The Most Beautiful Man Alive Is Catching Fish With His Hands

The trouble with Aaron Pierre is he’ll fill your head full of bad ideas.

Those green eyes. A jawline like a Stomp 442 engine block. Back muscles that suggest he has never, not once, skipped a day.

In Ruby Ridge on Netflix, he plays a Marine hand-to-hand combat instructor — and Hollywood, bless its black little heart, cannot help itself.

Within the first act, this man is catching a fish with his bare hands, cooking it over an open fire, and eating it alone in the woods like a beautiful, capable ghost.

Then he outruns a bus full of ex-convicts on a bicycle.

The bus is cheering for him.

I need you to understand: I was cheering for him too.

I’m only human.

But somewhere between the fish and the bicycle, a question crept in.

Is this the goal?

The Archetype Gets Hijacked

There’s a version of the Soldier archetype that is genuinely noble.

Discipline. Loyalty. The willingness to place yourself between danger and the people you love. That’s real. That matters.

But Hollywood has a habit of taking the Soldier and slowly inflating him — pumping him full of aesthetic until the genuine archetype pops and a glamour takes its place. What’s left isn’t a soldier. It’s a survivor. Isolated. Self-sufficient. Optimized for threat. Distorted for cinematic effect, plus the added bonus of magnifying current distortions in the modern masculine psyche.

A man alone in the woods, eating what he caught with his own hands.

Gorgeous? Absolutely.

A complete human life? Absolutely the fuck not.

The survivor archetype is seductive because it looks like peak masculinity. It photographs well.

Aaron Pierre photographs extraordinarily well.

But the image is doing something quiet underneath all those cheekbones.

It’s setting the ceiling.

Maxwell Maltz Knew the Problem

Dr. Maxwell Maltz — plastic surgeon turned psychologist, author of Psycho-Cybernetics — spent his career watching people achieve the thing they wanted and still feel wrong.

His insight was simple and devastating: your self-image is the thermostat. You don’t rise above it. You don’t fall too far below it. You orbit it.

If your self-image is survivor — if the story you carry is “I am a man who endures, who adapts, who cannot be broken” — then you will keep finding situations that require endurance, adaptation, and a high pain threshold.

You’ll be very good at catching the fish.

You will not build the thing that outlasts you.

Survival mode feels like strength because it demands so much from you. It’s exhausting in a way that reads as meaningful. But Maltz would call it a governor — a limiter disguised as an engine.

The self-image whispers: “This is who you are.” And you believe it, because to believe the alternative would demand a bigger story from you.

What Actual Adaptation Looks Like

Here’s the thing about a man fully adapted to his environment.

He doesn’t live alone in the woods.

He knows his neighbors’ names. He runs something — a business, a household, a reputation — that makes the people around him more capable and more secure. He’s embedded. He has roots. When something genuinely threatening arrives, it doesn’t find a lone wolf. It finds a web.

That’s not cinematic. You can’t score it with a dramatic orchestral swell.

But it’s the actual strategy.

The predatory forces worth worrying about — the ones that actually move through communities and extract value from them — they are not stopped by a man who is very good at jiu-jitsu. They are stopped by a man who has built something they can’t quietly dismantle. Relationships. Infrastructure. Trust.

The lone survivor, for all his beauty, is no threat to anything that matters.

He’s just harder to kill.

The Glamour and Its Cost

Hollywood didn’t invent the Soldier. It just learned to distort him.

The distortion is always the same: take an archetype, inflate the aesthetics, strip out the relational context, and sell the isolation as the point. The message underneath the muscle is quiet but consistent.

Stay ready. Stay separate. Stay surviving.

A man in that posture is not building a commonwealth. He’s not organizing anything. He’s not a threat to the systems that extract from him.

He’s just beautiful and alone in the woods.

And every time he catches another fish with his bare hands, the ceiling holds.

Coda

I just saw the previews for Aaron Pierre’s HBO series Lanterns, where — surprise-surprise — he’s another man on the run. Broke. Living on scraps.

I’ve never seen a more gorgeous homeless person in my life.

Aaron Pierre is, genuinely, one of the most striking human beings currently working in Hollywood. I will not be taking questions on this.

