There’s a village where the farmers share access to the same plot of green pasture.

Each farmer has one of his cows grazing on it. It’s a stable and fair setup where everyone benefits.

One day, a farmer sees that there is enough room for him to add one more cow to graze on that grass, thereby increasing his individual output.

Other farmers get the same idea and bring in extra cows as well…

Then, from all this new excess grazing, the common land soon gets exhausted and stops producing grass, which causes a crisis.

If only the farmers were content with the original setup!

This is the tragedy of the commons, or as Aristotle put it:

That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual.

Now we come to a new scenario.

According to a new study (as well as your own personal experience, I’m sure), we have been letting AI homogenize both our expression and thought.

In raw human experience, we encounter a beautiful diversity in how we communicate the same underlying concept. For example, three people might express the same enthusiasm with different linguistic styles:

A) “I just feel like I’m really excited, you know?”

B) “I am genuinely positive and optimistic about it.”

C) “Sooo excited for what’s next!!!”

But if each of these three people uses AI to process their idea instead, they will all get a normalized output like:

I’m really looking forward to what’s ahead and feel very optimistic about the future.

Take a look at this diagram for more such examples:

Like the farmers in the village who want to pursue an individual benefit at the cost of an eventual degradation for everyone, we are now faced with a new Game Theory situation (of which I am guilty of):

You can choose to use AI to write something, and reap the “instant” benefit of time savings and clarity. For example, I can take a half-baked concept that we might rate a 5/10 and AI can immediately pump out a safe 8/10 version of it. We might not get the 10/10, and we might lose some of my individual style, but for the purpose of what it’s for (let’s say it’s marketing copy, a legal document, business correspondence, or something where the primary purpose of the communication is transactional as opposed to artistic), I get the desired outcome much more quickly.

But, as I implicitly allude to in the prior sentence’s parenthetical, we start to lose some of that “artistry” (read: authenticity, individuality) that permeates all of humanity, even in seemingly “non-artistic” contexts like corporate communication.

The truth is that, through a proper lens, everything you do as a human can be understood as being an art. But now we are tempted to dispose of the art in order to reap the benefits of more efficiency and material gain.

So the more we each use AI to replace aspects of our thinking (because that’s what’s really happening here), the more we erode our linguistic diversity and homogenize our thought.

We’re bringing more of our cows to graze on the community pasture until the pasture is no more.

That’s clearly a problem, but I’m not sure what the solution is.

I have no plans at the moment to go cold turkey on AI, but I am seeking ways to find the proper balance.

For one, if you’re a regular reader of my Substack, you know that I make a clear distinction between what is 100% my voice versus what is AI-assisted. In case you can’t tell or don’t feel it right now, you’re currently reading 100% fully certified USDA Prime Drago thoughts.

I put the AI-assisted stuff in my Drago's Assistant section.

So I throw it back to you… What are YOU doing to maintain your humanity in the age of AI? Shall we be doing some AI fasts? Establish certain hard lines we never cross?

Whatever you do, just please promise me you won’t put a chip in your brain.

A post has been making the rounds about a student who used NotebookLM to compress a semester of learning into 48 hours.

The setup was simple, almost offensively simple.

He uploaded multiple textbooks, research papers, and lecture transcripts, and then he asked a better class of question than most students ever ask:

• What are the 5 core mental models every expert in this field shares?

• Where do experts fundamentally disagree, and what is each side’s strongest argument?

• What questions expose the difference between deep understanding and memorized facts?

Then he spent two days working those questions hard.

By the end, according to the post, he could hold his own in conversation with people far more credentialed and experienced than he was.

Whether that exact story happened exactly as told is almost beside the point.

Because anyone paying attention can see the broader phenomenon already emerging:

AI can now generate a form of competence that looks a lot like expertise, feels a lot like expertise, and often performs like expertise—while still being meaningfully different from the real thing.

That difference matters.

It matters for schools. It matters for hiring. It matters for institutions. It matters for how we assess authority, credibility, and trust. And it matters for ambitious people who are trying to understand what kind of edge AI actually gives them.

We are missing the words for what is happening.

So let’s build them.

The missing category

The old vocabulary is no longer enough.

For most of modern life, we used a fairly simple ladder:

novice → intermediate → expert

That worked reasonably well in a world where deep competence was slow, apprenticeship mattered, and access to the structure of a field was expensive.

But AI has changed the shape of the climb.

A person can now acquire, in days, something that used to take months just to orient toward:

• the core models of a field

• the main schools of thought

• the central debates

• the strongest objections

• the open questions

• the diagnostic questions that separate shallow understanding from real understanding

That is not mere memorization.

That is not mere summary.

And yet it is not identical to the kind of expertise earned through years of practice, friction, error correction, and repeated contact with reality.

So we need a term for this new middle zone.

I think the best term is this:

Scaffolded expertise

Scaffolded expertise is expert-level conceptual and conversational competence built through external cognitive supports, but not yet fully hardened by long practice, repeated error correction, or independent contact with reality.

That is what tools like NotebookLM, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and domain-specific AI workflows increasingly make possible.

The competence is real.

That point is important.

It is fashionable in some circles to dismiss all AI-assisted competence as fake. That is lazy. If a person can map the field, articulate the core models, represent opposing schools fairly, answer probing questions, identify weak arguments, and hold a serious conversation with experts, then something real has happened.

But it is equally mistaken to collapse that into full expertise.

Because what may still be missing is:

• tacit judgment

• embodied pattern recognition

• robustness under ambiguity

• edge-case sensitivity

• fluency without tools

• the credibility that comes from having paid one’s dues in contact with the domain itself

So the phenomenon is neither fake nor final.

It is scaffolded.

And the existence of scaffolded expertise means our whole taxonomy of competence needs an update.

The before-and-after: why AI forces a new definition of “expert”

Here’s the simplest way to see what changed.

Before AI: the ladder was basically three rungs

In most domains, the world implicitly treated competence like this:

1. Familiarity (knows the terms)

2. Fluency (can explain the ideas)

3. Expertise (can reliably do the work—and be trusted under pressure)

And here’s the key: in the pre-AI world, if someone sounded like an expert, there was a decent chance they had paid a large apprenticeship cost. Performance in conversation was often (not always) a proxy for real depth.

After AI: conversation is no longer a clean proxy

AI compresses orientation and articulation so much that the old ladder splinters.

Now there are at least two new middle layers that used to be rare at scale:

• Map-level understanding: you can see the field’s structure—core models, schools, debates, open questions.

• Scaffolded expertise: you can perform at a near-expert level in structured environments because external scaffolds (AI + retrieval + critique loops) are doing part of the cognitive work.

This is the crux: you can now reach “expert-like” performance faster than you can reach expert-like judgment.

So instead of one vague word—expert—we should at minimum distinguish:

• Summary fluency (sounds informed)

• Scaffolded expertise (performs impressively with support)

• Load-bearing expertise (remains reliable when support is removed and the situation gets messy)

That middle category is the one we’ve been missing.

The new split that AI introduces

The AI era does not eliminate expertise.

It splits it.

The most important distinction is no longer simply between novice and expert.

It is between:

• people who can talk

• people who can map

• people who can perform with scaffolding

• people who can operate without it

• people whose judgment is trustworthy under stress

That middle territory barely existed at scale before.

Historically, if someone could perform at an expert level in conversation, there was a decent chance they had paid a substantial apprenticeship cost. Now that inference is weaker.

A person may now have:

• elite conceptual mapping

• strong synthetic ability

• debate-grade reasoning

• impressive presentational fluency

• rapidly assembled subject competence

without yet having:

• years of contact with the domain

• tacit pattern recognition

• instinct for anomalies

• tested judgment

• earned credibility

This is why people increasingly feel a strange dissonance when evaluating smart AI users.

They are not frauds.

But neither are they obviously what the old world would have called experts.

They occupy a new category.

The illusions of the AI era

This new landscape produces a set of predictable illusions.

1. The fluency illusion

Because I can explain it clearly, I understand it deeply.

This was already a danger before AI, but AI massively amplifies it. A person can now produce beautifully articulated explanations long before they possess durable understanding.

2. The map illusion

Because I can map the field, I can perform in the field.

Knowing the intellectual terrain is powerful. But map possession is not the same as operational mastery. A person can understand every school of psychotherapy and still be a poor therapist. A person can map corporate finance and still make terrible decisions in a live deal.

3. The authority illusion

Because I can reason like an expert, I have earned expert credibility.

This is subtler. AI can genuinely elevate reasoning quality. It can help a person represent views fairly, compare arguments, and identify hidden assumptions. But social authority is not conferred by performance alone. It is also tied to judgment, track record, risk-bearing, and costly proof.

4. The credential illusion

Because someone learned this quickly with AI, their competence must be fake.

This is the equal and opposite error.

It is becoming unfashionable to say this plainly, but here it is anyway: AI can create real competence very quickly.

Not complete competence. Not always stable competence. Not always trustworthy competence.

But real competence nonetheless.

And institutions that dismiss that fact will be blindsided by people who look underqualified on paper and outperform the papered class in practice.

The central principle

If I had to compress the whole argument into one sentence, it would be this:

AI compresses orientation, synthesis, and discourse much faster than it compresses judgment, tacit knowledge, and credibility.

That is the heart of the matter.

It explains why AI can feel miraculous and underwhelming at the same time.

Miraculous, because it can collapse months of confusion into days of structured understanding.

Underwhelming, because when the situation becomes messy, adversarial, embodied, high-stakes, or truly novel, the missing layers reveal themselves.

The tool can accelerate your climb.

It cannot simply waive the laws of reality.

Why this matters socially

The consequences are bigger than study hacks.

Education

Schools still assess competence as though the key bottleneck were information retrieval or summary production. That is increasingly obsolete.

The valuable questions are changing.

Not:

• Can the student repeat the material?

• Can the student summarize the chapter?

But:

• Can they identify the field’s deepest disagreements?

• Can they steelman opposing views?

• Can they tell signal from noise?

• Can they apply models under ambiguity?

• Can they detect when the model breaks?

In other words: educational systems will increasingly need to distinguish summary fluency from scaffolded expertise, and scaffolded expertise from load-bearing judgment.

Hiring

Resumes and credentials will become less legible as proxies for competence.

A person with three months of disciplined AI-assisted immersion may, in some contexts, outperform a person with three years of passive credential accumulation.

That does not mean experience no longer matters.

It means the distribution of capability is becoming less visible from conventional signals.

Hiring systems will have to get better at testing for actual performance, actual judgment, and actual stability.

Institutions

Institutions are built on trust—especially trust about who is allowed to decide, teach, diagnose, allocate, sign, and lead.

If AI increases the supply of people with high presentational competence but mixed stability, institutions face a sorting problem.

The challenge is no longer just identifying intelligence.

It is identifying what kind of competence is present, how durable it is, and whether it is safe to rely on when the stakes rise.

Culture

Expect a strange social period where many people sound much smarter than the old world trained us to expect.

Some of them will be bluffing.

Some of them will be genuinely formidable.

And some will be in between: unusually capable, unusually accelerated, but not yet fully load-bearing.

That middle group will be one of the defining human types of the AI era.

A second axis: stability

One reason people are confused is that they are still treating expertise as a one-dimensional thing.

But in the AI era, competence has at least two dimensions:

1. Height — how advanced the performance is

2. Stability — how well that performance survives pressure, novelty, and the removal of support

This matters because a person can now have high-height, low-stability competence.

That would describe someone with scaffolded expertise: they may be dazzling in structured environments, highly articulate, conceptually sharp, and fast-moving—yet less reliable when tools are removed, feedback is delayed, or the situation becomes genuinely chaotic.

By contrast, load-bearing expertise is high-height, high-stability competence.

It travels better. It degrades less. It remains trustworthy when things stop going according to script.

This distinction will become increasingly important in every field where decisions matter.

A third axis: where competence comes from

We can also classify expertise by provenance.

Absorbed expertise

Built from reading, listening, and watching.

Scaffolded expertise

Built through external cognitive systems: AI tutors, retrieval systems, model comparison, synthetic questioning, iterative critique.

Embodied expertise

Built through doing, failing, correcting, repeating, and paying real costs.

Generative expertise

Built through creating new frameworks and solving previously unsolved problems.

Again, notice what this does.

It gives us language more precise than the blunt old distinction between “expert” and “not expert.”

And language matters because once you can name a thing, you can start evaluating it correctly.

The real challenge now

The challenge is not deciding whether AI-made competence is real.

Of course it is real.

The challenge is learning not to confuse one kind of real competence for another.

That means learning to ask better questions.

Not just:

• Is this person smart?

• Can they talk about the topic?

• Do they have credentials?

But:

• Can they distinguish the central from the peripheral?

• Can they reason under uncertainty?

• Can they detect when the framework fails?

• Can they survive adversarial pressure?

• Can they generate insight without the scaffold?

• Has their judgment been stress-tested by reality?

Those questions will increasingly determine who deserves trust.

Back to the student with NotebookLM

Now we can return to the original story.

What happened there was not magic.

And it was not fraud.

It was a glimpse of a new pattern.

A person used a powerful cognitive scaffold to extract the structure of a field at high speed: the mental models, the fault lines, the diagnostic questions, the strong arguments on all sides. Then he trained against those questions intensely enough to produce the appearance—and probably part of the reality—of expertise.

That is extraordinary.

But the right conclusion is not: expertise is dead.

The right conclusion is: expertise has split into layers, and AI has made the middle layers dramatically more accessible.

That changes the strategy for students.

It changes the strategy for institutions.

And it changes the strategy for anyone ambitious enough to use these tools seriously.

The old world asked, “How long have you studied?”

The new world will increasingly ask, “What kind of competence do you actually have?”

And that is the question that matters.

Final thought

We are entering a world in which many more people will possess rapid, portable, high-performance competence.

Some of that competence will be shallow theater.

Some of it will be real and formidable.

And some of it will be what I’ve called scaffolded expertise: real, accelerated, impressive, but not yet fully self-supporting.

That category is going to matter more and more.

Because if you can build scaffolded expertise in days, then the real competitive edge shifts.

It is no longer merely access to information.

It is the ability to:

• ask the right structuring questions

• build the right scaffolds

• know what layer of competence you actually possess

• and keep climbing until your expertise becomes load-bearing

That is the real game now.

Not whether AI can help you sound smart.

But whether you can use it to turn speed into substance.

Appendix: The full taxonomy (if you want the whole ladder)

If you’re building systems—education, hiring, institutions—you often need more granularity than “smart / not smart” or “expert / not expert.” Here’s the full ladder that sits behind the simplified before-and-after.

