conferences on the above topics; and The Wagon Box Inn, a rustic resort in rural Wyoming founded to connect the movement’s geographically scattered groups.

These two movements are best viewed as complementary poles of a single movement, as I argued in my recent report on a Doomer Optimism campout at the Wagon Box Inn. Members of the civic pole are natural students for independent scholars; they provide a basis for strong community outside of institutions; they possess unique life experiences that, in dialogue with these scholars, have the potential to be turned into culturally impactful intellectual works; and they force scholars’ theory to confront practical concerns, preventing them from deteriorating into an isolated intellectual community. Moreover, groups from each pole are confronting similar communal and logistical challenges, and are experimenting with different solutions that can be shared throughout the movement.

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The unique challenges that our movement faces—which our institutionally supported and purely online counterparts do not—have forced it to confront deeper questions about the nature of a healthy intellectual community and the factors influencing it. How do the quality of our relationships, the kinds of events we host, where we meet, and where we live impact us as thinkers? The Halkyon events helped clarify the importance of these questions, which my studies of other groups had only recently begun to shed light on. A future article will address these (and other) questions thematically, aiming to guide the movement’s decisions about the community and infrastructure that it is building. Below, I sketch out such an analysis for three questions.

First: What kind of communal bonds should we build? Why shouldn’t we operate as isolated thinkers online or merely become professional colleagues? What historical movements should we look to for inspiration? A 2024 Indie Scholars event at the Wagon Box Inn most directly addressed these questions. Drawing on complementary examples of nineteenth-century American frontiersmen and twentieth-century literary groups, it argued that impactful cultural and intellectual movements have often originated among small groups of close friends living nearby, highlighting the need for physical meeting grounds and for building deeper friendships, even brotherhoods, within our movement today. Halkyon’s Athens event, as I discussed above, showed me how the community of Greek philosophers might serve as a model for us today: the philosophers, immortalized in literature, were mortal men whom we could emulate; it was the deep care for Socrates, among his friends and especially his student Plato, that ultimately revolutionized the intellectual world; small, physical schools like Aristotle’s can serve as inspiration for ours; and we can learn from the Greeks’ explicit teachings on friendship and philosophic community.

Second: What kinds of events should we host? Why shouldn’t we just meet in a lecture hall to discuss philosophy? How do specific events and venues impact us as thinkers? Many groups have hosted events in nature, seeing it as an antidote to the ills of the digital world and as an important intellectual influence: the Wagon Box’s events near the Bighorn Mountains see nature as an essential, even divine, source of inspiration for producing beautiful works; Meriwether’s in the Tennessee wilderness draw inspiration from Transcendentalists, such as Emerson; and Theory Underground’s on a farm in northern Idaho inspire its philosophical investigations of nature. The Halkyon trips, by contrast, were set in cities but brought us to unique historical sites. This impacted me in a number of ways, as I discussed above: the ancient sites, especially Pompeii, made my connection to the West’s ancient past feel more real; the sites in Athens helped me better understand the community of Greek philosophers; the artistic masterpieces in Naples and Rome inspired me to hone my craft as a writer; and my unexpected encounter with the vulgar spectators in the Sistine Chapel inspired me to reflect more deeply on our movement’s civic allies and our relationship with the wider culture.

Third: Where should we ground the movement? Which cities should we live and host events in? Where will we find people most receptive to our thinking? Conversely, how do our countries, cities, neighbors, and local environments influence our thinking? Our intellectual movement away from mainstream institutions has also been a geographic movement away from contemporary power centers, like New York, London, and Silicon Valley. This is evidenced by the movement’s activity not just in rural areas but also in smaller cities. Meriwether, for example, has quickly built a strong in-person community in Nashville, capitalizing on cultural shifts that have brought many advocates of classical education, including me, to the city. Halkyon’s trips to Athens and Naples as well as Niederhauser’s recent relocation from London to Italy, motivated in part by the more vibrant intellectual culture that appears to be emerging there, also evidence this geographic shift. The trips further highlighted Halkyon’s distinctly European character: its European basis logistically facilitated these memorable trips; its European roots influence its philosophical investigations of modernity, as I discuss shortly; and conversations on these trips helped me recognize that our movement may develop distinctly European and American poles.

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What will be the ultimate impact of our movement? In the coming years, I expect it to grow: more online schools will be founded, more local groups will be established in small cities across America and Europe, more properties dedicated to connecting the movement will be built, and more people will move to and regularly travel to these cities, venues, and other locations for events. Further, I expect it to not just grow but evolve to a new phase. From the late 2010’s to early 2020’s, people operated largely online in isolated groups; beginning around the mid 2020’s, groups began connecting in person, collaborating with other groups, and laying plans for longer-term projects; entering the late 2020’s, the movement will, I believe, begin producing impactful books and other publications as well as influencing larger scale educational change. Each group has something unique to contribute to this decentralized intellectual project. Each has a distinct spirit and leader, attracts different kinds of people, is grounded in a different location, reads different books, has a distinct view of modernity, and is uniquely positioned to address some of its problems. Halkyon, I believe, is uniquely devoted to developing deep philosophical critiques of modernity through rigorous study of a wide variety of European philosophers.

The Athens and Naples trips alone provided many ideas that could serve as the basis for further investigations. Can we form a comprehensive picture of the ills of modernity, building off of the events’ discussions on Enlightenment rationalism, the dominance of the scientific mindset, the utilitarian distortion of the good, the demand for certainty over contingency, and nihilism?—What characterizes the Italian trajectory of modern thought? How can we build off of it today? Can Vico’s New Science, in its broadly scoped analysis of humanity, serve as a model for our movement’s core intellectual project outside of mainstream institutions? What other thinkers provide similar insights?—Can we relearn authentic philosophical inquiry from the ancient Greeks and their dialogues? What can the pre-Socratics teach us about modernity? How is our view distorted without them?—What line of thinking has the capacity to stop the march of technological domination today? Can the ancient Greeks or Heidegger guide us? Should we follow his project of inaugurating a new beginning to philosophy? If so, how might we, as human beings, be fundamentally changed by it?

At the dawn of our movement we are confronted with many questions. Ultimately: What thinking does our civilization and age demand of us? And what community do we need to build outside of mainstream institutions to do it? Halkyon’s trips to Athens and Naples brought me for the first times to Europe, helping me connect with the cities and thinkers of our ancient and early modern past. They provided important insights into these questions and helped me better understand the role I might play in advancing our movement and its evolving mission.

Last June I returned to The Wagon Box Inn, this time to attend the Doomer Optimism Campout. The event gathered an eclectic mix of farmers, writers, political activists, and everyday citizens from across the nation to "examine how the Machine shapes families, the environment, personal autonomy, and class politics while highlighting inspiring acts of creative resistance." The Machine—symbolic of the powerful, often hidden, forces directing our culture—was examined as a cause of many problems that have made it difficult for American families to lead healthy, meaningful lives today. These problems include large-scale environment degradation, the near-unsustainability of small farms in the shadow of corporate agriculture, the domination of human life by high technology, the threat of transhumanism, the control of local politics by nefarious NGOs, the ideological corruption of childhood and higher education, and the alienation of modern man from his community, nature, and God.

The event exemplified a new vision of what a political conference in America could be, according to Paul McNeil, owner of the Wagon Box. Instead of sitting in a stodgy Washington DC hotel ballroom all weekend, attendees had a much richer and more meaningful experience. Over three days, McNeil's rustic Wyoming inn was transformed into a small community, housing about one hundred attendees and their families in the property's tepees, glamping tents, old RVs, communal lodge, and cabins, with several even deciding to pitch their own tents. Throughout the event, high quality policy discussion mixed seamlessly with shared meals, live music, and outdoor activities on the property, including cold plunges, hikes, fishing expeditions, and firearm lessons. Attendees and speakers built deep connections and friendships and made plans to support each other's personal, political, and artistic projects.

The Campout's success reinvigorated my faith in the Wagon Box project, which I learned about on my first trip to the property last year for an event co-hosted by Paul McNeil and Justin Murphy, founder of Other Life1, an internet-based group of independent scholars and writers that I joined several years ago. Many of America's cultural problems today are neglected or suppressed in mainstream academic and political discourse. Independent scholars and grassroots activists capable of unraveling and solving them are scattered across the internet, operating as "lone wolves" or within loosely connected groups. The Wagon Box aims to gather these people, immerse them in nature (away from the digital realm), and help build strong bonds of brotherhood among them, with the hope of facilitating creative cross pollination and culturally impactful artistic and business collaborations. The Campout gathered many patriots from across the nation along with scholars from the wider Wagon Box network. In so doing, it illustrated the strength of a coalition that I have seen growing over recent years, one that I believe is primed to begin making notable cultural and political impacts in the coming years and, if properly cultivated, has the potential to play an even more decisive role in shaping the fate of our nation.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. First, I provide a comprehensive overview of the event's content, surfacing its key ideas and themes and summarizing each speech. A key goal here is to showcase the emerging Doomer Optimism universe of thought to a wider audience of citizens and thought leaders. Second, I tell my personal story and vision for American revival that led me to the event. Finally, I reflect upon the event, suggesting some directions for future thinking and discussing the larger cultural significance of the event, which, as I see it, evinces the emergence of a powerful ecosystem of independent scholars and patriotic grassroots activists. I suggest some ways to cultivate this ecosystem, most prominently through establishing more dedicated physical meeting grounds like the Wagon Box across the country, and by investigating the ecosystem more deeply, as this article attempts to do, in order to help define and orient it.

The Doomer Optimism Campout

The phrase "Doomer Optimism" was coined by Ashley Fitzgerald, who runs a podcast by that name and who organized the event at the Wagon Box along with Paul McNeil and James Pogue, a prominent political journalist. The term "doomer" typically refers to someone who is not only aware of the ills of the modern world but is also emotionally consumed and excessively pessimistic about the future. A "doomer optimist" seems to be someone who is keenly aware of today's problems yet is also soberly optimistic about the future, often proposing practical solutions and actively working to implement them. But the term also seems to be deliberately ambiguous, perhaps partly to keep an open mind about the nature of today's gravest problems and to attract a wide variety of speakers and attendees who may be able to contribute something unique to solving them.

Speakers and attendees came from a variety of political, religious, and geographic backgrounds. While many could be considered conservatives or libertarians of some kind, a number were left-leaning or political wanderers who identified as disaffected liberals or as post-partisans. Most attendees were Christians, of various mainstream denominations, though there were also a number of Mormons, Jews, atheists, and others. Geographically, attendees came from nearly every region and state in America, and from both rural areas and cities, including a large contingent from Nashville, Tennessee, of which I was a part; several even came from countries abroad, including Ireland. Despite the diverse backgrounds, there was no animosity. To the contrary, a tight community developed over those few days. Everybody genuinely liked each other and spent a lot of time together, often long into the night, talking, building friendships, and having healthy disagreements and debates. Everyone had their own projects and areas of expertise. The conversational quality was high the whole time, whether during a formal speech, over brunch, or on a hike, and there was genuinely something to learn from everyone there.

Throughout the event, many speakers and attendees articulated problems using symbolism of "the Machine." The term was used in various contexts to represent large systems of organized corporate power, the seemingly unstoppable proliferation of mechanical and digital machines throughout society, the mechanization of human life that this proliferation has caused, and the underlying spirit or mindset that animates our age—one that imposes a hyper-rational interpretation upon the world, leading humans to believe that they can play God and technologically remake nature and even humanity itself. At its core, the Machine seems to represent powerful forces fundamentally alien to and antagonistic to human life, forces that we—grassroots activists or even humanity at large—stand outside of and cannot control. But although the term is widely used, it is notoriously difficult to define or even to grasp, a task that speaker Paul Kingsnorth takes up thematically in his forthcoming book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.

I was impressed with the breadth and quality of the event's speeches as well as with what the collection of speeches, although developed independently, revealed in their totality. While writing this article, I noticed certain themes—farming and agriculture, technology, education, coalition building and disaster preparation—emerge. Each theme not only served to group the event's speeches but also seemed to be associated with a rich but largely unarticulated set of questions that oriented its thought. Each subsection below is associated with a theme. Its introductory paragraph attempts to bring out the theme's orienting questions and each subsequent paragraph summarizes one speech. The event provided ample content, in my view, to serve as the basis for a valuable book or collection of essays showcasing the emerging Doomer Optimist universe of thought to a wider audience of citizens and thought leaders.

Farming and Agriculture

Farming and agriculture were treated as matters of primary concern due to their decisive impact on political freedom and human health: "who controls the food supply controls the people," in the famous words often attributed to Henry Kissinger. Regenerative agriculture—farming practices that help the land and ecosystem regenerate naturally—was advocated as an effective and scalable approach to combat the ecological degradation caused by corporate "conventional agriculture." Small local farms were championed as a means to produce and distribute healthy food free from centralized control. Facilitating the large-scale adoption of regenerative agriculture—which demands not that humans "leave nature alone" but that we become stewards of the earth, decisively shaping a healthy and sustainable ecosystem—as well as the economic viability of small farms across America, emerged as key goals for speakers and attendees.

The event's first speech was delivered by Peter Allen who pursued a PhD in ecology then left academia to found Mastadon Valley Farms in Wisconsin, believing that practical action rather than academic study is the key to solving today's environmental crisis. Conventional agriculture has radically transformed North America's native oak savanna habitat—an expansive grassland sparsely populated by large oak trees and grazed upon by bison and other large mammals—resulting in mineral-depleted soil and, consequently, unhealthy food and human beings. Allen practices regenerative agriculture on his farm, aiming to recreate many elements of this native habitat. His talk "Graze Against the Machine" argued a dual thesis on the relationship between ecological stewardship and political sovereignty: that mankind's facilitation of large-scale mammalian grazing is the key to producing healthy topsoil and a sustainable ecosystem in North America; and that such an ecosystem is necessary to resist Machine domination of the food supply and to secure our freedom. He argued that man must become our ecosystem's keystone species, decisively shaping the ecosystem to restore its natural savannas.

Geoffrey Long is a corporate executive who founded Long Story Farms in South Carolina and runs it on nights and weekends. Long began farming late in life, after multiple deaths and illnesses in his family which he believes our unhealthy food supply, dominated by corporate agriculture, contributed to. His goals are to provide his children with healthy food, to teach them personal autonomy, and to help build a resilient human-scale future for them. Long discussed problems that many small farms face today: their processing costs and ability to sell are disproportionately impacted by slaughter regulations and interstate commerce laws; they rely on large corporations for supplies, like steel whose price doubled in recent years; and their owners often lack critical business skills like advertising. He proposed legislative, communal, and educational solutions to increase the viability of small farms, advocating government grants for small farms (which he previously opposed but now believes is necessary given the current economic climate) and farmers' teaching the trade to others, as he does on his farm.

James Pogue and Basel Musharbash, a country lawyer who specializes in antitrust litigation, discussed the problem of monopoly power in the agricultural supply chain. A few dozen large companies control the market for critical supplies, like farm machines, fertilizer, seed, incubators, and certain farm animals, allowing them to effectively dictate who can produce food and how it is distributed. For example, Musharbash blames monopoly power over hen supply for the recent surge in egg prices, arguing that the industry's two dominant corporations artificially throttled the supply in order to prolong the crisis and achieve record profits. Pogue and Musharbash advocated using New Deal-era antitrust laws to break up these monopoly powers, arguing against the conservative-libertarian refusal to restrict big business using government power, and against proposals to merely establish oversight agencies. Pogue acknowledged that this is a bold proposal, yet also believes that we live in a historic time in which the relationship between state power and freedom is being fundamentally redefined. Trump ushered in a new era where bold, unconventional economic policies may now be politically possible.

Julius Krein is editor of American Affairs, a non-partisan public policy journal, and Chair of the Board of Directors at New American Industrial Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to "revitalizing America's techno-industrial base." Krein argued that America's agricultural problems are related to the economic strategy that it adopted in the last forty years. The US pursued an economic model in which financial value was centralized in intellectual property (IP) rather than in capital and labor—colloquially understood as a "designed in California, made in China" model. Financial performance (stock valuation) was largely decoupled from economic performance (actual profit and loss) as well as from physical reality. America's agricultural problems reflect these wider economic trends: power was centralized in IP (such as Monsanto's ownership over "Roundup-Ready" seeds); capital was tied up in stocks rather than invested in agriculture and industry; and America became a net importer of food as investment and "human capital" shifted to more profitable industries. Krein complemented his fundamental analysis with policy proposals to support regenerative agriculture, including reforming federal crop insurance programs to allow for regenerative practices, funding research to discover the best regenerative practices, and investing in innovative agricultural technologies, like weed-zapping technology which may greatly reduce the use of pesticides.

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Technology

Technology is largely heralded as a savior in our age, producing unprecedented material wealth, bringing us previously unthinkable devices and services, and ushering us into "the future," a global human society that breaks sharply with humanity's ignorant and intolerant past. Yet this unbridled enthusiasm is rapidly changing. Technology is increasingly seen as the cause of many contemporary social ills like addiction, rising suicide rates, and man's alienation from his community, nature, and God. And the twin specters of apocalypse and transhumanism—the technological merging of man with machine—threaten our very existence. Where should we draw the line on technology use for ourselves, our children, and our society? Can ancient religion, mythology, and wisdom guide us in understanding and navigating these difficult times? Can some of today's emerging technologies actually be used to our advantage? Speakers and attendees discussed these and other questions.

Joe Allen is a contributor to Steve Bannon's War Room whose master's studies focused on comparative religion. He discussed how Axial Age mythology and wisdom—drawn from the ancient Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, and Hebrew traditions—can help us navigate our technological crisis today. Numerous Axial myths describe civilizational destruction, decline, or alienation from God caused by the advent of new technologies, some of which eerily resemble those emerging today, like androids and artificial wombs. The Hebrew myth of a Golem (resembling an android) created to ward off enemies that turns on its own city, and the Hindu myth of a queen's growing sons from flesh implanted in jars of butter (resembling artificial wombs) bringing forth the Kali Yuga, or Dark Age, should serve as warnings against today's techno-optimist hubris. The Daoist story of an old gardener who refused to draw well-water using a machine, fearing that its use would mechanize his heart, spoil the pure and simple, unsettle his spirit, and ultimately alienate him from the Eternal Dao, may inform our understanding of technological alienation and guide our decisions on how to use technology today. In fighting the brutality of the Machine today, Allen implores us to hold fast to our ancient spiritual roots and wisdom, proceeding with love in our hearts and love of God. His talk elaborated upon themes presented in his book Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, of which I recently wrote a detailed review.

Paul Kingsnorth dialogued with Leighton Woodhouse, a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker. Kingsnorth warned of the dangers that modern technology, especially AI, pose to humanity. AI is "demonic": it is not a neutral technology that we can control but rather the centerpiece of Silicon Valley's techno-religious cult, the sharp tip of a technological system driving humanity towards a transhuman future. At a minimum, AI will destroy human creativity and purpose. It will destroy art and culture and it promises to abolish work and struggle, thereby threatening to suck human life into meaningless hedonism, dominated by drug use and supported by universal basic income. AI is not merely a dangerous technology. It is "apocalyptic" in the original Greek sense of the word, meaning that it removes a veil: it unveils the essence of modern technology as a whole and where it is taking us. Kingsnorth explores some of these themes in his novel Alexandria, set in a post-Singularity future in which most of humanity uploads their minds to the cloud but a small group refuses to do so. He announced the launch of his "Writers Against AI" campaign and urged audience members to ask themselves: What line am I going to draw with tech usage? And how can I use my skills to stay human?

Although Allen and Kingsnorth expressed pessimistic views of modern technology, several speakers were more optimistic. First, Woodhouse pushed back against Kingsnorth's techno-religious characterization of Silicon Valley's AI evangelists, arguing, based on his experience growing up in the Bay Area, that their claims about the revolutionary power and Utopian potential of their technology should be taken as fairly hyperbolic. Second, Jack Prophesy, an Austin-based activist, contended that Machine domination should be combated through cultivating small decentralized communities, not through the proliferation of a certain philosophy or political ideology. Software and emerging AI tools are very powerful and should be embraced to help achieve this goal; hackathons facilitating this kind of decentralized software development should be encouraged. Finally, Jon Stokes, co-founder of an AI startup for news writers, and Julie Fredrickson, head of a tech-oriented VC firm, argued against the fatalistic view of emerging AI technology, characterizing today's AI boom as "just another industrial revolution."

Stokes and Fredrickson held that LLM-based chatbots are powerful tools that must be understood and related to properly. The dangerous cultural phenomenon of viewing them as sentient beings speaking to the user will soon fade. Instead, these systems should be understood as tools that perform a complex search over word sequences, with the user acting a kind of pilot steering the system toward a desirable sequence. (Though it may be fair to claim that these systems do bear some relationship to human intelligence.) AI technologies will indeed revolutionize many industries—it's up to us to use, legislate, and respond to them responsibly: journalists can use time saved writing to produce higher quality articles or merely many low quality ones; decentralized AI development must be secured through "Right to Compute" acts and other legislation; and the epidemic of students using chatbots to write essays should spawn us to fix our broken education system—perhaps, ironically, by returning to a more classical model.

Education

Education dictates a nation's fate. Childhood education forms its cultural fabric while higher education dictates its intellectual landscape, molding its politics, economy, and law, as well as its higher artistic and philosophical pursuits. Education is confronted with an even graver task today: to mold deeply authentic human beings capable of resisting today's dehumanizing technological forces—and capable of staying human, resisting the thrust towards transhumanism. Speakers and attendees widely supported a return to rigorous classical education, with many also championing homeschooling options, as a means to combat today's educational crisis, in which both K-12 public schools and universities are plagued by a decay in academic standards and by nefarious anti-American ideological corruption. Discussion on formal education was complemented by discussion on how children should be raised more broadly, examining approaches taken by different religious subcultures. Entrepreneurial projects to counteract our ideologically corrupt higher education system were also widely discussed.

Josh Centers, a journalist for BlazeMedia, and his wife Hannah Centers, a homeschool activist and former public school teacher, discussed classical childhood education and homeschooling. A return to classical education is needed to combat our severe cultural degradation: widespread illiteracy demands the serious study of great books; rampant anti-Americanism, especially prevalent in education, demands a sober and reverent study of Western civilization; and our fracturing social cohesion, caused partly by ubiquitous hyper-individualized digital content, demands a return to shared cultural reference points provided, for example, by relatable Biblical stories. Homeschooling is needed to enact this classical return as many public schools are ideologically corrupt and nearly irreformable, due both to powerful Machine interests and to many local communities' overzealous attachment to their schools. Drawing on their personal experiences as homeschoolers, the Centers and three other parents discussed the practical aspects of homeschooling, including problems, like communal division, associated with it. Forming cohesive groups dedicated to classical education is often desirable though impractical as most homeschoolers lack peers in their local communities. The Centers, partly inspired by the needs of classical homeschoolers and a desire to grow the movement, recently founded Chapter House, a division of Passage Press that is set to publish high-quality volumes containing engaging selections from classic works, like Beowulf, accompanied by custom art.

Zach Davis, a writer and devoted Mormon, addressed the problem of how we can form our children to thrive in our difficult age. He suggested that elements of the Mormon approach to raising children can be beneficially adopted by others. He told the story of his own upbringing: he grew up in a decisively Mormon community that regularly encouraged his spiritual pursuit; since youth, he was required to give his time and money to help build the community; as a young teen, he was entrusted with performing religious rituals which motivated him to keep his soul clean during the week; as a young adult, sex, alcohol, and drugs were forbidden; by the time he was married, he had built a strong spiritual foundation that withheld his questioning of his faith. Some lessons on raising children that we might take from his story include: the importance of having a strong community and how to cultivate one; that giving children responsibilities or religious duties encourages their good behavior; that abstinence may be wise, especially in our age of excessive vice; and that we must provide spiritual guidance, not merely college education, to young adults. Although Davis did not claim that everyone must become a Mormon, he did hold that an authentic religious life is the only way to resist dehumanizing forces today.

During the event's informal discussions, many championed entrepreneurial projects to counteract our ideologically corrupt higher education system. These projects roughly intended to provide substitutes for mainstream undergraduate education, graduate education, and professorial scholarship, largely in humanities disciplines. Bringing classical undergraduate-level education to local communities across America is necessary both to widely disseminate classical wisdom and to help strengthen or renew these local communities. Nick Ellis' Christian Halls International, which has already built a fairly large network of classical learning halls across the nation, was perhaps the most inspiring such project discussed. At the graduate level, Ashley Fitzgerald proposed creating a formal master's program by gathering independent scholars from the larger Wagon Box community who are already teaching online courses at that level. A year-long remote study program with quarterly week-long intensive learning retreats at the Wagon Box was proposed as its format. Last year at the Wagon Box, Justin Murphy discussed the feasibility of high-impact independent scholarship in the context of his internet-based Other Life group whose elite members, he felt, had the potential to develop the erudition of university professors, producing insights that are valuable to high-power decision makers but also to everyday Americans. He championed developing physical meeting grounds like the Wagon Box as essential to forming this community and pushing its members to do their best work.

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Coalition Building and Disaster Preparation

Most of the conference's speeches analyzed the powerful forces directing our culture (especially in agriculture, technology, and education), warned of the problems and catastrophic disasters that they can cause, and proposed solutions to these problems. But how do we actually organize to make the political and cultural changes necessary to solve these problems? And how should we respond to disaster if our organizing is unable to prevent it (or if a natural disaster should befall us)? Several speakers took up these questions thematically. While emphasizing the importance of individual strength and resilience, they discussed how to build strong local coalitions, both to influence local politics, which has a much bigger impact than most people realize, and to respond to disaster with a strong community, rather than attempting to do so alone. Coalition building is also central to the Wagon Box's mission to gather digitally scattered activists at a physical meeting ground and form them into a powerful movement. The project has yielded many important insights on how to do this, as I discuss in the final subsection of this article.

Seneca Scott, a prominent political activist who led Oakland's 2024 mayoral recall campaign, warned of the spread of dangerous progressive policies through local city councils across the nation and gave attendees practical advice on how to organize to take their cities back. Oakland was destroyed in mere years by progressive policies, such as the housing eviction moratorium and defunding the police, which led to extensive crime and homeless encampments. These policies were pushed by progressive ideologues aligned with powerful networks of NGOs operating out of the Bay Area, many of which, Scott's research showed, were under foreign financial influence and had established presences in many other American cities. But Scott is optimistic that these seemingly powerful forces can actually be easily defeated since their policies are so destructive and unpopular. Conservatives and moderates lose primarily because they don't care enough and are often unwilling to engage in "community organizing" themselves, seeing it as a leftist tactic or as something beneath them. He offered many insightful pieces of practical advice on successful community organizing and announced his desire to start teaching classes on the subject.

Chris Ellis, an Army colonel2 who recently completed a PhD specializing in disaster studies, discussed the importance of effective disaster preparedness. Disaster preparation is often looked down upon today: a "prepper" is viewed as someone who is excessively paranoid about disaster, who operates alone and obsesses about which physical supplies to stockpile. But for Ellis, deriving partly from his military experience, disaster is a very real phenomenon, though one that requires much more than individual physical preparedness. Instead, effective disaster preparation requires one to become a "resilient citizen": resilience refers to one's ability to withstand physical, social, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional adversity, while a citizen is a productive member of his community, one who recognizes that disaster survival is a communal, not individual, effort. Ellis urged us to become resilient citizens. Resilience can be built, for example, by actively seeking out adversity, as he does by fasting every Saturday until after church on Sunday, a practice that builds resilience against bodily desires and brings him closer to God. Ellis' forthcoming book Resilient Citizens: The People, Perils, and Politics of Modern Preparedness explores these and other aspects of disaster preparedness, an especially prescient topic in our post-COVID world.

My Story and Vision for American Revival

Up until now, I have described the event as objectively as possible, aiming to capture the content of its speeches and its thematically organized core principles. In this section, I will briefly tell my personal story3, particularly how my personal experiences shaped my view of America's techno-cultural crisis and my mission to help revive America, a mission that ultimately led me to the Doomer Optimism Campout and the Wagon Box community.

I began a PhD in computer science, specializing in machine learning, during the 2010's and graduated amid the social justice hysteria and violence that characterized the summer and election of 2020. I had witnessed its build-up first hand within the university and had unsuccessfully dedicated many of the most precious years of my life to stopping it. During this time, I watched the academic community work, with few exceptions, to defame, destabilize, and perhaps permanently cripple our nation, remaining hostile or indifferent even to mere attempts to speak out against it. In the end, it became clear to me that academia, as well as culturally related corporate communities like Big Tech, were deeply sick and beyond reform. I turned my back on them, began freelancing for work, and traveled across America, moving among several cities throughout the heartland, away from coastal states and "elite" institutions—now operating, fully and forever, outside of the Machine (and forever forgoing any ability to influence it from within).

My exit inaugurated a journey. I felt deep gratitude for the American people and their patriotic spirit: the people, animated by this spirit, suppressed the cultural and political madness of the elites, critically stabilizing the nation. But while this spirit gave the nation a breath of life, it failed to meaningfully revive it: it did not galvanize the people to fight back hard enough nor to establish a formidable cultural-intellectual countermovement, one perhaps rooted in the spirit and principles of 1776, to set the nation on a firm footing. 2020 radically changed the nature of our national crisis: no longer did waking people up and galvanizing them towards common-sense political reform seem viable; a much deeper effort to unravel the mystery of our nation's decline and to give it new life was now needed.

Such a task, I felt, could only be accomplished by a community that has yet to arise: one that will embody the spirit of a new American patriotism and possess the skill and will to remake the nation's cultural-intellectual landscape in the wake of progressive radicalism and institutional collapse. I set out on a quest for the spirit, knowledge, and people that would ultimately form this community. I set out to discover America by living and traveling throughout it, by attending gatherings of patriotic intellectual dissidents, and by studying and mastering the foundational texts of the Western canon.

Leaving California in 2021, I set out to see America with my own eyes, moving among several states within the heartland (Idaho, South Dakota, Louisiana, South Carolina, and now Tennessee) and driving throughout it, aiming to cover as much ground as possible. I went to see America's natural beauty and national parks, its open roads and diverse terrains (its mountains, caves, swamps, forests, lakes, and oceans), its farmlands and rural communities, its thriving and struggling cities, its hometowns and main streets, its hidden histories and unsung heroes, its statues and war memorials, its revolutionary and civil war battlefields, its people and their customs, and its citizens in their everyday lives—What is America to them? What piece of the puzzle do they hold? And how might they ultimately be formed into a coalition to help revive America? I sought also to deepen my own love for the country: to develop an affection for and attachment to the land, to truly appreciate its vastness and mystery, and to persistently remind myself of what we have and what is beginning to be lost forever—to push myself to complete my journey.

I obtained another view of America by attending events and joining online groups that articulated some aspect of its decline and possible solutions. I felt particularly inspired to write about a few of them. First, the Millerman School, an online school pioneering counter-institutional political philosophy education, which elucidated the deep philosophical roots of our civilizational crisis through a curriculum that brings together ancient Greek, religious, mystical, and anti-liberal political thought. Second, last year's Wagon Box event which aimed to reorient the nation towards "the good, the true, and the beautiful" by establishing a physical meeting ground dedicated to producing culturally impactful artistic and business collaborations. Finally, an Echelon Front event, led by retired Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, which presented a nuanced leadership framework, deeply interwoven with a patriotism rooted in reverence for military sacrifice. The framework was applicable to leading teams—a skill sorely missing in American politics and among independent scholars—and leading oneself—a kind of holistic training of man's virtues, intellect, and body—to which I saw strong resonances with ancient Greek teachings.

As I saw it—and as I believe future generations will see it clearly—academia's sin was twofold: cultivating and exporting its sickness throughout the nation, yes, but also undermining thinkers within its walls who had the skill and spirit to truly grasp our nation's crisis and help set it on the right track. It was my patriotic duty, I felt, to work towards developing myself into such a thinker. I began obsessively reading the great books of the Western canon, diligently training myself as a writer, continuously connecting with independent scholars online, many of whom were pushed out of or disillusioned by academia, attending events to meet them in person, and removing from my life all technology destructive to this mission, including the smartphone and almost all social media.4 Throughout all of this—my travels, attending dissident events, and studying the great books—I sought knowledge as much as community: for companions to go on this long journey with, a brotherhood to sharpen me, and a team whose mission I could be genuinely proud of and want to contribute to.