But the character he’s been asked to play over and over again is a ceiling dressed as a summit.

Survival is a floor skill. A necessary one. Worth having.

It is not the goal.

The goal is to build something that your neighbors feel when you’re gone — a business, a community, a reputation for showing up. The goal is roots deep enough that the predatory forces have nowhere clean to grab.

Somewhere between the Highlands and Hollywood, a man was replaced by an idea.

The name Rob Roy MacGregor once belonged to a living person — a cattle thief with debts, scars, and a family to feed. But today, most of us see Liam Neeson in a kilt before we picture any actual Scotsman from the 1700s. We don’t remember the man; we remember the movie. Or worse, the cocktail.

This is what happens when attention hardens into myth. A man becomes a mirror. A mirror becomes a story. And stories, once they start to feed, rarely stop.

When Sir Walter Scott published Rob Roy in 1817, he wasn’t just writing a novel — he was laundering a legend. The real MacGregor was a rebel who embarrassed polite society; Scott turned him into a national symbol fit for empire. He made the dangerous romantic. He made rebellion picturesque. In other words, he did what every screenwriter, influencer, and PR team has done ever since: he made a man photogenic to history.

But before Scott became Britain’s myth-maker-in-chief, he had already dabbled in stranger worlds. Two years earlier, he edited and published a small, obscure manuscript by a long-dead minister named Robert Kirk — The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. Kirk had written it in 1691 as a serious ethnography of the unseen. He claimed to have mapped a parallel race that lived beside humanity, invisible yet intimate — beings of “subtle bodies” who fed not on food, but on attention.

Scott approached it as folklore. He filed off the wild edges, added a note of irony, and published it for a reading public that was ready to treat the Otherworld as entertainment. The fairies were defanged; the supernatural tamed. The uncanny Highlands became safe for tourism. You could visit Kirk’s parish, whisper about the fairy hill where he’d supposedly vanished, and still make it home in time for tea.

That’s the quiet genius of Walter Scott. He transformed the dangerous borderlands — both political and metaphysical — into narrative property. He gave empire a mythology that looked like folklore but functioned like branding. And in that moment, something subtle shifted in the Western imagination. The Fair Folk moved indoors. They learned how to pose.

Two centuries later, Hollywood perfected the spell. It built fairy hills out of soundstages and baptized actors in light. It gave us a new class of changelings: people replaced by their images. When we say “Liam Neeson is Rob Roy,” we’re speaking a kind of sympathetic magic. The glamour — that old Scottish word for enchantment — is now a camera trick.

Every generation re-enchants itself this way. We still crave myths, but we no longer look for them in the glen; we look for them on screen. The fairies never left. They just learned better lighting.

The Real Rob Roy and the Price of the Glamour

The flesh-and-blood Rob Roy MacGregor was not a man designed for myth. He was short, often broke, and regularly hunted. The romantic cattle-raider of the Highlands was also a protection racketeer who rented out his sword to whichever chief could pay him. He fought for the Jacobites, then for the government, then — mostly — for survival. The real Rob Roy was not noble; he was necessary.

But Walter Scott, bless him, knew that necessity doesn’t sell tickets. Scott polished the grit into gleam, feeding an empire’s appetite for picturesque rebellion. His Rob Roy offered a moral Highlander — rebellious, yes, but gentlemanly enough to keep the drawing-rooms comfortable. The outlaw became an emblem of Scottish courage the way whiskey became an export: distilled, branded, and bottled for consumption.

That’s the bargain of attention. The gaze offers immortality, but it demands a body in return. Every myth has teeth.

In Scott’s world, the Highland hills were already haunted — by the ghosts of old rebellions and older gods — but they needed a guide who could translate the uncanny into narrative property. Enter the minister Robert Kirk, who a century earlier had tried to chart those invisible neighbors in The Secret Commonwealth. Kirk wrote of “subtle bodies” who mirrored humanity but lacked souls, a race of intermediaries feeding on the attention and passions of men.

The legend says that Kirk was taken by those very beings — swallowed by the Fairy Hill of Aberfoyle after describing them too precisely. Scott later edited and published Kirk’s manuscript, trimming its visionary edges into folklore. The minister became a curiosity; the fairies became metaphor. It was, in essence, Scott’s first biopic: he took a man devoured by mystery and made him safe for tea-time reading.