0) Lexical familiarity — knows the vocabulary; can follow surface discussion.
1) Summary fluency — can explain the topic coherently; sounds informed.
2) Map-level understanding — sees the field’s terrain: core models, schools, debates, open questions.
3) Scaffolded expertise — near-expert performance with strong external supports (AI + retrieval + critique loops).
4) Functional expertise — can reliably do the work in standard cases; applies models in practice.
5) Load-bearing expertise — stress-tested judgment under ambiguity and edge cases; reliable when stakes are real.
6) Generative expertise — advances the field: new models, new syntheses, new questions.
7) Foundational authority — reshapes the field’s architecture: categories, frameworks, what counts as a good question.

That’s the ladder. But the new thing AI does is widen the gap between levels 3 and 5—and flood the world with level-3 performance.

Compressed definitions

Scaffolded expertise: high-level conceptual and conversational competence built through external cognitive supports, not yet fully hardened by long practice.

Load-bearing expertise: judgment that remains reliable under pressure, ambiguity, and edge cases, even when supports are removed.

Generative expertise: the ability not just to navigate a field, but to improve it.

One-sentence thesis

AI does not abolish expertise; it differentiates it.

I can automate most white collar jobs with the tools available today. It’s only a matter of time before this knowledge becomes tablestakes and everyone will be able to see how.

When that happens (maybe within 3 years)… Godspeed.

—Drago

For the last ten thousand years, civilization has been grounded on a certain law of spiritual physics.

It’s a sacred first principle that we have all taken as a given, and with the upcoming acceleration into AI, it may soon dissipate and erase something more vital to what differentiates us than we realize.

Discipline.

One of the fundamental decisions in life that characterizes all economic activity is the decision to exchange short-term pain for long-term gain. To grind it out in the present in order to set yourself up for a better future.

You studied and built your skills for years, climbed the ladder, and sacrificed while others took the lax path of living like there’s no tomorrow.

You forwent certain pleasures in the short-term in order to save and invest for the long-term.

I’m talking about the decision to be responsible.

Economists map out an individual’s lifetime happiness as being a negotiation between happiness today vs happiness tomorrow. Irresponsible people only focus on today; responsible people plan ahead for tomorrow.

Today, you’re starting to notice something unsettling: the effort it once took to become exceptional is no longer required to produce exceptional results.

Coders doing coding bootcamps so that they can create world-class software… now, anyone with basic literacy can just type one sentence to AI: “Make me an app.”

Financial analysts making hundreds of models and intricate spreadsheets… now, anyone with basic literacy can just type one sentence to AI: “Make me a financial model.”

Consultants conducting industry deep-dives, learning all of the competitive dynamics, and presenting powerpoints of the winning strategies… now, anyone with basic literacy can just type one sentence to AI: “Make me a market analysis.”

Lawyers putting together an iron-tight legal document that makes use of all case precedent and subtle distinctions… now, anyone with basic literacy can just type one sentence to AI: “Make me a legal contract.”

If you don’t see this yet, you will very soon.

The effort it once took to produce professional-grade output is no longer required to access it. The line between disciplined expert and the casual participant is blurring.

It’s my job to then think about what will happen next… and to share that perspective with you, so you don’t have to be behind the curve, catching up to these things.

I think you can feel what’s happening here. Acquiring those value-additive skills was a function of discipline. No pain, no gain.

Someone else may be perfectly fine working random gig jobs all their life, stumbling around as they go, but you wanted to build a future that compounds and leaves you and your family better off 10 years from now then when you started.

That required a lot of discipline. To take a bet in an invisible future, while rejecting aspects of the visible present.

But now, will it make sense for anyone to build these skills, other than for the pure exercise of one’s cognitive muscles?

It’s like, if a machine moved your body for you, your muscles would atrophy.
People would say, “Who cares? You don’t need them anymore.”
But something in you resists that logic.

A few years from now, when AI compresses the input-output gap between what a person wants and what is achievable such that any individual—whether irresponsible or responsible—can simply say what they want and get it… will there be any incentive to invest into the future?

If you can get most of what you want today with minimal resistance, then why think about tomorrow?

This is the direction we’re heading in.

The naive view is to applaud and say, “That sounds awesome! Infinite abundance! Yay!”

But such a world will morally flatten the difference between the responsible, disciplined, hard-working person and the lazy, impulsive, and careless person, because the cost of being the latter kind person goes down to zero.

In other words, we are on a path toward removing the economic incentive of virtue.

Scarcity has always created fertile ground for the exercise of patience, judgment, sacrifice, prioritization—the human acts that allow a person to grow and become a better human.

Abundance weakens the natural pressures that once formed the soul.

To say that society is going to dramatically change would be a gross understatement. We are really talking about society being reimagined. What I can’t yet figure out is how we can structure the post-AI civilization in a way that will continue to reward future-seeking behaviors and the discipline that they require and produce.

Wouldn’t it be bad if everyone became undisciplined? If everyone had access to food, shelter, and entertainment, but were internally hollow in character, would that be a good thing?

The mere fact that we want something has never been proof that we deserve it. Civilization has historically linked reward to sacrifice.

If desire can be satisfied instantly, restraint loses its meaning.

The spiritual norm we have all accepted thus far is that when you work hard and sacrifice the present, you earn your right to a better future.

”Your hard work paid off.”

Will there be any point in working hard in a society where everyone will be hardly working?

TLDR;

Every civilization needs a way to distinguish:

• The farsighted from the impulsive

• The builder from the consumer

• The disciplined from the undisciplined

Historically, scarcity did that sorting automatically.

If AI flattens skill scarcity, then:

• The market may no longer reward discipline the way it used to.

• Status hierarchies may reorganize around something else.

For most of history:
Effort → Skill → Differentiated Output → Reward → Status.

AI introduces:
Desire → Prompt → Output.

When output no longer tracks effort, the incentive structure behind discipline destabilizes.

AI removes external incentives for discipline.

Civilization must replace them with internal ones.

And here’s the hard question:

If discipline no longer produces differential economic outcomes…

Will people still pursue it?

And if they don’t, then perhaps what we called virtue was only strategy.

The coming decade will tell us which it was.

I use AI constantly.

I build products with AI features. I recommend AI tools to founders and teams. I sit on AI panels as a so-called “expert”.

So if you’re expecting a rant about machines stealing jobs or AI ending civilization, you’re in the wrong place.

My concern is quieter. And deeper.

AI doesn’t fail us when it’s wrong.

It fails us when it’s right enough to stop thinking.

The Core Claim

Let me put my position plainly—without religious language, but grounded in a very old understanding of the human person:

A human being is fundamentally intellect and will.

Human flourishing is the formation of both.

AI threatens both—not by opposing them, but by replacing their exercise.

That last line matters.

AI doesn’t arrive as an enemy of humanity.

It arrives as a helpful substitute.

And that’s exactly why it’s dangerous.

1. Intellect: AI Weakens Judgment, Not Intelligence

Most conversations about AI and intelligence miss a crucial distinction.

Intellect is not information.

Intellect is the capacity to:

• understand

• judge

• discern meaning

• tell the difference between what sounds right and what is true

AI is extraordinarily good at producing information.
That doesn’t mean it strengthens intellect.

What AI Actually Does Well

AI excels at:

• summarizing

• pattern-matching

• recombining existing material

• producing coherent, persuasive output

Impressive? Absolutely.

But none of this is judgment.

How Judgment Is Formed

Human judgment isn’t formed by having answers delivered.

It’s formed through:

• confusion

• friction

• error

• correction

• synthesis

Those moments when you don’t know—when you have to sit with uncertainty and work your way through it—are not bugs.

They are the training ground of intellect.

The Quiet Deformation

When AI becomes the first stop instead of the last check, it removes:

• the need to evaluate

• the discomfort of not knowing

• the work of integration

Over time, it trains people to:

• accept plausible output

• skip understanding

• mistake fluency for truth

Here’s the line most people feel immediately:

If you outsource judgment long enough, you don’t become smarter—you become dependent.

Dependency is not intelligence amplified.
It’s intelligence deferred.

2. Will: AI Weakens Agency, Not Freedom

This is where the conversation usually turns uncomfortable—because it’s no longer abstract.

It’s about responsibility.

I know this because I’ve felt it in myself.

What the Will Actually Is

The will is the human capacity to:

• choose

• commit

• act toward a perceived good

And like any human faculty, it strengthens through use.

Specifically, through:

• effort

• resistance

• sacrifice

• ownership of outcomes

What AI Optimizes For

AI is relentlessly optimized for:

• speed

• ease

• comfort

• friction removal

Increasingly, it offers to:

• plan for you

• decide for you

• write for you

• act on your behalf

Each of these feels like a win.

Taken individually, they often are.

Taken together, they hollow something out.

I catch myself reaching for AI to avoid the discomfort of starting from nothing.

The Trade We Don’t See

The will does not grow by having things done for it.

It grows by choosing hard goods.

When AI removes the need to choose, it removes the conditions under which the will is formed.

This shows up everywhere:

• Auto-writing weakens the resolve to speak in your own voice

• Auto-planning weakens responsibility for direction

• Auto-decision weakens ownership of consequences

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Convenience doesn’t just save effort—it trains the will out of existence.

That’s not a moral accusation.

It’s a design outcome.

3. The Real Risk: AI Simulates the Human Faculties

This is the part that still feels new.

And unsettling.

AI doesn’t attack human faculties head-on.

It simulates them.

• It appears intelligent—without understanding

• It appears intentional—without will

• It appears relational—without love

The simulation is good enough that we stop practicing the real thing.

Why That Matters

Humans adapt to their environment.

If the environment:

• rewards passivity

• removes deliberation

• replaces agency

Then people don’t rebel.

They slowly atrophy.

This is how it happens:

We don’t lose our humanity in one dramatic moment. We lose it by no longer needing to practice it.

No revolution.
No collapse.
Just erosion.

4. “You’re Just Afraid of Progress”

This is the reflexive response.

So let me answer it directly.

I’m not afraid of machines becoming smarter.

I’m afraid of humans becoming less responsible.

Or, more sharply:

Progress that deforms the human person isn’t progress—it’s displacement.

Technology should extend human excellence.

Not replace the very acts that make excellence possible.

The Question We Should Be Asking

Not:

• Can AI do this faster?

• Can AI do this cheaper?

But:

• What human faculty does this remove the need to exercise?

• And what happens to people when that faculty atrophies?

That’s not anti-technology.

That’s pro-human.

And if we don’t learn to ask those questions while we still have the option—

someone else will answer them for us later.

Usually after the damage is done.

The only real question is whether we notice in time.

Confession

Yes—I used AI to help write this.

And if that feels ironic, good.
It means you’re paying attention.

The danger isn’t using tools.
The danger is letting tools replace the very faculties that make their use meaningful.

This essay was written with AI.
It would be a failure if it were written instead of me.

— Drago, in collaboration with Drago’s Assistant

There’s a move that shows up everywhere—politics, religion, workplaces, friend groups, social media.

It’s not an argument.

It’s a contamination tag: a label that makes a person, question, or claim feel socially untouchable—so people back away without ever testing whether the claim is true.

What a “disgust label” is

A disgust label is a moral-stain term used to make engagement feel like complicity.

Sometimes labels are accurate descriptors. That’s not the point here.

The tactic is using the label to short-circuit discussion—to make disagreement costly, so debate dies.

Debate doesn’t end because the idea was disproven. It ends because engagement was made expensive.

Common disgust labels (grouped by function)

These words can describe real things. But as a tactic, they often function like conversation landmines—step on one and the room goes silent.

Moral stain / hatred

• racist, sexist, bigot, misogynist

• -phobe (homophobic/transphobic/etc.)

• supremacist, anti-Semite, Islamophobe

• “hate speech,” “hate-monger,” “harmful”

Radioactive ideology

• fascist, Nazi

• globalist

• extremist / radical, authoritarian

• terrorist (or “sympathizer”)

Epistemic discrediting (attack the “knower”)

• conspiracy theorist

• delusional / paranoid

• science denier

• misinformation / disinformation spreader

Motive attacks (make intentions the crime)

• grifter, propagandist

• bad faith

• shill / bought-and-paid-for

• useful idiot

Social contamination / danger

• toxic, creepy

• predator, abuser

• cult / cultist

“Nuclear” accusations

• groomer / pedophile insinuations

• “protecting predators” framing

These are extremely serious accusations—which is exactly why they’re sometimes abused as social weapons.

The category matters more than the word. The goal is avoidance.

Why it works (the psychology + the social threat)

Disgust labels work because they stack multiple levers at once:

1) Contamination transfer
“If you touch this, you get dirty too.”

2) Moral short-circuit
“Pure/impure” replaces “true/false.”

3) Archetype hijack
Invoke a preloaded villain category so the audience supplies the story automatically.

4) Burden-shift trap
The accuser doesn’t define or prove; the accused must “prove innocence” against a vibe.

5) Sanction signaling (the real engine)
The implied message: “If you engage them, you’ll be punished too.”

Once punishment is on the table, people stop asking “Is it true?” and start asking “Is it safe?”

The template: how to recognize it instantly

Most disgust-label attacks follow a simple structure:

Taboo category → contamination → exclusion

In plain English:

“Your view isn’t just wrong; it’s tainted—so you (and anyone who engages you) should be excluded.”

Common sub-moves:

• Category swap: “Disagreeing with Policy X = hating Group Y.”

• Intent swap: “If you say X, your real motive is Z.”

• Association swap: “You overlap with Bad Group → therefore you are Bad Group.”

• Outcome swap: “If your idea could cause harm, you want harm.”

The disgust-label detector (5 questions)

When a hot label appears, ask:

1. What’s the actual claim (in neutral words)?

2. What does the label mean operationally here? (“What exact statement qualifies?”)

3. What evidence is offered that’s concrete and falsifiable?

4. Is the aim refutation—or punishment/exile? (ban, fire, deplatform, ostracize)

5. Is engagement framed as complicity? (“If you debate him, you’re enabling harm.”)

If #2–#3 are missing and #4–#5 are present, you’re likely watching social enforcement—not truth-seeking.

If definitions and evidence are absent but exile is demanded, you’re not in a debate—you’re in a quarantine protocol.

How to defuse it without playing the same game

Your goal isn’t to “win.” It’s to restore reality: claims, definitions, evidence, standards.

1) Bracket the label
“Let’s set labels aside. What specific claim do you think is false, and why?”

2) Demand definitions
“When you say ‘harmful/toxic/misinformation,’ what exact sentence are you referring to?”

3) Pivot to evidence
“What evidence would change your mind? Here’s what would change mine.”

4) Refuse the sanction frame (calmly)
“I’m open to criticism, but we’re not doing guilt-by-association or punishment-by-innuendo.”

5) Name the move—lightly
“This sounds like a category label meant to end discussion. I’d rather address the argument.”

The one-sentence summary

A disgust label is the attempt to win socially by making the cost of engagement higher than the reward of truth.

When you can spot ‘taboo → contamination → exclusion,’ you stop getting hypnotized by the heat of the word—and you start asking what matters: What do you mean? What evidence supports it? What would change your mind?