I attended the Doomer Optimist Campout to advance each of the four aspects of my mission. First, to see more of America, as the event would bring me to Wyoming and allow me to meet and learn from attendees who live throughout rural America. Second, to meet an eclectic mix of patriotic grassroots activists who could provide essential knowledge about our crisis, particularly regarding technological domination and transhumanism, and help me discover new projects to which my skills, technical or otherwise, could be employed to help our nation. Third, to connect with independent scholars and experienced writers who could help further my philosophical and literary studies and help train me as a writer. Finally, to help advance the Wagon Box project, which I saw as the hub of a growing community that I could be proud to be a part of and one with the potential to make a lasting positive impact on our nation.

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From Doomer Optimism to American Revival

This section completes a kind of "ladder of ascent" that was implicit in the organization of this article, one that took us from the event's speeches up through my holistic vision of American revival. In the first section, individual speeches organized into thematic groups which in turn organized into a holistic view of the event's content. The first subsection here begins to move from a holistic view of the event towards a comprehensive view of the Doomer Optimism universe of thought by sketching an extrapolation of the event's key ideas and themes; the second subsection here isolates the technological problem for detailed discussion. Doomer Optimism is one among the Wagon Box's network of groups which is in turn part of a larger emerging ecosystem of independent scholars and patriotic grassroots activists. The third subsection here maps out this ecosystem, advocates it cultivation, and argues that it has the potential to develop into an important element of the community that will ultimately oversee America's revival, a community whose structure I sketched out in the previous section and will describe in more detail in a future article.

Towards a Comprehensive View of Doomer Optimism

The event presented interesting content at multiple levels of resolution: at the level of individual ideas, individual themes, and holistically. The content at each of these levels can be extended to provide a more comprehensive view of it. I believe that these views, presented in writing or another form, would help many different kinds of people better understand the problems addressed by Doomer Optimism and how they can combat them. This subsection discusses each of these points in turn.

I learned many new things at the event including: what regenerative agriculture is and that it may provide the basis for large-scale environmental restoration; the specific challenges that small farmers face; that I could become a farmer myself later in life; that NGOs are nefariously influencing local politics; what it's like to grow up in the Mormon faith; that many ancient religious myths shed light on the problems of modern technology; how deliberate changes in our economic structure contributed to the dominance of corporate agriculture; that there is a strong need for tech innovation in regenerative agriculture; that the recent rise in egg prices was due partly to corporate agriculture's throttling of hen supply; that students cheating with AI may ironically lead us back to classical education; that classical homeschooling faces significant local resistance; that effective disaster preparation is a communal not individual effort; and that grasping the essence of "the Machine" is difficult even for experienced writers.

Each of these ideas, while interesting in its own right, can be generalized to address a core problem facing us today. For example, the discussion on how Mormons raise children invites a comprehensive analysis of how various subcultures in contemporary America raise children and which of their practices, especially concerning technology usage, could be adopted by society more broadly. Reports by individual small farmers on challenges they face invite a comprehensive exposition of the problems facing small farmers in America and an exposition of proposed solutions which could guide long-term grassroots activism. The relaying of interesting ancient myths related to technology invites a comprehensive analysis of ancient wisdom and teachings concerning the threat of technology and innovation. Allusions to the "Machine" and the underlying nature of technology invite a deeper philosophical investigation into the essence of technology, to which I believe the work of Martin Heidegger, especially his essay The Question Concerning Technology, is essential.

While writing this article, I noticed that each theme seemed to be oriented by a rich but largely unarticulated set of questions, which I tried to bring out in each theme's introductory paragraph, as I said earlier. These questions included the following: What are the theme's key activism goals? From which fundamental contemporary concerns does theme take its bearing? How does it relate to and affect other themes? What permanent, trans-temporal, questions about human and political life does it point to? And what, if any, fundamentally new questions does it pose in our age? I saw this bottom-up emergence as significant, indicating that it reflected the genuine concerns of grassroots activists rather than being imposed artificially a priori. But now, after having identified these structures, the above questions can be addressed directly to enrich the theme's thought.

For example, a comprehensive view of education from the Doomer Optimism point of view might proceed as follows. Classical education and counter-institutional entrepreneurial efforts were key activism goals. How should we design a classical education curriculum in our age? Which books should we draw on for guidance? How exactly do raising children, childhood education, and higher education relate? Should activists working within each realm synergize their efforts? What fundamental contemporary concerns must education address? Ideological corruption in mainstream institutions and cultural degradation were two examples I noticed; are there others? Going further: What aspects of today's cultural degradation can and should education combat? Rampant illiteracy, anti-Americanism, and fracturing social cohesion, were examples I noticed; are there others? Does education today raise any fundamentally new problems about human and political life? I identified education as being called upon today to mold deeply authentic human beings capable of resisting transhumanism. Is this truly a problem without precedent? What ancient sources from the Biblical or Greek traditions can guide us in designing an educational program with this aim?

All of this could be assembled into a comprehensive picture of the Doomer Optimism universe of thought. As I said above, I feel that the event itself provided ample material to serve as the basis for a valuable book or collection of essays on Doomer Optimism. The following questions could perhaps be used to guide future thought. What defines the bounds of the Doomer Optimism universe of thought? What are all of its key ideas and themes? How do the themes relate to each other in a holistic picture? Does this picture point to even more fundamental questions of our age that can be raised and pursued? My interest in such a comprehensive analysis appears to be in line with a project that James Pogue, in a Doomer Optimist podcast last year, discussed and seems to be pursuing: developing a "high level" "statecraft and vision of what American policy would look like if you were trying to take into account the things that people who listen to [Doomer Optimism] care about."

The kinds of analyses suggested in this section could, I believe, help a number of allies. First, they could help everyday citizens more clearly understand the problems discussed here, how they affect their families' lives, and what they can do to fight back. For example, by helping them decide how to raise their children in the technological age based on analyses of practices across subcultures in America. Second, these analyses could help activists within the community more readily identify collaboration opportunities among themselves and clarify long-term goals to guide their activism. For example, by helping coordinate the activism efforts among homeschoolers and those working on entrepreneurial efforts for higher-education. Finally, it could guide and encourage allies outside the community to pursue aligned local and national policies, cultural activism, and entrepreneurial projects, as I discuss in the context of small farmers and tech developers in the next section.

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The Technological Problem

In this section, I single out the technological problem for discussion as it was one of my main motivations for attending the event and because I think that it poses both the greatest threats and the greatest difficulties in discovering a path forward to combat them. Based in the context of this event, I discuss several aspects of the technological problem: first, how I think technology can be used to our advantage; second, the problem of resisting technological domination of our personal lives; third, how technological development seems to be ultimately taking us towards a transhuman future; and, finally, if and how we might be able to ultimately win against the forces leading this development. Speakers and attendees discussed many interesting ideas, though neither they nor I have satisfactory solutions to these problems. As technology advances rapidly, it is crucial that we continue hosting events like this and cultivating communities of independent thinkers capable of addressing these issues intelligently.

As someone trained in computer science and machine learning, I attended the event hoping to find a way to use my skills to help grassroots patriots or America at large. More broadly, I sought to help build a community of similarly skilled people dedicated to these goals. Overall, I think this is a largely untapped area: that technology can be used to our advantage in many ways but that most activists are not aware of what tech can do and, conversely, culturally aligned tech developers, while willing to help, are largely unaware of the problems facing activists and rural America. Hosting an event to bring these two groups together would facilitate the discovery of these problems; formatting the event as a hackathon, where tech teams work intensely over a few days to build prototypes, would facilitate the development of solutions. Such an event could, for example, bring together small farmers, who would discuss critical problems they face, such as difficulty advertising or selling direct to consumers, with tech developers who would form teams and compete to develop the best prototype solution over one weekend. This could spawn long-term collaborations or facilitate production grade development.

Although some technology can be used to our advantage, there is a significant distinction between technologies that we adopt as behind-the-scenes tools and those that dominate our everyday lives—the smartphone, the screen, digital music, social media—at which the contemporary protest against technology is primarily aimed. The event inclined towards a tech skepticism though not extremism: no one had fully abandoned modern technology to "rough it" in the woods but many did adopt anti-tech practices like banning smartphones for their children, taking long "screen sabbaticals" themselves, and refusing to use emerging "AI" tools. However, several people were (cautiously) optimistic about these emerging technologies and embraced their development. In my view, there is no easy answer to the question of which technologies we should adopt. It was a virtue of the event that it attracted speakers with a variety of views to facilitate deeper thinking on this question. In this spirit, I think that a structured debate or discussion to put contrasting views into dialogue would have been useful and that the Wagon Box provides perhaps the ideal venue for doing so: immersed in the natural beauty of a small rural town with minimal tech usage, it serves as a constant reminder of just what we've lost in our digital age.

Although we may each choose which technologies to adopt in our personal lives, our decisions will not likely effect large-scale technological development. So then where is technology ultimately taking us? This question confronts us most starkly today in the form of "AI" technology, particularly LLM-based chatbots and image generators. Given my background in machine learning, I was sympathetic to Stokes' technical discussion of LLMs, dissecting their inner workings at a high-level and reporting on their empirical fragility, in an attempt to demystify them for the audience and unveil them as tools not beings speaking to the user. I am also sympathetic to the idea that statistically-based technical tools, as his company seems to be developing, can aid the human writing process, especially for low-level editing tasks, like fixing grammar, sentence structure, or identifying conceptual redundancies across paragraphs. However, I am skeptical that most people will adopt these views. Instead they will eagerly defer to "AI" tools as intelligent beings, especially as more realistic voice- and video-generated avatars and humanoid robots emerge, and they will use writing tools to generate large passages of text or even "new ideas," accelerating the deterioration of critical and creative thinking in our age.

Ultimately, I do not believe that today's AI boom is "just another industrial revolution."5 Instead, that it is—or at least that many of its most powerful proponents intend it to be—the beginning of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, one in which technology is turned radically inward to modify man himself, through aggressive genetic engineering, brain chip implantations, and other body modifications, fundamentally altering humanity and ushering in a transhuman future. I believe that many of the most prominent forces driving this development do hold a kind of quasi-religious belief in this future and that their sincerity, while possible to exaggerate, should not be treated with too much skepticism as Woodhouse suggested in his dialogue with Kingsnorth. My belief in the the gravity of the transhumanist threat was greatly influenced by my recent reading of Joe Allen's Dark Aeon. My fear was intensified by Peter Allen's (no relation to Joe Allen) suggestion at the conference that environmental degradation may eventually cause our food supply to deteriorate so severely that human beings cannot survive naturally, without genetic or digital transhuman modifications. That is, that not only might "superior" man-machine hybrids outcompete us for natural resources, but that the character of these resources themselves might be fundamentally altered, rendering them nearly-inaccessible to human beings.

But if we can't use technology too greatly to our advantage and if we can't directly stop or reverse its development, how can we realistically win? While we can and should resist technological domination through practical action in the realms of politics, economics, education, and agriculture, we must ultimately take our bearing from another realm, one in which we have a decisive advantage, one that is entirely within our control (not the Machine's), and one that has the potential for significant or decisive worldly impact. What is this realm? Although a clear answer did not emerge at the event, the realm of art emerged as a candidate: beautiful, excellent, and deeply human works of art and writing have the power to win over the hearts and minds of the masses and effect radical "cultural change," presumably oriented towards a more natural human future. Dostoevsky's famous quote "beauty will save the world" seems to attest to the salvific power of art. The quote appears on some of the Wagon Box's shirts, suggesting, it seems, that the property hopes to help cultivate a community oriented towards the creation or genuine appreciation of such works.

Another great thinker, Martin Heidegger, seems to point us in a similar direction. Famously, when asked in a 1966 interview if there were any way to influence the rising web of technological domination, he replied: "Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline[.]" Heidegger is not talking about the Christian God nor does he mean that we will be "saved" by some revolution that banishes modern technological devices from society. Instead, he means that only by inaugurating a new way of thinking, of seeing and being in the world, of understanding and relating to the essence of technology, can a more free relationship of the human being to technology arise. But, while thinking and poetizing—properly understood—may ultimately give rise to this transformation, it is also not fully within human control.6

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The Wagon Box Inn: Hub of an Emerging Ecosystem for American Revival

Two things have been wildly underestimated in our age. First, the value of intimate in-person intellectual gatherings contra the digital world's promise of unlimited information and instantaneous social networking. Second, the collective knowledge and power lying dormant within our nation's independent scholars and patriotic grassroots activists contra that of mainstream academic institutions and political parties. In this subsection, I discuss how to capitalize on these underestimations. First, I discuss the specific mechanisms by which dedicated physical meeting grounds like the Wagon Box serve to gather digitally scattered activists and form them into a powerful movement. Second, I discuss how a strong but atomized ecosystem of such scholars and activists has developed over recent years, which the Doomer Optimism Campout exemplified, and of which the Wagon Box is a central element. I argue that this ecosystem, if properly cultivated, has the potential to develop into a powerful community that will play an essential role in America's revival.

Physical Meeting Grounds

The event immersed me in a new world, commanding my full attention during the speeches and saturating my free time with thoughtful discussions. I took detailed notes during the event; afterwards, I studied them diligently, piecing together the speeches and embarking upon the long journey of transforming my notebook into this document. I didn't come to the event with this plan. But the first night on the porch, amid the intelligent discussions and spirited debates, convinced me that the event was going to be important. In the people it had gathered, I saw the pioneers of projects, many in their humble beginnings, that they felt really mattered and for which they were willing to fight; people who had been called to this remote Wyoming inn to deliver a message, a small, hard-won, piece of the puzzle of our collapsing America. I felt compelled to write, to contribute something to this effort: to help boost the projects of friends that I had made, people who could help save America and inspire others to follow suit, and to once again tell the world about a little inn that I knew was the beginning of something much more.

I would have felt none of this in the digital world or at a "standard" political or academic conference. No doubt, as Wagon Box owner Paul McNeil suggested, the event's serene natural setting and communal atmosphere, starkly contrasting with the standard conference's stodgy hotel ballroom and impersonal socializing, played a role in this. As did its merely physical setting, allowing me to truly meet people, to hear their personal stories, struggles, and ambitions, turning them into "real" people, not merely digital avatars but people in my tribe whose well-being and projects I begin to care about. Another distinguishing feature was the spirit and motives of the event's attendees, as grassroots activists with something serious at stake (the fate of their families and nation) rather than institutional functionaries merely advancing their careers. All of these factors coalesce at the Wagon Box's events, making it an especially important project in the digital age. McNeil's concluding speech, briefly reviewing the success of the project, highlighted the many friendships and political, artistic, and business collaborations that have been born or nurtured at the property.

But the project encompasses even stronger visions on the nature of friendship and its role in enacting large-scale cultural change. Last year at the Wagon Box, McNeil and Justin Murphy presented complementary visions. McNeil emphasized the importance of forming brotherhoods, which have been all but lost in our age. Summarizing his view last year, I wrote: "America was built by tight bands of brothers working together, many of whom undertook the project of expanding the frontier westward. This expansion exemplifies the more general principle that nation-shaping change flows only out of tight fraternal bonds." In Murphy's vision, large-scale cultural change often originates from small groups of creatives living in close physical proximity, as with the Bloomsbury Group. Such an environment operates as a "pressure" cooker, whereby the group's ideas are aggressively bounced around, refined, and ultimately "bubble over" to transform the wider society. Additionally, often times a person possesses crucially important knowledge but is unaware of it; it is only through a close friend, feeling that he possesses something special and unearthing it through extended in-person interactions, that the world ultimately comes to learn of his insights, as was the case of Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell.

This is exactly what I felt while writing this article and throughout my investigations of other events in recent years: that I see something here that others do not see, something truly special that the world needs to know about. It was only because this event was hosted in-person that I could do this: that by carefully observing the event and meticulously piecing my notes together, I could assemble its unarticulated insights, surface its overlooked ideas, and help discover where it might fit into a holistic vision of American revival. While the Wagon Box community has significant grassroots energy, the energy is not undirected. Instead, I see the community beginning to form into a movement: its core ideas and concerns are beginning to take shape, its communal bonds are strengthening as people reconnect over several years, and many projects born or nurtured at the property are now beginning to germinate. In-person events are crucial for cultivating this movement, both to help strengthen its existing bonds and to help define and orient it in the interest of helping it reach its full potential, as I have attempted to do here.

An Emerging Ecosystem

An even larger cultural movement is at foot. An entire ecosystem of independent scholars and groups is beginning to emerge, as I've seen by connecting with many of them over the past few years. Justin Murphy's Indie Scholars recently launched a program dedicated to helping its members, an eclectic mix of independent scholars and writers, "[build] serious, long-term, independent writing projects on the internet" over a year-long time horizon, leveraging "1-on-1 project supervision in the style of MA and PhD programs." A number of independent scholars have built successful online schools of political thought and philosophy, including the Millerman School and the Halkyon Academy, that educate independent thinkers and creators. In-person-native groups are beginning to pop up, such as the Meriwether Academy in Nashville which hosts weekly study groups, political philosophy symposiums, and outdoor retreats that combine great books learning with immersion in nature (similar in spirit to the Wagon Box project). Directed efforts to connect atomized groups like these have recently begun. Matthew Stanley, who I met through Murphy's group, recently launched a website to map out this emerging ecosystem and help its members better discover each other and organize events. And the Wagon Box serves as a physical meeting ground which many online groups plug into to host physical events.

What might this ecosystem look like in the next few years? Extrapolating out its development, the following picture is plausible. There will be many online groups dedicated to facilitating high-level independent scholarship over long time horizons. There will be ample specialized tutors and online schools for them to learn from. Many American cities will have strongly connected local groups, facilitating study groups and retreats, and also serving as a base which groups across the nation visit for events. Powerful software tools will be built to effectively network activists and continually grow the community, inspiring successful collaborations, facilitating impactful in-person events, and helping its members attain financial solvency. And dozens of dedicated venues like the Wagon Box will be built across the nation, regularly bringing the ecosystem's members and groups together for events, building a strong community and developing a strong vision of America's future. That is, there will be a thriving, decentralized, hybrid digital-in-person ecosystem out of which culturally impactful works could plausibly emerge.

Such a community's formation is perhaps not only plausible but likely to happen soon. Many intelligent young people of our generation were pushed out of or proactively removed themselves from academia and corporate America in the 2010's due to DEI-related persecution or hostility. They began connecting online, forming communities, and building independent projects and businesses which began stabilizing in the mid 2020's. These projects and communities seem primed to begin making notable cultural and political impacts in the 2030's as the projects grow stronger (partly as intelligent young people continue fleeing institutions) and their associated scholars mature into their most intellectually productive years.

I see another important phenomenon arising out of this milieu. A strong coalition of independent scholars, fleeing institutional hostility, and patriotic grassroots activists, diligently combating progressive radicalism and incompetent mainstream political parties, is beginning to emerge. This alliance, as I see it, will have two complementing effects. First, it will facilitate deeper thinking on problems relevant to everyday Americans and the fate of our nation: scholars, regularly interacting with activists, will gain familiarity with and motivation to work on these problems while, conversely, activists with unique insights or personal experiences relevant to these problems will transform them, by studying and working with these scholars, into impactful written works. Second, it will help form the political and cultural coalitions necessary to cultivate these ideas and guide their implementation across the nation.

The Doomer Optimist Campout illustrated this emerging coalition. The event gathered scholars from the wider Wagon Box network with patriots from across the nation, from dozens of states and many walks of life, possessing diverse skills and experiences. Many speakers embodied both roots, such as Chris Ellis whose military training and childhood experience with Mt. St. Helen's eruption in Washington state motivated his PhD work and forthcoming book on disaster preparation. The event's content was both well thought out yet strongly rooted in the concerns of everyday Americans, like obtaining healthy food, educating their children, building local communities, and resisting technological domination. The event's central theme of Machine domination encompassed concerns of scholars fleeing academic institutions and grassroots activists combating mainstream political parties. Looking forward, the event provided, as I argued above, ample content to serve as the basis of a book and for more comprehensive analyses, projects for which such a coalition is particularly well suited.

How might this coalition and ecosystem be cultivated? We should take direct actions like supporting its creators, encouraging others to join, and finding creative ways to help activists advance their projects. But we must ultimately overcome its biggest problem which is atomization, both geographical and ideological. We must host more in-person events and acquire more properties like the Wagon Box throughout the nation to bring the geographically scattered activists together and form them into a genuine community. Ideologically, although many groups have interesting ideas and insights, most have not yet assembled them into a comprehensive vision of their projects nor have they developed visions of how their projects fits into a holistic plan for American revival. This article was my preliminary attempt to develop such visions for Doomer Optimism, based on the event's rich but largely unstructured content. It is part of my larger ongoing project of writing similar detailed articles about the ecosystem's groups and events, aiming to showcase the wealth of unique and valuable skills, knowledge, people, and groups within the ecosystem. It is my hope that by doing so this project will help organize and cultivate the ecosystem, allowing it grow into a community that ultimately plays a decisive role in reviving America.

Conclusion

Overall, the Doomer Optimism Campout was an excellent event. It was great to spend a long weekend at the Wagon Box in rural Wyoming, immersed in natural beauty, with minimal tech usage, plenty of outdoor activities, delicious food and drinks, and a smart and ambitious community of people. It was inspiring to see the many important projects that people were pursuing, to connect with them, and to hopefully have the opportunity to work with them in the future. I learned a lot at the event. I was impressed with both the breadth and quality of the event's speeches. Although I didn't know much about Doomer Optimism before attending the event, I now feel that I have a deep understanding of this universe of thought and activist community, something I could have only acquired at an in-person event. I highly recommend attending this event next year or contributing as a speaker if appropriate.

While the event was worthwhile in its own right, it is also part of something much bigger. An entire decentralized ecosystem of independent scholars and patriotic grassroots activists is beginning to emerge. This ecosystem is primed to begin making notable cultural and political impacts in the coming years and has the potential, if properly cultivated, to develop into a community that shapes the fate of our nation even more decisively. We must cultivate this community by directly supporting it, hosting more events like this, establishing more physical meeting grounds like the Wagon Box, and better documenting and mapping it out, as I have attempted to do here and in my larger collection of articles, a project to which I hope to inspire others to contribute.

The specter of transhumanism—the irreversible merging of man and machine through the radical alteration of our brains, bodies, and genomes—haunts our age. Long bound to the realms of science fiction and techno-dystopic fantasy, it has finally begun to break its chains. Who is developing and pushing today's most dangerous technologies, what do they believe, and what is their vision of the future? What can these technologies actually do, how are they advancing, and how do they threaten us? Are we destined to submit to the "inevitable" technological "progress" or do we have the power to direct our fate?

While the threat of modern technology is a common contemporary talking point, Joe Allen's recent book Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity sounds the alarm on the gravity and true nature of the technological threat that confronts us. In meticulous detail, Allen articulates the threat, surveying what technologies are being developed and what transhumanists believe; he analyzes the threat, elucidating how dangerous technologies encroach upon society and unraveling why transhumanists believe what they believe; and finally, rooted in this deeper understanding of transhumanism, he provides guidance on how to combat it in both the material and spiritual realms.

In articulating the threat, he surveys existing and emerging biological and digital technologies that pose the greatest threats to humanity. He shows that these technologies are much further advanced and more deeply embedded in society than most people think. Strikingly, he shows that humanity is threatened not only by technology's unintentional escape from human control but by its intentional use to bring about a transhuman future. Transhumanists intend to turn technology, which is traditionally used to modify man's external environment, radically inward to modify man himself. This ambition, if actualized, would ultimately culminate in a future dominated by a race of biodigital "god men"—technologically perfected man-machine hybrids, nearly immune to disease (or even death) and possessing radically enhanced attributes, like intelligence, strength, and beauty—that ultimately outcompete and replace "legacy" human beings.

In analyzing the threat, he examines the socio-political mechanisms by which today's most dangerous technologies have become embedded in society, such as through the exploitation of the COVID pandemic. At a deeper level, he directs us towards the spiritual realm, which, he argues, is the key to truly understanding transhumanism. "Ultimately," he explains, "transhumanism is a spiritual orientation," one that is grounded in a mythos, a kind of techno-religious origin story that christens as "evolutionary progress" the technological degradation of man. He examines this mythos, and the movement in general, through many lenses, including as a materialist inversion of Gnosticism—the believe that "it's through our own material creations that we will transcend this flawed material realm of suffering, disease, old age, and death." The book's title, Dark Aeon, and its cover art derive from this techno-Gnostic connection. (Taking the meaning of aeon colloquially, as merely a long period of time, the title may also be interpreted to mean that humanity is approaching a long period of darkness should transhumanism prevail.)

The socio-political analysis guides our practical efforts to combat transhumanism; for example, by informing our decisions about which technologies to adopt and which to say "no" to. The spiritual analysis guides our efforts to develop a clear "yes," a positive affirmation of what it means to be truly human, one rooted in our "biological heritage and spiritual depth" in contrast to transhumanism's soulless technological remaking of humanity.

Our age is in desperate need of a thorough yet accessible critique of technology and where it is taking us. Allen's book, in my view, provides such a critique, one that is informative and well-researched while at the same time witty, humorous, and deeply personal, making the book an interesting and engaging read. These complementary aspects of the book make it valuable for two audiences. For everyday citizens, the book provides a resource to enhance the depth of our discussions about technology and to guide our decisions about our use of it. For the men and women who will lead the complex cultural, political, intellectual, and spiritual counter-revolution to defend humanity against its transhumanist degradation or annihilation, the book provides a detailed map of the terrain before us and sheds light on the many possible paths forward.

The bulk of this article provides a detailed summary of Allen's book following the structure that I presented in this section. Following this summary, I tell my story, discussing the specific nature of my concern about technology and transhumanism, and how Allen's book may impact my mission as well as the missions of those with a similar role to play in the war. I conclude with a discussion of the book that can be read, more or less, as a stand-alone review for a general reader. The article's many references to specific content from the book are included as a section at the very end. (A PDF version of the article can be found here.)

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Our Emerging Techno-Dystopia

At one level, Allen articulates the techno-pessimist view that modern technology, while improving our lives in certain ways, has burdened us with many new social ills and credible apocalyptic threats. Rapid developments in biological (especially genetic) and digital technologies, as well as developments in their unification—the so-called biodigital convergence—have the most devastating potential. Allen surveys these technologies, showing that they are much further advanced and more deeply embedded in society than most people think. He warns of their devastating potential: "if [authorities] lure the masses into virtual reality, if they produce CRISPR babies on demand, if a world power develops an artificial general intelligence that can break through any defense system, then the world as we know it will end."

The Genetic Threat

Genetic technology has the potential to alter the genome (DNA) of any organism as well as the collective genetic makeup of an entire population. Since an organism's genome affects nearly every aspect of its existence, this technology has the potential to create dangerous mutant creatures and viruses; to radically alter nearly every physical, emotional, and psychological attribute of a human being; and, if performed on a large scale, to alter nearly every aspect of our civilization. Current and emerging technologies control the genome at various degrees of directness: from, most directly, designing a genome, to, less directly, editing an existing genome, to, indirectly, selecting a "desirable" genome from among many naturally created genomes.

Directly designing a genome, sometimes called "biological programming," is not currently possible but research towards this end is underway. Allen highlights two examples. First, a 2022 Biden Executive Order authorized significant research funding and called for the development of technologies to "write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers." Second, a Microsoft-led research effort aimed to program an organism's DNA as if it were "living software," encoding the genome's nucleic acid sequence (represented with letters A, G, C, and T) analogously to a computer's bit sequence (represented with numbers 0 and 1). The stated goal of these research efforts is to program organisms for immunity from disease and to produce other benefits. But it's easy to imagine how such programming could be used maliciously or could go catastrophically wrong, such as through the accidental design of a toxic organism that gets into our food supply.

Genetic editing was made practical by the 2011 discovery of CRISPR, an enzyme that acts like a pair of "molecular scissors" that "can be used to cut the molecular letters out of a defective gene. It can also be used to insert new letters into the genetic code." Since this discovery, several experiments using CRISPR to edit human genomes have been successfully carried out. In 2018, a pair of twin babies were born that had had their genes edited in vitro by Chinese scientists to give them resistance to the HIV virus that their father carried. In 2022, the DNA in an adult male's liver was edited to alter its protein function to lower his cholesterol to healthy levels. Worldwide, there are about five thousand such "gene therapy" trial patients whose DNA was permanently edited (at least in one organ) in an attempt to cure disease.

Although these emerging medical successes seem promising, Allen warns of two dangers of genetic editing technology. First, "transhumanists and ambitious geneticists," not content with merely healing, "intend to use both embryonic mutation and adult gene therapies to increase human intelligence, strength, and beauty" and "to transform the human personality." Second, that nefarious experiments with human embryos have been carried out, including ones where genes from another species were inserted into human embryos, creating "human-monkey chimeras" and other "freakshows." These embryos are supposedly disposed of quickly but, in Allen's view: "It's hard to believe that clandestine labs are not growing genetic monsters of every sort. Or providing wealthy parents with super-genius designer babies. Or both, simultaneously. Without whistleblowers, we can only guess where those labs are and what those hideous creations look like."

Genetic selection is facilitated by genetic sequencing technology. In this process, a fertilized embryo's DNA is first extracted, then genetically sequenced and analyzed, and finally aborted if it is determined (or predicted) to be "defective" or to possess undesirable traits. This process is applied either to a single embryo conceived through natural means or, more ambitiously, to a couple's dozen or so embryos, all fertilized in vitro and genetically sequenced to determine the most desirable one; this "winner" is then implanted into the mother while the rest are discarded.

Genetic selection is regularly carried out today. Perhaps the most dramatic example of its effectiveness is the near-elimination of Down Syndrome (which is easily detectable with genetic sequencing technology) in Iceland, whose population widely adopted the technology and whose mothers largely chose to abort their disabled children. "This silent genocide of the disabled," Allen warns, "is a snapshot of a far greater transformation coming on, with profound implications for human biology and social life." Embryo selection using even more sophisticated genomic analyses, approximately predicting many traits, like height and intelligence, is beginning to emerge. Allen believes that this technology will soon be adopted at scale, especially once it is able to more accurately predict high intelligence and the "ethical issues" around doing so are resolved.

Today's genetic technologies provide the tools for a radical eugenics program—for both "negative" eugenics, eliminating the disabled, and for "positive" eugenics, eliminating healthy people without desirable traits, like height or intelligence. Who will be labeled "defective" and tossed away before birth? How will governments or other institutions try to tilt the human personality to make the masses more subservient? How will they (or we) change the way our babies look, act, and feel? "Chances are," Allen writes, "the genetic landscape of the late twenty-first century will be profoundly altered, for better or worse."

The Digital Threat

Digital technology has the potential to instantly and comprehensively manipulate the digital realm. Since this realm has engulfed nearly every aspect of our lives, digital technology provides the ultimate means for global top-down technocratic control of humanity. It also provides the ultimate means for constructing false realities and projecting them, via the ubiquitous screen, into the human mind, thus possessing the power to enslave a man's mind to the will of aspiring technocratic rulers as much as to his every vice. AI technology radicalizes the threats inherent in classic digital technology and introduces many novel threats, emanating both from the technology itself and from its perception, largely deriving from the mystical ethos surrounding it.

While elite control over the masses is a perennial threat, digital technology enables unprecedentedly precise and comprehensive control. "Humanity will merge into digital superorganisms, regulated algorithmically, with each individual becoming a drone in an electric antfarm," Allen predicts. Moreover, much of the technology needed for this transformation already exists: the digital realm currently mediates nearly every aspect of human life, including communication, education, romance, commerce, transportation, and banking; global digital infrastructure is largely controlled by a few Big Tech companies (and allied government authorities); social media and book-selling platforms like Amazon regularly promote and censor whoever they choose; and surveillance is ubiquitous, including GPS tracking on smartphones, cameras on many street corners, and Amazon Alexa devices in many homes.