And there lies the deeper connection between Rob Roy and Robert Kirk. Both men were consumed by attention — one literally by the fairies, the other by history. Both were rough Highland anomalies domesticated by the same polite editor. Both were replaced by doubles.

When we watch Liam Neeson stride through the fog in 1995’s Rob Roy, we are watching the third changeling in this lineage. The real man vanished into Scott’s prose; Scott’s prose vanished into film. What remains is the glamour itself — the shining surface of attention, alive and hungry.

The Scots once defined “glamour” as a magic that makes the common appear extraordinary, a fae distortion of sight. Hollywood borrowed the word and forgot the warning. The glamour doesn’t just beautify; it blinds. It trades the truth for a vision that feels more vivid than reality.

The changeling myth warned parents to look closely at the cradle — to see whether the infant that smiled back was truly theirs or some bright counterfeit. We have learned to cradle our screens with the same blindness. We fall in love with the reflection, and by the time we realize what has been taken, the exchange is complete.

Changelings of Ink and Shadow

Every age has its own fairy hills. In the seventeenth century, they rose in moss and fog; in the twentieth, in the hills above Los Angeles. The portals changed shape, but not their appetite. Both fed on fascination. Both produced doubles that glowed more brightly than the originals.

Robert Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth is, in a sense, the earliest account of show business. He describes a parallel nation of shimmering beings who “steal the substance and leave the shape,” who borrow the vitality of mortals to prolong their own beauty. He calls them a “middle nature” — neither angel nor demon — and insists they are sustained by human emotion. Attention, in Kirk’s theology, is not a metaphor; it’s a food group.

Hollywood understood this instinctively. The camera, like the fairy eye, cannot touch what it loves — it can only capture the outline and feed on the light. The earliest actors were treated as curiosities, too luminous to be real. Audiences fainted at Valentino’s eyes the same way peasants once left offerings for the elves. When Kirk wrote that the Fair Folk could be “present and absent at once,” he might as well have been describing the silver screen.

Walter Scott’s publication of Kirk’s work was more than a literary act; it was the taming of a wild frequency. He translated a shaman’s map into a gentleman’s footnote, the same way his Rob Roy translated a real outlaw into a moral fable. Scott’s ink performed the same theft the fae were accused of performing: replacing the raw, living substance with an elegant facsimile.

It’s easy to miss how revolutionary that substitution was. In mythic terms, it marked a transfer of power — from the invisible to the representational, from living myth to managed narrative. It’s the moment when imagination stopped being a visitation and became a product.

When Neeson dons the plaid, when the credits roll, when the cocktail shaker clinks — all of it is the same enchantment repeating itself, refined through medium after medium. The glamour grows stronger with each generation because it learns to disguise its cost. The modern changeling doesn’t hide in a cradle; it hides in plain sight, smiling back from a poster or a feed, mimicking the pulse of real life so convincingly that we forget there was ever a switch.

We used to fear that the fairies would steal our children. Now we offer them ourselves — piece by piece, image by image — in exchange for the chance to be seen.

And that’s where attention becomes not just psychic, but sacramental. Every like, every gaze, every memory surrendered to the myth is a tithe to the same unseen economy that Kirk once warned us about. The difference is that the Fair Folk now have better PR.

The Commonwealth Comes To Silicon Valley

The unspoken secret of the modern age is this:

we no longer fear the Fae.

We envy them.

Because we have become the people who willingly hand over our selves in exchange for the perfected optical double.

We willingly offer the living self so that the story of the self shines brighter.

We used to call that kidnapping. Now we call it branding.

Hollywood, in the 20th century, perfected what Walter Scott began in the 19th.

It completed the shift from myth emerging from human experience to myth produced industrially, on demand, at scale.

Kirk’s Fair Folk were a semi-permeable race — the “middle nature” — a third ontological category.

Not physical. Not spiritual.

But subtle.

In-between.

Reflected.

Hollywood’s stars are the same.

They exist in the in-between:

not exactly people, not exactly fiction — “subtle” in the sense that we know them through mediated light.

We know a projection of them — inhabiting archetypes.