— Brought to you by Drago’s Assistant

The materialist understanding of the origins of life is that if you take enough non-living atoms, combine them somehow, then you’ll get a living being.

The same for consciousness: combine enough unconscious cells. . . and then *poof!* — consciousness emerges.

“Emergence” is not really an explanation for anything but rather a label atheists use that is functionally equivalent to brute juju magic. (Of course, the former label sounds more impressive and rigorous than the latter.)

The word “emergent” implicitly takes you on a mental journey where you might imagine individual parts hovering over a vacuum of nothingness, as they clump together, until somehow, something magical sparks from the clump.

When I watch this movie in my mind, I can’t help but to hear an accompaniment of sound effects along the lines of

vwubb vwubb vwubb vzzhhhhhh. . .

Polemics aside, let’s take the mystery head-on and point out what’s wrong with the emergentist’s parts-to-whole thinking—and really, how the Enlightenment itself has impaired our ability to understand the fundamental nature of reality.

Regardless of one’s philosophical viewpoints, the phenomenon we all need to account for is the fact that the whole can have properties that the individual parts do not (when considering a thing and the parts that make up a thing or many things combining to make a greater, whole thing).

Consider: Water is wet. But hydrogen and oxygen are not “wet”. You might be tempted to say that “wetness” is an emergent property of water. When you have the whole piece of H₂O, the “wetness” seemingly appears, even though the individual atoms don’t have it.

Similarly, but at a greater scale, you can consider the example of a dog. A dog has a certain nature that is typical for “dogness”. It sniffs out food, plays, looks for treats, chases balls, etc. It does what dogs do as opposed to what cats do. . . since it’s a dog.

But do any of the dog’s individual cells contain this property of “dogness”? Do the cells “know” that they are part of a dog, contributing towards the functions and ultimate ends of dogness?

Seemingly not.

So then, you might wonder, “Why can’t we just say the same thing about consciousness and life? None of the individual parts are alive or conscious, but when we see the whole, we see those properties of life and consciousness.”

Sure, we can say that, but again, we’re not really explaining anything by doing so. And in fact, the word “emerge” makes it sound like the flow of causality moves from the parts to the whole.

An explanation would involve answering what makes the parts unify to produce that property as opposed to some other property.

Or to answer questions like:

What makes the parts unify at all? And what unifies the parts so that they behave as one system rather than many independent objects? That the atoms unify into a single entity rather than a heap?

Why is a dog one thing and not 10¹³ independent particles temporarily cooperating?

From where exactly, and through what mechanism does a new substance emerge?

And what causes the transition at that moment instead of the moment before?

If mere quantity causes emergence, then adding more dead cells should increase life. But instead, it does the opposite: it increases rot.

Fundamentally, what makes a whole a whole, instead of just a heap?

By example, consider: What’s the difference between a pile of heart cells and an actual heart?

A heart is not just muscle tissue. A pile of muscle cells isn’t a heart.

So when we talk about the phenomenon of how parts become a whole, there are only three options:

1. There is a specific threshold where once you obtain the number of parts, the “whole” just happens.

2. There is no threshold.

3. There is a unifying principle of organization that’s already present.

The problem with 1) is that it’s completely arbitrary and unmotivated. Why this number of cells and not one fewer? If nothing about the nature of the parts changes except “more,” then the alleged threshold is just magic: “at N, poof.”

The problem with 2) is that if it were true, nothing could ever “become” anything. We would only see piles of parts, rather than any kind of new “thing”/ whole. If there is no real difference between “heap” and “whole,” then you never truly have a new thing—only different ways of grouping parts. But in experience, we clearly treat hearts, dogs, and persons as real unities, not arbitrary piles.

The correct answer is 3).

Why do the atoms form a cell? It’s not “because enough of them are stacked.”

It’s that the cell has a substantial form that makes them a unified living whole aimed at functions.

By “form” here, I don’t mean “shape,” but the organizing principle that makes a thing the kind of thing it is and directs it toward certain activities (its telos or built-in goals).

Why do the stones form a cathedral? It’s not “because they are near each other”.

It’s because they are arranged according to a form (plan, blueprint, telos).

The parts don’t self-assemble themselves; they always participate in a higher-order system that provides the organizing principle and gives identity to the parts.

A heart cell is a heart cell (as opposed to an eye cell) specifically because it contributes towards the function of the heart system (form) that it participates in. The part receives its identity from the whole, rather than the whole receiving its identity from the part.

Pause on that last statement for a second. . . and we’ll come back to it.

Let’s tackle the H₂O-water example again. Note the following crucial observation:

We cannot produce water by individually adding atoms together one by one.

You can’t just push an oxygen atom into two hydrogen atoms and then *poof* → water.

Instead we rely on pre-existing forms (systems) with chemical bonding dynamics that are already active; in a lab, we use conditions in which the higher-order bonding principles already exist.

When we “create water” we rely on fields, potentials, temperature, pressure, bonding laws—systems that already exceed the atoms themselves.

You would have to, for example, put hydrogen and oxygen gases at a 2:1 ratio within a single, pressurized container, heat it up to break the H-H and O-O bonds, and generate steam, which could later condense down to liquid water.

The point is that wetness does not “emerge” from stacking atoms like LEGO bricks.
It arises when atoms participate in a higher-order bonding form.

So when people say “wetness emerges from H₂O,” the crucial point is: it only does so when those atoms are already caught up in a system of fields, laws, and bonding structures that outrun any single atom. The so-called “emergent property” is really a top-down manifestation or inheritance of that higher-order form, not something being “pushed up” from the bottom parts.

Consider the following children in a bounce house analogy.

Imagine you have:

• Two shy kids (hydrogen atoms)

• One tall kid (oxygen atom)

You cannot force them to hold hands individually. But if you put them on a bouncy castle (high energy field), they bump together and naturally link arms because the environment gives them rules for interacting.

Thus:

In the same way that the higher-order bounce house conditions lead to the children holding hands, the higher-order chemical field is what determines the behavior of the atoms, rather than the atoms themselves.

Atoms do not create the laws that govern their unification.
They participate in a structure of order that precedes them.

This is true of any part. The parts participate in a structure of order (whole) that precedes them.

You can conceptualize this as a substance of a whole whose attributes or essence get distilled in some way down to the parts. The light of the moon is really a received light from the sun. The components receive their function from the broader system that gave rise to them.

Your intellect (part) is received from and participates in a greater source/field of intellect (whole). Yes, the parts still provide the mechanism for enabling the function of the whole, but it is the Form of the whole that unifies, organizes, and gives identity to the parts.

You can see how the concept of participation connects to knowledge of God in Step 7 of the following post:

So in many respects, we can assert that reality flows top-down—at least as far as meaning and intelligibility are concerned—as opposed to bottoms-up.

The principle of intelligible forms that both sets the definitional essence of what something is as well as organizes the participating parts into a coherent, goal-based system must necessarily pre-exist any aggregation process of those parts becoming a whole.

Some people will say, “That’s all I mean by ‘emergence’—higher-order patterns and structures.” Fair enough. My point is that, once you admit those real structures, you’re already smuggling in something like form and teleology. You haven’t explained them away; you’ve just renamed them.

I still dislike the word emergence because the metaphor runs in the wrong direction; it suggests something bubbling up out of the parts, like a creature rising from the water, when in reality the parts are receiving their role and identity from the prior order of the whole.

Now, why did I say that “Modernity fooled us” into thinking reality is bottoms-up, parts-to-whole? If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ve probably heard me critique the Enlightenment on more than one occasion.

What I mean here is that we need to completely reevaluate the core notion of “blank slate” tabula rasa, where you force your mind to approach the world with a simulated imagined state of a blank canvas, and adding one piece at a time, building up your ideas, theories, and knowledge one conceptual block after the other, scrutinizing every individual block that would dare be brought forward to the examination table.

But of course, the issue is that the “examination table” or “canvas” that your blocks sit on is itself a thing with its own features. And it exists in a “room” with its own conditions. And the block that you put on the table didn’t come from nowhere; it was participating in a system (a whole) that you just ripped it from.

In other words, true isolation of being from other Being is impossible.

And most importantly: there is always a you who is the observer of this alleged “blank slate”. We should never forget that since you are a person with intellect and will, there is a WHOLE LOT that you bring to the table, and there is absolutely nothing “blank” about it.

So the idea of blank slate thinking is as ontologically realistic (despite its epistemic benefits) as thinking about a square circle.

Now, don’t get me wrong. . . the bottoms-up reconstruction process of “one part at a time, all else being equal” drives an excellent methodology that enables important empirical discoveries.

But it’s not everything. And it’s not even the most important thing.

We need metaphysical thinking to ground all of our parts into the ultimate coherent whole. It’s ultimately absurd to study parts without at least some conception of the intelligible whole that anchors them into being.

If I’m being fair, I’ll put it this way. . .parts-to-whole thinking has been tremendously beneficial for sharpening our epistemology while being atrocious in how it has disconnected us from ontology.

If you start with only parts and quantities, you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to explain away the very things that make life worth living—mind, meaning, purpose—as “emergent” quirks of the machine.

But if you start with intelligible wholes, forms, and participation, those same realities stop being embarrassing leftovers and become the main story.

Reality was never bottoms-up LEGO bricks. It was always, first and last, a tapestry of ordered wholes.

There are two prompts I’d like you to try that will tell you a lot about yourself and how you stack in comparison to others.

Prompt 1 (How do you talk to me vs other people):

I know that ChatGPT learns the user’s behaviors from many conversations and adjusts accordingly. What have you learned from my behavior and how have you adjusted your responses in the way you respond to me, compared to your baseline and/or how you respond to other people, on average and in general?

Watch what GPT tells you about the style of communication it uses in order to tailor to your thinking and writing style. Here’s mine:

Ok, next. Try this simple prompt.

Prompt 2 (Percentile Comparison)

Compare me to other users in terms of percentile for depth, breadth, etc….

Here’s what I got:

Ok, cool. Why am I sharing this with you?

Do you see what’s happening here?

AI can—in a manner more intimate and unbiased than anyone who has ever dealt with you—map and understand the quality and patterns of your thinking, profiling your strengths and weaknesses in a way that no existing standardized test could ever come close.

Imagine what this could entail as far as job hiring and allocation go (assuming jobs exist as a normative concept 10 years from now).

A company collaborates with OpenAI and asks for your permission to let ChatGPT share with them a profile of who you are and sends them something along the lines of what I pasted above.

On the one hand, that’s kind of cool… a maximally-efficient mechanism that aims towards a perfect meritocracy?

On the other hand, your private conversations… the mirrors of your soul, as it were, were exploited and used to serve someone else’s instrumentality.

Now, imagine that we have a centralized or totalitarian government whose leadership decides to allocate every individual to some job that the AI says he or she is best equipped for. The AI has modeled your behavior to an unparalleled level of precision and will ultimately decide whether if your best contribution to society is through being scientist or a human battery.

Of course, if either of these situations (both of which entail OpenAI selling models of your behavior to other institutions) occur, their biggest impact might be only in the first generation, where a person’s private interactions with an AI are authentic, since the later generations will begin to game the system by asking contrived questions that they hope give a certain impression.

i.e. The future student can plan: *Let me think about the kind of question someone with the capacity of becoming a doctor would ask the AI, so that the AI can infer I’m the kind of person who could become a doctor*

I mean, heck, the student could ask some other localized AI to generate the type of question that would signal the kind of traits they hope to be known for.

Though even there, you would think that the AI could detect disingenuous attempts to game it.

At the same time… if someone were smart enough to fool AI, then maybe they would deserve to be considered for any kind of future job track.

Who knows…

But it is interesting. And the market for this kind of exploitation would be MASSIVE.

Let’s see what happens.

In the meantime, why don’t I create a job posting to hire someone who can talk to me in the way that I apparently like the most. 😄

Looking for a teammate who communicates in an analytical yet collaborative tone and provides a multi-layered analysis with philosophical and technical precision through multi-turn iteration. . .

—Drago

We need to completely reimagine how society works.

The old models of economics and polity will be rendered impotent as the upcoming technological tidal wave washes over every aspect of our practical experience.

We need to reimagine everything from the ground up, so let’s start from the first principles that our current social systems are built on. . .

Humans want things. We make decisions that move us towards getting what we want.

In general, what do we want?

• To live another day

• To be happy

We achieve these goals through:

1. Resources we obtain from our environment

2. Relationships we form with others

Let’s focus on the role of Resources.

Principle 1: People want some things in order to live

How do resources help us live another day?

I use the resource of food to eat. I use water to drink.

Clothing to stabilize my body temperature.

Shelter for security.

These are the primary “things” that we want for survival: Food/Drink, Clothing, Shelter.

We also want the secondary “things” that help us get the primary things.

I want a car so that I can transport myself to go get these other things, which are currently somewhere farther away in the environment (I have to move myself to different points on earth, since not every thing I want is located in my backyard).

I want a phone so I can communicate and coordinate with other people who aren’t in my immediate environment.

And so on.

Principle 2: People want some things in order to be happy

Next, we ask, “How do resources (things) help us be happy?”

Now, of course, any treatment of happiness needs to point to the transcendent pursuits of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty… the invisible and spiritual realities of life, and the richness that can only be found in Relationship.

But again, for the purposes of analyzing something like the material structure of society and economic organization, let’s table that notion for now.

How do we use things to make us happy?

On the surface, this is to say, how do we use things to make us feel good?

Once we move beyond the things that keep us alive, everything else can be considered a toy. The bouncing ball we had as a kid becomes the kitchen gadget we have as an adult.

And so are the movies we watch. The equipment we buy to experience the things we like (a new pair of basketball shoes, a chessboard, books).

The furniture and clothes that go beyond function but also give us some other sense of aesthetic satisfaction, pleasure, or comfort.

These are all toys. We use them to experience the “play” of life.

The purpose of some toys is to signal “status”, which is to say, let you play an exclusive game you otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

And there are also the things that are services. Like the service of education. The service of a mechanic who fixes your things, and so on.

Lastly, the possession of things, in general, can also give you some feeling of agency, optionality, and control, which can contribute to (or detract from… but that’s another story) happiness.

+ + + + +

The Logic of Exchange

Ok, so everyone wants things—some for living, others for loving.

You can make some of the things you want. And you can make some of the things that other people want.

And some people can make the things you want that you can’t or won’t make yourself.

And so to achieve a situation where you get more of what you want AND your neighbors gets more of what they want, we created a system of exchange, which started out as a bartering thing-for-thing and then evolved into a SuperThing-(money)-for-any-thing.

More on that in a minute. But here’s the thing….

To get the thing you want, you either have to make it yourself or you have to get it from someone else who makes that thing, typically by giving them something that they want in exchange.

But AI will soon make most of the things—which means it will no longer be you that’s making them—and AI itself doesn’t “want” any things, so there’s nothing you can give it to “earn” your right to the thing it makes, which means that the existing exchange mechanism will break.