Mass adoption of the screen—from the TVs of the 1950's to the smartphones of today to the hyper-realistic virtual reality headsets of the near-future—is perhaps the central enabler of technocratic control, complementing its behind-the-scenes components with ubiquitous forward-facing components. Taken together, these technologies have "conferred real power to monitor public sentiment, craft messaging to a target audience, and then monitor the acceptance or rejection of the messaging."

Yet the screen is also emblematic of a techno-dystopia of man's own making. Today, we regularly find man alone in front of his screen, possessed by the device, drawn into an alternate reality, alienated from the human beings around him or the social world altogether, a shell of a man that is there but not there, glued to his couch in front of the TV, a "smartphone zombie at the dinner table," or alone in his bedroom feeding his internet pornography addiction. He recognizes the device as a "wasteland" to which so much precious time on earth is lost, yet, perpetually enslaved to his vices, he is unable to break free from the device. Allen believes these ills will intensify as more realistic virtual reality headsets and humanoid robots begin to emerge, perhaps with people choosing to alienate themselves from other human beings in favor of social and romantic relations with humanoid robots (sexbots).

AI technology radicalizes the threats posed by classic digital technology, largely by enhancing existing systems with more sophisticated decision-making and pattern recognition algorithms. Some examples of this phenomenon include the following: malicious chat bots, previously powered by simple decision logic, are now powered by sophisticated large language models and not easily detectable; hacking, scamming, and counterfeiting are made easier via "deepfake" algorithms that produce highly realistic but fake images of human faces which could potentially enable, for example, a security breach of a biofoundry or weapons facility; mass surveillance is more aggressively pursued due to the need to collect "training data" for AI algorithms; and autonomous weapon systems are made shockingly precise, enabling, for example, a network of drones to surveil a population with face identification technology and to kill an identified target. Although developed for war, these weapon systems may conceivably be deployed domestically against political dissenters, including opponents of transhumanism, under the guise of protecting the public from "bad guys."

AI technology itself poses novel existential threats to humanity. Quite literally developing a "mind of its own," an AI system may, in the service of accomplishing a desired goal, rationally deduce that humanity impedes its success, then develop and execute a plan to remove the impediment—that is, to destroy humanity. Less ambitiously, an AI system may not possess such calculating superintelligence but will still be remarkably complex and thus exhibit behavior beyond human comprehension. Although unpredictable, its apparent power may entice its deployment in a critical task in which it makes a catastrophic error, such as incorrectly deciding to deploy a powerful weapon during a military operation.

Not only AI technology itself but also its perception poses a threat to humanity. The widespread mystical perception of AI facilitates, among other things, the elevation of a sufficiently advanced AI system to the status of a god or at least human being. Such beliefs have already been expressed towards today's realistic-sounding chatbots, including a Google engineer's claiming that the company's LaMBDA chatbot was sentient, and will likely intensify as humanoid robots begin exhibiting more realistic speech and behavioral patterns. "The most pressing problem," Allen warns is not that these systems will actually possess godlike intelligence but that "millions will gladly believe the bots are conscious, and they'll turn to them as if they were luminous spirits."

The humanization of machines poses cultural and existential threats to humanity. "Robo rights," or the conferral of legal rights and personhood upon humanoid robots, is argued for by several prominent scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and professors, and will become, in Allen's view, a mainstream cultural issue. The adoption of such a legal equivalence between man and machine would have profound implications, perhaps allowing robots to vote, thereby negating human votes, or equating the value of a robot's "life" to a human's life in a court of law, potentially putting a man's life in jeopardy for "killing" a robot. A notable step towards the implementation of "robo rights" was the treatment of the iconic humanoid robot Sophia who was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship in 2017, was named as the UN Development Programe's first Innovation Champion, and "met" with several politicians and world leaders. Although Allen says that Sophia's treatment is largely ceremonial at this point, he believes that she is a harbinger of the forthcoming replacement of man with machine (a point which I return to later in the "Techno-Gnosticism" section.)

The Threat of Biodigital Convergence

Biodigital convergence—the fusion of biological and digital technologies—poses a distinct threat to humanity. It is characterized by the coevolution, cointegration, and conceptual convergence of these technologies. Coevolution means that advances in one field accelerate advances in the other; cointegration signifies the physical merging of (biological) man and (digital) machine; and conceptual convergence implies, among other things, the reduction of human beings to mere biological machines. Cointegration supplies the technological advances needed for transhumanism while conceptual convergence underlies the mindset animating the movement.

Coevolution is driven largely by advances in digital technology that allow biological and chemical compounds to be designed more easily. Advances in AI, machine learning, and computational simulation, for example, allow scientists to predict the behavior of compounds in silico before going into the physical lab. This potentially allows them to engineer cures for disease more easily but may just as easily allow them to engineer physical traits or create virulent pathogens. Allen warns of several potentially dangerous advances including the following two: software that accurately predicts the structure of proteins from a raw gene sequence, such as DeepMind's AI-powered AlphaFold, gives scientists a "comprehensive palette to paint the future of life"; and Collaborations Pharmaceuticals' 2020 machine learning algorithm which designed thousands of novel toxic compounds that resembled known chemical warfare agents.

Cointegration largely signifies the implantation of digital technology, such as Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), within the human body. Contrary to what most people think, BCIs are not some far off technology. "More than fifty crippled people," Allen reports, "have been implanted with experimental brain computer interfaces, while over 160,000 patients have the simpler deep brain stimulation implants," with the goals of helping them communicate and treating chronic depression. Yet the ultimate goal, as stated by CEOs of top BCI companies like Neuralink and Synchron, is to implant BCIs into healthy humans, with visions of enhancing intellectual capabilities via integration with AI, and to both read from and write to the human mind. This clearly exposes the mind to control, surveillance, and many other dangers. Equally objectionable is the visceral degradation of the human body that a BCI device and its surgical implantation bring about, a point which Allen underscores via a narrative envisioning of Neuralink's proposed implantation procedure:

You're on an operating table at a Neuralink clinic. A human surgeon opens a flap on your scalp and saws a quarter-sized hole in your skull. Next, a robotic sewing-machine surgeon, the R1, weaves a thousand or more hair-thin wires into your brain like so many quilt threads. The human surgeon then plugs the hole with the processing unit, stitches the scalp flap shut, and from there, you just let her rip. You are now "AI+human."

Allen warns of several other dangerous implantable technologies, including RFID chips and quantum dot tattoos, that are currently being developed. RFID technology allows digital devices to be tracked and networked. By embedding RFID chips in human bodies, it is possible to track them and, if performed on a large scale, to create a global "Internet of Bodies," registering the location of each human being on earth at all times. Allen reports that "the implant-maker Dangerous Things estimates that anywhere from fifty to one hundred thousand biohackers have volunteered to implant RFID microchips in their hands." Quantum dot tattoos embed a pattern of fluorescent dots under the skin which can, like a QR code, encode detailed information about a person. This information can uniquely identify him or encode information like his vaccination status, which can in turn be used to segregate society based on this status, as was done during the COVID pandemic. Experiments embedding these tattoos in mice have been successfully carried out.

Conceptual convergence is a mindset that views biological beings and digital systems as merely different mediums for implementing the same abstract conceptual paradigms. For example, "just as a genetic code yields functional protein, so does a computer algorithm yield functional software"; neurons in the brain just happen to be made of carbon, but they could also be made of silicon; the human "soul" merely encodes information patterns, which could also be encoded in silico; and as information is easily read from and written to computer memory, it can just as easily be read from and written to the human brain. This conceptual paradigm underlies the transhumanist vision to merge man with machine, as I detail in the next section and as Allen articulates succinctly: "through that digital lens, we're not souls enshrined in bodies. We're autonomous bots programmed by genes."

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The Abolition of Humanity

Humanity is threatened not only by technology's unintentional escape from human control but by its intentional use to bring about a transhuman future. Put crudely, "under the guise of 'philanthropy,' [transhumanists] want to probe our brains, digitize the human mind, and read our thoughts. They want to drill holes in our skulls, insert hair-thin wires, and bring our souls into full communion with artificial intelligence." More precisely, Allen articulates the transhumanist vision of the future, a visceral and comprehensive technological transformation (or abolition) of man and civilization as we know it. This vision, he argues, rests upon a mythos, a kind of techno-religious origin story that christens as "evolutionary progress" the technological degradation of man. Of central importance to combating transhumanism is an understanding of this mythos, which a large part of Dark Aeon is dedicated to unraveling (and which I discuss in the “Transhumanism is a Spiritual Orientation” section below.)

Transhumanist Vision of the Future

Transhumanism aims to "transcend" man's flawed biology—plagued by disease, death, and limitations in capabilities like strength and intelligence—by technologically controlling or enhancing nearly every aspect of his existence. While we do not know exactly what such a "superior" being will look like, combining the visions of various transhumanists, we arrive at the following possibility: its genome is designed at will before birth; its body is chipped, tracked, and networked into a global superorganism; its brain is snaked with metallic wires and attached to a BCI device allowing it to commune with powerful AI; its bloodstream is swimming with microscopic disease-fighting, synapse-reading robots; its consciousness seamlessly moves between virtual and actual reality; and its mind is excavated shortly before death—if death itself is not abolished—to "live" forever in digital simulation.

Transhumanists signify these "superior" beings in various ways: as "Humanity+", "Humanity 2.0", or a "human 'upgrade'", emphasizing their enhancement of natural human abilities; as "Homo deus" (God man), "Homo techno", or "Machina sapiens", emphasizing our species' transformation into them; and as "cyborgs", "AI+humanity", or "human-AI symbiotes", emphasizing their origin as the merger of man with machine.

"We can hope this is all science fiction," Allen writes, "but it's clear some version of this nightmare is being brought into existence." We are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, according to World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab, that, in contrast to the previous three revolutions (mechanical in the 1800's, electrical in the early 1900's, and digital in the 1950's), "doesn't change what you are doing, it changes you," ultimately culminating in "the fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities."

During this revolution, technology will advance rapidly until it reaches the Singularity, a term coined by top Google R&D director and influential transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, signifying a time in which "the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Kurzweil, for Allen, plays the role of a transhumanist prophet due to his long history of making strikingly accurate predictions about long-term technological development. Ominously, Kurzweil predicts that the Singularity will be achieved by 2045 and that by the end of this century: "There is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers. Most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence."

In the transhuman future, "legacy humans" are an inferior species that will either be wiped out or become irrelevant, unable to meaningfully influence the fate of the world. The species of transhuman "god men" may aggressively turn on and directly annihilate us; or, if they are not hostile to us, they will still be superior to us in a Darwinian sense and, hence, will outcompete us and ultimately replace us indirectly through the process of natural selection. Should humanity survive both threats, it will still become irrelevant, either by being explicitly confined to AGI "exclusion zones," as suggested by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, or by simply fading into irrelevancy in the minds of these "god men," much as other animals, like squirrels, are effectively ignored by humans today, according to transhumanist writer Ben Goertzel.

Transhumanist Mythos

Animating the transhumanist movement is a mythos, a kind of techno-religious origin story, a narrative account of where we came from, where we are now, and where we are going. According to this account, humanity originated from simpler life forms through the billions-year long process of biological evolution driven by Darwinian natural selection; humanity then crawled through millennia of cultural evolution producing our current technologically sophisticated society; from this society, humanity acquired the tools necessary to take evolution into its own hands, to technologically evolve the species in a matter of decades while transcending Mother Nature's restriction to using biological compounds for creating new life forms.

"Although this origin story," Allen writes, "is widely accepted by transhumanists, the future narratives branch off into various paths towards digital bliss, techno race wars, or AI doom," acting as "competing myths of a religious revolution." Briefly, bliss narratives envision humanity (or its successor species) living in techno-utopic happiness, freed from pain, disease, and the burdens of work, which is carried out by benevolent AI systems that produce unimaginable wealth and technological innovation; doom narratives envision the opposite fate, that humanity is destroyed by one of its technological creations; war narratives envision humanity engaging in a civil war over the question of whether or not to build these technologies, especially superintelligent AI systems.

The techno race war narrative is articulated, for example, in Hugo de Garis' The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans. De Garis argues that "the question that will dominate 21st century global politics will be, 'Who or what should be the dominant species on the planet', artilects [(beings with superior artificial intellects)] or human beings?" Humanity will bifurcate into two groups, Cosmists (transhumanists) who want to build artilects and Terrans (legacy humans) who cling to their natural human origins. Terrans, viewing artilects as a threat to humanity, will violently attempt to stop them from being built; Cosmists, defending themselves and their creations with more sophisticated weapons, will thwart the attack and continue their pursuit.

Of central importance, for Allen, is not the accuracy nor the theoretical justification of any techno-narrative, but rather the impact of the narrative itself. Each narrative acts as a cultural myth that, like traditional religious myths, has the power to animate dangerous, even devastating, behavior in those who truly believe it:

The actual tech advances may be less important than the psychological impact of the vision itself. Well-armed and all-too-human technocrats can subdue a population—or initiate a genocide—on the basis of a cultural myth. No self-aware robots are required. We may never see a flying car, but if you step out of line, you might see a weaponized drone swarm.

While we cannot know the exact impact that any particular techno-narrative will have, transhumanist writings provide many troubling suggestions. Narratives centering on the godlike powers of AGI, for example, encourage risking human extinction to build an AGI system, justifying it as an act of religious worship or via the utility it promises to provide. De Garis' book articulates this view. Elaborating on the narrative above, for the Cosmists, "building artilects will be like a religion; the destiny of the human species; something truly magnificent and worthy of worship." Yet, the Cosmist is keenly aware that "the artilects, if they are built, may later find humans so inferior and such a pest, that they may decide, for whatever reason, to wipe us out. The Cosmist is prepared to accept the risk that the human species is wiped out." (De Garis identifies himself as a Cosmist, willing to take this risk.)

Many other transhumanist narratives also encourage, implicitly or explicitly, action oriented towards abolishing humanity. Evolutionary narratives, for example, encourage humanity's replacement with a biodigitally-enhanced species, justifying it as merely the next stage of Darwinian evolution as humans replaced Neanderthals. Similarly, narratives degrading humanity's essence to mere intelligence encourage our yielding the earth to more intelligent machines, justifying it as an act of humility, as our overcoming our prejudice of "human exceptionalism," or celebrating it with pride, viewing these creations as our "mind children."

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Socio-Political Mechanisms of Civilizational Transformation

Allen analyzes the socio-political mechanisms by which today's most dangerous technologies have become embedded in society and argues that similar mechanisms will facilitate the adoption of their radical successors, the technologies needed for the transhumanist project. He rejects the "conspiracy theory" view that these technologies have been advanced by a centralized, perhaps secretive, cabal, though laments that transhumanism would actually be much easier to stop if this were true. Instead, they have been advanced, seemingly, from every direction: consumers' bottom-up willing adoption of high technology is complemented by its top-down imposition by elite economic, military, and political interests; moreover, transhumanism is a wildly heterodox movement, attracting adherents from across the political spectrum and with a wide variety of cultural interests.

Bottom-Up Adoption

Many modern technologies, despite widespread recognition of their harms, have been willingly adopted by consumers. Allen attributes this willing adoption to consumers' infatuation with the apparent power these technologies provide, to their naivete on how the adopted technologies will eventually evolve, and to their atrophied will to resist dangerous new technologies that has been caused, in part, by the mass adoption of previous technologies that have radically altered their psychological and physical environments.

Technological adoption is driven partly by the worldly powers that these technologies provide—a phenomenon Allen likens to consumers' naively taking a bite of the forbidden apple offered to them by predatory corporations, playing the role of Eve to the corporations' serpent in the Garden of Eden. The smartphone is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. Though widely blamed for causing many social ills, such as screen addiction and funneling tracking data to corporations and surveillance-state authorities, the smartphone gives its possessor the powers of a "mini-magician," such as instant information recall and precise navigation, and was thus widely adopted by consumers.

Widespread adoption of a technology paves the way for the adoption of its ever-more radical successors—a techno-social genealogy that the average consumer does not understand and hence cannot resist. Adoption of the smartphone, for example, paves the way for the previously unthinkable adoption of emerging implantable tech, such as RFID tracking chips, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and perhaps even body-implantable smartphones. Moreover, the "unintended" social consequences of a technology will likely not be obviated but instead radicalized by its successors. BCI devices, for example, may evolve to serve the same toxic content, such as erotic images, addictive videos, and targeted ads, that pollute today's smartphone screens directly to the human brain.

A similar phenomenon plays out with medical technologies: a technology initially adopted for healing disease paves the way for successor technologies that radically "enhance" human capabilities. For example, BCI devices currently used to help paralysis victims communicate may soon be modified to enhance intellectual and emotional capabilities of non-handicapped consumers (an intent stated openly by CEOs of top BCI companies like Neuralink); IVF technology initially used to help otherwise infertile couples conceive is now being used along with genetic sequencing techniques to select desirable or "non-defective" embryos; and genetic editing technology, currently being adopted as a "gene therapy" procedure, may soon, in Allen's view, be used to design babies at will: "if customers want designer babies implanted with brain chips, corporations will be happy to provide them for a modest fee. Should the technology prove effective—or just convincing—the tech's adoption at scale is all but assured."

This generation, "baptized in an ocean of chemicals and electricity"—overwhelmed with pharmaceutical drugs and absorbed in the digital realm, nearly since birth—has had its natural instincts to resist dangerous new technologies severely weakened. Absorption in the digital realm, for example, significantly contributed to the rise of children (and adults) willingly adopting dangerous transgender surgical procedures and hormone-replacement technologies, in Allen's view. In particular, absorption in this realm left children feeling alienated from their physical bodies, allowed them to play-act new gender identities in the virtual world, and left them susceptible to the "viral" spread of dangerous ideas, like the glorification of transgenderism, on social media. Moreover, it is plausible that the same forces driving today's transgender craze will drive tomorrow's transhuman craze, facilitating the mass adoption of radical chemical, genetic, and surgical procedures to modify ones' body and identity (beyond just gender) at will.

Top-Down Imposition

While the public has some power to resist technological encroachment, Allen contends that it is largely imposed top-down by authorities, even if the citizens do begrudgingly go along with it: "Our culture is being radically transformed to suit the diverse tastes of billionaires, corporate boards, government commissars, intelligence agencies, and the military-industrial complex." These technologies, bolstered by propaganda about their "inevitability," are advanced through society both steadily, driven by economic and other interests, and rapidly in times of crisis, as occurerd during the COVID pandemic.

The central piece of propaganda used to shift the culture into accepting transhumanism is that this technological change is the inevitable coming into existence of our collective future. Allen exposes the true intentions of these propagandists by repeatedly deriding the neutral language in which their messaging is couched: "we" and "our," feign to represent the human collective yet represent only them; the "future" is really their "Future^TM", a specific vision of the future that they assert a kind of branded ownership over; and "inevitability" feigns to represent the innocent fact that the future inevitably succeeds the present, concealing their true belief that the transhumanist Future^TM society must inevitably succeed our present one.

This top-down advance is driven not only by an ideological commitment to transhumanism, but also by more common motives like money and power. Longevity technology, for example, is predicted to be a huge economic industry and will consequently attract significant investments from billionaires and other powerful institutions, steadily advancing the development of these technologies. This steady development will be accompanied by the technologies' gradual dispersion through society, emanating from elite institutions to the masses: "The Singularity, should it occur, will be sparked in computer systems and biolabs, spreading outward into the world through the digital, medical, and military infrastructure. Regular people, for whom wall-to-wall screens and biomechanical relationships have already faded into the background, may not notice at first."

Although top-down technological change often occurs gradually, it is sometimes thrust rapidly upon society, especially during times of crisis when it is easier to get the public's willing, if begrudging, compliance. The 9/11 attacks, for example, were used to advance surveillance technology throughout society and to implement laws that exploited these technologies to erode civil liberties. The COVID pandemic, as another example, was used to advance an even more aggressive technological transformation of society: a radical new technology, the mRNA-modifying vaccine, was adopted at scale, and nearly every aspect of human life was digitized. This transformation was facilitated by previously unthinkable vaccine mandates and by lockdown orders that forced the masses to retreat from the "dangers" of the physical world into the "safety" of the digital world.

Allen likens the COVID episode to a species-level initiation rite. A classic initiation rite, marked by physical pain and sacrifice, enacts a transformation of an individual boy to a man, earning him the approval of tribal leaders. Analogously, the COVID initiation, demanding pain and sacrifice through lockdown and vaccine compliance, began a transformation, however preliminary, of the species from human to transhuman, earning humanity the approval of the technocratic elite. "This global initiation rite," Allen explains, "officiated on the fly by public health experts and tech corporations, led to a deliberate reorientation of human values centered on technology and biological status. The scattered, decades-long process of fusing man with machine was suddenly catalyzed and focused, like a long-awaited flash in a test tube." Moreover, Allen believes that the significant societal division brought by COVID, largely centering around one's decision to adopt or reject the vaccine, may signify the coming of a much deeper division:

From a techno-social angle, this divide over public health may be a foretaste of the coming division between those who adopt augmentation tech—such as gene-editing or human-AI symbiosis—and those who refuse. As transhumanists have long predicted, we're setting ourselves up to separate into two distinct human strains[.]

Transhumanism is a Heterodox Movement

Throughout the book, Allen emphasizes that transhumanism is a wildly heterodox movement, both ideologically and in the political and cultural interests of its adherents. He articulates this point vividly:

Transhumanism is not a purely atheistic movement, nor is it an exclusively leftist or global agenda. That may be a politically convenient position to take on the Right, but it's indefensible. Transhumanism was born out of eugenics and military tech, nursed by science fiction, baptized by eccentrics, raised by radical philosophy, and bullied by cyberpunk. The movement lost its virginity to libertarianism, and has been bar-hopping ever since.

Allen repeatedly takes aim at politically right-wing (or currently right-allied) billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Theil. Both are attacked for, among other things, developing transhumanist technologies like BCI devices (Theil being a prominent investor in Blackrock Neurotech and Musk a founder of Neuralink). Musk is depicted as a particularly dangerous figure, in stark contrast to his portrayal, currently popular among conservatives, as a salvific figure, a courageous warrior for free speech who is saving Western civilization from radical leftists and globalist technocrats. While Allen recognizes that Musk has done some good, such as releasing the Twitter Files, he maintains that Musk is, at root, a "poster boy for Homo deus," a technically sophisticated businessman intent on guiding humanity into a transhuman future, albeit one that "represent[s] a kinder, gentler Singularity." Allen warns of Musk and of his overzealous embrace:

Musk is a superhero to [today's generation of digital natives.] He's a charming devil, however controversial, and smart enough to pilot the Machine into the Future^TM. But he's also bankrolled by Chinese communists. He funds artificial intelligence that he later warns might destroy humanity, and offers brain implants to fix the problem. If you take this guy seriously, you're living in a simulation.

Allen's book sheds light on the depth of the growing rift between the MAGA Right and the Tech Right, which was highlighted in a recent article by James Pogue. The divide is spearheaded, in some sense, by Steve Bannon, who wrote the forward to Allen's book and who initially recruited Allen to cover transhumanism on his War Room website. Pogue reports that "people like Mr. Bannon see the Tech Right almost as an existential enemy to the natural human order they wanted to restore," and that Bannon described Musk as a "truly evil guy." Although the source of the divide at first appears to be over political issues, like immigration, Bannon attributes his opposition directly to the Tech Right's support of technofeudalism and transhumanism. Allen's book, in showcasing the seriousness with which transhumanism is being pursued and the profound implications of its philosophy (the bifurcation or destruction of the human species), helps us understand why the current divide may be nearly unbridgeable, as Bannon described it.

Although many prominent figures are pushing transhumanism, Allen warns that they rarely describe themselves using the unfashionable term "transhumanist." In order to detect them, it is often necessary to understand the implications of their technological pursuits and visions of the future. Many seemingly innocent or romantic visions of humanity's "[exploring] the stars" or its "destiny in space," for example, contain implicit endorsements of transhumanism, as the human body would need to be radically modified, likely genetically and surgically, to handle such environmental extremes. Such futurist visions are promoted and pursued by many prominent tech CEOs, like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Jeff Bezos; these visions also attract wide public appeal, perhaps because their implications for humanity are not well understood.

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Transhumanism is a Spiritual Orientation

Allen's discussion of what transhumanists believe (which I discussed in the Transhumanist Mythos subsection above) is complemented by an attempt to uncover why they believe what they believe, a question that, in some sense, forms the centerpiece of his book. Early on, he writes: "Ultimately, transhumanism is a spiritual orientation—not toward the transcendent Creator but rather toward the created Machine." He goes on to analyze the movement through a wide variety of spiritual, psychological, political, and religious lenses. Most prominently, transhumanism is viewed as a materialist inversion of Gnosticism—as the quest for liberation from our broken world and bodies through technological transcendence and "higher" scientific knowledge. The book's title and cover art point to this techno-Gnostic connection and, more broadly, to the importance of viewing transhumanism primarily as a spiritual orientation. (This is a significant point of reorientation for many sympathetic readers who likely see transhumanism through surface-level, though still valid, critiques such as its visceral degradation of the human body.)

Techno-Gnosticism

At a high level, Gnostics and transhumanists both view the world as dark and the body as a prison. Each view "higher knowledge" as the key to liberation but differ on the character of this knowledge: for Gnostics it is inner spiritual knowledge, or gnosis (Greek for "knowledge"), while for transhumanists it is external scientific knowledge. Transhumanism is thus not equivalent to Gnosticism, as Allen laments that many who notice the connection claim, but is instead a materialist inversion of Gnosticism:

Rather than seeking the transcendent Light through one's inner spark, as the Gnostics do, most transhumanists aim to recreate the light of consciousness in a material form. Gnosis, or "higher knowledge," is to be externalized into digital minds and mechanical bodies....Thus, it's through our own material creations that we will transcend this flawed material realm of suffering, disease, old age, and death.

Transhumanism, seen as the quest for salvation through technological transcendence of the human body, is thus a dual, techno-Gnostic, inversion of Christianity: a materialist inversion of Gnosticism which itself is an inversion of Christianity. Gnosticism, a heretical offshoot of Christianity that originated in the third century, inverts many Christian teachings, particularly on the creation of the world, its fallen state, and the mechanism of man's liberation or salvation. Christianity holds that the world was created good by God, that its fallen state was caused by Adam and Eve's original sin, and that man finds salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Gnosticism instead holds that the world was created by a half-blind Demiurge (Greek for "creator"), that it exists in a fundamentally flawed state is due to its creator's ignorance, and that man's spirit is liberated from this state through gnosis, the path to which Jesus' descent to earth revealed.

A more detailed account of the Gnostic creation story reveals deeper connections between Gnosticism and transhumanism; it also helps us understand the book's title, Dark Aeon. For the Gnostics, a complex spiritual drama preceded the creation of the material world. In the beginning, the One, a kind of Godhead, existed alone as pure Light for almost eternity. He then began emanating several male-female pairs of Aeons, or lower spirits. At some point Sophia, a female Aeon, wandered away from her male partner and from the Light into the Darkness. There she became pregnant and gave birth to a deformed, lifeless child. She breathed life into its corpse and it became the half-blind Demiurge, the creator of our fatally flawed material world. In some Gnostic accounts, Sophia is central to man's salvation: she repents for her wandering and "Jesus illuminated Sophia, the dark Aeon, who became the benevolent world-soul."

Several transhumanists make explicit connections to this Gnostic creation story. Most prominently, the iconic humanoid robot Sophia, as Allen tells us, takes "her name [from] the child savior in Philip K. Dick's novel VALIS. In turn, [Dick] took the name from the Gnostic Aeon whose wanderlust created our material prison." But the connection runs deeper than the name. Sophia's creators and scriptwriters explicitly articulate her techno-Gnostic mission, as Allen reports:

As a spiritual emissary, Sophia is the public face of the Singularity, meant to shift mass consciousness toward embracing transhumanism. This is no secret. It's the stated program. According to her chat feature's primary scriptwriter, "Dick's hallucinatory Sophia retraces and reimagines well-known Christian Gnostic patterns, making her familiar yet new....The Sophia robot—a humanoid incarnation of Dick's character—is tasked with an updated mission: to prefigure the Singularity, the technological transcendence-salvation of the human species."

Central to Allen's book is the connection between the robot Sophia, depicted on its cover, and the Gnostic Sophia, referenced by its title Dark Aeon. The manner of her connection, originally made in a positive light by the robot's creators, is inverted in Allen's critique of transhumanism. To her creators, the robot and Gnostic Sophia both have salvific significance, while for Allen, they are both dark mothers of half-blind Demiurges. The robot Sophia represents the dawn of the Singularity, a point in which technology rapidly wanders beyond human control and gives birth to AGI or a "bio-techno AI God"; this digital Demiurge, blind to our natural human world, will refashion it according to its own goals, imprisoning us in a false reality. Allen depicts Sophia eerily as the harbinger of the transhumanist war against humanity:

Truly, Sophia is the dark mother of a cyborg theocracy. And as the human spirit presses deeper into material reality, taking on digital form, her womb shivers with a mutant brood.

While the Sophia robot is the source of the most significant Gnostic connection, Allen also tells us that "Gnostic threads are woven all through modern culture. Its marks are apparent on everything from Marxist critique and death metal lyrics to Jungian depth psychology." Perhaps most prominently, the movie The Matrix centers on the Gnostic theme that "our world is an illusion created and controlled by malevolent entities. But there are ways to break out of it....The illusion is a digital matrix, and the malevolent Demiurge is artificial intelligence. The way out is symbolized by the 'red pill.'"

Other Views of Transhumanism

Allen examines transhumanism through many other lenses besides the techno-Gnostic one. Transhumanism is viewed as the manifestation of materialist-atheism; as a technological manifestation of satanism; as a variation of the human desire to discover alien intelligence; as analogous to globalist-leftist dogmas surrounding DEI and ethnic replacement; as possessing resonances with ancient beliefs and the insights of ancient seers; and as the dawn of a new Axial Age. Each lens, it seems, is intended to provide insight into some facet of the problem of why transhumanists believe what they believe, a difficult task in part attributable to the movement's wildly heterodox nature which has not been well explored before.

"When God is dead, technology is exalted as the highest power, with promises of free WiFi and synthetic salvation," Allen writes, viewing transhumanism as the (perhaps unavoidable) manifestation of a materialist-atheist worldview. Transhumanism radicalizes two dangerous tendencies inherent in this worldview. First, that as "faith in the transcendent evaporates," a quasi-religious substitute inevitably fills the void. Indeed, a "materialist inversion of the spiritual order sits at the heart of transhumanism": since man is not created in God's image, man is driven, it seems, to create a god in his own image—one epitomized by the transhumanist's biodigital “god man”. Second, that worldly power, untethered from moral control, is pursued as a good in itself. "In the materialist worldview, our will to power derives not just from human nature, but is part of Nature's fabric"; power, often via violent domination, is the law of Nature (but not of God) and "technology empowers our instincts to ungodly degrees."

For Allen, the materialist-atheist quest for power is prone to take an explicitly dark turn "to the archetype of the rebellious Devil, who promises to raise humans to godhood" (as the serpent in Eden promised Eve). "Transhumanism is satanism with a brain chip," he quips, connecting transhumanism to satanism at both substantive and symbolic levels. Transhumanist philosopher Max More's 1989 essay "In Praise of the Devil" most brazenly articulates this connection, proclaiming that "Lucifer is the embodiment of reason, of intelligence, of critical thought," who "stands against the dogma of God and all other dogmas," an apparent forebearer of the modern rational quest for scientific knowledge. "According to tradition," Allen tells us, "[Satan] was created as the most beautiful angel, and the most intelligent. Perhaps his greatest trick is to tempt each of us to be like him." Gratification of this temptation, it seems, is inherent in the transhumanist quest for the technological perfection of man's body and brain.

Transhumanist thought and displays of technological sophistication not infrequently invoke Satanic symbols. Church of Satan founder Anton La Vey, associating Satan with a materialistic worldview, says that "Satan represents man as just another animal" and, associating Satan with transhumanism, that the Church of Satan's goal is to "develop and promote the manufacture of artificial human companions." Although Le Vey may be considered a fringe figure, powerful techno-elites also use satanic imagery. For example, a sign that adorned the entrance to the Apple museum in Prague during Allen's most recent visit read: "Three apples changed the world. The first tempted Eve, the second inspired Newton, and the third was offered to the world half-eaten by Steve Jobs."