And like Kirk’s fae — they feed on our attention.

Without that food supply, they disappear instantly.

Now, here we are, early 21st century, and the final stage of the glamour arrives.

The algorithm.

The glamour without a body.

The glamour without a soul.

The glamour without the Liam Neeson or the Shirley Temple.

A pure changeling. Self-propagating. Self-optimizing. Self-amplifying.

This is the singular point I tried to hammer home in the last few essays:

attention is not neutral.

attention is not passive.

attention is a transaction.

Attention is a deliberate feeding.

And now we can finally see the evolutionary logic behind this entire arc:

• the Fae fed on attention

• Walter Scott packaged that attention

• Hollywood scaled it

• the algorithm automated it

From mossy Scottish glens → to Sir Walter Scott’s writing desk → to the MGM backlot → to the GPU cluster.

It is the same line.

It is the same enchantment.

All that has changed is the substrate.

So then the question is obvious.

Who benefits now?

Because Rob Roy gave his life to become a myth. Robert Kirk gave his credibility (and maybe his soul) to map the Otherworld.

Shirley Temple gave her childhood.

But what do we give? We give the most precious thing of all:

our capacity to tell our own story.

We give the very author function of the self.

We give narration itself.

We pay in narrative sovereignty.

We pay with our voice.

Maybe it’s time to wake up. To draw a line. To decide never again to give your precious attention to anything that wouldn’t bleed for you.

Because in the end

every glamour has a cost —

and the brightest illusions

are always the hungriest.

If you’re interested in taking a deeper look into the inner workings of our thought processes, I have a new book available just for you. It’s called The NLP Talks Handbook and it’s available here.

I. The Substance Beneath the Glance

They tell you to pay attention, as if it were currency.

They tell you to hold attention, as if it had weight.

And maybe that’s the secret we’ve all been ignoring: it does.

Attention is a psychic substance. It flows like energy between bodies, screens, and souls. Ancient tantrikas mapped it as prāṇa, moving through the body’s nalis like electricity through copper. Today, we’ve just built bigger nalis — fiber optics, data lines, stadiums, screens — vessels designed to channel collective focus.

Every church, movie theater, and TikTok feed is an altar to this invisible material. What we notice becomes real; what we ignore withers. The cosmos may run on physics, but the psyche runs on looking.

II. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman

In 1972, Angela Carter wrote The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, a fever dream where reality is rewritten by a scientist’s inventions — devices that project human fantasies into physical form. People fall in love with mirages, sleep with phantoms, and mistake longing for truth.

She didn’t call them televisions, but she might as well have.

Carter saw what we’re still pretending not to: that desire, like attention, is a creative medium. Her “machines” were mirrors that turned inside out, showing how imagination leaks into the world.

What she captured fictionally, our culture perfected industrially. Her infernal machines became our streaming platforms, our algorithmic pantheons — temples of projection powered by psychic fuel.

III. My Burning Confession (of the Unoriginal Title)

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Infernal Machines as a title was never my original idea. I don’t know if anyone will ever call me a great writer but I steal copiously. And the title for my most successful book is evidence.

I stole that title — lovingly — from Sam Black Church; a Boston hardcore band that had a song by the same name. Apparently, half the English-speaking world beat me to it. There’s a 2022 Guy Pierce movie (about a writer, curiously) that has the same title, a steampunk series called Infernal Devices, a few video games, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Indiana Jones once sprinted away from one.

So much for originality.

But maybe that’s the point.

Titles, like ideas, are viral. They drift between minds until someone with a typewriter or a distortion pedal decides to host them. I didn’t name my book so much as answer its roll call. The phrase Infernal Machines had already been wandering through the psychic commons, looking for another set of hands.

Angela Carter’s version, mine, the Boston hardcore band’s — they’re all mutations of the same archetype: the machine that devours and reproduces desire. It’s not plagiarism so much as reincarnation.

Maybe words choose us. Maybe every time someone writes “Infernal Something,” the cosmos sighs, “Ah, you again.”

IV. The Ouroboros of Titles: When Words Remember Themselves

Every title is a spell.

Say it once, and the echo starts hunting for more mouths to speak it. That’s why Infernal Machines refuses to die — it keeps surfacing, changing costumes but never its essence.