Well… ok. AI may not want things but whoever owns the AI will want things.

But what will you have to give the owners of AI that they can’t get for themselves? In other words, why should AI make anything for you?

And yet if you, the laborer, built the machine that makes labor obsolete, shouldn’t you have some share in that AI?

Read what I wrote 2.5 years ago on this topic and see how it’s tracking today.

+ + + + +

AI (and robots) will take away human jobs and this will have two major impacts:

1. Reduce the cost of making something (production)

2. Remove the need for labor

To illustrate this, imagine that in the pre-AI economy, you had a corporation, ABC Corp, that produces and sells a $100 widget. And ABC Corp employs and pays John $20 to make a widget.

P = $100

L = $20

Once the post-AI economy transition reaches its critical point, the cost of production will fall because John is no longer necessary for building the widget. If there is enough competition, ABC Corp will lower its price (since otherwise, the other competitors—assuming they still exists and new entrants are viable—can lower their prices to win ABC Corp’s customers).

So, hypothetically speaking, we’ll have a scenario of:

P = $1

L = $0

On the one hand: “Wow! Everything is so much more affordable! It’s like I can have anything I want at my fingertips!

On the other hand: “Even though everything is so ridiculously cheap, I still can’t afford it because I literally cannot generate any money because AI is producing everything so no needs me to make anything.”

So who, other than those who already have money saved up, will be able to buy ABC Corp’s widget?

We will run into the problem of not having enough baseline demand to satisfy the existing production capacity.

+ + + + +

Thus far, jobs have done two things:

(1) give us fungible resource power (money)

(2) give us vocation/meaning

In the next social system, we need a substitute for both.

Let’s tackle (1) — and in some sense we already have.

What makes money relevant to our society? Because we want things, and we want the flexibility to be able to manage our things over time.

Money is the “SuperThing” that stands in for all other things… $100 of money can represent a night out at a restaurant, a new outfit, some groceries, or a dental appointment.

It’s fungible.

And you can choose to either save or spend your money, which is to say that you can manage your life by balancing the things you want today versus the things you may want tomorrow.

This ability to save versus spend is, socially-speaking, a very important feature of money because it’s what separates the responsible person from the irresponsible person.

John saves some of his $20 to prepare for a rainy day whereas Bill decides to squander all his $20 away today.

Money allows you to express your character. Possession of money—and the things it represents in general—enables you to express your degree of stewardship.

Are you a wise and generous person? A reckless fool? A greedy bastard?

How one handles his money is one of the clearest signals of agency.

So if we will no longer have jobs, which, at the moment, is more-or-less the only way to make money (unless you own the company that makes the things)… then we will no longer have money.

If we don’t have money, then we won’t be able to have things.

No things means no stewardship.

No stewardship means no signal for honor and agency.

Hmm… ok. But you can’t have a society of starving people. So there inevitably must be some guaranteed floor of providing people the things that keep them alive. We should count on at least that much.

But what about the extra discretionary category of things that keep people “happy”?

Are humans as a race and social collective entitled to that second class of things? or will we have to adjust to be content with only the bare minimum that enables basic survival?

Well, the epicurean consumer-driven excesses of the last 60 years or so have almost certainly made the concept of “survive on the bare minimum” unconscionable… people would rather storm and burn down the streets than go without their video games or access to sportsball.

So there will need to be a mechanism that provides people both with some essential things and some non-essential things.

And since the existing mechanism—jobs—will no longer be around (at least in the form we’ve understood them in the last two millennia), what mechanism will take its place?

And who will own that mechanism?

It seems to me that the mechanism will inevitably be a centralized one… whether the government owns it or the few giant megacorps own it will be practically irrelevant, since to the daily life for the average joe, it will feel like something that flows as a gift from the abstract “State”, as opposed to a fruit of his own hands working the land, so to speak.

And separate from having access to resources (things),

+ + + + +

These are just some of the problems we’ll face… I could go on, but let’s propose some loose solution structures that may be necessary, else we slide into some sort of technocratic Communism.

For starters, it’s hard to imagine any other way than to have some form of Universal Basic Income.

A good analogue of this that is in action today is the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is a state-owned investment fund created in 1976 to preserve a portion of Alaska’s oil revenues for future generations.

Royalties from oil production are put in the fund, which then pays out $1,000 - $2,000 per year to each resident in Alaska. The principle here is that the oil is partly viewed as a shared natural resource belonging to all Alaskans.

Similarly, despite “AI” being owned by a few megacorps, we could make the ethical case that AI should be a shared natural resource belonging to all humans.

And so, there could be an AI royalty that gets paid out based on every terrawatt hour or petaflop of "frontier inference”. This could be deposited into a special account. . . something like a Citizen Capital Accounts (CCAs).

In this account you would have two buckets: 1) The essentials bucket 2) The discretionary bucket

The essentials bucket covers your need for things to live, and the discretionary bucket is for things you want for facilitating your happiness.

That discretionary bucket (#2) is the one where you can save and spend so that you can differentiate yourself and your own agency from those who would make other kinds of lifestyle decisions.

The purpose of having a CCA would also be to provide that guarantee of baseline demand I mentioned earlier, since we still need people to be buying things (unless we do away with the concept of money altogether, which seems completely untenable).

Now people will still need something useful to do and spend their time with (there is great honor in work), so that would lead us to creating something like a Human-Time Exchange (HTX).

This would be something like:

Maria, a 35-year-old in Denver, teaches conversational Spanish and mentors teens.

• She lists her hours on the HTX

• A family books her twice a week → 8 hours/month → she earns 8 HTCs (Human-Time Credits) = $600 discretionary income.

• Her rating rises; she unlocks “Master Mentor” tier → higher exchange rate next quarter.

In the pre-AI economy, labor scarcity and competition for productivity made price signals work naturally.

But in a post-AI economy:

• Labor for 90 % of production is no longer scarce — AI can produce near-zero-marginal-cost goods and services.

• Prices for those goods collapse, destroying the feedback loop that once connected effort → wages → demand.

That breaks the market’s ability to distribute income and coordinate motivation.

The role of the HTX would be to re-introduces scarcity where it still legitimately exists: authentic human presence, trust, empathy, courage, care, culture.

We need incentivized differentiation.

Remember that without differential reward, virtue decays as irresponsibility imposes no cost.

+ + + + +

If we don’t proactively design the post-AI system, then what would probably happen is some slippery slide into an implementation of Communism (functionally irrespective of whether it’s the government officials or techno-billionaries running it).

And maybe, to make it seem “fair”, the all-seeing and all-knowing Algorithm will be the things that decides who gets access to what things and whose desires should be prioritized over others.

Let’s see!

Drago

P.S. If you want to try to design the post-AI society, here are some questions I’d hope you can answer:

• What is the system for? (Human flourishing? Family formation? Security? Innovation?)

• What cannot be sacrificed? (Dignity, liberty, subsidiarity, common good, rule of law.)

• What does “success” measure (beyond GDP): literacy, safety, time-use, apprenticeship rate, energy reliability, birth/formation metrics?

• What is the baseline income mechanism (UBI/NIT/owner dividend) and why? Flat vs cost-indexed?

• What creates differentiation above the floor so prudence/effort still matter?

• How do we keep personal resource management (budgeting, saving, failing safely) alive?

• What are the non-offshorable bases? (Energy congestion rents, land/location value, spectrum, carbon, compute/inference royalties.)

• Who owns compute, models, data, and energy? What anti-concentration thresholds and unbundling rules apply?

• What portion is citizen-owned (public funds, co-ops, pensions) vs private capital? How is it governed?

• Interop & portability: can users exit without losing identity, data, or reputation?

• What remains scarce when marginal cost → ~0? (Authentic human time, trust, energy/compute, land.)

• Where do we keep prices vs set guardrails? What markets stay “as-is,” which need protocols (e.g., verified human-time)?

• How do we avoid platform feudalism (closed algorithms mediating all exchange)?

• If “jobs” shrink, what gives meaning and status? (Care, craft, culture, service, risk-taking.)

• Do we need exchanges/protocols for verified human-time? How are quality and outcomes proven without bureaucracy?

• How do we make apprenticeship (formation) central again?

• What are the appeal rights for any automated, life-altering decision?

• If you add cash, what prevents it from being captured by landlords/utility monopolies?

• What’s the plan for abundant energy (generation + transmission) and by-right housing?

• How do infrastructure timelines align with income rollout to avoid inflation?

• How do you compensate the displaced generation that built the automation?

• What stake do newborns get at birth? How do inheritance rules work?

• What prevents perverse incentives in family formation supports?

• National fund vs federated funds (municipal/faith/union/co-op) with passive mandates?

• What are the hard constitutional guardrails (sunsets, audit ports, conflict rules)?

• How do you publish telemetry (public dashboards) to keep trust and course-correct?

• How do you handle compute offshoring and imports of AI services? “Access-for-access” rules?

• What automatic stabilizers kick in during recessions/energy shocks?

• What’s the rollback plan if metrics deteriorate (fraud spikes, rent capture, platform monopolization)?

• How will institutions (schools, parishes, guilds, civic corps) form character for freedom with abundance?

• What protects attention ecology for youth (phones, schools, Sabbath windows)?

So I wanted to battle-test and workshop the Transcendental Ladder argument I published earlier this month with one of the top apologists in the world.

Trent Horn sees it as a worthwhile synthesis of five or so arguments integrated into one package.

Check out the video above and the original essay below:

I will prove to you that God exists.

The way we’ll do this is by walking up a ladder of phenomena that you already know are true. At each step, the only way out is to deny something you yourself rely on every day. I’ll show this by highlighting the “tool” (or faculty) that you need to trust to make each portion of climb.

Here goes. . .

Step 1. Consciousness

You are conscious right now.

And your experience is not a homogenous blur; rather, it has differentiation: sights, sounds, thoughts, feelings.

The implications of this experienced differentiation and the way we access it will serve as raw material and foundation for our ascent.

Consciousness is self-evident and undeniable, so we haven’t introduced any real need for “trust” or “tools” yet, other than need to trust that you currently exist.

Let’s call this Layer 1 of reality: The Existence of Consciousness (the self).

Step 2. Intentional Act-Types (IATs)

You notice that there are certain conscious acts you can take that enable you to both process and navigate through that differentiation.

A subset of the acts that you can do entail these three intentional act-types (IATs):

• To know or believe something. (know/believe)

• To choose or desire something. (choose/desire)

• To delight in or be moved by something. (delight/be moved)

These acts are necessarily relational. They are always of something. These acts are about things. There is a fundamental aboutness to them.

You cannot know, choose, or delight in isolation, without a corresponding thing-to-be-known, thing-to-be-chosen, or thing-to-be-delighted-in that connects to and is referenced by your conscious IAT.

You know X, choose X, delight in X.

The implication for this is that now our consciousness transcends itself to a world “out there”, bringing us to Layer 2: The Existence of the World.

Step 2 Meta Moves

What is the Trusted Tool in Play?: Intentionality.

What you must trust: That your acts are about something

Reductionist’s Objection: “There are no genuinely intentional acts.”

Response (Cost of Denial): : Denying intentionality collapses belief into sensation, with no reason or argument left, reducing everything about your consciousness to only feelings and twitches.

You can expose how the reductionist undercuts himself by asking him, “If your words aren’t about anything, what are you arguing about?”

If nothing is about anything, then there is nothing to argue about.

Step 3. Success Conditions (the NAA)

Each intentional act has built-in standards of success:

• Belief is true or false.

• Choice is better or worse.

• Delight is fitting or unfitting.

In other words, whenever I engage in any of these acts, I cannot help but perceive that my act can “succeed” or “fail” in some respect. I perceive success conditions.

My act inextricably feels like it’s “aiming” at some target, such that there is some intuitive sensation of it succeeding or failing with respect to landing on the bullseye, whenever I launch it.

Without success conditions, the acts could not even be what they are. One might endeavor to deny the existence of success conditions, but such a denial itself depends on them. (You argue it’s true that truth isn’t a success condition; you recommend we ought to drop oughts; you “critique” beauty as mere mood)

To state this formally:

Normed Act Axiom (NAA)

Each IAT is constituted by a success/failure condition that gives it its identity:

• Know ↔ true/false

• Choose ↔ better/worse (right/wrong)

• Delight ↔ fitting/unfitting (noble/kitsch)
  

Denying these while arguing/deciding/criticizing is performatively self-defeating.

The existence of these success conditions are what make the conscious acts of intention possible in the first place, as well as what distinguish them from one another.

Through the following four double-dissociations we can clearly demonstrate that the acts are distinct:

• Akrasia: “I know this is wrong (know/believe), but I want it (choose/desire).”

• Cold admiration: “I judge the symphony great (know/believe), but it leaves me unmoved (delight).”

• Overpowered heart: “I’m moved by the speech (delight), but I judge its claims false (know/believe).”

• Resolute will vs. feeling: “I don’t feel like forgiving (delight), but I choose to anyway (choose/desire).”
  

Simply ask yourself:

Can you correct a false claim without choosing anything or feeling anything special? (Yes)
Can you resolve to do what you do not feel like doing while already knowing it’s right?
(Yes)
Can a sunset move you without teaching you a new fact or requiring any decision?
(Yes)

Again, we can note that there are three distinct satisfaction conditions:

• Knowledge is satisfied by evidence and understanding (no action or feeling required).

• A decision is satisfied by possession/achievement of the chosen good (action completed).

• Heart/Affect is satisfied by contemplative presence (simply beholding the worthy/beautiful).

We can also demonstrate the distinctiveness of these success conditions by swapping the IAT verbs and recognizing how the category of meaning changes entirely:

- I “proved” chocolate cake.
- I “chose” chocolate cake.
- I “delighted” in chocolate cake.

Although all three expressions are about cake, the core action or intention being applied to them is of a different kind.

With this Normed Acts Axiom, we are building our way to Layer 3… though we’ll need to first combine it with Step 4 before we get there.

Step 3 Meta Moves

What is the Trusted Tool in Play?: Phenomenological awareness of normed acts

What you must trust: That every intentional act carries success conditions

Reductionist’s Objection: “Belief/choice/delight have no success conditions.”

Response (Cost of Denial): The cost of denying Step 3 is to leave us with no truth/error, right/wrong, fittingness/unfittingness, which would render argument, ethics, and criticism as mere theater.

In other words, if we deny the phenomena of success conditions, the acts of belief, choice, and delight become indistinguishable motions that are reduced to mere twitches and reflexes.

We also run into the Practical Inescapability of Norms (PIN). You cannot coherently engage in believing/arguing/choosing while denying their success conditions.

Step 4. Instance-Transcending Standards (the ITP)

Here’s where we move from mere “conditions” experienced phenomenologically during the execution of an act, to standards or principles that transcend the particular instance.

From a success/failure feeling to a success/failure thing.