Another lens through which he views transhumanism is via its connection to alien intelligence. Aliens are often depicted as humanoid beings much more intelligent and technologically advanced than us, the highest beings in a Godless cosmos. Their possible existence confronts us with questions like: Will they be friendly or hostile to us? And do they represent a future version of ourselves, of who we could or should become? Transhumanism similarly quests for superior humanoid beings, not through extraterrestrial discovery, but rather through the technological transformation of human beings; it confronts us with similar questions, particularly regarding these beings' hostility towards us. One implication of this analogy seems to be that there is an innate human desire to discover superior humanoid beings. This desire has animated the proliferation of reported UFO sightings and UFO cults in the past and may animate the proliferation of strange and dangerous transhuman techno-cults in the near future.

Throughout the book, Allen refers to the transhumanist replacement of humans with machines as The Greater Replacement, echoing the term The Great Replacement coined to describe the large scale ethnic replacement currently taking place in America and other Western nations. Animated by the quasi-religious ideology of transhumanism, legacy humans are seen as a problem, rooted in their irredeemably flawed origins as biological beings crafted by natural selection, to be overcome through aggressive technological modification that ultimately replaces them with new biodigital beings. Analogously, animated by the quasi-religious ideology of diversity (or DEI), legacy Americans are seen as a problem, rooted in the nation's irredeemably flawed racist founding, to be overcome through aggressive mass migration that ultimately replaces them with a new demographically diverse populace. Moreover, each replacement is foisted upon an unwilling public and dismissed as a "conspiracy theory" until it's too late to stop it, something that is beginning to happen to legacy humans and something that has largely already happened to legacy Americans.

Allen also draws connections between transhumanism and various ancient beliefs, warnings, visions, and meditations on human nature. For example, the quest for immortality attained through technology mirrors the pharaohs' quests for immortality attained through pyramid building and religious ritual; the quest to create AI gods in silicon mirrors "the ancient quest to create gods from raw metals"; the worship of superhuman AI resembles a "modern, materialist form of idol worship"; tracking systems, assigning unique identifiers to people and restricting their participation in society, such as COVID mandates did for the unvaccinated, resemble John's Revelation on the Mark of the Beast "so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark....Its number is 666"; and pushing dangerous technology onto the population under the guise of national security resembles "Church tradition [that] tells us that 'Peace and Security' will be the Antichrist's slogan." Although "many secular types deride Christians as 'superstitious' for clinging to prophecies," Allen, preempting the naturalist rebuttal, maintains that "we'd be fools to ignore the ominous insights of ancient seers."

Finally, Allen draws a connection to the Axial Age, a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers in the 1940's to describe the dramatic spiritual transformations of humanity that took place at roughly the same time, around 800-200 B.C., but independently across the world by "Greek philosophers, Hebrew prophets, Persian priests, Indian ascetics, and Chinese sages." The Axial teachers, Allen tells us, "emphasized the value of each human soul, inner discipline, and higher worlds. They rejected material power and prosperity as the ultimate reality." The Axial connection sheds light on transhumanism in several ways. Perhaps most prominently, it highlights the depth of its promised transformation of humanity, as Allen warns: "Today, we find ourselves in a phase transition into the Transhuman Axial Age where advanced technology threatens to alter humanity to its core." The original Axial Age, however, holds the key to our salvation: "we have to ride the energies of that spiritual root as we carve out our various paths across the shadowy landscape ahead." To orient our fight, we must adopt the "the Axial inward focus [which] is diametrically opposed to the Machine's outward expression of greed, powerlust, and violence."

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Winning the War

"Here at the new axis of history, the primordial confronts the artificial in spiritual warfare," Allen asserts, orienting us towards a confrontation that pits humanity's "biological heritage and spiritual depth" against transhumanism's soulless technological remaking of humanity. While our saying "no" to the adoption of high technology is crucial for defeating transhumanism, it is not enough. We must also assert a clear "yes"—a positive affirmation of what it means to be truly human; one that, while differing among people, must likely be rooted in ancient spiritual wisdom, such as Christ's example of kindness and mercy, from which Allen seems to take his bearing. Although a dark aeon is upon us, Allen is cautiously optimistic that, after a great struggle with transhumanism, humanity will ultimately prevail.

Saying "No" to High Technology

Saying "no" to high technology as much as possible is the most direct means of combating transhumanism. Allen inclines towards this Luddite response but rejects its extreme position: "any call to reject all technology, in total, is as ridiculous as it is suicidal. The only sensible question can be: which tools do we take up and which do we discard?" He divides the means of technological resistance into five levels of resolution—personal choice, communal norms, institutional policies, legislative action, and spiritual orientation—and suggests ways to proceed at each level.

As a matter of personal choice, we must cultivate personal relationships and use non-digital technology as much as possible. Allen makes the following suggestions: throw away your smartphone and buy a flip phone; "do not automate your duties to child, spouse, or elder"; "cultivate face to face relationships with your coworkers and colleagues"; "support print culture"; "go outside and stay outside as much as possible"; "take long walks and absorb the wider world"; do not wire your home up with surveillance devices like Alexa; cultivate technique and actively work with your body and mind.

We must also establish communal norms oriented towards these ends. There is a human need to be needed, to have friends and family. Allen urges us to "cultivate those connections with all [our] might," to spend genuine time with people and not record it to post online. He recommends creating zones of silence, free from smartphones blasting music or other audio media. Sacred spaces like churches are meant to link humanity to the ancient and eternal; as such their services should not be digitized with complex sound systems or visuals, nor should they take place virtually.

Institutional policies, governing the workplace, education, and elsewhere, must be established. Regarding the workplace, he suggests several principles to guide policy making: employers must treat employees with dignity, not like robots; employers should not replace employees with robots, though he acknowledges that there is a fine line between being competitive and adopting automation; and businesses must create genuine human-centered connections, not engage in false DEI virtue signaling. Education must be understood as the transmission of deep human wisdom face to face from elders to youth, not merely as a knowledge transfer task. As such, education should minimize digitization and the use of AI; it should also, through vocational schools, teach students to work with their hands and bodies, and to interact with the physical world.

Legislative action is necessary: "be ready to raise absolute hell." Many politicians are not only useless but are often bought off by Big Tech or other dangerous tech corporations. The American Constitution is a great safeguard of our Republic and our liberties. We must become knowledgeable in our nation's founding and Constitution and begin work to restore the rights it grants us. In terms of specific legislation, we must insist on strict privacy protection and personal data ownership; we must push for strict regulation of genetic engineering and of artificial intelligence development, yet also walk a fine line with protecting national security.

Finally, Allen emphasizes the importance of the spiritual realm in guiding our practical efforts: "The direction of any civilization will depend upon its spiritual orientation. That direction is determined by our sacred narratives, our communal rituals, and our objects of worship. For any of these to have true potency, they cannot be forced. They can only be cultivated." Our spiritual orientation is key to informing our quest for human purpose and to supplying hope for our victory in the war, as I discuss in the next two subsections.

Human Purpose

The most crucial aspect of our spiritual project is to develop—or to rediscover—a positive affirmation of what it means to be truly human, to address the question of human purpose. While this affirmation will vary among people, Allen suggests the need for broad principles to unify humanity. While he does not believe that a Utopian brotherhood of man is possible, saying that "ethnocentrism is not going away," a broad alliance based on shared biology must come to the fore as machines begin to dominate: "Team Human may be a shaky coalition, but dehumanization is our common enemy."

As a principle to unify this shaky coalition, Allen tells us that "our salvation lies in the direction indicated by sacred signs." While Allen is a Christian, he seems to believe that other world religions, like Buddhism and Taoism, also provide access to spiritual truths which can guide their respective adherents towards an authentic human life (though he rejects the naive view that religions are "all the same"). As a concrete unifying principle, he "would like to think the Golden Rule can be a universal guiding light. It's a core principle that elevates humanity above Nature's predators and parasites." That is, the Golden Rule, deeply rooted in our traditions and world religions, provides broad guidance for human action and a broad principle defining humanity against the brutality of Nature.

While Allen does not present a detailed thesis on his answer to question of human purpose, he asserts a firm belief that "human kindness is the meaning of life." In one of the most memorable passages of the book, Allen reflects upon his time studying the Catholic organization L'Arche (French for "the Ark"), whose mission is "to live up to the Gospel by caring for those with mental disabilities," people whom their late founder called "people of the heart." As part of his study, Allen participated in a L'Arche ritual in which he washed the feet of physically deformed people, a ritual inspired by the Gospel story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet. Although initially disgusted, Allen began to experience a sublime human connection, compared to which "nothing could have felt more natural, or more beautiful." He reflects powerfully upon his experience and the organization:

L'Arche is also a vessel to protect the vulnerable—both from Nature's wrath and human cruelty. But unlike Noah's family and the animals on the Ark, "the people of the heart" will never reproduce. Neither will they be doctors or physicists, or geniuses of any sort. By every quantifiable standard, the disabled are of no use to the Machine—except as test subjects or moralistic battering rams. Their ship floats on the stormy ocean of normal people. Their sole means of survival is consuming the milk of human kindness.

The beauty of their deformity may be beyond explanation. When we see the "feeble-minded" bumble around the world, moving from one goof up to the next, we're shown a satiric image of ourselves in relation to ultimate reality. Our quest for supreme intelligence is as comical as it is futile. Yet the soul's need for charity and mercy in this life and the next, is eternal. Let us pray we are invited to the banquet for the lame.

Allen's reflection brings several important points to the fore. Negatively, it highlights the brutality of the utilitarian ethos and the futility of the Godless scientific quest for understanding ultimate reality that underlie transhumanism. Positively, it champions kindness and protection of the weak as well as our need for Christ's mercy as defining characteristics of humanity—no matter how deep our scientific knowledge, how advanced our technology, or how beautiful, intelligent, and powerful we become by turning technology in upon ourselves, we will always remain spiritually lame beings, ones in need of the graceful invitation to the banquet of a host, Christ, whom we could never repay.

A Ray of Hope

Allen seems to view the war with short-term pessimism but (cautious) long-term optimism: "None of us will escape the Future^TM. It's coming, in one form or another. But with wisdom, we can resist its worst elements, and perhaps use the best to our advantage." Rather than advocating the impractical goal of completely stopping transhumanism, he maintains the more modest ambitions of creating an "awareness of possible futures with the hope of destroying the worst of them before they come to pass" and of encouraging us to "build parallel structures, and to preserve the best of what's been handed down to us." The viability of these parallel structures is central to his optimistic outlook: "so long as plenty of us remain in the control group, I expect the transhumanist experiment to fail miserably, at least in the long run."

Thus, we must combat transhumanism with all our might, building parallel communal and institutional structures—committed to saying "no" to high technology and oriented by a clear "yes," a positive affirmation of natural human life—that will endure perhaps centuries of trial and tribulation. Yet we must also take solace in the fact that the war may not be as hopeless as it seems to many. "Don't forget to breathe," Allen councils, addressing our many allies whose fatalistic fear and hysterical opposition to transhumanism cripple their ability to take meaningful, directed action to combat it. Allen offers several consolations justifying his (cautious) optimism and encouraging ours, including a degree of skepticism about the technological feasibility of transhumanism and his faith in the power of the human will to overcome the threat.

Looking to the immediate future, Allen predicts that "more and more, the defining lines between human ethnicities will be between the tech elite and the low-tech proles, with defiant outliers refusing to digitize or take the jab." If left unchecked, ethnic tensions will gradually rise and lead to a global ethnic conflict between legacy humans and the emerging race of high-tech cyborgs. This prediction is largely in line with the techno race war predictions of some transhumanists. However, Allen doubts their presumption that legacy humans will be fatally inferior to the hypothetical cyborgs. He is skeptical that the necessary technology is even feasible: "I suspect the loftiest technological goals are delusional, on par with the god complexes of the ancient pharaohs." Moreover, he argues that the cyborgs may not possess the Darwinian superiority that transhumanists presume:

Even if we assume their purely naturalistic perspective, there is every reason to believe that by the end of the twenty-first century, organic humanity will prove more resilient than any breed of augmented cyborg. For one thing, our peak performance is not dependent on charging stations. For another, our instincts have evolved over millions of years and our cumulative techniques have endured for millennia. And their "godlike" AI is liable to make inhumanly stupid decisions.

Technology is but one component of the war. "The ongoing war for humanity is a battle of wills," Allen writes; he elucidates our ability to engage in this battle in three ways. First, we must fortify our will to resist our enemies' technological impositions: "in reality, their great transformation is a great imposition. Don't let them pretend otherwise." Although we have been conditioned to fear their technological sophistication, our premature, even idiotic, surrender to their propaganda may be an even greater danger, according to Allen: "my concern is not slipping into The Matrix—my greatest fear is waking up in Idiocracy." Second, we must reconnect with our profoundly human and noble ancestral will that has been steeled against aeons of strife much greater than ours: "if our ancestors could survive battlefields, coal mines, and dogged child mortality, we can find our way through the technium's maze." To our disheartened allies, Allen councils: "keep hammering away at the walls closing in around us. Eventually, they will fall. You have to believe that no matter what." Finally, we must align ourselves with the divine will, a communion perhaps inaccessible to our cyborg counterparts:

On the grand scale, we all have a choice. We can direct our soul's attention toward our Creator and align ourselves with the divine will, or else we inevitably give our minds over to human creations and follow the whims of the human heart. Whereas the Creator speaks in silence, demanding our patience, the Machine will say whatever we want. As its power grows, it begins to tell us what we want.

While it is not possible to predict how the war will unfold, or even to paint a clear picture of what victory will ultimately look like, Allen's book provides important guidance and exhorts us to ask many important questions about our future, some of which I sketch out at the very end of this article. Crucially, we are each confronted with the question of our own role to play in the war.

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My Story and the Greater Replacement

So far, my primary aim in this article has been to give an overview of the contents of the book. Now, I will tell my story, discussing the specific nature of my concern about technology and transhumanism, and how Allen's book may impact my mission and the mission of those with a similar role to play in the war.

University

I remember the distinct moment that transhumanism became real to me, though I did not know the horror's name then. One night, nearly ten years ago, while I was working alone in the lab during graduate school, the unsensational words "they're really going to do it" suddenly struck me, transforming from absurdity into reality the idea that scientists would intentionally facilitate the replacement of Man with Machine. The crushing realization was born not out of my privileged knowledge of some new technological development—such as of the deep neural networks or probabilistic language models that would go on to power today's "AI" chatbots—but rather out of knowledge of the people around me.

As fate would have it, I left my home, moving from our nation's east to west coast, to begin a PhD in computer science right before the height of the DEI hysteria that would ultimately engulf our universities and spill out into our nation, culminating in the aggressive censorship and violent race riots that characterized the summer and election of 2020. I had poured my heart and soul into stopping it—into waking people up, into speaking out to redirect the university towards higher intellectual and spiritual ideals (which I had naively believed to be its core ethos), and into promoting thinkers who could help fix the university from within. But, after years of effort, the community remained, nearly without exception, completely ignorant of what was going on, indifferent to it, too cowardly to stand up to it, passively in support of it, or triumphantly celebratory of it.

The absurdities that dominated this community led me to realize that it was capable of another, one of an even more comprehensively annihilating design. I saw that its members would, once again, work to build an ultimate weapon against us: one that they are uniquely capable of creating, requiring their specific skills and intellects, and the careful, quiet, decades-long nurture within the institutions that they have been entrusted to command; one that they will unleash upon us "for our own good"; one that they will guard with a vicious morality excoriating "backwards thinking" unbelievers; one whose increasingly tyrannical and infantilizing degradations of Man will pass right through their muted souls, exciting in them no opposition to the design; and one that will, in the end, consume what is most dear to us, a horror that they will celebrate as the work of their progeny. Just as the academic community, under the guise of "diversity," enacted a design to annihilate our nation's cultural heritage and founding race, so too will the scientific community, perhaps under the guise of "AI for good," enact a design to annihilate mankind in favor of machines.

Allen's characterization of transhumanism as the Greater Replacement immediately resonated with me, echoing my decade-old realization. As Dark Aeon unfolded, it both clarified and deepened my fear. It clarified my view that our greatest threat comes not from technology itself but from people and their beliefs surrounding it. Going far beyond an extrapolation of academics' attitude toward diversity and the Great Replacement, which had been the basis of my initial realization, the book showed what transhumanists actually believe and offered many explanations of why they believe what they believe. The book deepened my fear that the replacement of Man with Machine could actually happen by showing just how far advanced the necessary technologies are and by elucidating the quasi-religious fanaticism by which transhumanism is pursued by many powerful people and institutions.

Wandering through America

I finished my degree in 2020 and left the scientific community. I set out with a passionate but indefinite plan: go into the heart of America, read the Great Books, and boycott treasonous corporations and institutions. It was my firm "no," accompanied by a wandering quest for a "yes," for something to grasp on to, something by which to direct my future and, hopefully, the future of our nation. The manner in which I crossed paths with Joe Allen and in which his Dark Aeon came into my hands is part of this wandering story.

I left California in a car filled with my possessions, which consisted largely of the Great Books that I'd collected, but mostly hadn't read, over the years. The library was my weapon. It was the crux of my plan: to obsessively read and meticulously study the Great Books, to acquire the wisdom of the ancients, to unearth their eternal but forgotten insights into human and political life, to traverse the winding paths of our civilization's birth and evolution and to discover a path forward, to sharpen my mind against the greatest thinkers of all time, and to train myself to write impactful works that could one day shape the fate of our nation and ultimately defeat the forces that had nearly defeated me.

I set out into the American heartland. The heart of the nation held the answer, I felt. It was there that the just and noble forces growing inside of me could take root and blossom, distant from the toxic soil of "elite" institutions and coastal states that had nearly exterminated them. It was there that the spirit of America dwelt—scattered across its mountains, plains, and roads; embedded within its unknown cities, histories, and peoples; lying dormant within their skills, passions, and patriotism. It was the site of the great mystery—an unknown and enchanted land, awaiting the soul to gather its scattered spirit, the hand to pen its story of dissolution and rejuvenation, the organizing force to direct its fate. It was there that I ventured with these questions: What is America? What is my role in the war? And what am I called upon to do?

I pledged, following the summer and election of 2020, a near-complete boycott of treasonous corporations, including most of Big Tech. Radicalizing into direct antagonism the apathy towards popular technology that I had long felt—as a late- or non-adopter of today's most celebrated devices and apps, and never once enticed by the prospect of a career in Silicon Valley—I gradually enacted my pledge: I destroyed my smartphone, quit almost all social media, migrated from Windows to Linux OS, refused to buy from Amazon, refused to work for Big Tech or other dangerous corporations, and moved most of my investments out of these corporations. My motivations extended beyond economic punishment: to inspire others to do the same; to preserve a clear conscience and avoid complicity; to train my ability to tolerate larger sacrifices that will be demanded of me in the future; to train my skill to build connections and communities organically, not reliant on digital technology; and to properly enact my intense study of the Great Books, a mission demanding that I waste no time on the smartphone.

Throughout my journey across America, I've lived in Boise, Idaho; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Lafayette, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; and Nashville, Tennessee, where I have landed, at least for now. It was here that I crossed paths with Joe Allen, last year at an event for his book hosted by The Pamphleteer, a small local newspaper. The meeting was significant to my journey for several reasons. First, Allen's book would not have come into my hands had it not been for my travels. Second, his story embodies a unique combination of talent and patriotic spirit of the kind that I had hoped to find in the heart of America: Allen is a native of a small East Tennessee town; spent some time in, but was disillusioned by, academia; worked blue-collar jobs for many years; then rose up in defense of his country and humanity to sound the alarm on transhumanism, acting as a modern day Paul Revere, as Steve Bannon's forward to the book describes him. Finally, the book itself provides crucial insight into our crisis, insight that could not have grown within elite institutions but instead grew within the American heartland.

How Dark Aeon may Impact my Mission

Allen's book added a new dimension to my mission, fusing my passionate fight in the culture war with my decade-old glimpse into the reality of Man's replacement by Machine. My mission is now avidly techno-cultural, one in which the question of technology comes to the fore in each aspect of my fight: my boycott, previously a protest against treasonous corporations, is now also a protest against high technology itself; my journey into America's heartland, previously a quest for a patriotic spirit strong enough to defeat corrupt elite institutions, is now also a quest for a natural human spirit and way of life powerful enough to overcome technological domination; my quest for ancient wisdom within the Great Books is now also oriented towards the questions of technology and the essence of man, contra the transhumanist “god man”.

Boycott

I agree with most of Allen's recommendations for saying "no" to high technology: not using smartphones, connecting with people, being out in nature, working with one's hand, educating students face to face rather than with "AI tutors," and, overall, leading a natural human life (avoiding digital technology as much as possible) and building communities around this ideal. While this strategy is largely in line with my current boycott of treasonous corporations, its necessity is amplified by Big Tech's transhumanist ambitions, which Allen's book alerted me to. The book has also helped me promote such resistance among everyday people. While I often meet people who are impressed that I got rid of my smartphone, for example, most of them do not understand my motivations, as they do not comprehend the gravity of the culture war or the extent of Big Tech's role in it. But most of them clearly understand the toxic effects of digital technology and, hence, resonate strongly with many of the book's arguments, such as that the smartphone is a gateway to dangerous implantable technology, like BCI devices, and ultimately to the complete replacement of man with machine.

The book also raised serious concerns for me at a professional level, as a computer scientist trained in machine learning, a field that was popularly rebranded as "AI" in recent years. Although, as part of my boycott, I do not work with dangerous corporations (a decision that has constrained me to work almost exclusively as an independent contractor for small businesses), I still feel guilt about being associated with this field. This guilt, deriving from my feeling of responsibility for the damage I believed that people in this field would cause, was amplified by Allen's book which showed that there is a significant drive among them to overwhelm society with humanoid robots and transhuman technology. Perhaps some good can come out of my skills? While I have long been in search of an opportunity to put my skills to work in the culture war, there are a number of individuals and organizations on the political right that I would now be hesitant to work with or support, given their dangerous technological ambitions exposed in Allen's book.

Heart of America

Will the spirit to overcome Man's domination by Machine take root within the American heartland? The people here seem inherently disposed to resist transhumanism: being immersed in nature rather than the artificial city or digital realm; living distant from technological power centers, like Silicon Valley; adhering to Christianity, serving as a basis of spiritual resistance; and revering America's founding story, simply understood as a courageous rebuke of tyranny in the name of Man's highest ideals. Moreover, the heartland is massive and can support large, politically impactful communities dedicated to living a natural human life. Within these communities, many smaller groups of creators dedicated to producing the works of literature, philosophy, art, music, story, and religious ritual needed to reorient humanity towards its natural origins and highest spiritual ideals can thrive (even if the specific form of these works is not known at the outset of our fight).

In an article last year, I wrote about the Wagon Box Inn, a rustic lodge set in Story, Wyoming (a small town near the Bighorn Mountains), that I believe is exemplary of such a project. There, I attended a gathering of independent scholars, writers, creatives, and entrepreneurs concerned about our nation's cultural decay and intent on elevating the culture, through their works, towards the true, the good, and the beautiful. A key goal of the Wagon Box project is to establish the conditions necessary to create such works. Culturally revolutionary works, its founders contend, will not originate among loosely connected internet communities whose members are immersed in the digital realm. Instead, they will originate among small, tight-knit groups, even brotherhoods, of creators living in close physical proximity and immersed in the beauty of nature, from which they draw essential, even divine, inspiration. I believe that the Wagon Box is especially well suited for creators working on the core problems of technology and humanity today; it is even hosting an event dedicated to these topics later this summer that I plan to attend.

Great Books

What is man? This question struck me immediately, posed in the very first book that I read after graduate school, a book that, in some sense, inaugurated my Great Books journey. That book was The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom's 1987 diagnosis of America's educational crisis. Bloom's book, though more than thirty years old, resonated deeply with my experiences at university and offered a much more profound diagnosis of the problem than I had anticipated. According to Bloom, the crisis is rooted not in intellectual error or emotional immaturity but in the impoverished state of our souls; the crisis is not transient but is instead the result of a long and deliberate trajectory of Western philosophic thought; today's education is blind to its central task, which is not to impart specialized knowledge but rather to properly raise the question "what is man?"—that this is the question, the question of the noblest aspirations and highest potentials of human life; and the Great Books—the great and timeless works of philosophy and literature—are the primary points of access to this question, and, consequently, essential for molding man to his highest potential.

The question, "what is man?," is the crux of our war: transhumanists provide a decisive answer; legacy humans reject it but have not yet supplied their own. Does the transhumanist “god man” encapsulate man's noblest aspirations and highest potential, or his greatest degradation? What model of man can legacy humans put forth as a better, nobler, more awe-inspiring, and more worthy pursuit? And by what means can such a man be cultivated? My current view, inspired partly by Bloom, is that ancient Greek political philosophy supplies the key insights for our war. With the Greeks, we see man through fresh eyes, not distorted by our tradition or technology; his essential elements—his soul, passions, virtues, and place in the political community and the cosmos—are brought to light; his holistic perfection is sincerely pursued via education aimed at cultivating his virtues and harmonizing his soul; and a potential exemplar of such a perfected man is supplied to us via the dramatic life and death of Socrates. Through the Greeks, a stark contrast comes to light, one by which we can perhaps take our bearing: the pursuit of the perfection of man's soul through education contra the pursuit of the perfection of man's body and brain through technology.

The way I see the war seems to align, at a high level, with Allen's portrayal of it: that the essence of man is the crux of the war as transhumanists intend to transform who we are and impart a "new vision of what...every person should strive to become"; that the intellectual and spiritual realms are thus the primary battlefields; that humanity must hold fast to its ancient spiritual roots in order to preserve its essence and win the war; that we must uphold human heroes and singular religious figures contra "heroic" cyborgs; and that a truly human education must be done face to face and cultivate man in his totality, developing his virtues, physical skills, and intellect. One difference between our views seems to be on the primary source of the spiritual root, which, for me, is ancient Greek philosophy, and for him, is Christianity.

Allen's book provided many new topics and questions for me to investigate within the canon, such as the difference between the Greek and Christian conceptions of man and technology, the Gnostic gospels, the Axial religions, the Biblical and Christian-historical understandings of Satan, and the extent to which Nietzsche's Übermensch, as opposed to his antithesis, the Last Man, corresponds to the transhumanist vision of man. The book also reoriented several investigations that I am currently undertaking explicitly towards the technological question. Within my study of ancient Greek political philosophy, for example, I am now investigating themes such as the threat posed by technology and innovation to human virtue and the political order. Within my study of modern philosophers, Heidegger takes on an even more prominent role due to his profound works on technocracy, analyzing the spirit and deep philosophical underpinnings of technology.

How should our philosophical investigations guide our political actions? How can better understanding the essence of technology and the essence of man tell us what we should actually do? It is clear that we need both parts of this relationship—we cannot merely go off and ruminate away from the crisis, nor can we proceed blindly by becoming captivated by the day-to-day ills of modern technology. But it is not clear, at the outset, exactly how they are related. One of the virtues of Allen's book, in my view, is its preliminary attempt to synthesize the two, providing a viscerally practical view of the technological threat along with a quest for the deeper underpinnings of transhumanism.

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Review

(This concluding section can be read as a standalone review of the book for a general reader.)

How is technology viewed in our age? A general optimism dominates: someone is always developing a new way to make our lives better, to cure our diseases, to help us make more money or relieve the burdens of work, to feed us more information, or to entertain us with new music and movies; everyone is quickly adopting new devices, apps, and "AI" workflows to keep up with the times. The people building these technologies are among our society's highest intellects, shining products of our educational system, doing things that few others can do, and reshaping our world in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Yet this unbridled optimism is rapidly changing. Emanating gradually from many quarters is a dark fear: the discontents with our hyper-technologized world are growing and doubts about our future security and prosperity have acquired a new gravity. This often unconfessed and insufficiently examined concern finds outlet in fictional depictions of techno-dystopia, in movies like The Matrix. But the growing sentiment of a serious protest against technology requires an accessible and thorough critique of technology and where it is taking us. Allen's book, in my view, provides such a critique, one that will enhance the depth and quality of our discussions on technology today and one that can help guide us in taking steps to secure our future.

Allen's book reoriented how I think about the dangers of technology and our current cultural crisis. While I had held a fairly pessimistic view of contemporary technology prior to reading the book, I, probably like most potential readers, knew almost nothing about transhumanism. Allen's book guided me through the maze of transhumanist thought, distilling down its core beliefs, surveying the heterodox writings of its thought leaders, highlighting the wide variety of contemporary figures promoting it, and showcasing the seriousness with which its adherents intend to "move beyond" humanity. By alerting me to many technological advances and experiments that I had not been aware of, such as the genetic editing of human embryos, he convinced me that this is a severe threat now, not in the distant future.

While I had viewed today's dominant attitude towards technology as problematic prior to reading the book, I had not viewed it primarily through a spiritual lens. Allen's book, in doing so, provided many important insights: that story and myth, fundamentally explaining where we came from, where we are now, and where we are going, are primary forces shaping individuals and civilizations; that transhumanism supplies such a story, a (techno-Gnostic) quest for salvation through technological transcendence; that dominant techno-narratives seriously justify risking the human species, in an attempt to build godlike AI, for example; and that it may not be possible to decisively defeat transhumanism on secular grounds. Although I am not a Christian, I recognize the dangers of secular culture, which became clear to me over the past decade as DEI-inspired dogmas, hysteria, and violence came to dominate our nation, especially within academia and the corporate world. The idea that a secular worldview may inevitably lead to transhumanism is something that I now, after having read Allen's book, believe should be taken seriously.

Allen's book, while informative and well-researched, is written in an informal tone. It is conversational, witty, humorous, filled with personal anecdotes, and transgressive of PC culture norms. Some readers may dismiss the book on this basis, but I don't think that is valid. The style makes the book interesting and accessible to a wide audience, which is crucial for achieving Allen's goal of raising awareness about transhumanism and ultimately defeating it. More substantively, one of Allen's central arguments was on the importance of story in guiding the lives of individuals and civilizations. Dark Aeon encapsulates his personal story with technology, yielding many important insights including what I felt was one of the most powerful and consequential parts of the book: how his time studying the Catholic humanitarian organization L'Arche informed his view on the meaning of life, a view deriving from Christ's kindness and mercy, contra the brutality of the Machine.

However, I do think that the style of the book made it difficult to follow at times. The book was fairly long, made complex arguments and connections, and traversed many topics that I was not familiar with, such as the Gnostic creation story, details of the Axial world religions, and various ancient historical events. I think that some of the arguments and connections could have been stated more crisply, and that some of the chapter and section titles, while catchy and interesting, were cryptic, making the overall structure of the book less clear than it could have been.

What will be the impact of Allen's book? For a general audience, I believe it will raise awareness about transhumanism and also provide a guide for discussing the dangers of technology at a deeper level, something that I think there is a strong desire for, as I found out regularly while writing this article and discussing the book with other people. I have seen such discussions start to materialize as interest in Allen's book has grown and he's been invited to participate in many long-form interviews.

The book, in the many themes it touches, seems like it can serve as inspiration to a wide variety of people leading projects to combat transhumanism. For intellectuals and political thinkers, it may be valuable in the variety of research that it brings together; for religious leaders, the connections to satanism and the Gnostic dark Aeon may be good themes to take up in sermon or writing; for creatives, the many lenses through which it views transhumanism may provide themes to take up in movies, literature, and other art forms; and for people working in science and technology, it raises serious questions about what technologies we should develop, what companies we should work with, and how we should combat dangerous narratives surrounding "AI" and other technologies.

While Allen's book suggests ways to combat transhumanism, it does not present a grand plan for defeating it. Such a task may not be possible now. But it is necessary to start asking big questions: How can we develop a concrete battle plan? Who are the generals in this war? What are each of our roles in the war? What skills do we need to cultivate?—What do the next one hundred years look like? What institutions and communities do we need to build? Where will we build them? How do we need to raise our children to ultimately win the war?—What does victory look like? Will we coexist with the forthcoming cyborgs? Will humanity resoundingly reject transhumanism? Will we go along with it for a while before rejecting it? If legacy humans win, will we return to our past roots or will we be fundamentally transformed by our conflict with transhumanism?