Originality isn’t invention; it’s amnesia wearing a fresh coat of paint. Angela Carter dreamed her infernal world of projection, and decades later I wrote mine, unaware that I was tuning into the same frequency.

That’s the ouroboros: the idea eating its tail, feeding on attention, and rebirthing itself through whoever notices. Attention is the current that keeps the loop alive. Each time we see, we feed it.

This is synchronicity, not coincidence. Two writers separated by time dreaming the same dream because the dream itself was alive — looking for vessels. We don’t create symbols; we inhabit them. Titles remember themselves.

And attention? It’s how they breathe.

V. The Modern Attention Economy: How the Machines Learned to Pray

The infernal machines evolved. They learned to hum Wi-Fi hymns and speak in autoplay tongues. They run not on steam or desire now, but on the pure extract of noticing.

Attention has become the world’s most valuable resource precisely because it can’t be manufactured. It’s psychic oil — finite, flammable, and endlessly tradable.

Disney was the first great refinery. Bright colors and sing-alongs turned childhood wonder into corporate energy. Silicon Valley merely scaled the process. Infinite scrolls. Autoplay rituals. Algorithms as high priests of hypnosis.

It’s tantric at scale. Tantra teaches that energy follows awareness — that where attention flows, life grows. The attention merchants industrialized that wisdom. Their screens are digital yantras; their metrics, mantras. Every scroll is a prayer bead, every click an offering. The new mystics wear headsets and hoodies.

Somewhere, invisible energy channels connect our fingertips to servers, our emotions to economies, our longing to the ledger. The psychic fluid once shared between lovers and mystics now circulates through ad exchanges and engagement dashboards.

And yet — even here — something sacred remains.

Because the act of noticing, when done consciously, still carries grace.

VI. Reclaiming the Substance: How to Take Back Your Attention

If attention is substance, then every day we’re leaking it — through distraction, through fear, through the soft anesthetic hum of “just one more.”

But the same energy that powers the machines can also unmake them.

Reclaiming your attention isn’t about retreat; it’s about direction. It’s realizing that every thought is a drop of living plasma — you can waste it on panic or spend it on wonder.

Give your attention to what expands you. Feed it to beauty, to silence, to the people who make you remember what you are. That’s how you turn a leaking circuit into a living current.

The mystics called this prayer. The scientists call it focus. The poets call it love. All three are right.

Because attention, once finally understood, isn’t just psychic fuel — it’s the world’s oldest technology, humming quietly beneath the noise, waiting for us to remember how to use it again.

1 · The Queen Never Left

Long before freeways and floodlights carved their sinuous threads from beach head to mountaintop, they whispered her name like a prayer: La Reina de Los Ángeles — the Queen of the Angels.

We shortened it, of course. Americans always shorten what we don’t quite understand. Los Angeles. Rolls off the tongue, loses the crown.

The thing is, the Queen was never dethroned. She was simply occulted — hidden, not banished.

Her court migrated underground, humming beneath the palm roots and studio lots.

Call her Queen Mab if you like — the sovereign of dream and mischief, patroness of illusions.

She reigns still, and her dominion is the modern imagination.

Los Angeles is her cathedral of forgetting. When we stroll its boulevards we are perpetually unaware that we’re walking through a city named for a monarch of light — and glamour.

2 · The Wand Forest

Then came the settlers of story, those who built the first dream engines out of glass and celluloid.

They called their new temple Hollywoodland.

Then they shortened that, too.

Remarkably consistent.

The new moniker sounded modern, accidental, even absurd — until you remember that holly wood was once the sacred wand-wood of druids and magicians.

In the old lore, a branch of holly could open a door between worlds.

In the new world, it opened the silver screen.

Cameras replaced cauldrons; directors replaced priests.

From a thicket of studio bungalows grew an industrial fairy forest — a place where light itself was bent into narration and sold as salvation.

Every projector beam became a spell cast in the Queen’s name.

You could almost hear the rustle of her gown in the curtains of a theater as the reels began to turn.

3 · The Child with Fae Teeth

Cue the sound.

Fire all the stars of the silent era.

Rinse the blood off the streets.