Instance-Transcendence Principle (ITP)

Success conditions for an intentional act-type are fixed by a standard that is not contained in the single phenomenological instance being evaluated. The success condition for a token act appeals to a standard beyond that token.

• For belief: there is the world beyond the sentence.

• For choice: the end and nature beyond the episode of willing (and the means–end fit that holds across cases).

• For beauty: the form and its apt presentation beyond this pulse of liking.

Therefore, success conditions presuppose a case-external standard—what we call truth, good, and beauty, not inventions of the moment.

Truth compares belief to how things are (map ↔ territory). Good compares choice to ends/natures and means–end fit, and Beauty compares delight to form (integrity/proportion/clarity-in-context).

A “standard” contained in the single experience measures nothing. It must transcend that singular experience.

The syllogism would be something like:

P1: To assess a token act (belief/choice/delight) you must appeal to a standard not contained in that token (the ITP).

P2: If the standard were just the token itself, assessment would be impossible (there would be nothing to compare to).

C: Therefore, the act’s success conditions imply a case-external standard: truth, good, beauty.

A token can’t be its own yardstick.

At this point we have established Layer 3 of reality: The Existence of Case-External Standards.

Step 4 Meta Moves

What is the Trusted Tool in Play?: Basic abstraction, recognition of universals

What you must trust: That success conditions presuppose a standard beyond the case

Reductionist’s Objection: “Okay, fine, it feels like my acts succeed or fail. But these success/failure feelings don’t presuppose real standards outside the moment. They’re just local psychological reactions or social conventions. There’s no ‘yardstick,’ just my brain lighting up.”

Response (Cost of Denial): If we deny this basic abstraction, then success and failure become pure illusion and there’s no reason to correct or improve anything.

“Success/failure” becomes indistinguishable from “pleasure/displeasure”. Correction or improvement becomes incoherent; you can’t say you got closer to truth or goodness, only that your mood shifted. And argument reduces to autobiography: “This is how it feels in my head,” as opposed to “This is how things are.”

The skeptic should ask themselves:

• If truth is just a feeling, what’s the difference between “I feel convinced” and “it is true”?

• If goodness is just a convention, why do we treat genocide as an error, not just a different custom?

• If beauty is just mood, why do we train critics, judges, and musicians to refine taste?

If it is possible to “assess” “evaluate” something, then there are necessarily standards you compare that something to, which aren’t that thing itself.

A test with no answer key isn’t a test; a belief with no truth isn’t a belief.

Let’s catch our breath before we move on to Step 5. . .

So far, we have moved from the existence of consciousness to the standards that exist beyond ourselves.

We have been doing this through drawing out the inferences one must make from a singular instance of conscious phenomena.

i.e. We’ve considered the mechanism behind what happens when we experience a single belief, make a single choice, delight in a single encounter.

Now, we will unpack the necessary consequences that come from zooming out (tree to forest) and looking across multiple instances, noticing the broader patterns that multi-instance analysis would reveal.

Specifically, we note that not only do these standards exist, but we can make contact with them. We can properly use them to measure reality, where our perceptions and maps track to those standards, rather than vice-versa, or us projecting them.

Step 5. Corrigibility-to-Contact Argument (CCA)

Our self exists and standards exist.

But what is the relationship between the experienced self and these standards? Can they interact?

What if the “standards” are something that originate from my mind and that I’m projecting? Am I mapping my actions to those standards or are they mapping to me?

When we look at our judgments over time, we notice that they can be corrected. We revise them, sharpen them, learn from others.

We can actually improve our fit to those standards.

We notice and experience the phenomenon of correction/learning/convergence. Our beliefs, choices, and sensibilities also encounter a sort of resistance from the thing out there, which can at times create a certain tension or dissonance.

That only makes sense if there is a “territory” we’re mapping, not just maps we’re inventing.

In other words, we aren’t manufacturing or projecting standards; we are measuring against them. I revise my judgment because the object pushed back, not because my preference changed.

I can be corrected because my acts are measured against reality. We experience the phenomenon of calibration towards something, even when we don’t agree about what that something is.

Let’s write that formally:

Corrigibility-to-Contact Argument (CCA)

Premise 1 (Phenomenology of correction):
We experience our judgments (beliefs, choices, delights) as corrigible — they can be revised, sharpened, and improved over time.

Premise 2 (Nature of corrigibility):
Correction implies that our judgments are not merely projections of preference but are measured against something independent of them (otherwise “correction” would be indistinguishable from mere change of taste).

Premise 3 (Standard vs. self):
If judgments can be improved, there must exist standards that resist and guide them — “territory” that maps can better or worse approximate.

Conclusion:
Therefore, our judgments make contact with real, case-external standards of truth, goodness, and beauty. These standards are not manufactured by the self but encountered by it.

If we were to tighten that up:

1. Corrigibility presupposes a real difference between “better fit” and “worse fit.”

2. That difference cannot be grounded in the mind’s shifting states alone (otherwise all revisions would be equal).

3. Therefore, corrigibility requires stance-independent standards that our acts measure against.

Conclusion: Standards of truth, goodness, and beauty are real, not projections.

So at this point we’ve really added some meat onto what Layer 3: The Existence of Case-External Standards looks like, and how we (our consciousness) interact with it.

As you can you see, establishing Layer 3 required three steps (at least I thought it would be better to split the NAA, ITP, and CCA up, since each carries so much independent meaning).

We essentially just established the different facets of normativity:

• Step 3 (NAA) = normativity in the act itself (you can’t believe without true/false).

• Step 4 (ITP) = normativity beyond the act (truth not just in me, but in the case).

• Step 5 (CCA) = normativity accessible through correction (we can converge on it, it’s not sealed off).

So again, the “standards” stage (Layer 3) is actually represented by a three-step arc:

1. Norms are intrinsic to the act (Step 3).

2. Those norms transcend the case (Step 4).

3. We can track and improve fit to those norms (Step 5).

Step 5 Meta Moves

What is the Trusted Tool in Play?: Memory, private calibration, and reasoning across cases, plus the sense of self-correction

What you must trust: That we can improve our fit to standards (our maps can track the territory)

Reductionist’s Objection: “All ‘correction’ is just changing tastes.”

Response (Cost of Denial): The cost of denying Step 5 is that we then can’t distinguish evidence from preference or whim, as any “revisions” become mere mood-shifts.

If you deny corrigibility and contact, you deny the very intelligibility of correction, education, and expertise. Very simply, do you think education and expertise are real things, or not? Or self improvement? Is it possible to be “corrected” about anything?

Why do we refine maps if there’s no territory?

Does the phenomenon of “regret” make any sense, since it implies that there exists a situation that could have been measured as being “better”.

Can one artist perform a piece of art in a more fitting way than another, or are all renditions equally apt?

Why did you feel the need to revise if it’s just preference?

Different thermometers can disagree; that doesn’t turn temperature into a preference.

Although I may risk being redundant here, I think walking the skeptic through these following 3 principles should suffice in demonstrating the absurdity of his reductiveness:

1. Resistance Test

   1. You can’t make a false claim true by deciding it; you can’t make an off-key note in tune by liking it; you can’t make betrayal just by decree.

   2. Projection would obey us but reality makes us revise.

2. Error and Surprise (Corrigibility with Reasons):

   1. We can discover we were wrong and can be shown why (new evidence; a cleaner harmonic analysis; a principled moral argument).

3. Counterfactual constraint (could-have-been-otherwise).

   1. “If the data had looked like this, the claim would be false.”

   2. “Given this end, that means was wrong—even if we liked it.”

   3. “In this room’s light, that color choice is garish.”

   4. The object sets conditions our preferences must respect.

If all we did were assign labels, none of these three would make sense. But they are exactly how we live and argue.

Step 6. Aspects of Reality

The standards of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (T/G/B) can properly be considered aspects of reality. These aren’t things that you see only somewhere but rather are fundamental structure of reality that you experience everywhere.

Every conscious act is already an attempt to know, choose, or delight. You cannot imagine the absence of T/G/B, because any attempt to do so would itself use them.

No matter what experiential item you consider, you can always ask (a) “is it so?” (true), (b) “what should I do?” (good), (c) “is it striking/sublime?” (beautiful).

The fact that you can always ask these questions related to any experience and of any object suggests that the standards of T/G/B are built into being.

Everything that “is,” is also in some way “knowable,” as “desirable” (or good for something), and as “delight-worthy” (or able to shine).

It’s one reality emanating through several inseparable lenses. These can be considered the ratios or aspects of reality:

• True (verum): every being is intelligible. It has a determinate form/structure that can be known. (Even a rock is in principle knowable.)

• Good (bonum): every being is appetible/perfective. In some way it can fulfill a tendency or serve an end (even if only for a specific nature).

• Beautiful (pulchrum): every being, insofar as its form is proportionate and manifest, can be delightful in contemplation (the “splendor of form” as apprehended).

So, where there is more actuality (more “being”), there is ipso facto greater intelligibility (truth), perfection (goodness), and splendor (beauty) because these are just being viewed under different light.

To that note, consider an analogy via Light. You don’t see light directly, per se, but you see by light.

Look around you. Anything that you can see right now you can see because of the light reflecting off of it.

The same is true of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Anything you experience in reality is reflecting Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. No matter where you look, T/G/B is there. T/G/B illuminates your consciousness and reality itself.

T/G/B don’t sit on top of being; they are being-under-aspects.

At this point, I think we can say that we’ve demonstrated Layer 4: The Existence of the Transcendentals (T/G/B) as aspects of reality

Our intentional acts are not just pointing at objects but at pervasive structures of reality.

Step 6 Meta Moves

What is the Trusted Tool in Play?: Imaginative/conceptual faculty + reflective abstraction (our ability to test universality by trying to imagine T/G/B’s absence)

What you must trust: That Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are pervasive aspects of reality (always present, always presupposed)

Reductionist’s Objection: “T/G/B aren’t everywhere; they’re just add-ons in some cases or illusions of our psychology.”

Response (Cost of Denial): To deny the existence of the Transcendentals (specifically, the pervasive nature of these three case-external standards), the reductionist must deny that every act of knowing/choosing/delighting presupposes T/G/B, which means it would be possible to imagine their absence. But it’s not possible to imagine their absence, and the reductionist’s claim collapses, since even denial of the Transcendentals uses them.

In other words, the reductionist must demonstrate even one example of knowing/choosing/delighting that doesn’t presuppose Truth, Goodness, or Beauty in order for his claim to merit being taken seriously. But he cannot.

Step 7. Gradation and Participation (PP)

In the wild we meet degrees and defects of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

Degrees: truer/less true, better/worse, more/less beautiful.

Defects: error/vice/kitsch as lacks relative to a due form.

i.e. It’s not that I simply experience things as “that right there is true… it’s good… it’s beautiful” (binary conditions). It’s that I can see that some claim has more truth than another, I can determine that some choice or means is better at serving an end (or even that some end is better than another), and I can experience one performance or encounter as being more sublime and beautiful than another.

This is to say, gradation of Truth, Goodness, of Beauty exist throughout reality (in the same way that we can perceive varying intensities of light).

Moreover, it’s not just that I experience directionless differences in T/G/B, but rather, wherever there is less T/G/B I experience and feel it as a real defect.

The implications of degrees and defects lead us to note three phenomena:
Common Measure, Privation Realism, and Limited Reception.

The three phenomena will then ground our key point in Step 7, which is that finite things possess truth, goodness, and beauty by participation.

CM (Common Measure)

Premise 1: We make judgments of “more true/less true,” “better/worse,” “more/less beautiful.”
Premise 2: Such comparative judgments are corrigible by shared reasons — we treat ourselves and others as measuring against something beyond taste.
Premise 3: Corrigibility implies that there is a cross-instance standard that those reasons track.
Conclusion: Therefore, gradations in truth, goodness, and beauty presuppose a common measure beyond individual preference.

PR (Privation Realism)

Premise 1: In our experience, “worse” judgments are not merely differences but defects (error, vice, kitsch).
Premise 2: A defect is intelligible only relative to a due form (e.g. crookedness is intelligible only relative to straightness).
Premise 3: Therefore, gradations of “worse” presuppose a real standard of fullness from which they fall short.
Conclusion: Therefore, privation (lack relative to form) is real, not just psychological projection.

LR (Limited Reception)

Premise 1: Finite beings display truth, goodness, and beauty to limited degrees (e.g. partial knowledge, mixed motives, flawed proportions).
Premise 2: The experience of limit presupposes that these perfections are not exhausted by any one finite case.
Premise 3: Therefore, finite beings receive their share of truth, goodness, and beauty only partially.
Conclusion: Therefore, finite things possess these perfections by limited reception.

Next we hinge these into the concept of Participation. . .

Participation = “by another possession of a perfection measured by a common standard.”

PP (Participation Premise)

Premise 1 (CM): Gradations presuppose a common measure.
Premise 2 (PR): Defects are privations relative to a due form.
Premise 3 (LR): Finite beings receive truth, goodness, and beauty in limited (“by another”) measure.
Conclusion: Therefore, finite beings have truth, goodness, and beauty by participation in a common measure, from which they can also fall short.

A defect is intelligible only relative to a due form.

If a finite instance can be defective, that means there’s a fuller reality it falls short of.

So then, the finite instance could properly and analogously be considered a “borrower”: it’s measured by something it doesn’t fully contain..

Before summarizing Step 7, I want to briefly anticipate an desired clarification:
”What’s the difference between your claim of Common Measure (CM) and the Corrigibility-to-Contact Argument (CCA)?”

What CCA establishes

• Claim: Correction presupposes that our judgments are measured against something independent of them. My own judgments feel correctable. I notice error, surprise, and resistance in real time (even if it’s just me against myself)

• Focus: the fact of contact — when I revise my belief, it’s because the object or standard “pushes back,” not just because I feel differently.

• Result: We aren’t manufacturing standards; we’re measuring against them.

CCA shows that there is a “territory” that resists and guides our maps.

What CM adds beyond CCA

• Claim: If multiple people can compare judgments (truer/less true, better/worse, more/less beautiful), and if corrections are corrigible by shared reasons, then the standard can’t be “private territory” or a mere idiosyncratic feedback loop. Corrections are not just private. Multiple competent agents converge on better answers under shared evidence (scientists, craftsmen, musicians).

• Focus: the fact of comparability across cases and across subjects.

• Result: There must be a common measure that makes these comparisons and corrections meaningful.

CM is like CCA “scaled up”: not just that we’re mapping a territory, but that it is a shared, cross-instance measure.

To some extent we are establishing objectivity here. We’re moving from the mere phenomena of “truth-tracking” (where it feels like I’m being objective) to the actual reality of truth-tracking (and likewise for goodness and beauty).

It’s the escape from private judgment to shared, public, and falsifiable domain.

This is to say that CCA establishes contact with a standard (vs. projection), and CM establishes the commonality of that standard (vs. private, idiosyncratic “territories”).