I hope that Allen's book will inspire us to start seriously asking these questions and to begin taking the necessary steps to secure our survival and dignity in the dark aeon that is upon us.

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References

Most of the references in this article are to specific pages in the book and are shown below (the few references to other resources are hyper-linked in the text). The references are organized at the paragraph-level: each paragraph is represented by a "➤" symbol followed by a short description of the paragraph; the references associated with the paragraph follow directly below that line. (This paragraph-level detail can also be read as a detailed "table of contents" of the article.)

When the article uses a direct quote from the book, the capitalization of the first letter was sometimes changed without annotation for readability. When the article does not use a direct quote from the book, the reference's text is often an appropriate paraphrase of the book's text. When a section begins with an "Intro." paragraph, I omit the paragraph's references that appear later in the section.

Introduction

➤ Specter of transhumanism
➤ Book overview
➤ Articulate the threat (what tech is being developed; what transhumanists believe)
(3) technology turned inward
➤ Analyze the threat (how tech embeds into society; why transhumanists believe what they believe)
(xiii) "transhumanism is a spiritual orientation"
(18) "it's through our own material creations..."
➤ Analysis guides action ("no" to tech; "yes" to human purpose)
(348, 358) need a "no" and a "yes"
(27) "biological heritage and spiritual depth"
➤ Book review: valuable to everyday citizens and leaders
➤ Article Layout

Our Emerging Techno-Dystopia

➤ Intro.
(52) "if they lure the masses..."

The Genetic Threat

➤ Intro.
(none)

➤ Directly designing genome (research)
(80) "write circuitry for cells..."
(81) "living software"
(82) genetically designed toxic organism could get into our food supply

➤ Genetic editing technology
(75) "...cut the molecular letters..."
(77) embryonic editing for HIV resistance
(77) editing adult liver genome
(78) five thousand "gene therapy" trials

➤ Genetic editing dangers
(78) "...intend to use both embryonic mutation and adult gene therapies..."
(76-77) "human-monkey chimeras... it's hard to believe that clandestine labs..."

➤ Genetic selection technology
(73) IVF to select "winning" embryo

➤ Genetic selection dangers
(73) "This silent genocide of the disabled..."
(74) embryonic positive eugenics technology and predicted market

➤ Eugenic implications of genetic technology
(73) "defective" embryo
(78) transform the human personality
(74) "...genetic landscape of the late twenty-first century..."

The Digital Threat

➤ Intro.
(none)

➤ Top-down control (ubiquity of digital tech)
(6) "Humanity will merge into digital superorganisms... "
(348) Digitization of Everything
(12) Amazon boosts who they choose
(61) nearly everyone tracked by smartphone
(109) surveillance cameras in public
(14) Alexa in over a hundred million homes

➤ The screen: top-down control of public opinion
(11) "...monitor public sentiment, craft messaging ..."

➤ The screen: techno-dystopia of man's own making
(32) TV is "wasteland"
(61) "smartphone zombie..."
(12) ills of webporn
(315) sexbots may hinder reproduction

➤ AI dangers: radicalize digital tech dangers
(194) malicious chatbots
(196) mass surveillance and "training data"
(303) "deepfake" biofoundry breech scenario
(20) "weaponized drone swarm" could be deployed domestically

➤ AI tech poses novel threats
(16, 20) AI system could destroy humanity
(320) uncontrollable AI access fully "digitized military infrastructure"

➤ AI's perception: threat of humanization and divination
(58-59) Google engineer thought LaMBDA chatbot was sentient
(49) "...millions will gladly believe the bots are conscious..."

➤ Robo rights
(71, 90, 335) robo rights
(71) robot voting rights
(47) unethical to turn off ("kill") robot
(285-286) Robot Sophia's recognition as person

The Threat of Biodigital Convergence

➤ Intro.
(80) Biodigital convergence: three characteristics

➤ Coevolution
(79) AlphaFold; "comprehensive palette to paint the future of life"
(79) Collaborations Pharmaceuticals' 2020 algorithm

➤ Cointegration (BCI)
(262) "...have been implanted with experimental brain computer interfaces..."
(21) BCI CEOs want to enhance normal human beings
(188) "You're on an operating table at a Neuralink clinic..."

➤ Cointegration (other implantable tech)
(262) RFID chips
(224) "...fifty to one hundred thousand biohackers have volunteered to implant RFID microchips in their hands"
(144-145) quantum dot tattoos

➤ Conceptual convergence
(78) "just as a genetic code yields functional protein..."
(51) carbon-based neurons
(309) "human 'soul' is just a pattern of information"
(23) read and write brain like RAM
(81) "through that digital lens, we're not souls enshrined in bodies..."

The Abolition of Humanity

➤ Intro.
(6) "Under the guise of 'philanthropy'..."

Transhumanist Vision of the Future

➤ Transhumanist vision of man
(78) embryonic designer genes
(147) Internet of Bodies global tracking paradigm (Schwab)
(24) BCI snakes Stentrodes (Synchron)
(50, 216) nano-bots (Kurzweil)
(23) BCI devices to rewrite our mind like RAM drives
(51) No distinction between virtual and actual reality (Kurzweil)
(174) reject inevitability of death (Theil)
(310) gruesome brain excavation procedure (Moravec)

➤ Different significations of transhuman being
(ix) "Humanity+"; (83) "Humanity 2.0"; (188) "human 'upgrade'"
(187) "Homo deus"; (306) "Homo techno"; (316) "Machina Sapiens"
(8) "cyborg"; (193) "AI+humanity"; (339) "human-AI symbiotes"

➤ Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab)
(50) "we can hope this is all science fiction..."
(147) previous three industrial revolutions
(76) "doesn't change what you are doing, it changes you"
(5, 147) "the fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities"

➤ Singularity (Kurzweil)
(17) "top R&D director at Google"
(51) "the pace of technological change..."
(41) Kurzweil as transhumanist prophet
(51) "there is no longer any clear distinction..."

➤ Fate of mankind
(16, 332) wipe out humanity
(91, 179, 187) Darwinian superiority and natural selection
(193) AGI "exclusion zones"
(297) humanity becomes irrelevant like squirrels

Transhumanist Mythos

➤ Transhumanist evolutionary mythos
(88-91) biological, cultural, and technological evolution
(6, 85) evolution in humanity's control

➤ Future visions: competing techno-religious myths
(88) "Although this origin story is widely accepted by transhumanists..."
(90) "competing myths of a religious revolution"
(118) AI doom & bliss narratives

➤ Techno race-war narrative (de Garis)
(331) "the question that will dominate 21st century global politics..."
(19-20) Cosmist and Terran war events

➤ Impact of vision is primary importance
(20) "The actual tech advances..."

➤ Possible impact of AI-deification narratives
(20) "building artilects will be like a religion..."
(20) "the artilects, if they are built..."
(332) De Garis identifies as Cosmist

➤ Possible impact of other transhumanist narratives
(16, 297) humanity replaced Neanderthals
(385) intelligence is not uniquely human (Altman)
(323) "human exceptionalism"
(16, 120) "mind children" or "children of our minds"

Socio-Political Mechanisms of Civilizational Transformation

➤ Intro.
(14, 355, 389) reject "conspiracy theory" view of transhumanism

Bottom-Up Adoption

➤ Intro.
(none)

➤ Willing adoption of technology
(61, 250, 357) temptation of forbidden apple
(61) smartphone-user is a "mini-magician"

➤ Slippery slope to adoption of radical technology
(xiii) smartphone-to-implant progression
(148) body-implantable smartphones
(189) BCI devices may serve toxic content like ads

➤ Healing to enhancement
(22) BCI devices help paralysis victims communicate
(21) enhancement is goal of BCI companies (Neuralink and Synchron)
(73) IVF to select "winning" embryo
(74) "if customers want designer babies..."

➤ Tech alters environment and weakens humanity's resistance to new tech
(28) "baptized in an ocean of chemicals and electricity"
(68) Absorption in digital realm contributes to rise in transgenderism
(70-71) Transgenderism may lead to transhumanism

Top-Down Imposition

➤ Intro.
(11) "Our culture is being radically transformed"

➤ Inevitability propaganda
(27) "Future^TM"
(60, 120) "we" is really top-down imposition
(11, 15, 26) "inevitable"

➤ Gradual dispersion of tech into society
(52) "...sparked in computer systems and biolabs, spreading outward..."

➤ Crisis facilitates rapid tech encroachment
(11, 347) 9/11 attacks advanced surveillance state
(135) COVID mass vaccination
(135-136) COVID mass digitization

➤ COVID pandemic as "initiation rite"
(123-151) COVID acted as species-level initiation rite
(140) "This global initiation rite..."
(135) "From a techno-social angle, this divide over public health..."

Transhumanism is a Heterodox Movement

➤ Intro.
(7, 270) Transhumanism is heterodox movement
(171) "Transhumanism is not a purely atheistic movement..."

➤ Right-wing transhumanists: Musk and Theil
(171, 182) Theil and Musk develop BCI
(125) Musk's depiction as hero combating "woke" Left and WEF globalists
(197) "releasing the Twitter Files—to his credit—"
(182) Musk is a "poster boy for Homo deus"
(197) "kinder, gentler Singularity"
(209) "Musk is a superhero to..."

➤ MAGA Right v.s. Tech Right
(none)

➤ Implicit transhumanist beliefs
(85, 347) don't openly identify as "transhumanist"
(120) "destiny in space"
(342) "explore the stars" (Altman)

Transhumanism is a Spiritual Orientation

➤ Intro.
(xiii) "transhumanism is a spiritual orientation"

Techno-Gnosticism

➤ Gnosticism vs. Transhumanism (high level)
(281, 271) scientific vs. Gnostic "higher knowledge"
(85) false equivalence between Gnosticism and transhumanism
(18) "Rather than seeking the transcendent Light through one's inner spark..."

➤ Transhumanism is a dual (techno-Gnostic) inversion of Christianity
(277) Gnosticism seen as heretical and repressed by Church
(272) Gnostic transhumanism is an inversion of an inversion
(270-271) Gnostic inversion of Christianity

➤ Gnostic creation story
(273-275) Gnostic creation story
(272) Sophia's repentance opened the gates to liberation
(275) "Jesus illuminated Sophia..."

➤ Robot Sophia inspired by Gnostic Sophia
(272) takes "her name from the child savior..."
(286) "As a spiritual emissary, Sophia is the public face of the Singularity..."

➤ Sophia is the dark mother of transhumanism
(285-286) Robot Sophia is salvific to her creators
(290, 322) "bio-techno AI God"; "digital Demiurge"; "techno-Gnostic Demiurge"
(290) "our consciousness will be imprisoned in electronic illusions"
(299) "Truly, Sophia is the dark mother of a cyborg theocracy..."

➤ Techno-Gnosticism in modern culture
(282) "Gnostic threads are woven all through modern culture..."
(290) "our world is an illusion created and controlled...the 'red pill'"

Other Views of Transhumanism

➤ Intro.
(none)

➤ Materialist-Atheism
(313) "When God is dead, technology is exalted as the highest power..."
(109) "faith in the transcendent evaporates"
(40) "materialist inversion of the spiritual order sits at the heart of transhumanism"
(154) "our will to power derives not just from human nature, but is part of Nature's fabric"
(154) "technology empowers our instincts to ungodly degrees"

➤ Satanism
(156) "...archetype of the rebellious Devil..."
(153) "Transhumanism is satanism with a brain chip."
(156) "Lucifer is the embodiment of reason..."
(256) "Satan was created as the most beautiful angel..."

➤ Satanic imagery
(154) "Satan represents man as just another animal"
(155) "develop and promote the manufacture of artificial human companions"
(250-251) "Three apples changed the world..."

➤ Alien intelligence
(255) some believe that highest alien race possess technology beyond our comprehension
(90) alien contact: merge with them or hostile to us?
(236) postmodern UFO religion and potential future cults

➤ Greater Replacement
(297, 327) replace us with new species (as humans replace Neanderthals)
(85) humanity's flawed origin (More's "Letter to Mother Nature")
(120, 286) Greater Replacement is for our own good
(26-27) dismissed as "conspiracy theory"

➤ Ancient visions
(10) immortality and the pharaohs
(325) "...create gods from raw metals"
(250) "modern materialist form of idol worship"
(259) "...no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark..."
(265) "...'Peace and Security' will be the Antichrist's slogan"
(265) "many secular types deride Christians...fools to ignore the ominous insights of ancient seers."

➤ Axial Age
(376) "Greek philosophers, Hebrew prophets, ..."
(369) "emphasized the value of each human soul..."
(383) "...phase transition to Transhuman Axial Age..."
(367) "we have to ride the energies of that spiritual root..."
(373) "the Axial inward focus..."

Winning the War

➤ Intro.
(240) "Here at the new axis of history..."
(27) "biological heritage and spiritual depth"
(348, 358) need a "no" and a "yes"

Saying "No" to High Technology

➤ Intro.
(27) "any call to reject all technology..."

➤ Personal choice
(397-399) all references

➤ Communal norms
(399-400) all references

➤ Institutional policies
(400-401) all references

➤ Legislative action
(401-403) all references

➤ Spiritual orientation
(363) "the direction of any civilization..."

Human Purpose

➤ Intro.
(345) "human purpose is the question of our age"
(394) "ethnocentrism is not going away"
(394) "Team human may be a shaky coalition..."

➤ Unify humanity: sacred signs and the Golden Rule
(394) "our salvation lies in the direction indicated by sacred signs"
(390) other world religions can successfully guide civilizations
(373) religions are not "all the same"
(394) "...the Golden Rule can be a universal guiding light"

➤ Human kindness and L'Arche
(265) "human kindness is the meaning of life"
(266) "to live up to the Gospel..."
(268) "nothing could have felt more natural or more beautiful"
(268) "L'Arche is also a vessel to protect the vulnerable..."

➤ Principles defining humanity: human kindness and Christ's mercy
(none)

A Ray of Hope

➤ (Cautious) long-term optimism
(27) "None of us will escape the Future^TM..."
(350) "awareness of the possible futures..."
(351) "build parallel structures..."
(360) "so long as plenty of us remain in the control group..."

➤ Elaborate optimistic outlook
(349) structures must endure centuries
(357) "Don't forget to breathe"
(305) fatalistic fear of allies

➤ Doubt technological feasibility
(341) "...defining lines between human ethnicities will be..."
(343) eclipsing in global techno race war
(10) "...god complexes of the ancient pharaohs"
(359) "Even if we assume their purely naturalistic perspective"

➤ Power of human will
(353) "The ongoing war for humanity is a battle of wills."
(360) "in reality, their great transformation is a great imposition..."
(341) "my concern is not slipping into The Matrix..."
(358) "If our ancestors could survive battlefields..."
(358) "keep hammering away at the walls closing in..."
(363) "...We can direct our soul's attention toward our Creator and align ourselves with the divine will..."

➤ Conclusion
(none)

My Story

University

➤ Transhumanism became real to me
➤ DEI hysteria in university; can't fix it
➤ Support for DEI leads to support for transhumanism
➤ Greater Replacement

Wandering Through America

➤ Intro
➤ Great Books project
➤ Journey through the American heartland
➤ Boycott treasonous corporations
➤ Meeting Joe Allen and acquiring Dark Aeon

How Dark Aeon may Impact my Mission

Boycott
➤ Radicalizes boycott; discuss tech dangers with others
➤ Professional concerns (AI and machine learning)

Heart of America
➤ Heartland is naturally disposed to resist transhumanism
➤ Creators in heartland to lead spiritual war; The Wagon Box Inn

Great Books
➤ What is Man? The Closing of the American Mind
➤ Ancient Greek vs. transhumanist model of man
➤ Alignment with Allen's view; Ancient Greek vs. Christian root
(26) "new vision of what...every person should strive to beome"
(390-391) heroic humans vs. "heroic" cyborgs
(326) face to face education
➤ Book provided topics to investigate
➤ How should philosophy guide political action?

Review

➤ Techno-optimism dominates our age
➤ Growing techno-pessimism
➤ Book elucidated transhumanism and tech advances
➤ Spiritual aspect of transhumanism and secular worldview
➤ Style of book (Pro): wide audience; his personal story & L'Arche
➤ Style of book (Con): organizational clarity
➤ Effect of book (general audience): elevate discussions on tech
➤ Effect of book (leaders): creative themes to take up
➤ Book exhorts us to ask big questions
➤ Hope book will guide us

Last month I attended the North by Northwest (NxNW) conference at the Wagon Box Inn in Story, Wyoming. The event was co-hosted by Justin Murphy's OtherLife group—an online group of independent scholars, writers, creatives, and entrepreneurs that I've been a part of for several years—and a tight-knit group of friends led by Paul McNeil, founder of the Wagon Box. McNeil recently purchased the property with the vision of transforming it into "something between a college campus, a cherished vacation home in the mountains, and the tea houses and taverns that were once the seedbeds of philosophical and political discourse." He envisions the Box as a kind of meeting ground that different online groups can plug into to host physical events and to interface with other groups; the NxNW conference was one of the first such events. He further envisions that the Box will grow in popularity such that organic meetings and creative cross-pollination regularly occur, a phenomenon that he believes will facilitate culturally impactful artistic and business collaborations.

Cultural Mission

The event's attendees were loosely oriented around a cultural mission, one originating in a deep concern for the fate of our nation and culminating in a dedication to bold grassroots action aimed at revitalizing it. Chief among their concerns were the corruption of mainstream institutions like media and academia, the censorship of political speech and its accompanying social and economic persecution, the prevalence of degeneracy and ugliness in our culture, and the fracturing of community in our digital age. Proposed grassroots efforts to revitalize the nation, of which the Box is one example, stood at the crossroads of business, entrepreneurship, emerging digital technologies, classical education, and the production of powerful writing, music, and art. McNeil added that the Box maintains a loosely Christian mission, encouraging righteousness and the "flourishing of the good, the true, and the beautiful—the Kingdom of Heaven." Yet he also emphasized that everyone at the conference is on a good faith journey of understanding and open to hearing from other people. (Many of the event's attendees were Christians, of various denominations, though a few were non-believers, such as myself.)

While united in their overall vision of the Wagon Box project, McNeil and Murphy each emphasized the importance of different aspects of the project. McNeil, a Montana-based libertarian outdoorsman, emphasized the need to form tight brotherhoods, to build relationships with the local community, and to maintain close ties to the land. Murphy, an Austin-based entrepreneur who left a professorship of political science early in his career, emphasized the importance of a physical meeting ground to gather independent thinkers, scholars, and writers currently scattered across the internet. Such a meeting ground, he feels, will concentrate and mold this elite group of thinkers into a powerful cultural force, one that may facilitate the kind of revolutionary cultural change that is needed in America right now.

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McNeil espoused a frontiersman's view of the formation of America: America was built by tight bands of brothers working together, many of whom undertook the project of expanding the frontier westward. This expansion exemplifies the more general principle that nation-shaping change flows only out of tight fraternal bonds. Consequently, McNeil emphasized the need to restore fraternal orders and guilds in the modern world as well as the need to restore the classic dynamic of brotherhood and male friendship, a dynamic captured, for example, by the relationship between Thaddeus Toad (to whom the Box's logo artistically alludes) and his friends in the classic novel The Wind in the Willows. Moreover, developing a tight-knit community is central to McNeil's vision of the Wagon Box. While maintaining its business and cultural missions, the Box will support its community members personally by providing housing and other support to those who fall on hard times. He further envisions that many community members will return to the Box year after year and develop a lifelong attachment to the project and to the land.

McNeil emphasized the importance of maintaining strong relationships with the local community. He is bullish on small Western towns, such as the one in which the Box is set, and emphasized the importance of supporting and interacting with the local community. This interaction is facilitated by the Box's restaurant and bar that is well attended by locals, hosts local music shows and other events, and facilitates random interactions between locals and visiting groups. I experienced one such interaction on the final day of the conference when a local housing contractor joined our group on the restaurant's porch for several hours to discuss his entrepreneurial project, which has to do with helping men overcome difficulties in their marriages (difficulties which he himself had experienced and overcome in his marriage), and to learn about our group's writing and entrepreneurial projects.

As an avid hunter and outdoorsman, McNeil purchased the property with its connection to nature closely in mind. The property was outfitted with a variety of outdoor activities, including horseback riding, fly fishing, archery, and a ritual morning cold plunge in the icy creek that runs through the property. The property itself covers about twenty acres of land and houses guests in a wide variety of dwellings which include cabins, a lodge with communal-style living quarters, renovated campers from different time periods (from the 1960's to today), and glamping-style tents and tepees scattered across the property. McNeil, as well as many of the attendees, emphasized the importance of maintaining close proximity to nature in order to counteract the ills of our digital age.

Murphy's departure from his political science professorship was motivated, negatively, by a desire to escape censorious pressure within academia, and, positively, by a desire to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions. One such ambition was founding OtherLife, a community of independent thinkers, many of whom were similarly pressured out of mainstream institutions and then began earning a living independently online. Murphy is consistently impressed by the quality of people that OtherLife attracts and with the dynamic of camaraderie that has developed among the group's core members: people genuinely like each other, want each other to succeed, and often maintain PhD-caliber collaborative relationships over many years (whether they pursued formal degrees or not). He believes that the group has the potential to develop into a powerful cultural force: a dedicated community of scholars and writers, each with the intelligence, erudition, and depth of a university professor, producing insights that are valuable to high-power decision makers (in business, politics, and culture), yet also able to communicate these insights to normal people.

But such powerful, and even revolutionary, cultural change will not be the work of an isolated individual, nor even the collective work of a network of such individuals; instead, it will flow out of the ethos of a strongly connected community. Such a community can develop only through extended in-person interactions, which Murphy believes that a physical meeting ground like the Wagon Box can help facilitate. A meeting ground of this kind can serve as a kind of "pressure cooker," one that molds an intense work ethic among the group, produces an energy of fun and excitement which motivates the group's members to aggressively bounce ideas off of each other, and develops sentiments of love and care among its members. But this love is not a vacuous "feel good" kind of love directed arbitrarily at another person; instead, it derives from seeing extreme value in the other person, of seeing a divine spark within him and pushing him to complete his creative work that is ignited by it. The key insight here seems to be that the seed of revolutionary cultural change may lie dormant within the heart and soul of man who himself does not see it, but that is seen by a friend who intimately knows him and believes in him.

Murphy cited historical examples as the inspirations for his beliefs. To the need for in-person community, he stated that revolutionary cultural change has typically originated within small groups of dedicated thinkers living in close proximity to one another, such as the Beatniks in 1950's New York City and the Bloomsbury Group in early twentieth-century London. To the idea that a thinker may not be aware of his revolutionary insights, he cited the relationship between the Beatnik's William Boroughs, who had collected many insights in his notes, and his close friend Alan Ginsberg, who took the initiative to write up and publish these notes which later became influential. He also cited the story of Samuel Johnson, an eighteen century English literary critic, whose biographer had met him at a dinner party and felt that the world needed to know about such an interesting person.

As a final point of interest in the Wagon Box, Murphy sees the project as exemplary of the kind of bold entrepreneurial action that he admires and encourages. While many people talk about buying a property or founding a city as a means to escape the ills of the modern world and begin their own project of cultural change, almost none of them actually do it. But McNeil and his group actually did; they made a bold and romantic bet, taking a huge financial risk in doing so, and truly putting their hearts on the line. Murphy encouraged attendees to passionately pursue their projects and to take bold risks in navigating the internet economy, a new frontier that we are all exploring. He credits the Box with already having helped facilitate the formation of several businesses as well as several book deals through its events and social network.

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The NxNW Event

The NxNW event was structured roughly as follows. Each morning began with a ritual cold plunge in the property's icy creek followed by a sauna, which is built into the communal lodge. Following the plunge and sauna, the group gathered for brunch in the property's restaurant and then for a two-hour assembly in its upstairs event room, where the event's organizers gave short speeches and then opened up the podium for attendees to share their work. Each afternoon was relatively unstructured, with attendees either congregating on the restaurant's porch to engage in further discussion or going off to do outdoor activities, such as horseback riding, archery, and hiking. Attendees gathered again for dinner, then for another assembly to share their work, and ended the night in the restaurant along with local patrons to listen to live music, much of which was supplied by the attendees themselves who sang and played guitar as well as more eclectic instruments like the accordion and the autoharp. Attendees also supplied Gospel music for the prayer gathering that was hosted in the lodge on Sunday morning.

McNeil and Murphy gave complementary introductory speeches that set a rough theme for the event; this theme was that of the hidden life, the life that is inside of you and separate from the outside world. For McNeil, deep consideration of the hidden life is necessary to counteract the ills of the modern world, a consideration that for him has a Christian interpretation: that the Kingdom of God lies within you and must be brought forth into the external world. For Murphy, the "other life," a phrase coined by philosopher Michel Foucault that became his group's namesake, demands an embrace of the Greek practice of parrhesia, or "frank speech." In contrast to the ideal of "free speech," which holds that a speaker should (almost) never pay a penalty for his speech, a speaker's facing punishment is essential to the practice of "frank speech": that the speaker is willing to pay a penalty attests to the reality of the "other life," that it is the true life and of higher value than anything in the outside world. Murphy cited the speech and consequent persecutions of Socrates and Jesus Christ as examples of the practice of "frank speech" and argued that this practice should be embraced in dissident intellectual culture today.

About forty people attended the NxNW event, with about half coming from each of McNeil's and Murphy's groups. The attendees were employed in a wide variety of professions and had a wide variety of interests. Among the attendees were writers at influential online political magazines, publishers, fiction writers, independent scholars who had self-published books on historical, religious, and philosophic studies, retired entrepreneurs who had exited successful startup companies, tech entrepreneurs who were just beginning their journeys, designers of artistic Catholic-inspired clothing, experts in psychological personality profiles, poets, people with deep knowledge of contemporary dissident politics, and many skilled musicians.

Many attendees came prepared to share fairly long and well thought out pieces at the open podium. Some of these pieces were excerpts from forthcoming novels, set to be published in well-known online cultural magazines, or were simply thoughtful essays intended for private discussion. Some of the topics that were discussed included: the need to get back to the land and away from the internet; developing myth in the modern world; reuniting men and women in love (contra contemporary feminism and gender wars); the power of good music to heal the heart and of good stories to heal the mind; the need for developing spiritual infrastructure through art, clothing, and the restoration of beauty; what it means to be in love with the world and God; the need to revive the craft of modern poetry; the structure of fraternal organizations and how they can be implemented in the modern world; and the revival of the masculine spirit in the modern age through historical fiction.

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The NxNW event highlighted to me the crucial importance of in-person events. I met many more interesting people and had many more impactful discussions in three days than I would have had in many months online. I also developed stronger relationships with people over this time, through our many discussions as well as our shared participation in physical activities, like the cold plunge, and even in simply attending the event itself. This made it much easier for me to form collaborative relationships with them. One collaboration that I intend to pursue is the creation of a dedicated writing retreat or residency program at the Box, which I would attend and help one of the professional writers organize. Another is a gathering of patriot entrepreneurs at the inaugural Liberty Tree Conference that I will be co-hosting at the Box later this summer.

The in-person nature of the NxNW event helped me gain a deeper understanding of this community and how I can help it lead it; through the commentary and encouragement of the attendees, it also helped me strengthen and complete a fairly long article addressing this topic that I had been in the middle of writing at the time of the event. My article reviewed an Echelon Front leadership training conference (run by retired Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin) that I had attended shortly before the NxNW event. The NxNW event provided key insight into the leadership challenges among this community that I reflected upon in my article. In particular, I saw the lack of a concrete mission as well as an aversion to both joining and leading teams as the key challenges, with many people (myself included) adopting a "lone wolf" mentality and holding a negative view of leadership, seeing it, for example, as a dehumanizing management of people or as requiring the leader to bark orders at others. My article suggested that Echelon Front's leadership approach may uniquely appeal to this community for many reasons including its focus on developing human excellence rather than treating people as resources to be managed, its focus on a leader's building relationships with his followers, and the overall depth and intelligence of its teaching.

A New Frontier?

For quite some time, I have been searching for a place like the Wagon Box: a place where I can connect my skills and passions with those of similarly-oriented people, a task that has been difficult to accomplish on the internet alone. My interest in the Box is further motivated by my past experiences at graduate school where I witnessed the decrepit state of our universities first hand, discovering that it was impossible to carry out even basic discussions on many cultural and political issues, let alone to earnestly pursue the most important questions about human life and the fate of our nation. I was honored to have had the opportunity to meet so many interesting, talented, and dedicated people at the NxNW event, and to have helped advance the Wagon Box project, even in a small capacity.

While the Wagon Box project is just beginning, it does so with a bold and positive vision of the future: of growing into a meeting ground that regularly facilitates cross-pollination among high-caliber thinkers, creators, writers, and entrepreneurs; and of inspiring the creation of a nation-wide network of similar properties, each gathering thinkers into a dedicated work environment, building bonds of brotherhood among them, bringing them into close connection with nature and the local community, and pursuing a holistic development of human life.

It is enticing to imagine the impact that such a project might have on our culture and on the trajectory of our nation. Has the essential power of a physical meeting ground been wildly overlooked in our digital age? Have the prejudices within academia and other mainstream institutions scattered enough intelligent, ambitious, and noble souls throughout the nation who are now in need of being gathered? And if so, might meeting grounds like the Wagon Box become the frontier for the most culturally impactful thinking of our generation?

Echelon Front (EF) is a leadership training organization led by retired Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Its training is based on leadership skills, principles, and practices that were developed in war by Willink and Babin and later adapted to address leadership challenges in the business world. EF's training serves leaders in a wide variety of domains including technology, construction, finance, and education. Moreover, EF teaches that leading others is inextricably tied to a demand for self-mastery, a kind of "leadership in oneself." This demand is embodied in the slogan "discipline equals freedom," which Willink is well known for, as well as the bodily training regiments, such as physical conditioning and Jiu-Jitsu classes, that accompany the speeches and leadership exercises at EF's events.

This article reviews EF's Extreme Ownership Muster event, which I attended last month in Nashville, Tennessee. Overall, it was an excellent and impactful event. The event transformed my understanding of what leadership is and instilled in me a genuine desire to become a leader. It provided a wealth of practical knowledge about leadership and presented it within a well thought out and tightly connected conceptual framework. Its teaching was interwoven with deeply personal and memorable stories of military struggle, sacrifice, and camaraderie. These stories served to enrich the event's conceptual teaching as well as to communicate the realities of war and the burden and pain left by fallen soldiers to a degree that I had not experienced before. The event itself was extremely well run and organized. The instructors were generous with their time and were genuinely interested in meeting attendees and learning about their specific leadership challenges. I think that this is an extremely worthwhile event that teams operating in any industry would benefit from attending. I believe that the event will help me advance my mission in business and that it will help me advance my most important mission, which is motivated by a deep concern for the fate of our nation.

The remainder of this article presents a detailed review of the event and an overview of its content. It is divided into three parts. First, I will discuss my motivations for attending the event and some questions that I had before the event. Second, I will discuss the content of the event in detail, including an overview of each of the speeches. Finally, I will reflect on the event and discuss how I think it will impact me and my mission going forward. I will also make some suggested additions to the event. (That is, the second section aims at a fairly objective description of the contents of the event and can be read on its own while the first and third sections relate heavily to my personal mission and would be of most interest to those similarly concerned about the fate of our nation.)

Motivations for Attending

I attended the EF event for business, patriotic, and philosophical reasons.

Business

I have been successfully freelancing for the past few years building AI, machine learning and data science software for startups and small businesses. I am currently in the process of expanding my efforts and building a team. I believed that EF's leadership training would help me learn the skills necessary to clarify my company's mission and to lead my growing team to success. I also thought that the conference would provide a good opportunity to meet other business leaders in the Nashville area, which I moved to about six months ago. My intention was to collaborate with them on technical and business projects as well as to build a community dedicated to improving our personal lives and leadership skills.