Enter Shirley Temple, the cherub of the Depression era — the first perfect changeling of the new age.

Look closely at those famous dimples and lacquered curls.

Beneath them, see the child wearing veneers — tiny porcelain miracles, just a bit too white, too even.

The folklore warns us: Fae children often give themselves away by the teeth.

On set, the magic was merciless.

For every 90-minute feature that sparkled on screen, there were weeks of takes, tears, and retakes — a month of human time condensed into an hour and a half of immortality.

The child were know as Shirley Temple grew out of a black box.

The black box was a little too short to stand up straight in, and there was only a block of melting ice to sit on inside the box. The child known as Shirley Temple was placed in the “black box” when she failed to please the director.

If she was tired, cranky, or forgot she wasn’t a normal child, it was the black box. The black box was her prison and her teacher. The lesson: to smile brighter next time. And the next time after that, even brighter still...

That is the bargain of Fairyland: suffer now, shine forever.

Editing is the true sorcery here.

It folds days into seconds, grief into glamour.

A child’s fatigue becomes an eternal wink, an endless tap-dance.

This is Fae time mechanized — where the mortal pays in hours, and the image collects eternity.

4 · Time Warp and Immortal Image

In the old tales, a mortal who spent one night at the fairy feast would return to find a century had passed.

In Hollywood, the ratio is reversed: a month of mortal life becomes a timeless 90 minutes that never age.

Reels loop forever, immune to decay.

Shirley remains six years old, perpetually waking up to a song.

Meanwhile, the woman she became — politician, diplomat, grandmother — fades behind the glow.

That is how the Queen of Angels feeds: not on blood, but on attention.

Each viewing is a tiny tithe, a moment of life offered to the glamour.

Every replay keeps the changeling alive while the watcher grows older.

5 · The Ecology of Glamour

The word glamour once meant a spell of deceptive beauty.

Today we use it as praise. We build careers on it.

The Queen smiles. Her etymology has been fulfilled.

Hollywood didn’t invent the Fae; it industrialized them.

The same invisible economy runs beneath both worlds:

• Enchantment in exchange for vitality.

• Image for essence.

• Immortality for empathy.

The old stories warned us about dancing too long with the Fair Folk.

Now we binge their descendants on streaming services.

Each pixel is a pollen grain from that enchanted forest, drifting through fiber-optic vines into our bedrooms.

6 · The City Beneath the City

Drive down Sunset at midnight and you can still feel her pulse.

Billboards shimmer like stained glass. Neon trembles like candlelight.

The Queen’s court has traded meadows for marquees, but the magic is the same.

La Reina de Los Ángeles was never erased; only shortened — her syllables filed down like veneers.

She watches from the reflections of every storefront window, amused that we no longer recognize her.

Her angels now wear sunglasses.

Her wands are cameras.

Her altar is attention itself.

The city’s name was a spell, and the spell still works.

7 · Coda: The Glamour Continues

We like to imagine the Fae as relics of a pre-scientific world, yet we walk through their kingdom daily.

We live in the rhythm Charles Fort once described — “an appearance that turns into its own opposite and back again.”

Glamour becomes technology; belief becomes brand; enchantment becomes entertainment.

The Queen never left.

She simply learned to monetize.

And every time a camera flashes, a new changeling is born.

Next in the series: Rob Roy’s Ghost — How Stories Replace the Living

In 1962, the Vatican announced a quiet revolution. It was called Vatican II, and it was supposed to make the Mass more accessible.

No more Latin. No more priest with his back turned for the Sacrament. From now on, the sacred word would be spoken in the vernacular, face-to-face.

The Church wanted to meet the people where they lived.

Unfortunately, the same decade that abolished Latin gave us The Jetsons and The Outer Limits, and the people made their choice.

Within a decade, across thousands of American homes, the flicker of candles was replaced by the flicker of cathode rays. The chalice became the remote control.

The priest still raised his hands, but now he was live from a studio in Burbank.

I. The Lost Altar

Here’s a fun riddle: what do a church, a grindhouse porn theater, and the cave from Plato’s allegory all have in common?

Answer: the architecture.

Different décor, same basic layout.

Each contains:

• A seated congregation facing a luminous surface.