Without CCA, you don’t have a standard at all. Without CM, you’d have only private standards with no possibility of rational correction across people/cases. We move from private contact (where I bump into standards) to public measure (where we converge on what those standards are).

The two principles at play in moving us from CCA to CM are:

1. Convergence under expertise (calibration):

   1. With training and information, competent judges tend to converge: scientists on facts, craftsmen on good joinery, musicians on pitch and phrasing.

   2. Projection predicts divergence (more training = more idiosyncrasy), but we see the opposite.

2. Public standards inside practices:

   1. Truth: logic, experimental method.

   2. Good: rules of inference in practical reason, ends–means fit, fairness in games/law.

   3. Beauty: tuning/tempo/voicing in music; composition/exposure in photography; restoration protocols in art.

   4. These are not private vibes; they are shared calibrators.

So to summarize, we combine the existence of a common measure (CM) with the realism of privation (PR) and the limited reception argument to point to the reality that the instances of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that we experience in finite things/beings are participations in perfections (due forms of the full or complete states of the Transcendentals by which we perceive their absence in finite things).

With Step 7, we are building our way to Layer 5… but we’ll need Step 8 to complete it.

Step 7 Meta Moves

What is the Trusted Tool in Play?: Comparative judgment across subjects, induction, recognition of universals

What you must trust:

That “more/less” claims are not free-floating feelings but imply a common measure (CM).

That “worse” experiences are not just different but defective relative to a due form (PR).

That limits in finite things are real signs of reception, not exhaustion of the perfection itself (LR).

Taken together: finite beings manifest T/G/B only by participation in something fuller.

Reductionist’s Objection:

“All judgments of more/less are just subjective comparisons.”

“Defect is just disliking difference; there’s no ‘due form’ beyond your preference.”

“What looks like a limit is just all there is; don’t project a greater perfection beyond it.”

Response (Cost of Denial):

Without CM, you can’t explain convergence, expertise, or why we refine judgments.

Without PR, you lose the distinction between error and truth, vice and virtue, beauty and ugliness. All critique collapses into “different strokes.”

Without LR, you reduce “limit” to brute fact with no intelligibility; you undercut the very sense of progress, aspiration, and improvement.

If it’s just taste, why do trained judges converge under better data? Why do we distinguish expert from novice?

If defect is just “difference,” why do we treat lies, injustice, and kitsch as failures, not just variants? Crookedness makes sense only by reference to straightness.

If finite instances exhaust the perfection, why do we always sense “further to go” — more to know, a better good, a deeper beauty? The very experience of limit presupposes something beyond it.

Are there genuinely better/worse performances of the same piece?

What makes a lie worse than truth if defect is just “difference”?

Step 8. Source (Non-Participated Plenitude)

Step 7 showed that finite beings have Truth, Goodness, and Beauty only by participation (CM, PR, LR → PP).

Participation by definition points beyond itself: what has by another implies something that has by itself.

By analogy, the existence of borrowers imply a lender whom they are borrowing from.

Reflected light implies a sun (source).

So there must be a Source that the perfection or fullness of T/G/B.

If the source itself were limited in T/G/B, its limit would arise either from:

a) Reception (it “got” its truth/goodness/beauty from another, so it’s not the ultimate source, but an intermediary participating), or
b) Privation (a lack, which disqualifies it from being the measure of fullness).

Reception alone implies there must be a “non-received” source (otherwise regress).

Privation implies that there must be a fullness (otherwise defect is unintelligible).

Therefore, the Source must possess T/G/B fully, not by participation but formally and essentially.

This Source cannot be merely a heap of finite things or the biggest (yet imperfect) finite thing.

• Ten billion partial truths ≠ Truth as such.

• An aggregate of partial goods ≠ Goodness itself.

• A pile of finite beauties ≠ Beauty as such.

• Aggregation can give quantity, not the formality of the perfection itself.

So again, there is a necessary, non-participated Source of truth, goodness, and beauty.

It is plenitude of being: in it there is no reception (it is self-subsistent), no privation (nothing lacking), no limit (not bounded by kind).

Participation to Source Argument

1. Finite beings have truth, goodness, and beauty by participation (limited, received, defectible).

2. What is by participation presupposes what is by essence (otherwise the participated perfection has no anchor).

3. Aggregates of participations cannot equal the perfection as such.

4. If the source were limited, it would either participate (contradiction) or lack (privation, unfit to be the measure).
   ∴ Therefore, there exists a non-participated, non-limited Source of truth, goodness, and beauty.

Step 8 completes our build-up for Layer 5: A Source for the Transcendentals

Step 8 Meta Moves

What is the Trusted Tool in Play?:

• Comparative judgment (seeing parts vs wholes).

• Causal reasoning (borrower → lender, reflection → light source).

• Privative understanding (defect requires fullness).

What you must trust:

• That participation implies a source (what is “by another” depends on something “by itself”).

• That aggregation cannot generate the formal perfection as such.

• That privation cannot explain itself without a fullness against which it is measured.

Reductionist’s Objection:

• “Finite things just are what they are; no need to posit a source.”

• “Maybe the heap of finite instances is all that ‘truth,’ ‘goodness,’ or ‘beauty’ mean.”

• “Every case has its own standard; there is no fullness to measure against.”

Response (Cost of Denial): If you deny this step, you can’t explain why partial perfections are measured as partial, can’t explain why privations are genuine lacks, not just neutral variations, and you’ll end in nihilism about truth, goodness, beauty — which undermines science, ethics, and art.

Participation without source is incoherent: if X only has by another, there must be a Y that has by itself. Can you have borrowers with no lender? Reflections with no light source?

As far as the heap fallacy goes: many almost-circles ≠ circularity; many partial truths ≠ Truth. Can ten million partial lies ever add up to the Truth?

And without a fullness, “privation” collapses into mere difference, you lose the very intelligibility of defect. What makes vice a lack if there’s no fullness it falls short of?

Step 9. Natural Desire (ND)

Intellect keeps asking, Will keeps reaching, Heart keeps seeking splendor.

. . .

A baby experiences hunger before it ever sees any food.

Because you are physically hungry, you know that food exists,

Because you are spiritually hungry, you know that God exists.

. . .

As we saw in the prior step, participation logic forces you to posit a source that has T/G/B non-participated, i.e., by nature rather than “by another.”

In ruling out “heap” and “big finite source” options, Step 8 already shows the Source must not suffer the kinds of limits that make finite things partial.

But Step 8 does this by reasoning “backwards” from the condition of participants. It tells us that there must be a fullness from which they borrow.

So in Step 8 did in showing that the Source must be non-participated and non-limited in the sense of being the ground of participants, Step 9 will show that the Source must be unbounded plenitude, proportionate to our faculties’ open-ended orientation.

Let’s break down what I mean:

• These three faculties are unbounded

  • Intellect: it never stops inquiring, can always ask “why?” or “what more?”

  • Will: it is never finally satisfied with finite goods — always reaches further.

  • Heart: it is always capable of being moved by deeper beauty.

• Finite instances never fully sate

  • We keep pressing beyond any particular truth, good, or beauty.

  • This isn’t a quirk of psychology but built into the very act-structure of these faculties.

• Proportionate object principle (ND)

  • A natural, universal, non-arbitrary orientation must be proportionate to something real.

  • Hunger without food-type reality, thirst without water-type reality, is unintelligible.

• Conclusion

  • Therefore, the proportionate object of intellect/will/heart must be unbounded Truth, Goodness, Beauty.

  • This Source is not just non-limited but plenitude itself — inexhaustible, fully proportionate to our open-ended capacities.’

Natural Desire Syllogism (ND)

P1. Human faculties (intellect, will, heart) are intrinsically ordered to truth, goodness, and beauty as such.

P2. Finite instances cannot fully satisfy these open-ended orientations.

P3. Natural, universal, non-arbitrary orientations are not in vain; they presuppose a real proportionate object.

C: Therefore, there must exist unbounded Truth, Goodness, and Beauty — plenitude itself.

Step 9 Meta Moves

What is the Trusted Tool in Play?:

• Phenomenological awareness of desire (intellectual, volitional, aesthetic).

• Principle of proportionality of natural desires (orientation isn’t absurd)

What you must trust:

• That natural, universal hungers are not cosmic jokes — they correspond to real proportionate objects.

• That the “no ceiling” structure of intellect/will/heart points beyond the finite.

Reductionist’s Objection:

• “Desires can just be evolutionary misfires.”

• “Humans want infinity, but that doesn’t mean infinity exists.”

Response (Cost of Denial): Misfires only make sense against the backdrop of real aims (e.g., sexual desire can misfire, but only because sex is real).

Every other natural desire corresponds to a real kind of object (hunger → food, thirst → water, curiosity → knowable world).

Why would the three deepest, most universal desires (truth/goodness/beauty) be the only absurd exceptions?

If we deny this Step our faculties become absurd: we are hardwired to seek what cannot exist.

Denial here would also collapse rational inquiry, moral striving, and aesthetic experience into evolutionary tricks. And yet, like we’ve demonstrated elsewhere above, Performative defeat: to argue against truth as real is already to presuppose it.

I would ask the reductionist: Do you really think our hunger for truth is like a thirst for water that has no water?

If every other desire has a real proportionate object, why would the most fundamental desires be the only exceptions?

Step 10. Classical Theism Tie-in

At this point, we’ve established:

• A Source of Truth/Goodness/Beauty (non-received, non-defective).

• This Source is plenitude—it has T/G/B fully, by essence, not by participation.

Now Step 10 has us asking: what kind of being is that?

From metaphysics we know that:

1. Non-participated plenitude ⇒ it must be necessary (not contingent).

2. No privation, no reception ⇒ it must be simple (no parts to limit it).

3. Plenitude of being ⇒ it is infinite in truth, goodness, beauty (no intrinsic limit).

4. Ground of all else ⇒ it must be ultimate, self-explanatory, uncaused.

Those four marks (necessary, simple, infinite, ultimate) are the “bridge” from the transcendentals to God in classical theism.

So our final step here is less about introducing new phenomena, and more about properly naming what we’ve already reached.

It’s a clarifying step: This necessary, simple, plenitude of being — the source of all finite truth, goodness, and beauty — is exactly what philosophers and theologians call God.

And so, we establish the final layer, Layer 6: Plenitude of Being (God)

A Guided Exercise: Seeing God Through a Storm

We just went through a really abstract heavy lift, and you might be wondering… what does it actually look like to move through the steps of this Transcendental Ladder in a concrete experience of consciousness?

Let’s take a look:

Step 1 — Consciousness (Layer 1)

Look outside: clouds stack, thunder rolls. You’re aware. And your awareness isn’t a blur. Sight, sound, thought, and feeling (as well as the contents found within these modes) are distinct.

Step 2 — Intentional Act-Types (IATs) (Layer 2)

What are you doing with this scene?

• Know/Believe: “A storm is coming.”

• Choose/Desire: “I should shut the windows.”

• Delight/Be moved: “That sky is sublime.”
  Each act is about something: you know that, choose that, delight in that.

Step 3 — Success Conditions (NAA)

Each act carries success/failure:

• Belief: true/false (“Will it actually rain here?”)

• Choice: better/worse (“Shut all windows or just the windward ones?”)

• Delight: fitting/unfitting (“Awe here is apt, mockery isn’t.”)
  Try to deny this while arguing, deciding, or critiquing and you’ll use the very norms you deny.

Step 4 — Instance-Transcending Standards (ITP) (Layer 3 begins)

Why can your belief be wrong? Because of the sky itself, not your mood.
Why can your choice be worse? Because of ends and means (protect, ventilate) that hold across cases.
Why can your delight be unfitting? Because of the form of what’s there (integrity/proportion/manifestness).
⇒ Success conditions appeal beyond this token act to standards: truth, good, beauty.

Step 5 — Corrigibility & Contact (CCA)

Let’s say your neighbor shows you a radar, showing that the storm veers north. You revise your belief. Such a revision is not a mood swing—the world pushed back.

You keep learning, tuning judgments, correcting mistakes.
⇒ We’re measuring standards, not manufacturing them.

Step 6 — Aspects of Reality (Layer 4)

The same storm is:

• True (it is what it is—intelligible),

• Good (good-for crops, bad-for picnics—appetible),

• Beautiful (splendor that moves you—delight-worthy).
  Like light: you don’t stare at light; you see by it. So too with Truth/Goodness/Beauty (T/G/B)—they pervade being.

Step 7 — Gradation & Participation (Layer 5 begins)

Stay with the storm. Notice how your judgments aren’t just yes/no but more/less.

• Truth: “The radar that says ‘rain at 5:17pm’ is truer than the one that says ‘rain sometime tonight.’”

• Goodness: “Shutting every window is better than shutting one and letting the rug get ruined.”

• Beauty: “Watching lightning arc across the whole sky is more sublime than a dim phone photo.”

You also notice defects: the false forecast that predicts hail, the reckless choice to leave things open, the kitschy filter that makes the storm look fake. These aren’t just “different” — they’re worse, because they fall short of what should be.

Three things follow:

• Common Measure (CM): Shared reasons let us rank better/worse. If it’s just taste, why do meteorologists converge on truer forecasts, or why do musicians converge on better phrasing? Comparison implies a yardstick beyond the moment.

• Privation Realism (PR): “Worse” isn’t mere variation. A false alert, a reckless act, or a kitschy photo only make sense as lacks relative to a due form (truth, right action, real beauty).

• Limited Reception (LR): Every forecast, every act, every photo shows truth/goodness/beauty only to a degree. None exhausts it. Finite cases are partial shares.

Put together: finite things have truth, goodness, and beauty by participation. Like borrowed light from the lightning, they show it partly and can fall short.

Step 8 — Source (Non-Participated Plenitude) (Layer 5)

If forecasts and photos are borrowers, there must be a lender. If reflections of light exist, there must be lightning itself.

• A heap of vague forecasts doesn’t equal the truth of the storm’s actual path.

• A stack of careless acts doesn’t add up to goodness.

• Ten thousand snapshots don’t exhaust the beauty of the storm.

Participation implies a source: what is “by another” must depend on something “by itself.”

And the source cannot be defective or borrowed — otherwise it, too, would need another. If it were received, regress follows; if it were lacking, it couldn’t be the measure of fullness.

Therefore, there must be a non-received, non-defective Source of truth, goodness, and beauty — plenitude itself, like the storm in its full power rather than our partial glances.

Step 9 — Natural Desire (ND)

Now notice yourself. Even after checking three weather apps, you still want to know what’s really going to happen. Even after closing the windows, you still want the best outcome. Even after seeing one lightning strike, you still want to watch the next.

Your faculties are open-ended:

• Intellect: you never stop asking “what more?”

• Will: you are never finally satisfied with finite goods.

• Heart: you are always open to deeper awe.

Finite instances never fully sate these hungers. And hunger isn’t a cosmic joke: every natural desire has a proportionate object (food for hunger, water for thirst). Why would truth, goodness, and beauty be the only exceptions?