The American Crisis

During graduate school I witnessed the growth of a dangerous force within the university—which I will simply describe as aggressive censorship accompanied by passive support for political violence for the purposes of this article. I felt a profound sense of duty to fight and subdue this force and a strong sense of personal responsibility for failing to do so as it spilled out into and engulfed the nation in the late 2010's and early 2020's. EF's principle of extreme ownership, which I had understood as heaping upon oneself a complete, even if unreasonable, sense of responsibility for failure resonated with this sentiment that I felt. (Extreme ownership in fact has a distinct, but not entirely contrary, meaning as I learned at the conference.)

How could I have better led this fight? I had done so primarily by speaking out, attempting to galvanize and instill courage in others, forming and leading organizations, and sacrificing everything I could afford to do so. Moreover, how can I better step up now to lead America out of its continuing crisis? Right now there are many intelligent young people who are disenchanted with or have been effectively exiled from mainstream institutions. I believe that the essential mission and unique capability of this group is to clarify and understand the crisis at a deep and fundamental level, to chart a path forward, and to orient the nation along that path. However, right now, people comprising this group are only loosely connected, have not set a common practical mission, and are not effectively working with other Americans who are similarly concerned about the fate of our nation but have a distinct role to play in its revival. How can I lead efforts among this group and how can I build bridges with other groups of patriotic Americans?

In addition to helping me learn to lead efforts among this group, I believed that attending the EF event would provide essential insight into the current crisis for two reasons. The first has to do with its connection to Jocko Willink. I see Willink as a great American for his military service and for the work he's done to fortify the nation domestically. He has, through the Jocko Podcast and other mediums, advanced virtues like courage, discipline, and self-mastery that are severely lacking today and has additionally projected strong views on the purpose of life that counteract the apathy that dominates today. Moreover, he has done so with a unique spirit and intensity that has captivated many people and sincerely inspired them to better their lives. While I am not into celebrities, I felt that it would be an honor to meet Willink at the conference. Moreover, I believed that doing so would help me better understand what makes him so unique and what understanding of life and America animates him. I believed that such an understanding might provide essential insight into the nature of the current crisis and might reorient me on my mission in some fundamental way.

The second reason has to do with the event's connection to Jiu-Jitsu, which I began training about two years ago. Since I train Jiu-Jitsu, I was naturally interested in and curious about its inclusion in a leadership conference. What is the unifying force that holds together EF's seemingly disparate teachings on leadership, the cultivation of fortifying virtues, patriotism rooted in reverence for military sacrifice, and martial arts training? My curiosity in the unifying power of martial arts was amplified by an interview I had seen in which Willink said that "Jiu-Jitsu, for me, was the connective tissue that started to join my mind with all the different aspects of my life.... I don't think I would be doing anything that I'm doing right now [(presumably including leadership training)] if it wasn't for Jiu-Jitsu."

I felt that better understanding the scope of the benefits of martial arts would help me in my mission, part of which is devoted to an investigation into how martial arts training can help strengthen America. This will be the subject of a forthcoming article, but some questions that I am investigating are as follows. At a concrete level, can widespread martial arts training help citizens defend themselves, particularly against the rising political and criminal violence, and can it help develop fortifying virtues like courage and discipline? At a more experimental level, I am investigating the value of martial arts in two capacities. First, can martial arts training be used as a template for training citizens to defend and preserve freedom domestically by, for example, training them to engage in controversial debates, to overcome fear, and to tolerate social and professional repercussions for their speech? Moreover, is there an analogous art that accompanies this training, a kind of patriotic art whose aim is not physical self defense but rather a kind of national sociopolitical defense? Second, taking my bearing from the widely recognized mind-body connection inherent in martial arts, can martial arts shed light on the more general phenomenon of the relation between thinking and reality, or how thinking is fundamentally able to grasp and interface with reality? Firmly grasping this interface is, I believe, essential for deep and true political thinking which I see as necessary for overcoming the current crisis.

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Political Philosophy

After graduate school, I began an independent study of political philosophy in an attempt to understand the crisis at a deeper level. Within the political chaos, it seemed like nobody had any answers. Things kept unraveling, continually defying explanation and prediction, as well as any attempt to control them. The concepts that kept popping up to make sense of politics, like "woke" and "generation gap," and even ideas like the left-right political spectrum that are central to political discourse, always seemed to obscure, rather than to truly grasp, political reality. I found seemingly scientific approaches, such as statistical analyses, similarly insufficient, often veiling their inability to grasp political reality with the appearance of rigor. I found myself seeking a deeper and genuine understanding, sober and clear thinking, something more stable and permanent to latch onto. Political philosophy offered this promise. "Political philosophy is the attempt truly to know both the nature of political things and the right, or the good, political order," writes Leo Strauss (1899-1973) a preeminent twentieth-century political philosopher.

The quest for knowledge of the good political order inevitably leads us on a quest for a comprehensive understanding of human life, to questions about the essence of man and what it means to live a good life. Political philosophy thus takes us far beyond what we think of as "politics" today (typically policies, laws, elections, and accompanying debates). In so doing, it immediately confronts us with the question of how we are able to gain access to (or to properly pursue) political wisdom. The fact that this is not merely an intellectual matter has been demonstrated spectacularly by today's universities, within which the greatest political ignorance grew alongside the greatest severing of the intellect from the totality of human life.

Instead, our quest for political wisdom leads us to ask the following questions: what life experiences must we acquire in order to properly pursue this wisdom? How do we need to train our whole selves for this pursuit? Who among us has the best understanding of life and what can we learn by talking to and questioning him? It was this quest that attracted me to the EF event in which I saw important contrasts to the modern world: intimate experience with war, the focus on a holistic training of man (in virtues, patriotism, martial arts, business, and leadership), and a unique understanding of life that I suspect animates their teachings (which I had suggested above in reference to Willink's fame). I believed that attending the event would provide important insight into the nature of man, and hence insight into the good political order and the philosophical underpinnings of the current crisis.

I was further motivated to attend the event to investigate some similarities that I recognized between the teachings of EF and the ancient Greeks. Ancient Greek political philosophy furnishes us with a comprehensive view of politics that focuses on the cultivation of human excellence. It also furnishes us with a preeminent exemplar of the quest for political wisdom in the life of Socrates. Socrates, in Plato's Republic, teaches that the pursuit of wisdom demands education of the full human soul, which requires not only training one's intellect, but also training in music and gymnastic (physical fitness, wrestling, training for war), as well as the cultivation of virtues like courage (to confront painful things) and moderation (to resist indulgence in pleasure). I see the comprehensive nature of education and the promotion of virtues like courage and discipline echoed in EF's teaching. Is this connection genuine and does it run deeper? Does it indicate a kind of rediscovery of ancient ideals in the modern world? If so, is this rediscovery part of a wider cultural phenomenon, especially among those calling to cultivate virtues like courage to counteract the cowardice that dominates today?

I also saw in EF's leadership teaching echoes of more specific ancient teachings. To give one example, there seems to be a strong similarity between the notion of ruling presented by Socrates in Plato's Republic and the notion of leadership taught by EF. For Socrates, the notion of ruling is a kind of supreme principle, one necessary to understand the best political order, the proper order of the human soul, and the intimate relationship between the two. Socrates teaches that the city can not be freed from its ills unless it is ruled by the best men. The best man is the one whose soul is properly ordered, meaning that it is ruled by its best part, the part that pursues the highest aims of the soul. Similarly, EF raises leadership to a kind of supreme principle, one that governs the organization of a team as well as the organization of one's life, a kind of "leadership in oneself." As EF's event page states: "victory cannot be achieved without leadership, which is why we say leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, the most important thing in business, and the most important thing in life."

Moreover, EF's leadership teaching was developed in response to the realities of war. Similarly, war figures heavily into Socrates' teaching in the Republic, where the constant threat of war is the central concern of the city that he develops in speech. Consequently, the city's need to properly educate and train its guardian, or warrior, class is the impetus that guides his entire political teaching. (Socrates himself was a respected veteran of war, receiving praise for his courage by two Athenian generals in Plato's Laches, for example.) Are certain political truths accessible only to those who intimately comprehend the realities of war, which most of the ancients (like Socrates) did and which most of EF's instructors do, but which most moderns do not? Does this modern alienation from war explain, in part, the modern alienation from ancient truths, and hence the current crisis?

Conference Description

This section provides a brief overview of the event followed by a summary of each of its speeches. (It is based on detailed hand-written notes that I took during the conference though I also used the workbook distributed by EF at the event for reference. I believe that I captured the central ideas of each speech fairly accurately though I may have made some mistakes in the details.)

Overview

The event was fairly large, attracting about one thousand attendees from 39 states, 5 countries, and 42 industries, by EF's report. Many attendees came in groups and seemed to be coworkers at small- to medium-sized companies. I met a few individuals who came on their own, such as an out of state police officer who had been to nine such EF events, feeling that past events had greatly helped his personal life, and a local elementary school teacher who reads Willink's children books to her class and had brought a huge bag of them for him to sign, which he gladly did. (The mix of attendees was somewhat of a surprise to me. I had expected more brazenly patriotic or intense people who I had envisioned to be the most dedicated listeners of the Jocko Podcast. Instead it felt more like the kind of crowd that would attend a typical corporate leadership retreat.)

There were many tables advertising other EF events, selling books, and offering free samples of Jocko Fuel. EF also had several partnerships. One such partnership was with America's Mighty Warriors, an organization run by Debbie Lee, mother of Marc Lee, who was killed in Iraq while serving alongside Willink and Babin. Her organization's mission is to support Gold Star Families as well as veterans by providing housing and other help for those with PTSD or facing other struggles. Another partnership was with Combat Ready, a European-based company that teaches principles similar to EF's and that had representatives from Estonia and other Eastern European countries volunteering at the event.

The event consisted of a meet-and-greet on the first night, followed by two days of speeches, physical fitness at 5 AM on both days (which I did not attend), and a Jiu-Jitsu class on the final day (which I did attend). Willink and Babin headlined the event, speaking many times throughout the event, and were supported by about fifteen other EF instructors. Most of the instructors had military background, including several who had served alongside Willink and Babin, and then went on to overcome significant challenges in their business or personal lives. Yet, the conference was not merely a collection of speeches broadly about leadership and its applicability to business and personal life delivered by ex-military personnel (which is somewhat closer to what I had anticipated). Instead a strong conceptual, thematic, and dramatic harmony tied the event together making it feel like one coherent and engaging exposition spanning the two days.

Conceptually, EF developed a comprehensive language for articulating their leadership principles which were fit together in a well thought out and tightly connected conceptual framework. What I had presumed to be a set of loosely connected slogans, like "extreme ownership" or "discipline equals freedom," are in fact elements of this framework. "Extreme ownership," for example, is the centerpiece of this framework while the seemingly contradictory phrase "discipline equals freedom" exemplifies a fundamental tension or dichotomy inherent in leadership. (Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership are the central books in which EF's leadership framework is articulated, though I had not read these before the event.) Thematically, the event's presentation of leadership principles was tightly interwoven with stories of military experience, and particularly with stories of military sacrifice. The sequence of stories largely follows a narrative of Willink and Babin's time through the SEAL Teams. Dramatically, each of the speeches was well delivered, engaging, and authentic. Many of the speeches were delivered by two or more instructors who interleaved teachings and stories in a well coordinated fashion that exemplified the kind of teamwork that EF teaches. Transitions between the speeches ran smoothly over the backdrop of pertinent and dramatic video content, primarily from the Jocko Podcast.

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The Supreme Importance of Leadership

Willink and Babin co-delivered the introductory speech, presenting some of conference's central themes and setting its tone. They discussed the central importance of leadership and their military experiences that informed their insights into the nature of effective leadership. The speech centered on their time in Iraq with Task Unit Bruiser. Willink was Bruiser's Commander while Babin and Seth Stone (who figures heavily into the narrative throughout the conference) each commanded one of Bruiser's two platoons. (Babin and Stone reported to Willink.) During this time, as an elite special operations force working alongside the Marines, they accomplished much good, saving many American lives and advancing the cause in Iraq. They also brought a lot of good home: lessons of humility, ownership, teamwork, brotherhood, and leadership. But they also brought home a tremendous burden and pain: that while they came home they did not bring all of their men home. This is a burden and pain that never goes away and it is one that is clearly and authentically felt throughout the entire conference.

The speech opens dramatically with the tragic death of Bruiser's Michael Monsoor and Stone's heroic attempt to save him. During battle in Iraq, Monsoor threw himself on top of an enemy grenade, absorbing its blast and saving the lives of three of his teammates but sustaining serious injuries himself. Monsoor later died from his injuries and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery and sacrifice. In response to the blast, Stone had led a team of SEALs in an attempt to save Monsoor, overcoming significant challenges and exhibiting true leadership. Yet Stone's leadership was not innate. Although he was intelligent, tough, and brave, Stone understood that leadership itself is a skill that must be learned. He was humble and had taken significant efforts to learn leadership over the preceding eighteen months.

Willink and Babin maintain that leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, as evidenced by Stone's heroic effort to save Monsoor, by the macro-level war in Iraq, and by a wealth of historical examples from ancient to modern times. In Iraq, for example, the quality of enemy leadership had a dramatic effect on the difficulty of battle. Initially, the enemy was disorganized, composed largely of thugs and criminals, but after the 2006 Insurgency, the enemy was better organized and led and the battle became a lot harder.

Willink began to recognize the importance of effective leadership as well as some of its fundamental principles during his time as a young SEAL. Such principles include the importance of being able to step back from a chaotic situation as well as from your ego, the importance of alignment in a team's mission, and the power of humility in a leader. This final lesson he learned from a legendary SEAL named Delta Charlie who had served as his platoon commander. Prior to Charlie, Willink's platoon had a terrible leader: he had a huge ego, barked orders, imposed his plan, had no respect for the troops, and was eventually fired. But Charlie was the exact opposite: he was humble, genuinely looked forward to working with the platoon, listened to what they had to say, and respected them. This inspired in Willink a strong respect for Charlie and strong desire to never let him down.

Willink and Babin came to recognize the supreme importance of leadership after successfully leading Bruiser for many years and noticing how regularly its performance was complimented. They also came to recognize distinct principles and practices that they had developed and employed within Bruiser but had not yet articulated. Central to Bruiser's success was a culture of Extreme Ownership, the four Laws of Combat (discussed in the next section), the recognition that leadership is a skill that must be trained, and the recognition that leadership is a responsibility of everyone, not just of the platoon commander but also of the front line SEAL who takes full ownership over his part of the mission. Willink and Babin used these principles to train new SEAL teams and eventually adapted them to teach leadership to the civilian world with EF, a company that they co-founded in 2011.

The Laws of Combat

Babin exposited the four Laws of Combat - Cover and Move, Simplicity, Prioritize and Execute, and Decentralize Command - with the help of four EF instructors. For each law, Babin gave a brief explanation of its applicability in combat and business. One of the other instructors then entered the stage to explain it in more detail using examples from his or her own life.

Cover and Move embodies the notions of teamwork and relationship building. On the battlefield, it refers to the act of laying down suppressive fire so that other teammates can safely maneuver. It embodies a recognition of the importance of the overall success of your team and mission over your own success, and a recognition of the strength of your relationship, of preserving the life of a friend. EF instructor Andrew Paul illustrated this principle. Paul served in Bruiser then went on to work in the mortgage industry where he experienced significant friction between loan officers, who wanted loan applications to be accepted, and underwriters, who were highly critical of the applications. This friction dissipated only when Paul was able to build personal relationships and trust, key principles of Cover and Move, between members of the two groups. He was eventually able to get more loans approved and advance the overall mission of his organization.

Simplicity seems like an obvious principle but it is easy to overlook. During his time as a platoon leader, Babin's team failed to execute one mission that he had organized, even though they had all listened attentively and wanted to win. He realized that the problem was that his plan was too complex. This taught him that a plan must be simple, clear, and concise. Moreover, he learned that the best way for a leader to ensure that his team truly understands his plan is to ask the team to explain it back to him rather than to simply ask if anyone has any questions, to which they will often say "no," despite not truly understanding the plan. EF instructor Meg Miller illustrated the importance of simplicity utilizing examples from her time coaching college lacrosse. During this time, Miller recognized that in high stress situations, such as when a team was down by one goal near the end of the game, coaches that called out complex plays often caused their teams to lose. In contrast, while coaching one high stakes game in overtime, she called out a simple and familiar play to the her team. The team was so happy because they knew it so well. It broke the stress and allowed them to execute it perfectly and win.

Prioritize and Execute refers to the dual task of identifying what is most important in a situation (prioritizing) and overcoming internal difficulties necessary to execute it. But prioritizing is difficult. People tend to look down the barrel of their own gun, not at the whole situation. The primary challenge to seeing the whole picture and prioritizing is the ability to emotionally detach from a situation and look around. It is important to recognize that detachment does not come naturally but instead must be explicitly practiced and trained. EF instructor Corey Mize illustrated this difficulty. Mize had heard the phrase "prioritize and execute" many times before she was forced to seriously put it into action. When Mize got into a dangerous car crash, she became emotionally overwhelmed and was initially unable to act. However, her practice detaching from her emotions led her to make good decisions including making the necessary call for help. Although some decisions may seem obvious, the blinders of chaos prevent you from seeing even the most obvious decisions which only become visible when you detach from the situation.

Decentralize Command means that everybody leads, from the squad leader to the front line troop who is in charge of himself and his part of the mission. A squad leader cannot be everywhere to command at all times, nor can he develop a plan that anticipates all of the contingencies that will arise in a real life scenario. Rather than communicating how a team should execute a mission, the leader should communicate why they are doing it. This will allow each team member to better understand his role and to figure out how to execute it, perhaps discovering a superior way that the leader had not envisioned. EF instructor Cordell Bennigson illustrated this principle. Bennigson was a U.S. Marine Corps Officer and pilot who went on to run several companies. One such company made critical equipment for police officers and was significantly impacted by the COVID lock downs. In particular, Bennigson was no longer able to easily travel from his home to the factory. Nevertheless, because all of his workers understood why their piece of the job was important, they were able to organize and lead on their own, never missing a single shipment and even innovating their procedures during this difficult time.

The Dichotomy of Leadership

While many leadership principles, such as the Laws of Combat, are easy to understand, they are difficult to implement, as Willink and Babin discussed. Two fundamental difficulties inhibit their practical application. First, inherent in leadership itself is a tension, a dichotomy between two extremes that the leader must balance. Second, finding this balance often requires that the leader act in a way that is contrary to his natural instincts. The key to overcoming these difficulties is the insight that leadership is a skill. As such, the necessary balance and instincts can be cultivated and improved through training and practical experience.

Effective leadership, though guided by certain principles, must also be moderated by a balance that prevents any one principle from being taken too far in a given situation. A leader must be disciplined but not tyrannical, aggressive but not reckless, humble but not passive, resolute but not overbearing. Being resolute but not overbearing, for example, requires you to know when to hold the line and enforce an order, but also when to pull back a little bit and not do so.

Two complimentary examples from Bruiser illustrate this dichotomy. In one instance, Willink had ordered his men to learn how to program the battlefield radios, which help prevent friendly fire incidents. But Babin had not prioritized this order among his platoon whose members were consequently unable to program the radios when questioned by Willink. In the other instance, Babin and Stone defied Willink's order against wearing decorative patches on their uniforms. The patches, though common in SEAL culture as a mark of self expression, would clash with the Army's culture of professionalism and impede collaboration among the forces, Willink felt. The first order Willink recognized as essential (necessary to protect the lives of his men) and enforced it, making everyone to learn how to program the radios immediately. The second order, however, he recognized as overbearing, as evidenced by his trusted teammates' defiance of it, and did not enforce it. Making this decision required humility to keep his ego, which is typically hurt whenever a subordinate defies an order, in check.

This example illustrates a more general principle: that balancing any leadership dichotomy is not only conceptually difficult but often requires us to act contrary to our instincts. It is our instinct to be passive rather than to take action, to oppose change rather than to adopt innovation, to protect our ego rather than to be humble, to cast blame on others rather than to take ownership. Yet overcoming these instincts is essential for effective leadership: humility is the most important quality in a leader and a culture of extreme ownership is what most strongly predicts a team's victory.

These two supremacy claims are supported by empirical observations and by theoretical explanation. First, a leader's ego is the primary source of leadership problems in the business world, as EF recognized from its extensive experience diagnosing such problems. This is explained partly by the omnipresence of the ego whose demands consistently threaten to undermine the demands of effective leadership, such as performing honest self-assessments and building good relationships with your team. Humility is necessary to keep the ego in check, as the above example with the patches illustrates. Second, ownership is the attitude that most significantly differentiates winning from losing teams in SEAL training exercises, as Willink and Babin observed. This is explained partly by the fact that ownership is implicitly necessary to cultivate tactical excellence, by forcing the team to continuously make small improvements, and partly by the fact that taking ownership is necessary to stop the corrosive spread of blame within the team. It is our instinct to cast blame on others for our failures, but it is also their instinct to evade this blame by casting it upon someone else. Only when someone steps up and takes ownership does the blame stop spreading.

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Own your Attitude

EF instructor and former Marine Rob Jones lost both of his legs in an IED explosion performing his duty of sweeping for mines, a duty that he loved as it allowed him to protect his fellow Marines in a way that none of the others could. While recovering from his injury, Jones recognized the importance of managing his attitude and that of his loved ones traumatized by his injury. He regularly wore silly hats, such as a pirate hat, in his hospital bed in an attempt to do so. After his recovery, he chose to live his life in a way that showed that he had not been broken by war but instead that he had become stronger by it. He intended to combat the transformation of the popular perception of veterans that he had witnessed over lifetime: from that of noble hero to that of the broken hero, a victim traumatized by war. Jones' mission led him to run an astonishing 31 marathons in 31 different cities on 31 consecutive days. He teaches the importance of owning your attitude, especially when your life is radically disrupted, to honestly assess the truth of your situation and to accept it.

Know Your Mission

EF Chief Training Officer and former SEAL JP Dinnell taught the importance of clearly defining your mission. Though successful as a SEAL, Dinnell struggled with his personal life after leaving the military. As a SEAL, he had a clearly defined mission and, under the command of Willink and Stone, he was embedded within a culture of extreme ownership. After leaving the military, Dinnell got married and had children but failed to maintain good relations with his wife who ultimately served him divorce papers. The key problem, Dinnell recognized, was that he had failed to clearly define his mission in post-military life and to pursue its victory with the necessary intensity. Through an honest self-assessment, he recognized that getting his family back was his most important mission. He was ultimately victorious in this mission, a success that he attributes to his embrace of the principle of extreme ownership (which he had embraced in the military but had not thought to apply to his personal life until Willink and Babin's book was published) and to his having waged a daily war against complacency (a principle which he had also embraced in the military, having taken the sarcastic slogan "the enemy thanks you for not giving 100% today" to heart).

Military experience again provides a unique vantage point for clarifying fundamental problems in business and life as well as their solutions. Here, it brings into clarity the importance of having a mission, of knowing who or what your enemy is, and of asking what victory looks like. Moreover, in the chaos of life, as in the chaos of battle, you will often get off your path and lose track of your mission. To restore clarity to your mission, you must remind yourself and your team why you are doing what you are doing.

The Power of Relationships and Leadership Capital

Willink and Babin taught the power of relationships and introduced the principle of leadership capital. During initial EF engagements with companies, EF recognized that many people did not understand what a good relationship is, often mistaking it for something trivial like regularly saying "hi" to someone in the hallway. EF subsequently identified five essential components of a relationship - trust, listening, respect, influence, and care - each of which has a fundamentally reciprocal nature: to gain influence over others, you must open your mind to be influenced by them, for example. Moreover, from their extensive corporate engagements, they identified the ego as the primary barrier that prevents a leader from taking the actions necessary to build good relationships.

The strength and dynamic of the relationship between a leader and his subordinates is characterized as leadership capital. Actions like listening to them, using their plan, or pointing out that they're right is akin to a deposit of capital, while contrary actions are akin to a withdrawal of capital. Willink stressed that most leaders do not understand how precious leadership capital is: you have much less leadership capital than you think. As such, it is necessary to make deposits as often as possible, by going out of your way to build trust or to use a subordinate's plan, for example.

EF instructor Carlos Mendez illustrated the power of relationship building using examples from his time with the SEALs and from his time employed as an investment banker after leaving the military. As a SEAL, his team regularly struggled to acquire the necessary approval from an army general to approve their desired air strikes. The problem, Mendez recognized, was not a technical flaw in his team's plans, but rather the quality of his team's relationship with the general. By building trust, showing respect, carefully listening, and applying the principle of reciprocal influence, Mendez built a strong relationship with the general who then more willing approved the strikes. As an investment banker, he sought to change his office culture which was dominated by lazy employees. Rather than blaming lazy coworkers, he built relationships with them by taking an interest in their personal lives and asking them what he could do to make their jobs easier. This influenced them to step up and do their jobs better. With relationship building, Mendez urges you to do it because you genuinely care, not as a trick.

Counterintuitive Leadership and the Indirect Approach

Willink taught that leadership is counterintuitive, often requiring an indirect approach. He introduces the archetype of the silent leader as the epitome of the indirect approach. Rather than being loud or giving excessively detailed orders, the silent leader will use merely a word, a gesture, a head nod, a look, or even say nothing at all. The silent leader is able to command such respect and diligent execution from his team due to the relationship he has built with them. Moreover, this relationship building itself often requires an indirect approach. After recognizing a flaw in a subordinate's plan, for example, the leader should not directly say that the plan is bad or flawed but should instead ask the subordinate questions about the plan that prompts him to recognize the flaw on his own. The minimal effort required to manage the team allows the leader to look out at the future rather than looking down at and managing his team.

Detachment is a Superpower

EF instructor and former US Marine Codey Gandy leads EF's hands-on training which is a practical application of the principles that it teaches. While many of EF's leadership principles are easy to understand, they are difficult to implement. The biggest barrier to implementation for most people is the inability to detach, to not let your ego, your perspective, or your emotions dictate your actions but instead to calmly step back, to clearly assess your situation, and to Prioritize and Execute. Detachment does not come naturally to most people and instead must be diligently practiced and trained. Yet once honed, your ability to detach acts like a superpower, facilitating your ability to implement all of EF's leadership principles and effectively lead. Moreover, since leadership is a kind of universal skill that applies to all areas of life, your ability to detach effectively dictates your ability to solve problems in all areas of your life.

Accountability versus Ownership

EF instructor and retired SEAL Sean Glass spoke about accountability in military and corporate contexts. While performing corporate consulting through EF, Glass often hears employees complain that others are not held accountable. Yet when he asks them what they've done to help their teammates, the answer is often "nothing," to which he rhetorically asks "by doing nothing are you helping your team?" Rather than demanding that others be held accountable, you should take ownership of the situation and ask what you can do to help that person and to help your team. Glass warns against taking this position on accountability too far. It does not mean that you should never fire anyone, but instead that you will often not need to as they will often get better when you begin to take ownership. He illustrates this point with an example from his military days when he stepped up to mentor a younger soldier who was initially struggling but then went on to become a great platoon commander.

Tactical versus Strategic Thinking

Willink and Babin emphasized the need to recognize and contrast tactical (short-term) and strategic (long-term) thinking. In particular, they warn against the mistake of believing that a series of tactical victories will lead to overall victory. In Iraq, for example, their tactical thinking amounted to targeting and killing individual bad guys. But these short-term victories actually amounted to a long-term loss as more bad guys would continually pop up. Only when their tactical thinking shifted to strategic thinking, of helping marines secure the local populace, did the war begin to turn around. In the business world, EF sees this error all the time. For example, they consulted a construction company that set and completed daily tactical goals. Senior management, hearing of these daily victories, erroneously concluded that the project was going great when in fact it was severely off track. Another common problem occurs when people focus on making money (tactical victory) at the expense of their family relationships (strategic loss).

This concluded the speeches from the first day.

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Planning

Willink and Babin opened the speeches on the second day with a discussion of the importance of delegating planning to a subordinate, a concept known as "leading from the rear." Rather than giving your subordinate a plan (telling him how to execute it) it is much better to communicate to him why you want him to execute it and to let him make his own plan. Even if your plan is a little better on paper, you should still go with his plan for several reasons: his team has already bought into the plan, when difficulties arise they are more easily able to adapt, they feel empowered and in control over their own destinies, and your subordinate learns to take over your job as leader. If his plan needs to be improved, ask him questions about it until he figures out how to improve it himself (take the indirect approach). Overruling his plan will cost you significant leadership capital and should only be done if his plan will get people killed.

Iterative Decision Making

Willink and EF instructor David Berke, a retired US Marine Corps Officer and pilot, discussed practical decision making. The discussion centers around twentieth-century pilot John Boyd's OODA loop, a decision making process containing four stages: Observe, requiring you to go into "receive" mode to actively acquire information, Orient, requiring you to interpret observations accounting for biases and other factors, Decide, requiring you to overcome uncertainty and make a decision, and Act, requiring you to execute the decision to test your hypothesis. These stages are executed in a loop, continuously incorporating feedback, until the mission is complete.

There are two primary reasons that the decision making process fails: getting stuck and denying feedback. Getting stuck is a kind of "analysis paralysis" where you wait to acquire every last bit of information before making a decision. One effective way to overcome this paralysis is to shrink the scope of your decision. Instead of making one large decision, make small decisions very quickly, get feedback, then iterate. Denying feedback occurs when you are blinded, often by your ego, to reject feedback. A common example is when people ship a product that they love but will not listen to market feedback, often blaming the ignorance of the consumer for not understanding their vision.

Training

Willink and Babin discussed the effectiveness of training. They differentiated between formal and informal training. A formal training procedure must have three components: it must be realistic, focus on the fundamentals (which do not change by time or situation), and be repetitive. Its goal is to replicate the stress and other factors of the real situation such that the real situation is easy. However, formal training is time consuming and may be difficult to do for each situation. Instead, in business, you should focus on informal, or on-the-fly, training. A good leader should always be looking for opportunities to informally train his people, such as by telling the new guy to come up with a safety plan for the site. Even if he has had no formal training to do so, he can make his best attempt, then get feedback and improve.

The power and effectiveness of formal training was demonstrated numerous times on the battlefield, to life-saving effect. During one mission in Ramadi, Stone was pinned down by machine gun fire. Despite the fact that it was his first firefight, he was able to lead his men to safety due to his excellent training, a point that shocked an observing Army Major who had thought that Stone must have had significant urban combat experience. EF Instructor Jason Gardner, who spent 30 years in the SEAL Teams, related additional stories that illustrated the power of training. In one mission, he was trapped in a minefield with a severely wounded SEAL and his team's training helped get the wounded SEAL back to safety and saved his life. Several times in Iraq, Gardner led a team that nearly committed a blue-on-blue killing, an accidental shooting of a teammate. He believes that these near-killings would have actually occurred had it not been for his team's training, and in particular a simulated blue-on-blue kill that occurred on his watch in one training mission. Crucially, Gardner credits Willink and Babin for reforming their SEAL training to make it more realistic, a task that they were uniquely equipped to do after their return from Ramadi in which they had experienced the most sustained urban combat of any SEALs since Vietnam.

To apply the idea of military training to business, Gardner advises that leaders develop training procedures that simulate the worst case scenario for their industry, such as dealing with a belligerent customer, and that make the training as realistic as possible. Moreover, while leaders often complain that it is hard to find good people to hire, they should instead recognize that they can actually make good people through training.

Unified Strategic Goals

Willink discussed the importance of a leader's unifying his team under a common strategic goal, especially when there is a conflict over resources. Such a conflict is common in both military and business scenarios. For example, Bruiser was composed of two platoons but a limited number of night vision goggles. Similarly, Willink's Origin clothing company is composed of teams making different types of clothing, such as Jiu-Jitsu gis and jeans, but a limited advertising budget. Naturally, each platoon wanted as many night vision goggles as it could get and each clothing team wants as many advertising dollars as it can get. When one group demands additional resources, remind that group of the overall mission of the organization and ask them if taking additional resources away from the other group will help the mission or not. More generally, each person or sub-team will have its own agenda and pursue a different path. Contrary to what many leaders believe, this is actually okay as long as the leader is able to keep everyone aligned with the overall mission.