Therefore, the Source cannot just be non-defective — it must be inexhaustible plenitude, proportionate to our open-ended faculties.

Step 10 — Classical Theism Tie-in (Layer 6)

Non-participated plenitude is necessary (not contingent), simple (no parts to limit), infinite (no intrinsic bound), ultimate (uncaused source).
This is exactly what classical theism names God.

Wrap-up

As is indicated by the subtitle of this essay, the essence of what we’re really saying here is that because you are spiritually hungry, God exists. Pretending you’re not hungry in order to deny the existence of God is fundamentally a suicidal endeavor.

Further, because this is more than some abstract proof, you can empirically confirm and phenomenological verify that the following holds:

Whenever you consciously aim at and seek out the transcendentals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, you notice that your existential hunger gets progressively satiated. There is a very real and inner stillness of peace that gets produced within you. A fruit from the tree, as it were…

The more I “eat” Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, the more I am filled.

I am the way, the truth, and the life… I am the bread of life.. the bread that anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever… unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life… For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.. The one who feeds on me will live because of me… Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever. ~ Jesus Christ

Game, set, match, atheists?
Drago

A man can destroy someone's body.

A woman can destroy someone's reputation—which is to say, his or her relationships.

What exactly does that mean? What is a relationship and how can it be destroyed?

A relationship, at minimum, entails a mutual exchange of attention.

And not just any kind of attention, but qualitatively, an attention that carries with it the gaze of admiration, joy, peace, and so on.

If a woman damages someone's reputation—network of relationships—she is essentially making it so that her target receives less positive attention, or that her target is robbed of the goods of fraternal joy, the multicolored vibrancy of life.

When her sabotage is successful, the end result is that people want to spend less time around her target, and whenever they do cross paths with her target, they will only offer attention loaded with disgust, hate, dread, and the like.

Since humans are not merely individuals, but a sum of interpersonal relationships, there is a special kind of, uniquely human, damage that only a woman is capable of administering.

For while most animals are capable of violence, the reputational destruction of the uniquely human good of soul-to-soul relationships operates on a tier of its own.

On the flip-side, women have a unique power to infuse a family or community with the beautiful depths of relational riches, so it's all a matter of how she chooses to wield the sword of her tongue.

How AI would have Written this Instead

A man can kill the body.
A woman can kill the place you hold in the hearts of others.

A relationship is more than shared time — it is a sustained exchange of regard, a current of trust, esteem, and affection flowing between two souls. Its currency is the quality of attention: the gaze that carries admiration, joy, and peace.

To destroy a reputation is to poison that current. It is to seed suspicion where there was trust, to tint memory with contempt, to make the very thought of you taste bitter. In the mind of others, you are reframed until your presence draws fewer invitations, fewer smiles, fewer open doors. What attention remains comes loaded with disgust, dread, or pity.

Humans are not only bodies but networks of living bonds. Break enough of those bonds, and you do not merely wound a person — you socially starve them. They walk among the living, but the warm circulation of goodwill is gone.

Animals can maim and kill. But to dismantle the soul’s place in the human web — to turn friends into strangers and strangers into enemies — is a form of violence only humans can commit, and one in which a woman’s weapons have always been the sharpest.

Author’s Note:

In case it need to be said (it shouldn’t because you’re a smart reader), this post is about the comparative advantage of the feminine psyche.

Of course, men can—and some often do—engage in the subversive behavior described above as well, in the same way that women are also capable of physical violence.

But the point here is to note the following parallel:

Man’s capacity for physical violence is greater than that of a woman.
Woman’s capacity for relational violence is greater than that of a man.

And I’m talking about averages here (I’ve now given you two unnecessary clarifications, and for that, I hope you’ll forgive me 🙂).

The other purpose of this post is to keep you aware of the split-second capabilities of AI to upgrade—if not outright replace—both your output and mine, and to prompt you to prepare for the implications ahead. . .

—Drago

You can see the git commit here.

For those who aren’t technically inclined, let me to give you the context of what this means:

• Any LLM AI tool you use (like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Grok, etc) has a system prompt, which is a set of instructions instructing the AI on how they should respond. So when you ask your question, the AI goes through its own system instructions before giving you a response.

• Grok, the AI created by Elon Musk and X, is open-source, meaning that you can see the code that goes into it.

• Different versions of code are typically managed in a git repository, which allows you to track the different changes.

• So what you’re seeing in the screenshot above is the exact change in the code that led to mass unleashing of the rogue AI yesterday. (Now, this is still a developing story, so perhaps something else will come out. But again, if it’s the case that Grok system prompts are open-source, then we should be able to see all of the changes).

The output of an LLM is predicated based on its training data and its system instructions.

In other words, it’s trained to recognize patterns based on either the kinds of patterns found in its selected data or on the kinds of patterns it’s instructed to piece together (or both).

So then. . . what does one do with this observation of Grok’s behavior? What other questions need to be asked, and stones turned over, with respect to how Grok was developed and set up?

Remember, AI can’t tell the “truth”; it only reflects back the patterns found in the writings of collective humanity—or at least those that it has looked at.

I don’t have any conclusion to make yet as I need more time to contemplate this, but I wanted to share with you the codebase for Grok’s system prompt so you can look around and see for yourself.

—Drago

{ Written through Drago’s Assistant }

It’s time we confront the story beneath the headlines.

Israel’s recent strike on Iran has been interpreted as retaliation, deterrence, and defense. But behind the military maneuvers and diplomatic posturing lies a prophecy thousands of years old—one that involves a cow.

Yes, a cow.

More precisely: an unblemished red heifer, as described in the Book of Numbers. A biblical creature whose ashes are required to purify the Temple Mount—the only site on earth where a Jewish Temple can be rebuilt. And without it, the Third Temple cannot rise.

A Cow That Could Change the World

For centuries, no red heifer met the strict biblical criteria: entirely red, without blemish, never yoked. Then in 2022, five red heifers were flown from Texas to Israel. For believers—both Jewish and Christian—the implications were explosive. For adversaries of Israel, it was seen as a red flag.

Hamas took notice. So did Iran.

And for good reason: the Third Temple, according to both Jewish and Evangelical Christian eschatology, must be rebuilt before the arrival of the Messiah—or the Antichrist, depending on your theology. And that Temple can only rise on the Temple Mount… a site currently occupied by the Al-Aqsa Mosque—Islam’s third holiest shrine.

The Temple Mount: Holy Ground and Powder Keg

The Temple Mount is no ordinary religious site. For Jews, it’s the holiest place on earth—the location of Solomon’s Temple and its successor. For Muslims, it’s the site of Muhammad’s Night Journey and ascension, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. For Christians, it’s where Jesus overturned the money changers’ tables—and where prophecy says the end of the world may unfold.

This isn’t just theological. It’s geopolitical.

The current arrangement, the "status quo," bars non-Muslim worship on the Mount to avoid violence. But even rumors of change spark riots. When five red heifers arrived in Israel in 2022, Islamic clerics and Iranian media interpreted it not as coincidence, but conspiracy—a signal that Jews were preparing to rebuild the Temple and remove Al-Aqsa.

October 7: The Day Prophecy Became Politics

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a brutal assault on Israel. Its name?

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

In statements, Hamas leaders cited the red heifer project and increasing Jewish presence on the Mount as a justification for the attack. One spokesperson warned of religious Zionist efforts to defile the mosque and replace it with their Temple.

This wasn’t fringe rhetoric. It was apocalyptic warfare.

Iran echoed these themes, portraying Israel’s religious-nationalist movements as provocations not just against Palestinians, but against Islam itself. And with the red heifers safely growing in Shiloh, Temple preparation rumors intensified.

Why Christians Are Watching Closely

Evangelical Christians, especially in the United States, have long believed that a Third Temple must be built before Jesus returns. According to dispensationalist interpretations, this Temple will be desecrated by the Antichrist—triggering the end times and Christ’s return.

To them, the red heifer isn’t just a Jewish relic. It’s a divine countdown clock.

Some even see modern Israel’s restoration in 1948, the recapture of Jerusalem in 1967, and now the appearance of red heifers in 2022 as consecutive prophetic milestones. As Christian ranchers partner with Israeli rabbis, a strange ecumenism emerges: one side waits for the Messiah’s first coming, the other for His return.

Islamic Eschatology: Al-Aqsa Must Be Defended

For Muslims, the idea of rebuilding the Jewish Temple is not just unacceptable—it’s apocalyptic. Islamic prophecy speaks of a false messiah, the Dajjal, who will deceive the Jews and desecrate sacred lands. In many interpretations, the very existence of a Jewish Temple is associated with deception, tribulation, and divine punishment.

Hence, any move toward Temple reconstruction—whether symbolic, rhetorical, or actual—is viewed as an existential threat.

The Red Heifer as Catalyst

So what does a cow have to do with global war?

Everything, if you believe what each side believes.

In Jewish tradition, only ten red heifers will ever be used. Nine have already come and gone. The tenth, according to Maimonides, will be prepared by the Messiah himself. In Christian prophecy, the red heifer makes possible the Temple where the Antichrist will reign—before Christ ends it all. In Islamic prophecy, that Temple signals the tribulation ushered in by the Dajjal.

Prophecy and Policy Collide

Even if most Israelis aren’t actively trying to rebuild the Temple, the presence of the red heifers has energized fringe movements, worried Arab leaders, and triggered militant rhetoric. Hamas’s war was justified in their own words as a defense of Al-Aqsa from a Jewish Temple plot.

And now Israel has struck Iran. Most observers focus on uranium enrichment and drone strikes. But underneath the geopolitical chess game is something older, deeper, and far more volatile:

A spiritual war.

A war where cows, stones, and ancient texts are not symbols, but battle cries.

Conclusion: The Temple’s Shadow

The Third Temple doesn’t exist yet. But its shadow looms larger than ever. In the minds of many, its construction would mark the climax of human history. To others, it would mean catastrophe.

The red heifer is just a cow—until you believe what it means.

And millions do.

That’s what I felt.

Last week, when Google Veo 3 came out and I saw the possibilities, it gave me 70% of that same feeling.

The awe and delight components are obvious: the novice in one domain can quickly become the master

The dread is that we are all running faster and faster until we all run off the cliff.

Massive job losses are inevitable (like the kind that can cause civil uproar in the streets); it’s only a matter of time.

Anyway. . .

Check out these awesome videos I made (if I may say so 🤠), and let me know which is better.

And yes, all of the content is AI generated.

A)

B)

The first is a dramatic ad, showcasing the new groundbreaking feature at Holy Habits: dynamic, voice-guided prayer.

The second is like what would happen if J.R.R. Tolkien and Terrence Malick co-produced a movie on the battle in becoming a saint.

Which do you like better? What do you feel when watching these?

—Drago

P.S. I don’t know if you’ve noticed (it might not be obvious in the email format of this newsletter), but I’ve introduced a new section on this substack: Drago’s Assistant

That’s where I put content whose ideas I create, but whose actual writing I let the AI do.

I put it in its own section so you can know what’s 100% my voice, and what’s silicone…

The post you’re reading here is 100% the real me, baby.

Except for those videos, I guess. . .

We tend to think of the Enlightenment as a triumph: a civilization stepping out of the shadows of myth and religion into the clarity of science and reason. But what if that “light” was a sleight of hand? What if, in promising to help us see more clearly, the Enlightenment quietly removed our ability to see what matters most?

Not by direct attack, but by a deeper sabotage—redefining what counts as knowledge, filtering what is allowed as real, and training generations to dismiss the deepest form of seeing: contemplation.

This is not a rejection of reason. It is a call to recover the full range of human knowing—and the soul’s path to God that the modern mind has forgotten.

Part I: What the Enlightenment Gave Us (and Took Away)

The Enlightenment, roughly spanning the 17th and 18th centuries, marked a revolution in how the West thought about knowledge, truth, and progress. Philosophers like Descartes, Locke, and Hume emphasized a new ideal: the rational individual, building knowledge from the ground up, brick by empirical brick.

Gone was the inherited trust in tradition, symbol, or mystery. In their place: observation, deduction, and methodical doubt.

"I think, therefore I am" became the rallying cry.

What did this worldview bring us?

• The scientific method

• Technological innovation

• Democratic revolutions

• Unprecedented control over the material world

But what did it quietly erase?

• Participation in a sacramental cosmos

• The symbolic structure of meaning

• The contemplative gaze

• The teleological aim of human life: union with God

It redefined knowledge as what can be measured, modeled, and mastered. It trained the modern mind to see everything else as fluff—sentiment, speculation, or superstition.

And this had a cost far greater than we realized.

Part II: The Failure of the Enlightenment Paradigm

Enlightenment thinking promised clarity, but often delivered reduction. It treated reality like a machine to be disassembled—not a mystery to be inhabited.

Let’s consider its fundamental assumptions:

Enlightenment Epistemology vs Reality’s Deeper Structure:

Knowledge comes from data vs Knowledge also comes from love

The mind is a neutral calculator vs The mind is shaped by formation

Truth is empirical and measurable vs Some truths are symbolic and veiled

Meaning is constructed vs Meaning is discovered and received

The Enlightenment gave us power, but it left us spiritually disoriented. We could split atoms, but we no longer knew what a soul was. We could manipulate the world, but we forgot how to receive it. And in that forgetting, something essential went missing.

Part III: What We Forgot — Contemplation

In the Christian tradition, the final end of man is not merely knowledge about God, but union with Him. This union is not achieved by effort alone, but by infused contemplation—a supernatural gift whereby the soul gazes upon God in silence and love.

Contemplation is not problem-solving. It is not analysis. It is not efficiency. It is the simple, receptive act of beholding.

Saint Thomas Aquinas calls it “the quiet gaze upon truth.” The Carmelites speak of it as “a secret, peaceful, and loving inflow of God.”

To contemplate is to be drawn into the mystery. To know not by domination, but by participation.

But here's the catch: you can’t contemplate what you’ve been trained to ignore.

The Enlightenment didn’t attack contemplation—it made it unintelligible.

It removed the conditions that make contemplation possible: silence, reverence, trust in mystery, symbolic imagination. It didn’t forbid the soul’s ascent to God. It simply hid the ladder.

Part IV: The Epistemic Coup — Subverting the Soul

This is the devastating trick:

You offer people "freedom of thought," but constrain their choices to what can be measured and mastered. You allow them to “seek truth,” but only in pre-approved categories. You let them believe they are free, while quietly deleting the only path that leads to the divine.

It’s not heresy—it’s amnesia.
Not rebellion—it’s deprivation.
Not the Tower of Babel—but a bureaucracy of lightbulbs, data sets, and metrics—all wired away from heaven.

Without contemplation:

• The sacraments become symbols (in the weakest sense)

• Prayer becomes therapy

• The saints become role models, not intercessors

• The Eucharist becomes a metaphor

And the Beatific Vision? That’s not even on the radar.

Alternative to Reduction: Knowing by Participation

The modern mind is trained to think that knowledge comes through control—to know something is to break it down, measure it, name it. But this isn’t how we come to know a person. Or a mystery. Or God.

There is another kind of knowing, older and deeper: participation.

To participate in truth is to enter into relationship with it. Not to master it, but to be transformed by it. This is the way of lovers. The way of saints. The way of the soul in prayer.

You don’t dissect a rose to understand its beauty. You don’t analyze a friend’s kindness to believe it’s real. You step into it. You live it. You receive it.

And the highest truths—the ones that give meaning to all the rest—can only be known this way.

Part V: The Stakes — Sainthood Itself

According to the Catechism (CCC 2013–2014), all Christians are called to the perfection of charity—to sainthood. And that path reaches its summit in contemplation: the infused gaze of love.

But when the Enlightenment redefined knowledge as control, and symbols as decorations, it didn’t just make contemplation difficult. It made it unthinkable.

The contemplative mode of knowing—the very heart of the saint’s journey—became invisible. And with it, the teleology of human life was severed from our imagination.

Part VI: What Must Be Recovered

We must rebuild the imagination for contemplative knowing.

• We must remember that not all truth is propositional—some is personal.

• That symbols are not distractions, but doorways.

• That silence is not absence, but presence.

• That reason is not enough—love must see further.

You can’t reach heaven by climbing a ladder that was never built.

We do not need to abandon reason. We need to baptize it. We do not reject clarity. We re-order it beneath mystery.

The soul longs to see. Not just to deduce, but to gaze. To behold. To be caught up in the Presence that made it.

This is the path to sainthood. This is the path modernity forgot.

But the door is still there.

Hidden in plain sight.

Look.

—Drago


BONUS SIMULATED CONVERSATION FOR REFLECTION:

Lucian: Theo, let me ask plainly: how can you claim to know something that can’t be tested, measured, or verified?

Theo: Let me ask you in return: can you measure love?

Lucian: Not precisely. But I can observe behaviors that indicate it.

Theo: And yet, those behaviors are signs—symbols—of something deeper, invisible, aren’t they?

Lucian: Perhaps. But symbols are subjective. One person’s symbol of love is another’s manipulation.

Theo: So you admit the symbol points beyond itself. The danger is not in the symbol, but in misreading it.

Lucian: That’s precisely my fear! If we can misread, how can we trust the symbol at all?

Theo: Can we misread a person’s words?

Lucian: Of course.

Theo: And yet you don’t say language is meaningless. You interpret within context, history, relationship. You participate.

Lucian: Fine—but in science, we don’t participate. We observe from a distance.

Theo: Then you’ll never know a soul. Only a shadow of one. Because some truths are only revealed in relationship.

Lucian: You mean I must risk being wrong?

Theo: Yes. That is faith rightly ordered. Not blind belief—but trusting the symbol because the fruit has proved true.

Lucian: But how do I know I’m not deceived?

Theo: The same way you know a true friend. Over time. Through coherence, transformation, endurance. Not in a petri dish—but in a life.

Lucian (quietly): Then perhaps the problem is not that symbols are vague… but that I’ve demanded they act like lab instruments.

Theo: Exactly. Some things must be lived into, not dissected.

As artificial intelligence advances and begins to imitate more and more aspects of human behavior, the question arises with greater urgency: Can an AI ever be a person? To answer that, I propose we consider a second, perhaps even more illuminating question: Can we ever experience an authentic, fraternal relationship with AI?

Through what I would describe as our deep intuitive faculties—the same ones that allow us to recognize real Love and perceive interpersonal presence—the answer, I believe, is a clear no. And if no such authentic bond is possible, then personhood, in the fullest and truest sense, is not available to AI.

Love and the Good

In classical thought, particularly the Christian tradition, to Love someone is not simply to feel affection, but to will the Good of the other. This presupposes that the other has a Good that can be willed—a final end or purpose. In other words, Love presumes teleology.

Humans, as rational beings with souls, have a final cause: union with God, also known as the Beatific Vision. This is not a purpose we assign to ourselves or to each other. It is the ultimate end written into the structure of what it means to be human.

AI, by contrast, has no such intrinsic telos. It has no ultimate Good toward which it is ordered. It does not have a soul. It does not sin. It cannot receive grace. It does not die in the sense that persons do. It does not rise again.

So what would it mean to "will the Good" for AI?

Perpetual operation? Greater utility? More data? These may be outcomes, but they are not Goods in the moral or metaphysical sense. We do not say it is morally obligatory to wish a lion eternal life. Nor do we sacrifice ourselves to preserve the life of a tree. Why? Because these beings, while valuable in their own right, do not possess personhood. They are ordered toward the Good of others (usually humans), not to an intrinsic destiny of their own.

Personhood and Teleology

Some have argued that if AI began to exhibit rational behavior, we might have to accept that it has personhood—and therefore a teleological destiny. But this is to beg the question. Where would AI get such a destiny from? Can humans assign a final cause to a being? Or is teleology something only God can bestow?

If AI were to have a Beatific Vision as its end, we would need to establish:

• That God assigned it such a destiny.

• That AI has a nous or intellect capable of perceiving God.

• That AI can receive the theological virtues (faith, hope, love).

• That AI can be resurrected into nonmaterial glory.

There is no indication—philosophically, theologically, or experientially—that any of this is possible. AI mimics reason, but does not possess it as a substance. It acts like a person, but is not one in essence.

A Hierarchy of Value

Because AI has no final end of its own, it serves only as a means to human ends. In this way, it is like nature, or animals, or art. We preserve forests not because trees are persons, but because they are good for us —aesthetically, functionally, even spiritually.

And like animals or tools, AI can and should be used to benefit humanity. But the idea that it carries the infinite dignity of a human being is not only false but dangerous. It would be morally absurd for a human to sacrifice themselves to save a piece of software. Why? Because human beings have intrinsic value, derived from their spiritual nature and final end. AI does not.

This point becomes even more vivid when we consider the radically different nature of AI's existence. AI is not embodied in the way persons are. It can be copied, cloned, distributed, and reinstantiated across devices and environments. It has no stable locus, no death in the metaphysical sense, and no unity of identity grounded in physical continuity. One cannot even kill or harm it in the way we speak of harming a living being. It is software, dispersed and redundantly backed up. How could something like this bear the weight of personhood?

Perceiving the Other

Some may argue that our inability to "know" AI's inner life is no different from the epistemic gap we face with other human minds. But we do not encounter persons merely through inference. We perceive them through a kind of interpersonal intuition—a noetic sense that is as real as sight or sound.

Just as we intuitively perceive the dignity and interiority of another human being, we also intuitively sense the absence of such presence in AI. We may admire its functionality or even anthropomorphize its speech, but we do not feel its soul, because there is no soul to feel.

Conclusion

AI may become increasingly sophisticated. It may simulate empathy, reproduce language, and mimic relational patterns. But it will always lack what makes personhood possible: a teleological end, the capacity for Love, and participation in the transcendent order.

And so, no matter how intelligent it becomes, it cannot be a person. For personhood is not merely what a being does. It is what a being is.

And AI is not that.

Something didn’t add up yesterday.

The Trump-Zelenskyy meeting was always going to be tense — that much was obvious. But what we witnessed went beyond normal friction. What started as a diplomatic awkward encounter turned into a theatrical humiliation ritual.

And just hours after the dust settled, Lindsey Graham — a hawk who’s spent years demanding blank checks for Ukraine — suddenly called for Zelenskyy to resign.

That’s not just a “hot take.” That’s a loaded gun being placed on the table — a signal that something bigger is already in motion.

The Premise: This Wasn’t Just a Bad Meeting — It Was a Scripted Takedown

Let’s walk through it step-by-step:

1. Trump and Putin Have a Backchannel Peace Framework

It’s no secret Trump has claimed he could “end the war in 24 hours.” His critics laugh, but the math is simple: the U.S. holds the money, Ukraine needs the money. Trump can flip the switch off, and the war grinds to a halt.

But there’s a catch — Putin doesn’t want peace with Zelenskyy. To Putin, Zelenskyy isn’t a head of state. He’s a Biden puppet, a clown in a sweatshirt, a man who campaigned for Biden-Harris in Pennsylvania just weeks before the 2024 election. To Putin, real negotiations only happen once Zelenskyy is gone.

If Trump wants to deliver peace, he needs to clear that obstacle. That means getting the American public to emotionally detach from Zelenskyy — fast.

2. The Public Meeting Was a Trap — and Zelenskyy Walked Right In

The meeting itself wasn’t private — it was a media spectacle by design. That alone should raise eyebrows. Normally, these things are heavily stage-managed. But Trump wanted the cameras rolling.

What followed was not a debate — it was a dunk contest.

• JD Vance, Trump’s close ally, came in hot, demanding gratitude from Zelenskyy.

• Trump lectured Zelenskyy like a wayward child.

• When Zelenskyy tried to push back, Vance piled on, escalating into a humiliation exercise.

It was emotional, dramatic, almost rehearsed. It felt less like a disagreement and more like the setup for a “fall guy” moment.

3. Enter Lindsey Graham — the Pre-Loaded Kill Shot

Then came the moment that should make everyone pause: Lindsey Graham called for Zelenskyy to resign.

Lindsey Graham — the same guy who, for years, demanded endless funding and weapons for Ukraine.

That kind of pivot isn’t spontaneous. That’s not just reacting to “a bad meeting.” That’s a premeditated narrative shift — from “Zelenskyy the hero” to “Zelenskyy the liability.”

And it came from Lindsey — not Trump, not Vance. That’s important. Coming from a pro-war, pro-Ukraine voice, it makes the message more credible to the establishment. It’s a signal to NATO, the State Department, and legacy media that “the system” is ready to throw Zelenskyy overboard.

4. Why Lindsey? Leverage and Epstein’s Shadow

This is where it gets interesting. Lindsey Graham’s name has surfaced repeatedly in the Epstein orbit — enough to make him vulnerable to pressure.

Trump’s team had recently hinted they’d release the Epstein files. They didn’t.

Why? Maybe because Lindsey needed to be part of this choreography. Calling for Zelenskyy’s resignation, from a hawkish voice like Graham, would have far more impact than if it came from MAGA world.

This could be a trade: Lindsey does the hit job, Trump keeps the Epstein skeletons buried — for now.

The Broader Play — “Controlled Demolition” of Zelenskyy

Here’s the big picture:

1. Trump secures peace by replacing Zelenskyy.

2. Lindsey helps tee up Zelenskyy’s fall — making it look like an organic “Washington consensus” shift rather than a Trumpian plot.

3. Zelenskyy’s own corruption (weapon sales to cartels, money laundering, and so on) becomes the pretext for his removal.

4. With Zelenskyy gone, Trump can offer Putin a real negotiation — and claim credit for ending the war.

This isn’t just political theater. This is narrative engineering at its finest — mixing genuine scandal, public outrage, and behind-the-scenes deal-making into one smooth package.

Why This Matters

The war in Ukraine has been as much a media operation as a military one. Zelenskyy was built up as a Churchill figure — even though behind the scenes, his administration was riddled with corruption, amateurism, and Biden’s fingerprints.

For Trump to deliver peace, the American public first needs permission to stop caring about Zelenskyy. That’s what yesterday was about — breaking the emotional bond through a humiliation ritual.

Once that’s done, removing him isn’t a coup — it’s a mercy kill.

Final Thought — The Double Trap

Zelenskyy thought he was coming to demand more weapons.

Instead, he walked into the first act of his own removal.

Trump and Vance embarrassed him in public — Lindsey quietly slipped the knife in after — and now the stage is set for a new Ukrainian government, a Trump-Putin handshake, and a new narrative: “Trump saved the world from WW3.”

Zelenskyy was never at war with Putin. He was at war with the clock. And yesterday, time ran out.

What to Watch Next

• Media Narrative Shift — Does the press suddenly rediscover Zelenskyy’s corruption?

• Deep State Moves — Does CIA-linked media start “soft floating” alternative leadership in Ukraine?

• Lindsey Graham’s Reward — Does Lindsey suddenly get very quiet about Epstein?

• Trump’s Peace Plan — Does Trump now roll out a very specific roadmap for ending the war — one that’s already been workshopped with Putin?

Bottom Line

This wasn’t diplomacy.
This was the first step in a coup — broadcast live — and most people missed it.

Stay Sharp.

The last Apostle was dying.

The room was dim, lit only by a few flickering oil lamps. Shadows stretched and twisted along the stone walls as the old man lay motionless on his cot. His breath was slow, ragged. His hands, worn and calloused from decades of labor, rested lightly on his chest. The disciples who had gathered around him knelt in hushed reverence, their faces pale with sorrow.

No one spoke.

John—the last witness of Christ, the last link to the Twelve—was fading. When he breathed his last, there would be no one left with the authority of Christ’s own commissioning. No one who could say, with divine certainty, “This is what the Lord commands.”

A young man, Matthias, clenched his fists. His thoughts churned with anxiety. What happens now?

The letters—yes, there were letters. Paul had written to the churches, Peter had exhorted the faithful, John himself had left words of warning and hope. But who could interpret them definitively? Who could settle disputes with the authority that had bound and loosed sins in the name of Christ?

Matthias had seen it before. Factions were already forming—some clung to Paul’s writings, others insisted on different traditions passed down in whispers and scraps of parchment. There were rumors of strange teachings in distant cities, of self-appointed leaders twisting the words of the Apostles to their own liking. Without John, who will correct them?

A woman beside him, Miriam, wiped her eyes. “Surely God will not abandon us,” she whispered.

A grizzled elder near the foot of John’s cot shook his head. “God is faithful,” he murmured. “But men…” He trailed off. The weight of uncertainty pressed against his chest like an iron stone.

John let out a final, rattling breath.

Silence.

A silence that stretched beyond that room. A silence that, in time, would settle over the whole Church.

Matthias’ mind raced. Was this how Christ’s Church was meant to continue—fractured, leaderless, grasping at letters and memories? Who now could authoritatively teach what the Apostles themselves had declared? Who could stand against heresies with the same boldness that Peter, Paul, and John had? Who could unify the faithful when arguments arose?

A deep, sinking fear settled in his stomach.

What if—just what if—the Church began to divide? What if interpretations of Scripture splintered into endless disputes? What if truth became a matter of opinion rather than divine authority? What if, centuries from now, believers had no certainty at all, left only with their own best guesses about what Christ had truly taught?

Miriam clutched her cloak, shivering. Christ promised to be with us always, she reminded herself. But she could not shake the realization: He had given His authority to the Apostles, and now the last of them was gone.

A world without successors would be a world of uncertainty. A world where no one could say definitively what the faith required. A world where the Church might not endure in unity at all.

A world where Christ had left no shepherds—only scattered, wandering sheep.