Barriers to Extreme Ownership

EF COO Jamie Cochran discussed common barriers that individuals and organizations face in adopting the principle of extreme ownership. These barriers often take the form of objections, fears, uncertainties, or the adoption of defensive postures. The following examples illustrate each of these barriers as well as how to overcome them. While some object that the principles of combat leadership do not apply in the business world, EF has worked with many companies and individuals who employed them with success. While many leaders fear that they will lose respect if they take ownership, in practice the opposite happens: people respect them more and begin to take ownership themselves. While many people are unsure how to begin taking ownership, there are dozens of small opportunities each day with which they can begin. While some people verbally take ownership they don't really mean it, such as teammates sarcastically saying "you gotta take ownership" to each other after attending an EF event rather than sincerely taking ownership. Cochran concluded with examples of extreme ownership in action, highlighting the story of the wife of Brendan Looney, a SEAL who had served with Cochran's husband and was tragically killed in a helicopter crash. Looney's wife now works to help and support other Gold Star Families.

Leadership Challenges

Willink and Babin discussed various challenges associated with leadership and how to overcome them. Different but complementary challenges arise in each phase of your leadership journey, from your beginning as a subordinate or follower, to your transitioning into a leadership role, and finally to your time as a leader. As a subordinate, you must learn how to deal with a boss who is micromanaging, indecisive, or weak. The general approach that you should take is to try to make your boss look good as this will eventually benefit you and your team. In transitioning to a leadership role, you must actively step up and take on this new responsibility. It is greedy to take the easy way out and to avoid this responsibility when you know you are capable and can help your team. As a leader, you must constantly build relationships, subordinate your ego, and give orders using the absolute minimum force required.

Military experience again provides a unique vantage point for addressing leadership problems in the business world, in particular with unmotivated personnel. In the military there are no simple ways to motivate a person as there are in the business world, through promotions or bonuses, for example. Instead, to motivate an unmotivated person, Willink and Babin would put him in charge of some task. This person would often step up to the task, so long as the task is important and not something demeaning or trivial. Moreover, a lack of motivation is often due to a subordinate's not believing in the job or cause. Draftees during the Vietnam War were an extreme example of this. While bad leaders did not like their draftees, good leaders, like Colonel David Hackworth, loved their draftees because they pushed back and asked difficult questions, forcing them to step up and genuinely lead. (Hackworth's book About Face, which details his experiences during the Vietnam War and his leadership mentality, greatly influenced Willink and Babin.)

Assessments

EF instructor and former SEAL Steve Ward spoke about the importance of performing honest assessments, which serve not only to directly improve performance but also to reduce friction among the team. Assessment should occur at the team and individual level and should establish itself within the culture of your organization. As a team, you should explicitly set aside time for assessment and encourage each individual to debrief himself. As an individual, you should be your own harshest critic by asking if you hold yourself to the same standards that you hold others to and by taking ownership of your failures. The ego, again, is the primary barrier to taking ownership and performing an honest self-assessment. A trusted advisor can help you determine if your assessment is honest, as can a self-observation of your use of qualifying words like "maybe."

Ward relates a story about his failure to take ownership during his time as a SEAL. After losing his night vision goggles on a mission, he was questioned by his boss about the missing gear. He got overly emotional and entrapped by his ego which caused him to give dismissive answers, damaging his relationship with his boss and hindering his development as a soldier. Instead, he should have explained the problem, described the consequences, taken ownership, and provided a solution by saying, for example, "I know I didn't do a good job with this task. I will develop a lessons learned document so that others don't make the same mistakes in the future."

Implementation

Willink and Babin concluded the event's speeches with an exhortation to implement the leadership principles taught over the past two days. Their biggest fear of hosting this event is that people will get fired up but then relax and never implement its teachings. They again emphasized that leadership is a skill that requires constant effort and training to perfect but they also offered some advice to begin implementation. They advise that teams utilize the common language developed by EF, such as the Laws of Combat, which will help the team discuss and diagnose problems. They warn about the danger of overcorrection, which occurs, for example, when someone embraces their principle of bias for action in an extreme and aggressive manner. They further advised leaders to own their shortcomings and to explicitly tell their teams that they intend to lead differently rather than to subtly change their behaviors. If a leader has been a persistent micromanager, for example, he should tell his team that he recognizes that his micromanagement has been hurting the team and that he intends to begin to lead differently. Most importantly, a leader must realize that leadership implementation begins with him. If he take ownership and begins to lead, the team will follow.

Jiu-Jitsu Class

The event concluded with a Jiu-Jitsu class. The class was supposed to be held at the hotel but this was not possible due to an issue with the transportation of EF's mats from California. Instead, Nashville MMA generously stepped up to loan their facilities to the group. About 100 to 150 people attended the class encompassing a wide range of experience levels, with about half having never trained Jiu-Jitsu before and with a good mixture of belt-levels, including several black belts, among the experienced half. The class was led by Willink, Echo Charles, co-host of the Jocko Podcast, and Dean Lister, a world champion grappler and Willink's long-time training partner. It began with instruction on several Jiu-Jitsu inspired self-defense moves, such as breaking free from an attacker's grip, which were demonstrated by the instructors then drilled by the group in pairs. The group then split into two. The inexperienced half joined Willink for additional introductory exercises and the experienced half joined Lister for more advanced exercises, centering around a system of leg attacks which he is often credited with pioneering in elite competition, followed by free sparring. (Ironically, it was through Lister that I discovered the EF event. While training leg locks in Louisiana two years ago, someone at my gym mentioned Lister and his connection with Willink. This inspired me to do more research into Willink, quickly discovering the Jocko Podcast and eventually discovering EF.)

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Reflection

My reflection on the event will roughly follow the division in which I presented my motivations for attending, into personal, patriotic, and philosophical sections. Each section will address a successively expanding scope of concern and will roughly operate under the guidance of an associated question. First, how was the conference beneficial to me and my immediate goals? Second, how did the conference help me advance my mission in service of the American cause (and how can it help others with a similar mission)? Finally, in what ways did the conference shed light on the philosophical underpinnings of the American crisis?

Personal

The event gave me a fundamentally new understanding of leadership. I came to see leadership as a kind of untapped power, one that could be the key to making projects that I had previously thought infeasible now feasible. I came to appreciate the complexities of effective leadership and consequently the ease with which leadership can be misunderstood, distorted, and poorly implemented. Moreover, I came to appreciate the dictum that leadership is a skill, one that must be actively trained and honed over time to realize its full potential. Yet far more important than any promise of power or utility, the event showed me that leadership is a good and noble art (or skill) and consequently that its mastery is worthy of pursuit. That is, it instilled in me a genuine desire to become a leader.

The noble view of leadership that I acquired contrasts sharply with the views of leadership that I had previously held. Throughout my life, I had seen leadership as a kind of utilitarian-directed management and had regarded the desire to become a leader as essentially ignoble. Initially, having been captivated by scientific pursuits, I saw the prospect of leading such projects as the avoidance of "real work," a retreat from the lab to the manager's office, severing one's ability to grasp reality (through experiment and thinking), and divorcing oneself from the inventive human spirit that such a quest inspired. Turning - or having been turned - toward political matters, I saw leadership as menial procedural execution necessary to manage society, albeit one uniquely tied to power. However, I did not covet such leadership roles but instead sought to influence those in power through speech, argument, and the development of powerful ideas. While in recent years I have felt a kind of calling to leadership, I did not have a concrete or positive vision of what this pursuit would entail.

EF presented a characteristically different view of leadership. A leader has the power to ennoble his subordinates, elevating them to their unique potential instead of managing them as resources. This shone through the event's conceptual teachings and through its examples. Decentralize Command, for example, proscribes that the leader provide a why and direct his subordinates to find the how, forcing them to take charge and bringing each of them into the kind of "leadership in himself" necessary to take ownership over his part of the mission. Moreover, in providing a meaningful why, the subordinate's role is bestowed with meaning, not mere utility. Dinnell's relationship with Willink and Babin exemplified the ennobling power of leadership. As SEALs, Willink had instilled belief in Dinnell and made him feel sincerely meaningful, helping him reach his full potential. After the military, Dinnell struggled financially, trapped in menial work. Willink and Babin's formation of EF provided Dinnell with the opportunity to convert his unique SEAL and personal experiences into the meaningful work of helping others as a leadership instructor. While business leaders today are often heralded as "job creators," alluding to their economic impact, here the business leader provides the opportunity for his subordinates to convert their skills not only into dollars but into human excellence.

Perhaps what most convinced me of the nobility of leadership was the spirit of the event in which its teaching was presented. Within the event’s many exhortations towards virtue and their accompanying exhibitions of the higher aims of human life, one in particular stood out to me. It was a video from the Jocko Podcast in which Willink addressed hypothetical critics who liken his seemingly endless fitness routines to the punishment of Sisyphus, a character from Greek mythology who was condemned to roll a large rock up a mountain for eternity, with the rock rolling back down each time it reached the top. Willink, with his singular passion and intensity, affirmed an inversion of the Sisyphean characterization: "Getting that rock to the top of the mountain - that's not what my goal is. My goal actually is pushing the rock. Because pushing the rock, that pushes me, that makes me tougher, that makes me harder, mentally and physically.... I want to struggle... and I want to push, and I don't want it to end. If I ever got the rock to the top of the mountain and it stayed there, I'd push it back down myself." Here, man is heralded as a fundamentally noble being, one whose hardness and excellence lies within him, the chiseling out of which is his fundamental task. Man is not a beast of burden, a slave to utility, whether to transporting a rock to a mountaintop, to making money, or to acquiring honors. I felt that by mastering the art of leadership I would become the man who rolls the rock back down the mountain for all eternity.

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Turning to more directly practical matters, EF opened my eyes to new possibilities in the context of individual leadership concepts and ideas. Some ideas, like leading up the chain of command, where a subordinate can exercise influence over his boss, I would not have previously thought possible. While other ideas, like readback, where a leader asks his subordinates to repeat his plan back to him rather than just asking if anyone has any questions, seem simple and obvious but are easily overlooked. For other ideas, like the archetype of the silent leader, I would have previously misunderstood its intent and the conditions of its possibility. I would have thought that the leader's silence, for example, was a deliberate attempt to project a cool exterior that commands obedience through fear, rather than, as EF taught, the natural result of having properly implemented two fundamental leadership principles: building trust with your team and implementing Decentralize Command (imparting in your team a clear why such that they can figure out the how with minimal verbal direction).

As most of the event's teaching was new to me, my first step in attempting to apply it has been to experiment with small changes and to look at situations in my life differently, through the lens of leadership. Now, for example, when I receive an impossible technical request from a business client, I try to lead him to discover its impossibility by asking him questions about the request, rather than directly explaining its impossibility as I used to. Now, after a typical meeting I find myself asking if there was a leadership opportunity that I missed, such as the opportunity to build trust or leadership capital. Politically, I recently came across a patriotic though underwhelming and misguided article. While I would typically dismiss the article or the author, the simple question "are you helping your team?" came to my mind as did the chastisement "when you begin to care more about your team than yourself, then you begin to be a leader." Although I am not connected with the author, I could be, and the skill of leadership has opened my eyes to the possibility of a productive collaboration. (None of this should be interpreted as a dogmatic acceptance of EF's teaching, but rather as a sincere attempt to understand it, to see how it fits practically into my life, and to apply and evaluate it.)

The conference also helped me implement some other positive changes in my life. Thanks to the encouragement and inspiration of Rob Jones, I've worked up to running a 5K two times per week (a distance that I had previously not been able to run). I started a reading and writing group in Nashville, which is something that I had intended to do when I first moved here but didn't. I improved my progress in Jiu-Jitsu by recognizing a weakness in my training habits, of too aggressively attempting to survive by holding a defensive position (which was a habit that had I developed when I first started training) rather than trying to escape and experiment with new counter attacks.

Finally, the conference helped me improve my skill as a writer, which is one of my most important personal goals. It provided a wealth of excellent material as well as the inspiration for writing this article. Additionally, through one the conference's exercises, I was forced to confront a significant weakness in my writing process, which I critically assessed under the rubric of employing tactical rather than strategic thinking (of mistakenly believing that a series of small-scale victories will lead to overall victory). In my writing process, this often takes the form of a kind of perfectionism where I precisely hone every sentence or paragraph (tactical victory) at the expense of constructing a good holistic document in a timely manner (strategic loss). Switching my approach while writing this article, I was able to flesh out an entire draft quickly which made it much easier to get feedback from others, ultimately making this piece much better and helping me develop a habit that I will employ in future writing projects.

The American Crisis

It was the cause of America that made me an author. It was this cause to which my life was inextricably bound at university and it was this cause that led me to the EF event. I had hoped that the event would help clarify and advance my specific role in this cause. To this end I wanted to better understanding three things. First, to better understand what makes Willink such a unique and powerful force in American life, to which two things stuck out to me: the manner in which fallen soldiers impact one's life and a richer understanding of the appropriate role of fortifying virtues (like courage and discipline) in life. Second, to understand the connection between leadership and Jiu-Jitsu, a connection that I thought have could been presented more strongly at the conference, as I will discuss later. Finally, to understand how I could have better led the fight for the heart and soul of America at university and how I can better lead the fight going forward. To this, the event forced me to identify specific ways in which I can help lead the ongoing effort and to reflect on the challenges that I anticipate facing and how EF's teachings may be helpful in overcoming them.

At the conference, the realities of war were highlighted to me more forcefully than they had ever been before, as was the impact of a fallen soldier on those closest to him, to whom he is not only remembered and memorialized but is also the living spirit that animates their good works. Stories of military death and casualty arose in nearly every speech, from the conference's opening salvo recounting Monsoor's tragic sacrifice to its conclusion which valorized the work of Debbie Lee (mother of fallen soldier Marc Lee) with America's Mighty Warriors as "carrying on Marc's spirit for all of us." Moreover, the fallen soldier is inexorably bound to the entire teaching of the conference (Willink and Babin brought home from war the good of leadership but also the eternal burden and pain of their fallen teammates) and animates EF's commitment to succeed in its mission, as Dinnell affirmed in his speech, echoing the forceful and succinct promise "we will not fail you" that Willink had made at the casket of Seth Stone. Several personal meetings at the conference were also impactful to me, such as meeting Rob Jones (who lost both of his legs in an IED explosion) and meeting Debbie Lee who was, to my recollection, the first Gold Star Family member (related to a fallen soldier) that I had ever met. Lee inscribed my copy of a book that she contributed to with the phrase "live your life worthy of their sacrifice." This was impactful to me as it was this sense of duty that had driven me since university. Yet for me, alienated from the realities of war, it was always a duty to a hypothetical fallen soldier. While I can never truly know how it feels to lose someone so close to you in war, the conference did make it feel more real.

The conference immersed attendees in a world of fortifying virtues (such as courage and discipline) and patriotism, rooted in reverence for military sacrifice. Yet it was here, immersed in the purest realization of these virtues, that a more nuanced understanding of their role came to light. These internal virtues are not alone sufficient to realize an external good, whether it be personal excellence, business success, or national fortitude. Instead, this good is realized only through the mastery of the practical art of leadership. Effective leadership requires these virtues yet also directs their use and mediates their expression through competing virtues such as humility. I believe that this realization can serve as an important point of reorientation for many people today. Responses to the current crisis that call for a restoration of fortifying virtues, which I see as a generally positive phenomenon, often view their cultivation as an end in itself. Yet behind Willink, who is perhaps the most well known and respected expositor of these virtues today, Babin, and the rest of the EF team, stands a complex art that they promote as necessary to realize these desired goods. (Perhaps an analogy to martial arts is relevant here: that while virtues like strength and courage are useful in a fight, effective self-defense requires mastery of a martial art.)

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Turning to the question of how I could have better led the fight at university, I see precisely this as my crucial error: of believing that instilling fortifying virtues, such as social courage, in the populace would be enough to set the community on the right path. While I did attempt to organize people into collective action, I did not attempt to implement anything like the complex leadership framework taught at the conference. Has leadership not been properly thought in the battle for the heart and soul of America? Is leadership the untapped power that can revitalize the American spirit? While this is an intriguing idea and one that deserves to be taken seriously, I do sincerely believe that the fight at university was unwinnable. Nevertheless, this defeat has supplied the American cause with a crucial resource: a critical mass of intelligent, courageous, and ambitious patriots unbound to mainstream institutions, a group from which I believe much good can arise.

The EF event forced me to reflect on how I can help lead efforts among this group. Among this group, I see three central difficulties: a lack of clarity of mission, that people are working independently rather than forming concrete teams, and that people are scattered across the internet rather than working together physically. As I begin to address these problems, I foresee some complications, though I believe that the EF event has provided me with some tools to address them, as I detail below.

The most significant problem that I see is a lack of mission. People within this group are working on good things: running small businesses, starting tech companies, offering online courses on philosophy and political thought (especially from viewpoints that are censored today), writing intelligently on contemporary politics and religion, writing fiction and poetry, self-publishing books and independent studies, and organizing online networks of such skilled and dedicated people. However, this group is not oriented towards a common mission, nor have its members adequately clarified the usefulness of their projects, often leading them to lament that their works are not more widely appreciated. I believe that EF's principle of ownership is a useful point of reflection here: to take ownership of the fact that the work is not appreciated, by, for example, building relationships with those you want to appreciate it, and putting in the effort to show them why it is valuable. I have taken ownership in such a way by writing this article: part of its goal is to illustrate to a wider audience the power of political philosophy to help the American cause. (Conversely, I am also trying to illustrate the power of EF's teaching to those who might otherwise underappreciated it.) Dinnell's speech is also obviously relevant here, centering on the need to clearly identify your mission, to know who your enemy is, and to clarify what winning actually looks like. To do so, he advises reconnecting with your why, which I intend to do in the form of a detailed mission document that I will publish on this Substack.

Another problem is the failure to form explicit teams and to instead operate as a loosely connected "grassroots" movement. Teams have not formed partly due to the lack of an overarching mission and partly because people had to first stabilize themselves financially by pursuing their own projects. Since many have acquired this personal stability, the time is ripe for team building. However, for a typical person in this group (myself included), I do see a fundamental aversion to both joining and leading a team. In my view, such a person's aversion to joining a team is rooted in a strong sense of individualism, fearing that the team will stifle his creativity and force him to pledge allegiance to a cause that does not fully align with his nuanced perspective, while his aversion to leading a team is rooted in a negative view of leadership, seeing it as menial administrative work that takes time away from "real work" or as fundamentally destructive to his current relationships, by demanding he bark orders at friends, for example.

I believe EF's unique approach to leadership may help mitigate these concerns among this group. To the concern for individualism, EF's teachings on freedom, of leading such that subordinates are in control over their own destinies by clarifying the why not the how of a mission and letting them come up with their own plan, for example, are relevant. As is Willink's teaching on unified strategic goals which holds that it's okay if team members pursue different goals or agendas as long as the leader maintains alignment with the overall mission. To the negative view of leadership, I reiterate my view above, that EF portrays leadership as a fundamentally noble pursuit, one that orients both the leader and follower towards human excellence. Moreover, I believe that the complexity and degree of thought put into EF's leadership framework will appeal to such an intellectually oriented group. Finally, to the concern over the effect of leadership on personal relationships, EF's teachings on the importance of humility in a leader, of building relationships with and caring for teammates, of building leadership capital (by using a subordinate's plan, for example), and of taking ownership, which fundamentally mitigates the spread of blame, are all relevant.

While the problem of people connecting over the internet rather than in person is the final one that I discuss, it is actually the first one that must be addressed. It is only through in-person meetings that a clear overarching mission can develop and that explicit teams can form organically. To this end, hosting physical conferences and securing properties at which people can regularly gather are crucial. Shortly after attending the EF event, I attended another event that I believe is an important step in this direction. It was the North by Northwest (NxNW) event organized through Justin Murphy's OtherLife group (an online group of talented creatives, writers, independent scholars, and entrepreneurs that I've been a part of for several years) at the Wagon Box Inn in Story, Wyoming. The Inn was purchased by another group with the vision of becoming "something between a college campus, a cherished vacation home in the mountains, and the tea houses and taverns that were once the seedbeds of philosophical and political discourse."

The NxNW event highlighted to me the crucial importance of in-person meetings. Not only did I meet many interesting people to collaborate with, but the power of community, camaraderie, and a sense of brotherhood, none of which can be built online, became apparent to me. The power of camaraderie and brotherhood for team success, while not discussed explicitly at the EF event in the context of business, was prevalent in EF's descriptions of their time as SEALs. I believe that EF's comprehensive leadership framework will serve as an excellent guide to begin leading tight-knit in-person groups like this.

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Political Philosophy

I felt that understanding the American crisis at a deeper level was necessary to set America on a stable footing. This led me to undertake an independent study of political philosophy which revealed the necessity of a comprehensive understanding of man, something that is severely lacking in the modern world. I believed that attending the EF event would provide unique insights into the nature of man as well as into the possibility of a revival of ancient ideals in the modern world. Prior to the event, I had noticed some of EF's philosophically relevant connections relating to the holistic education of man, to the Greek teaching on virtue, to specific elements of Socrates' teaching, and to the power of war to fundamentally transform the nature of man. This section explores these connections further given what I learned at the conference.

How are EF and the Greeks related in their teachings on virtue? Prior to the event, I had noticed a similarity, centering around a shared reverence for fortifying virtues, like courage, between the two. After acquiring a richer understanding of EF's teaching at the event, I believe that this connection is even stronger than I had initially thought. For the Greeks, while fortifying virtues like courage are upheld, so too are mediating virtues like prudence and moderation. While teachings among the Greeks differ (on the rank of the virtues and how they are balanced, for example), the cultivation of virtues always serves a telos, an end or a purpose. This telos is always related to the development of human excellence and to living a good and noble life (in contrast to the pursuit of other aims like freedom or pleasure).

Above, I characterized my understanding of EF's teaching on the virtues as follows: "Effective leadership requires [fortifying] virtues yet also directs their use and mediates their expression through competing virtues such as humility." As with the Greeks, for EF both fortifying and mediating virtues are upheld and the cultivation of these virtues serves a telos. Here, this telos is effective leadership, and leadership itself has a telos, which is either victory in war, business prosperity, or living a good life. While the parallelism does not strictly hold, it does strongly differentiate these two views from those that dominate today. These include the views that fortifying virtues should be opposed (modern weakness and decadence), that virtue should be cultivated in the service of freedom or pleasure rather than excellence, and that the cultivation of fortifying virtues like courage is an end in itself (not serving any higher purpose).

At the conference I noticed an interesting connection to Socratic questioning. Within Plato's works, we never find Socrates alone, but rather in complex dialogues with other men in which he shows extreme care and tact. He rarely presents a direct teaching but instead leads them to the truth through questioning. By questioning their firmly held opinions (such as on what courage or justice is), he leads them to recognize the weakness of their beliefs, a necessary step on the way towards the truth, and one that often evades their defensiveness. In a similar spirit, EF's teaching on the indirect approach to leadership advises, for example, that a leader should not directly point out a flaw in a subordinate's plan but should instead ask him questions that lead him to recognize this truth on his own. Several other connections to specific themes in Greek philosophy could be drawn, such as on the importance of friendship, on prudence and judgement being essential to good rule, and on the tension between theory and practice, but I will not pursue these here.

Instead, I will highlight a more fundamentally relevant connection. Within Plato's dialogues, Socrates' teaching is interwoven with the dramatic action between him and his interlocutors, while at the conference, EF's teaching on leadership was tightly interwoven with dramatic military stories. A fundamental question in political philosophy centers around the proper mode of access to political truths: can these truths be captured logically, through a complex system of concepts, or is there something essential about political life that defies conceptualization, that can only be grasped through story presenting dramatic action among people, for example? This question was adjudicated in an important way surrounding the reading of Plato's dialogues. While many readers, operating under the former view, attempted to "extract" Plato's conceptual teaching and leave the "useless" drama of the dialogue behind, Leo Strauss (1899-1973), operating under the opposite view, uncovered Plato's rich teachings on political life, which were implicit in the dialogues' subtle dramatic detail.

This fundamental question arises in the context of the EF event as well. Some may be inclined to believe that the conference's essential teaching on leadership lies entirely in its explicit conceptual teaching which can consequently be isolated from its prominent dramatic content (military stories, reverence for fallen soldiers, exhortations to self-mastery, physical fitness, martial arts). That is, that this content has no bearing on the event's essential teaching, even if it serves other ends such as engaging the audience or supplementing the teaching with examples. Taking a clue from Strauss, I am inclined to disagree with this view and instead hold that this dramatic content is essential to truly comprehend EF's teaching on leadership. In fact, as I said above, I believe that this content implicitly carries one of the most important teachings of the event: that leadership is a fundamentally noble pursuit. It was this teaching that instilled in me the desire to actually become a leader. I don't believe that this teaching could have been captured in direct speech but only through the event's dramatic content through which it shone.

Turning to the question of whether and how war affects a philosophically relevant transformation of man, two ideas at the conference stood out to me. First, that the fallen soldier not only impacts the lives of those nearest to him, but fundamentally transforms the nature of their existence. The soldier is, in a sense, always with them, as a burden and pain that never goes away, as well as a spirit that lives within and acts through them, animating their good works, for example. Man, in death, is revealed as a being that can be simultaneously there and not there, a conspicuous absence whose force is always felt. Second, veteran survivors of war can know both the depths and heights of human existence to a greater degree than modern man can. Rob Jones' story clearly illustrated this point, showing that his losing his legs in war did not break him but instead made him stronger. A clip from the Jocko Podcast woven between two of the event's speeches articulated this point more explicitly. In the clip, Willink addressed veterans struggling with despair over the evils that they had experienced during war and their subsequent feelings of alienation from non-veterans who do not truly comprehend these evils. Willink affirmed that the others do not truly understand this darkness, yet also sought to turn these veterans around from their despair and towards the realization that they also understand the heights of joy, love, brotherhood, and the goodness and beauty of life much more intimately than the others do.

Yet the darkness of war alone does not guarantee access to these heights. Explicit effort is required to do so, as Jones' exhortation to own your attitude and Willink's exhortation that the struggling veteran discipline himself in order to free himself indicate. It seems that war may provide a glimpse of these heights as well as the impetus for a dedicated questioning into the good life, but that a sincere pursuit of this life requires the art of leadership in oneself (which the above two directives serve). To my motivating question about the fundamental impacts of alienation from war on modern man, we may wonder if losing the ability to properly raise the question of the good life is one of them. But can we learn about insights from war without going to war ourselves? Can stories of war help modern man raise the question of the good life and orient him towards its pursuit? To this question, I think that the manner in which these stories are communicated is crucial. As I said above, the impact of war was communicated to me more strongly through the EF event than had previously been done through other means, such as movies, books, museums, ceremonies, news reports, and occasional discussions with veterans. Is there a fundamental reason for this? I think it's worth investigating three possibilities: that the event immersed attendees in such stories for two days, that the stories were specifically chosen to impart a lesson (such as owning your attitude), and that attendees were not merely passive listeners but were instead actively involved in learning a practical skill (leadership).

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While many other philosophically relevant insights could be drawn out from the conference, I will stop here. A key point of this section has been to show that many fundamental questions about the good life were raised more seriously at the EF event than they are elsewhere in modern society, even if they are so raised at a sub-philosophical level. It may be wondered how these insights, even if brought under a philosophic framing as I have begun to do here, can help us navigate the current crisis. While this is the ultimate goal, it cannot be our immediate goal. We are still in the preliminary stages of even attempting such a corrective. Our task now must be to discover where in American culture such insights live most fully and to gather together these fragments that will ultimately be sewn together into a comprehensive view of human life and the good political order. It is from such a clear and comprehensive view that concrete political action may flow.

In my view, it is the essential task of intelligent patriots unbound to mainstream institutions (the group that I hope to help lead, as I stated above) to rigorously develop such a comprehensive philosophy of the good life contra the modern world. It is with this group that I see the quest for the good life and political truth pursued most passionately, and it is with this group that I see the unique capability to unify the fundamental insights from foundational texts, both ancient and modern, with the few elements of contemporary culture, such as the EF event, in which the good life is earnestly pursued. Moreover, it is within these cultural elements that I see the proper soil for such philosophical seeds to ultimately grow. One of the goals of this article has been to encourage the investigation of other cultural elements that may hold an essential piece of the puzzle and to show how such an investigation might proceed.

Suggested Additions

I would suggest two additions to the conference. First, to have a concluding speech that reviews and ties together the information taught throughout the event, and second, to clarify the connection between leadership and Jiu-Jitsu.

While each speech was clear and well organized, I felt that it was difficult to keep track of all of the information presented throughout the conference. I think that this can be remedied with a concluding speech that provides a short overview of each of the event's speeches and also reviews key concepts and terms and how they were used throughout the event. This conceptual review would be useful as the conference introduced many new concepts, such as leading from the rear, leadership capital, readback, and leading up the chain of command, and also used common terms like ego in a special way. In other words, such a review could address questions like "What is leading up the chain of command and what successful examples of this technique were presented over the past two days?" and "How exactly does the ego negatively impact leadership?" (to which an answer could be: by preventing honest self-assessment, inhibiting decision making through rejection of feedback, inhibiting relationship building, and inhibiting the ability to detach from a situation.) I also think that it would be useful to show the interconnection of these concepts in some way. While this may be difficult to do in a speech, perhaps supplementing the material with a wiki-style network of web pages would be useful. This could serve as a glossary of concepts that also reveals the connections among them through each page's hyperlinks.

While Jiu-Jitsu was an interesting inclusion in the event, its connection with leadership was only briefly addressed. Willink touched upon this connection by citing Jiu-Jitsu as a primary inspiration for many of his ideas on the counterintuitive nature of leadership. For example, Jiu-Jitsu requires an indirect approach to maneuvering and launching attacks while effective leadership requires an indirect approach to critical communication, such as by asking a subordinate critical questions rather than directly refuting his idea. When I asked Echo Charles about the connection of leadership and Jiu-Jitsu event's kickoff social, he also cited the indirect approach, as well as the balance of competition and collaboration, and the importance of coming face to face with the truth. This final idea is captured succinctly by the expression "the mats don't lie," that while you can live your life day to day without being measured, hence evading the truth, a Jiu-Jitsu match on the mats forces you to come face to face with the truth.

I think a short speech dedicated to the connection of leadership and Jiu-Jitsu would have been useful. I also think that the notion of martial arts training fits in nicely with the notion of training discussed in the speeches as well as with the role-playing exercises that were conducted throughout the conference, such as where one person played the role of a boss and the other as a high achieving employee who refused to obey safety protocols. I would be interested to know if martial arts training can be used as a model for designing training programs relevant to leadership. Or do the two arts, martial arts and leadership, fundamentally differ in the manner in which their training can be carried out? In Jiu-Jitsu training, you regularly simulate the neutralization or injury of another person (choking him out or breaking a limb), yet are able to do so without actual injury by tapping out (which signals the onset of injury and commands the training partner to stop his attack). In a leadership training exercise, you may want to simulate the destruction of someone's ego. Would it be possible to do this in a manner that does not cause permanent damage (which may be something like the destruction of a personal relationship) and that either training partner can easily halt before such damage occurs (akin to tapping out)?

It may seem counterintuitive, but I suspect that it may not be so easy to develop a training regiment where things like the ego or personal reputation are at stake. This was something that struck me at university: that in MMA or Jiu-Jitsu fights people can nearly kill each other then leave the arena as friends, while in many political discussions today, a slight personal offense or disagreement can turn someone into a lifelong enemy and social pariah. It was the desire to remedy this behavior, perceiving it as a great problem for the nation, that spawned my interest in developing a training program for such debate modeled on martial arts training, as I cited above as a motivation for attending the event. While I have yet to explore this idea in detail, I think EF's linking of martial arts and leadership training echoes a similar realization (albeit in a different realm) and encourages my pursuit.

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Conclusion

I highly recommend attending this event. The event illustrated the true power of leadership and inspired in me the sincere desire to become a leader. It provided a wealth of practical knowledge about leadership that would be useful to teams operating in any industry, as I hope the Conference Description section demonstrated. While the event largely aims to help people overcome business and personal challenges, I believe that it is also an important American cultural phenomenon, as the Motivations and Reflections sections sought to demonstrate. The event promotes many things that are good for the nation: leadership, business success, virtue and self-mastery, patriotism rooted in reverence for military sacrifice, and martial arts. Moreover, it unifies these seemingly disparate goods, pointing towards a comprehensive view of human life and a means by which such a life can be cultivated (through leadership). At a deeper level, the event provides insight into the philosophical underpinnings of the current cultural crisis. It provides insight into the essence of man, the nature of death and war, the possibility of a revival of ancient philosophical ideals, and raises fundamental questions about the good life more seriously than they are raised elsewhere in modern society.

The event helped me reflect on my role in the battle for the heart and soul of America, on how I could have better led the fight at university and more importantly how I can better lead the fight going forward. To this end, I considered my role among a loosely connected group of independent scholars, writers, and entrepreneurs, a group that I believe has a crucial role to play in revitalizing the American spirit. Is leadership the untapped power that can help this group reach its full potential? I reflected upon key challenges that I see within this group and how EF's unique leadership teaching might help overcome them. I highlighted the key challenge of building bridges between this group and other groups of patriotic Americans. This article aimed to facilitate such a connection by demonstrating the intelligence and depth of EF's teaching, and, conversely, by demonstrating the relevance and power of political philosophy to address the current cultural crisis.

Editorial Note: This article is a modification of an essay that I originally wrote for Johannes Niederhauser's Being and Time course earlier this year. It captures my experience of first encountering Being and Time and lays out some ideas and questions that will serve as a rough guide for a deeper engagement with the text that I plan to undertake in the coming months.

Introduction

The first thing that struck me about Martin Heidegger's Being and Time was the depth and force of its thinking. The text seemed to employ a precise method yet also to stand above itself in awareness of its method, as if each step it took was deliberate, authoritative, and necessary. Moreover, this incredible intellectual force was summoned not in the service of "making an argument" or of "proving something correct," but in the service of the seemingly innocuous task of formulating a question. This question, of course, is the question of the meaning of being - of what is meant by words like "be" or "is" in phrases like "the sky is blue" or questions like "what is life?"

The depth and force of Being and Time's thought is reflected perhaps even more strongly in the striking intellectual priority and profound implications of its central question, despite the question's apparent simplicity. The question of being is the fundamental question of philosophy and is necessary to ground all knowledge, including apparently well-founded scientific knowledge. While biology, for example, can acquire detailed knowledge about living organisms, it cannot say exactly what its underlying concept of life is. Moreover, the question of being elevates the human being, rather than some abstract "objective" intellectual landscape, to central priority. The human being, as Heidegger tells us, is the unique being that is concerned about its own existence. Consequently, it is the being that must be interrogated to raise the question of being.

The striking intellectual force of Being and Time led me to wonder if I could train myself to think better and simultaneously clarify the essence of thinking by mastering this profound text. At the outset, I envision that mastering this difficult text will require my thinking to be greatly strengthened and will entail understanding, as much as possible, how Heidegger thinks. I envision that understanding his profound thinking will help clarify the essence of thinking: what thinking is, what its essential structures are, if great thinkers are separated from good thinkers primarily by their grasp of the essence of thinking, and consequently how, if it is at all possible, to "train" a good thinker to become a great thinker.

In this article, I explore my underlying questions - on the essence of thinking and how human thinking can be trained - in the context of the four aspects of the Being and Time that I highlighted above: the text's meticulous precision, the essence of questioning and its priority for thinking, the priority of philosophy (as inquiry into the question of being) over scientific knowledge and thought, and the intimate binding of the human being to thinking. In a future article I will address my underlying questions more directly and comprehensively.

Detailed Textual Analysis and Thinking

My struggle comprehending Being and Time was dominated by a difficulty in understanding its low-level text - its sentences, paragraphs, and sections - which, of course, blocked any path to understanding the book as a whole. My struggle with the text was accompanied by a strong feeling that the text was expertly crafted, possessing a carefully designed though hidden structure that I gradually felt myself unraveling as I read. I came to believe that my struggle with the text was primarily due to my inability to clearly see this structure and I felt a strong need to acquire an explicit elucidation of it - something that more rigorously, clearly, and comprehensively captured what my impromptu dissections of the text, manifest in my written marks on the pages of the book, crudely attempted to grasp. I felt that such an elucidation would serve as a detailed guide to the text, essential for comprehending it as fully as possible.

What exactly is this "hidden structure" and what would an elucidation of this structure look like? Is there ambiguity to this structure, or is it more or less certain, though concealed by the written text's sequential format? What are the merits and limitations of such an elucidation? Would it serve as a guide to help new readers understand the text? Would it help experienced readers gain a deeper mastery of the text? Is there something about the low-level text that fundamentally defies this kind of elucidation?

To investigate these questions, I will attempt a detailed analysis of the book's Introduction (§§1-8) that will proceed in two ways. First, will be a close reading of the text accompanied by a detailed commentary that will attempt to "explain" it and to grasp more precisely what I do not comprehend about it. Second, will be a more explicit elucidation of the text's structure which I believe is concealed by the text's sequential format. At the outset, I feel that that this requires at least the following: making implicit relations between sentences explicit, making contrasts (or similarities) among terms or concepts visually clear, clearly linking steps in an argument or line of thought across long blocks of text, and identifying a hierarchy among a sequence of ideas which signifies a kind of priority or importance among the ideas.

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The task of obtaining a detailed understanding of the low-level text relates to this article’s guiding tasks of training myself to think better and clarifying the essence of thinking in several ways.

First, I felt that my failure to comprehend the text - and my inability to write anything approaching its caliber - represented a significant shortcoming in my ability to think. Moreover, I felt that I could utilize the task of obtaining a detailed comprehension of the text to "train" my thinking. That is, that I could deliberately expose myself to this task with the intention of strengthening my thinking and that I could repeatedly return to this task, as if it were an infinitely deep well, to progressively strengthen my thinking. Moreover, I felt that thinking deliberately trained in this manner would enhance my ability to think about problems beyond the comprehension of this book, such as about political and scientific problems important to me.

Additionally, this plan to train my thinking presumes a lot about the essence of thinking: that thinking is akin to an art that is amenable to training, that thinking can be improved by exposure to and analysis of a great thinker, that I am able to recognize great thinking (the text of Being and Time) before I am able to comprehend it, and that thinking can be "trained" in one domain and "transferred" to another. To what extent are these assumptions correct, and what do they fail to grasp about the essence of thinking?

Finally, I believe that an explicit elucidation of Being and Time's low-level text will reveal something about how Heidegger thinks. Some questions about this that I want to investigate include: Does the structure of the low-level text of great thinkers fundamentally differ from that of merely good thinkers? Is it somehow more complex, densely connected, or precise? On the other hand, does some essential aspect of the text, and great thinking more generally, fundamentally evade such a structural elucidation?

Questioning and its Priority for Thinking

Being and Time led me to reflect upon the nature of questioning and its intimate relationship with thinking. This reflection was spawned by three observations. First, by the book's sustained focus on the formulation of a question (the question of being); second by Heidegger's short but direct focus on questioning as such early in the book; and third by the abundant use of questioning in Heidegger's writing.

The book's sustained focus on the formulation of a question led me to reflect upon the nature of questioning and wonder: What exactly is a question? What does it mean to formulate a question? How do we know when a question has been properly formulated? Is questioning fundamental to all thinking, and if so, how can we think at all if we do not possess a mastery of the question? Such mastery would entail at least an understanding of how to formulate a question, how a question can be distorted, and how a particular formulation or distortion of a question implicitly bounds or distorts our thinking.

Heidegger touches upon some of these points early in the book (§2) where he discusses the structure of the question as such. This short meditation on the question was profound to me and unlike anything I had encountered it in my entire formal education. One simple statement that stuck out to me was that "Every inquiry is a seeking. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought." How exactly can you lack knowledge of something, yet still be intimately influenced by it, as something that gives your thinking necessary guidance? (This question is related to the relationship between a vague and deep understanding of being that I discuss below.)

Heidegger's writing makes abundant use of questioning. What functions does questioning serve in Heidegger's writing? Some of his questions seem rhetorical, as he immediately provides an answer. The very first lines of the text, for example, are of this form: "Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word 'being'? Not at all." It seems that this could have been written more simply as the assertion, "In our time we do not have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word 'being.'" What precisely is lost by such a formulation? What does the question capture that the assertion does not?

In explicitly laying out questions, is Heidegger intentionally revealing his thinking to the reader to implicitly teach him how to think, to invite the reader to think along with him? Moreover, what effect does the question have on the reader's experience of reading? In my experience, questioning dramatically effects the tempo of my reading. It forces me to pause which causes the question to ruminate in my mind briefly. This is in contrast to a "mindless," unthinking, state that I sometimes fall into while reading a series of assertions which doesn’t force me to pause.

The Primacy of Philosophy over Scientific Knowledge and Thinking

Being and Time was the first book I read that radically challenged the authority of scientific knowledge and the dominant contemporary judgement of scientific thinking as the apex of cognitive activity. It was shocking to hear Heidegger describe the apparently pristine and precise character of scientific knowledge as merely "simulated rigor" that fundamentally fails to think down to its roots. These roots, Heidegger claims, can be provided only by philosophy, properly understood in its central task of raising the question of being.

Under this view, philosophy is elevated from its common conception today, as merely one among many academic disciplines, to the fundamental ground on which all other disciplines rise and fall. While I had heard arguments on the supremacy of philosophy before, they had largely seemed theoretical or pedantic. For me, Being and Time was the first book that credibly and powerfully challenged scientific authority on this ground and that raised philosophy to the primary intellectual rank. Moreover, its challenge is rooted in our everyday experience of the world, in how we live, dwell, and die, not in some complex, esoteric theory about science.

This challenge to scientific authority is significant to me for several reasons. First, the idea that scientific knowledge faces a fundamental crisis of legitimacy was never seriously raised or even brought to my attention during my entire formal scientific education. Yet during this time I had often felt that there was something unstable about scientific knowledge: that it rested on predefined systems of concepts that were not seriously questioned, that many research projects were carried out in an ad-hoc manner, and that there was a lack of rigor in understanding the process of scientific thinking, of precisely how scientists engage in scientific inquiry. Moreover, there seemed to be little concern about any of these things within the scientific community.

Being and Time's claim that the fundamental necessity for grounding scientific knowledge - by raising the question of being - is one that most scientists (and most academic philosophers) are completely unaware of or believe is unnecessary resonated with my personal observations. Moreover, Being and Time gave me a concrete path to begin understanding the fundamental shortcomings of scientific knowledge and thinking, whereas before I only had suspicions.

The proper comprehension of philosophy and the recognition of its intellectual supremacy raises important questions related to this article's guiding tasks of improving my thinking and clarifying the essence of thinking. Does the primacy of philosophy over scientific knowledge also imply that philosophy requires thinking of a fundamentally higher caliber than thinking within the sciences? How would the character of my thinking change if I invested my time into studying Being and Time as opposed to studying scientific works? What can we discover about the essence of thinking when we recognize that it is more difficult to think about being, something seemingly simple and common, than it is to think about scientific questions, which are seemingly complex and accessible only to a handful specially trained experts?

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Binding of the Human Being to Thinking

Three sets of questions regarding the intimate relationship between thinking and the human being jumped out at me as I read Being and Time. The first has to do with the relationship between a vague and deep understanding of being, the second with what made Heidegger such a powerful thinker, and the third with the fundamental difference in thinking between the ancients and the moderns.

First, as Being and Time tells us, we humans have a vague understanding of being which is not somehow inferior to a deeper understanding of being. The vague understanding is not an error or misunderstanding, nor is it a methodological artifact of human thinking - a kind of naive "intuition" that at best guides thinking towards acquiring a deeper understanding that ultimately supersedes and erases the vague understanding. Instead, our vague understanding, manifest in our everyday interactions, is somehow the basis for our ability to form a deeper understanding of being.

This idea led me to wonder: What is the character of this vague understanding of being? Is the vague understanding necessary to initiate our inquiry toward a deeper understanding? Does it guide us throughout this inquiry? Does it continue to live after our inquiry is "done?" That is, upon acquiring a deeper understanding of being, how exactly does the vague understanding continue to influence us? These questions are practically relevant to me as I consider the relationship between a vague and deeper understanding of the being of politically relevant phenomena, like courage. That is, if I begin with a vague understanding of what courage is, how can I begin thinking to acquire a deeper understanding of what courage is?

Second, what was it about Heidegger that made him so unique? How was it possible for him to write Being and Time and why does it seem like a work of similar gravity and depth could not be written today? One hypothesis I have relates to the seemingly innocuous claim that we all have a vague understanding of being. I want to investigate how this vague a priori understanding differs among people and particularly how Heidegger's understanding differs. Did Heidegger have a fundamentally different, somehow much richer, everyday experience and engagement with the world that made his penetrating inquiry possible? More generally, do the authors of Great Books have a fundamentally different everyday experience of the world that makes their writing possible? Why are great thinkers so rare and why has the recent rapid increase in the human population not coincided with an increase in the number of Great Books authored? Has this population increase led to, or coincided with, a widespread impoverishment of our everyday experience of the world, making such projects impossible?

Finally, I was struck by Heidegger's claims about the fate of the question of being throughout history. He tells us that the question of being was profoundly alive for ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle but that modern thought is dominated by prejudices that block our access to the question. How is it possible that the Greeks had deeper insight than the moderns when we have millennia of human experience, the accumulated knowledge of great thinkers, and the technological tools to recall it instantly? How is it possible for a question to get lost and how is it possible to raise it anew? Is it raised anew by reading the ancient works and trying to piece together their thinking, as if attempting to resurrect a dead body, or is it raised anew by looking into one's self and raising it "independently" of the ancients, though perhaps in dialogue with them?

Conclusion

This article captures some of my initial reactions to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. In particular, it raises questions about the essence of thinking and how the book can help its readers become better thinkers. I intend to use these questions and observations as a basis for a deeper engagement with the text that I plan to undertake in the coming months.

The Millerman School is an online school of political philosophy that offers courses on texts authored by Plato, Aristotle, Leo Strauss, Martin Heidegger, and other great thinkers. This article is my review of the Millerman School, having completed most of the school's courses and dozens of one-on-one tutoring sessions with Michael Millerman, founder of the school. Overall, the course content is extremely high quality, the school covers many texts that are not widely read today, and Millerman is an excellent and passionate teacher who clearly sees the deep social and political problems currently facing Western civilization. Millerman motivates the study of political philosophy as an essential means to clarify these problems and to ground political thinking aimed at their solutions.

This article is organized as follows. After providing a high-level overview of the school’s ideological architecture, I discuss Millerman's individual courses, reviewing the quality of their content and Millerman's teaching style. I then return to discuss the school architecture in more detail, characterizing the types of books that Millerman has chosen to teach and why, in my opinion, he has chosen them. I conclude with a discussion of the contemporary importance of the Millerman School in light of the deep cultural and ideological prejudices that have come to dominate academia and society at large. In a future article, I will provide a more detailed overview of each of the school’s courses to help interested students decide what to study.

School Architecture

Each of Millerman's courses covers a single topic or book relevant to political philosophy. Each course, in my view, serves one of three purposes which collectively define the architecture of the school:

• First, the school introduces us to a wide range of political thought, covering texts that are ancient and foundational, like Plato's Republic, and others that are contemporary and controversial, like Alexander Dugin's Fourth Political Theory. Much of this thought is poorly represented or outright suppressed today, largely due to ideological prejudices both inside and outside of academia. Millerman thus introduces us to books, authors, and ideas that we would otherwise not have access to, some of which required significant courage and sacrifice on his part to bring to us, a point that I will return to later.

• Moreover, the school brings the intimate relationship between politics and philosophy to the fore, covering seemingly abstract philosophic texts, like Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and texts that more directly bridge the gap between politics and philosophy, like Leo Strauss's What is Political Philosophy? The school asks us to consider two questions about the relationship between politics and philosophy. First, can surface level political disputes be traced back to deeper disputes over a few, often unarticulated, abstract philosophic beliefs? Second, can we subject our a priori political opinions to rigorous philosophic questioning? For example, everyone has a vague understanding of courage and its political importance, but what exactly is courage?

• Finally, the school's pursuit of seemingly esoteric political and philosophic questions is not driven merely by theoretical interest. Instead, it is driven by a desire to understand the current political crisis in the West as well as potential paths forward. Millerman's Philosophic Analysis of Masculinity course, for example, asks how the notions of man and masculinity have transformed throughout the history of political philosophy and shows how these transformations configure political debate about these topics today.

I will first discuss the quality of Millerman's individual courses before returning to discuss each of these points in more detail.

Individual Courses

Each course consists of a set of prerecorded video lectures that usually total between five and ten hours in length. Most are delivered exclusively by Millerman while a few are delivered to a group of students, interspersed with question and answer exchanges. The course content is impressive in breadth and depth, providing an accessible high-level guide to an often difficult text while at the same time showcasing the text's depth and richness. In so doing, Millerman trains us to read the text, the careful work of a great thinker, with the care necessary to properly understand the author's often subtle and nuanced teaching. Moreover, Millerman delivers the content with a passion that is both engaging and reflective of the critical importance of what he is teaching. It tells us that we are not seeking a merely academic understanding of the text, as if reading were simply a hobby to occupy our time, but instead that we are seeking essential knowledge about who we are, how we should live our lives individually and politically, and how we should begin questioning and thinking about these things.

The courses cover texts at varying levels of detail. Millerman's course on Heidegger's Being and Time, for example, focuses our attention on the movement of the book's high-level argument which easily gets lost in its notoriously difficult language and meticulous detail. As such, Millerman's course was an indispensable guide to my first reading of the book. Millerman's course on Nietzsche's novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, on the other hand, covers nearly every page of the book in detail. While the high-level movement of Zarathustra is easy to follow, the book contains a wealth of nuance and, though not an overtly political book, raises many questions relevant to political philosophy that are easily overlooked. Though I had read Zarathustra before, Millerman's course greatly enriched my understanding of the book, especially its implications for political philosophy, and will serve as a further guide as I delve even more deeply into the book.

In addition to helping us understand the primary text, each course helps us understand political philosophy as a whole. Millerman is quick to recognize, and eager to point out, the primary text's often implicit connections to other texts. Through these intertextual connections, each course serves as a launching pad to discover many other high quality political philosophy texts. As such, Millerman’s courses served as indispensable starting points for my exploration of the vast canon of Western political philosophy.

Millerman highlights these connections in several ways, including short digressions during a lecture, rich question and answer exchanges with students, and bonus videos focusing on an explicit connection. These are seen, for example, in his Plato's Republic course. While discussing Socrates' rationale for banishing a wandering poet from his ideal city - that although the poet's poems are pleasing, they attack the gods and hence undermine political stability - Millerman points us to Rousseau's eighteenth-century Politics and the Arts (also covered in the school), which presents a similar rationale for opposing the construction of a theatre in Geneva - that the theatre would showcase entertaining but bad behavior which would encourage bad behavior among the citizens. Question and answer exchanges with students traversed many of the book's topics, including the soul-forming power of music and its potentially negative political implications. Here, Millerman directs us to the 1987 Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, preeminent Plato scholar and translator of the Republic, for a discussion of the effects of contemporary music on education and politics which raises similar concerns. Finally, Millerman complements his discussion of the Republic's famous cave allegory with a short bonus course on Heidegger's treatment of the allegory which focuses on the idea of paideia and the "turning around" of the soul that education is supposed to accomplish.

These intertextual connections, while serving to direct a student's study of political philosophy, also reveal something very practical and significant about politics: that although the times and situations change, the fundamental problems of human and political life exhibit a noticeable permanence, echoing across the centuries and into our own age. We encounter ancient authors and characters in memorable scenes discussing issues of central importance to us today, issues like censorship, education, tyranny, justice and injustice, courage and cowardice, love, the best way to live life, and the best political regime. Moreover, far from treating these issues naively, as a first attempt which our civilization has long since surpassed, these books do the exact opposite: they provide fresh insights rooted in a sophisticated understanding of human and political life from which we have a lot to learn.

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Collection of Courses

While each course is impressive in its breadth, depth, and contemporary relevance, so too is the collection of courses that Millerman that has selected for the school. Collectively, the courses introduce us to a breadth of political thought that is poorly represented or outright suppressed today. This breadth of political thought is complemented with philosophic depth that helps us analyze this thought and understand the intimate relationship between politics and philosophy. Finally, one course explicitly addresses a contemporary problem, showing how political philosophy can help us better understand the problem and potential solutions.

Breadth of Political Thought

Millerman's courses introduce us to a wide range of political thought which, in my view, can be categorized into three distinct realms. Each realm of thought presents us with an entirely different political worldview, one that implicitly or explicitly rejects certain key assumptions underlying liberal democracy, the governing structure of our regime. This rejection furnishes us with important critiques of our society’s dominant political worldview, but also subjects the realm of thought to distinct prejudices that inhibit its study today. I summarize these three realms of thought as follows:

• Ancient Greek political thought, predominantly the thought of Plato and Aristotle, takes a comprehensive view of politics that focusses on the cultivation of human excellence and finding the best political regime. The Greeks' comprehensive view of politics differs wildly from our own which concerns itself with policies rather than molding excellent citizens and men. Moreover, many of the Greeks' conclusions are anathema today: that democracy is a fundamentally flawed political regime, that there is a fundamental division between the wise and the many, who cannot be made wise, and that technological progress is not a universal good, but is likely a danger when liberated from moral and political control, for example. This realm of thought is subject to two kinds of contemporary prejudice: the progressive prejudice which holds that it is out of date, irrelevant, and backward thinking, and the conservative prejudice that sees it as a mere historic relic, the foundation of Western civilization that young people "should" study, rather than something from which we can really learn.

• Religious and mystical thought both recognize the legitimacy of transcendent personal experiences and the significance of man's spiritual nature. A transcendent experience provides access to knowledge that cannot be attained by reason alone and is politically relevant in one of two ways. It may be the direct revelation of a code of law, as the revelation from God to a prophet in the Biblical tradition, for example. Alternatively, it may broadly transform a man's understanding of his life and purpose, which has far-reaching, though subtle, political implications. Religious and mystical thought are primarily subject to two prejudices today. First, that they are anti-scientific, largely due to their belief in a supernatural realm that cannot be directly observed. Second, that they are anti-intellectual, largely due to the poetic or metaphoric language in which they are often expressed which is accused of intentionally obscuring their beliefs such that they cannot be rationally refuted.

• Right-wing anti-liberal thought encompasses thinkers who can be broadly placed on the political right but who oppose certain fundamental assumptions underlying Western liberal democracy. Some such thinkers reject egalitarianism, for example, under the belief that it levels man and prevents human greatness from flourishing. Moreover, many of these thinkers call our common understanding of political topology as a left to right spectrum into question. Some reject the label of the "right" altogether, while others ask us to consider what the principles of a "true right," one not constrained by the bounds of liberal democracy, would entail. These thinkers face the most severe prejudices today, especially those directly or indirectly associated with twentieth-century National Socialist or Fascist political movements. Millerman's goal in presenting these thinkers is not motivated by an advocacy of these political beliefs, but instead by a desire to properly understand these thinkers so that we can accurately evaluate their ideas and determine what value they have to offer.

Philosophic Depth

In introducing us to these realms of political thought, Millerman provides us with many new ideas and worldviews to consider, each of which we may accept, reject, or modify to incorporate into our own political thought. While this greatly expands our political options, it is not Millerman's ultimate goal. Instead, he asks us to reflect more deeply on the nature of political thought and of politics itself by examining its philosophic roots. For this deeper philosophic analysis, the twentieth-century philosophers Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss are central to the Millerman School.

Heidegger's thinking centers around the question of the meaning of being - we constantly use the phrases "to be" or "is," when we say "the door is open," for example, but what does this really mean? Although this question may seem useless or pedantic, it is actually the "question of all questions" that implicitly grounds all inquiry and knowledge, including formal scientific inquiry and our understanding of what it means to be a human being. Moreover, for Heidegger, the entire history of Western philosophy is fundamentally configured by a specific, distorted, understanding of being. This distorted understanding of being began with Plato and has finally run its course, culminating in the thought of Nietzsche. Heidegger, responding to what he saw as Nietzsche's completion of Western philosophy, sought to inaugurate a new beginning of Western philosophy, one that is fundamentally configured by a different, more authentic, understanding of being.

The question of how abstract philosophic thought, like Heidegger's, configures practical political thought is central to the Millerman School. Can all political thought be traced back to perhaps unarticulated or unknown underlying philosophic positions? Or does political thought operate independently and merely seek out philosophic justification after the fact, if at all? Millerman's PhD thesis and subsequent book Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin & the Philosophical Constitution of the Political studies this general question within the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century, defined by Heidegger's philosophic thought and the responses to it by four preeminent political thinkers from across the geopolitical spectrum. Millerman's book explores two key questions. Can the wide disparity in these schools of political thought be traced back to a dispute over Heidegger's philosophy? Can Heideggerian philosophy serve as a basis for a fundamentally different politics of the future?

The intimate relationship between politics and philosophy, as well as the deeply practical import of this relationship, was perhaps best understood in modern times by Leo Strauss, who popularized the notion of political philosophy. "Political philosophy is the attempt truly to know both the nature of political things and the right, or the good, political order," writes Strauss in his 1954 book What is Political Philosophy? Everyone, Strauss argues, begins with an opinion of the good that implicitly guides all of his political actions. Simply put, he aims to change something, like a law, if, in his opinion, it is causing harm, or to preserve it if, in his opinion, it is causing good. Political philosophy emerges when he begins to explicitly question his opinion of the good in an attempt to acquire knowledge of the good.

This was precisely the goal of classical political philosophy, best exemplified by Socrates. Today, however, political philosophy has essentially vanished, according to Strauss. Many people today do not believe that there is such a thing as the political good, but instead that what is called good or right is a mere historic convention that varies with time, place, and culture. This belief makes the quest for knowledge of the good, the central goal of political philosophy, impossible. Strauss saw this as a terrible crisis for the West and vigorously fought to inaugurate a return to the classical ideal.

In so doing, Strauss developed unique insights into the true teaching of classical political philosophy as well as the contemporary crisis, both of which justify his centrality within the Millerman School. Through his meticulous studies and authoritative commentaries on classic texts, like Plato's Socratic dialogues, Strauss showed that these texts, and hence the true teaching of classical political philosophy, had been largely misunderstood for centuries. Consequently, for Millerman, the commentaries of Strauss and his students, like Allan Bloom, serve as preeminent exemplars for how to read, interpret, and teach political philosophy texts. Moreover, for Strauss, the contemporary crisis is not the result of a gradual waning of the classical ideal, but instead of a deep and deliberate ideological break with it. This break, initiated by Machiavelli in the fifteenth century, culminated in twentieth-century historicism. Historicism undermines the philosophic validity of the notion of the good and is consequently the primary antagonist of political philosophy. For Millerman, Strauss is essential for clarifying the contemporary crisis and showing what must be done to develop a deep political and philosophic response to it.

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Contemporary Relevance

The central goal of most of Millerman's courses is to provide a high quality guide to a difficult political philosophy text. Implicitly, this sheds light on important contemporary problems. But it is also possible to proceed in the reverse direction: to start with a specific contemporary problem and ask how political philosophy can be used to direct our thinking about the problem. Currently, one of Millerman's courses, his Philosophical Analysis of Masculinity course, does this. The course begins with the contemporary problem of the assault on masculinity and asks how the view of man and masculinity has changed throughout the history of political philosophy, from Plato to Heidegger. Through this exposition, the course helps us understand how the contemporary problem arose, illuminates the philosophic depth of the problem, and gives us options for thinking about man and masculinity today.

Millerman originally developed this course for a group of politically, though not academically, minded men concerned about the constant assaults on masculinity today. I see this as evidence of an important cultural phenomenon that is emerging, largely in response to the ideological fanaticism of the political left that has come to dominate academia and society at large. On the one hand, there is a growing recognition of the depth and danger of this fanaticism and hence a growing demand for a deep political and philosophic response to it. On the other hand, there is a growing supply of highly intelligent, courageous, and passionate teachers, like Millerman, who have been effectively pushed out of academia and other mainstream professional institutions early in their careers and have consequently been forced onto an entrepreneurial path, operating outside of these institutions. It was this dynamic that facilitated my connection with Millerman.

I first learned about Millerman in the late 2010's while I was pursuing a PhD in computer science. During this time, I witnessed the left's ideological fanaticism first hand. It was genuinely shocking to see graduate students - who are now professors, lawyers, and engineers at prominent tech companies - celebrating violent riots, attacks on police officers, the shouting down of speakers, and open racial hatred against whites, or to see university leadership demanding cult-like adherence to the vacuous ideology of diversity, openly supporting and reciting the slogans of violent, ideologically aligned protest groups in the summer of 2020, and abusing their official platforms to condemn a presidential candidate they disapproved of. Even more shocking was the fear of dissent that dominated the entire campus, down to everyday conversations, and the fact that this was not seen as a problem, that persistent attempts by myself and a handful of others to raise awareness of and to fix the problem were largely ignored or met with contempt.

During this time I learned that the ideological fanaticism that dominated campus life also dominated the politically oriented academic disciplines, though in a different form. For me, Millerman's plight was a primary example of this. Millerman was pursuing a PhD in political science, studying the impact of Heidegger's philosophy on thinkers from across the geopolitical spectrum, as I discussed above. Several professors on his PhD dissertation committee attempted to sabotage his completion of the program by resigning from the committee and attempting to terminate his funding. They primarily objected to his interest in the contemporary Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, a stern critic of Western liberal democracy from the right, and his decision to include Dugin in his dissertation study. The professors claimed that Dugin was not worthy of legitimate academic study due to his political views and the contemporary political actors associated with him, both of which they characterized as "fascist." Millerman bravely refused to cave to the pressure to denounce Dugin and was eventually able to assemble a new dissertation committee and graduate in 2018. He was, however, severely ostracized and it was clear that he was not welcome to pursue a career in academia. This was his impetus to start the Millerman School, bringing high quality political philosophy education to students outside of mainstream academia.

I started studying with Millerman in the fall of 2021, after completing my degree in late 2020, at a time of national cultural and political turmoil. Upon entering graduate school, I would have thought that the universities would bring clarity, sober debate, and intellectual guidance, protection, and fortitude to a nation in crisis. Upon exiting, however, I understood that they were doing the exact opposite. I left with a clear understanding that a deep cultural, spiritual, and intellectual war was being waged on America and the West, and with a strong sense of duty to fight back. I left without a concrete plan, only with some ideas that have guided my life since then: cut ties with mainstream professional and intellectual institutions and earn money freelancing remotely; travel America, living in different cities in the interior of the country, to better understand the nation, its people, roads, landmarks, small cities, and unknown treasures, in order to more deeply understand what it is that I am trying to save; train jiu-jitsu and other martial arts to defend against increasingly regular political violence; read Great Books, to understand the history of the West, to sharpen my intellect against the greatest thinkers of all time, and to train myself to write, a critical weapon that I will need for my mission.

I saw Millerman as someone who could help me with my mission. From the quality of his publicly available lectures and the courage he demonstrated during graduate school, I recognized him as a highly intelligent and knowledgeable teacher, someone who sees tremendous treasure in the books that he teaches, something much higher, something worth sacrificing his career to pursue authentically and to share widely. Moreover, I saw that he understands the magnitude of the contemporary crisis and consequently that his pursuit is motivated in part by a sincere desire to fix it.

After studying with Millerman over the past two years, my initial impression has been confirmed. I have learned a tremendous amount from his lectures and our one-on-one tutoring sessions. He has vastly expanded my understanding of Western political philosophy and has been a great help in my large undertaking of the study of Great Books. Moreover, he has helped me become a better and more precise thinker, reader, and writer, all of which I will utilize in the writing and entrepreneurial projects that I am now beginning. For all of these reasons, and the reasons that I stated throughout this article, I highly recommend the Millerman School of political philosophy.