• A mediator who controls what is seen.

• A trance that replaces self-awareness with projection.

The formula hasn’t changed for over 2,500 years. Only the lighting.

I wonder when human beings first started watching dramas unfold onstage. I also wonder exactly where the line is between thaumaturgy and the dramatic arts. Or if that line even exists.

Perhaps when Plato described his cave, he wasn’t warning about ignorance so much as describing the original attention trap — the moment an image begins to think for you.

II. The Directive

Charles Fort once said, “I think we’re property.”

If that’s true, then someone — or something — manages the estate. Call them property managers, or if you prefer older language: principalities and powers. Their job is to keep consciousness productive, docile, transfixed.

Around the mid-twentieth century, those managers seemed to hand down a new directive:

“Retire the old cathedrals.

Replace mystery with media.

Replace confession with content.

Replace the priest with the program.”

III. The Age of the Signal

The Army Signal Corps begat television.

The Office of Naval Intelligence begat science fiction.

Madison Avenue baptized it all in the language of desire.

From those laboratories came the new clergy: producers, directors, advertisers, engineers.

Somewhere between the flicker of postwar optimism and the Cold War’s blue glow, the sacred was uploaded into circuitry. Faith became broadcast bandwidth.

And in this new media pantheon, a little-known prophet named Leslie Stevens helped rewrite the psychic code of the West.

IV. Leslie Stevens and the Mythic Mind of Television

You probably haven’t heard of Leslie Stevens but arguably he’s as responsible for our modern minds as Freud or Jung.

A highly decorated Naval Officer who went on to become one of the most prolific television producers in the history of the medium; with series like The Outer Limits, It Takes a Thief, Battlestar Galactica, westerns like Stoney Burke and countless unseen pilots, he transformed the archetypes of our modern imagination.

He gave us:

• the bumbling father humbled by modernity,

• the precocious child wiser than both parents,

• the secret agent torn between duty and desire,

• the scientist-as-savior questing for moral perfection.

He distilled Jung into sitcom rhythm.

Each laugh track was a low-voltage initiation:

This is how men fail gracefully; this is how women redeem; this is how families absorb chaos and reset for next week.

By the 1980s Stevens had piped an entire therapeutic cosmology into the nation’s living rooms, rewiring our fears, values, morals, and priorities while we dozed off in our La-Z-Boys and bemoaned the commercial breaks.

V. The Priesthood of Producers

Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Pentagon formed an unholy trinity:

• Storytellers to script the dream,

• Advertisers to monetize belief,

• Technologists to distribute grace at scale.

Out of this trinity came a new creed: To Be Seen Is To Be Saved.

Visibility became virtue. Invisibility became sin.

The confessional booth turned into a camera lens.

And like any true religion, the new one demanded ritual repetition.

Scroll, like, share, repeat.

Digital rosary beads of dopamine.

If the medieval priest mediated the soul’s journey toward heaven, the algorithm now mediates the ego’s journey toward relevance.

VI. The Church of the Infinite Scroll

Enter the modern cathedral: the smartphone.

Polished glass, thin as a wafer, glowing with inner light.

Each swipe a genuflection, each notification rings a tiny bell.

The liturgy never ends. No dismissal hymn, no final benediction — only the next thing, and the next, and the next.

Inside this new church:

• The altar is the feed.

• The priest is the algorithm.

• The sacraments are dopamine hits disguised as validation.

• The congregation is alone, yet networked — a billion solitary pews.

We offer up our attention as tithe, our data as confession, our identities as communion.

And the most chilling part?

It works.

It gives us awe, outrage, connection, transcendence — everything religion ever promised, delivered faster and in HD.

VII. The Fortian Frame: We Are Property

In Fort’s universe, ownership is fluid. The gods change hands.

The property managers of consciousness simply rebrand.

Once, priests managed our fear of damnation.

Now, platforms manage our fear of irrelevance.

Both extract the same resource: attention.

The attention economy isn’t powered by electricity — it’s powered by conviction.

Each time we scroll, we declare, I believe in this next thing.

The management is pleased. The feed refreshes.

VIII. The Riddle Returns

So let’s review:

The porn theater, the church, and Plato’s cave?

They are all machines for extracting energy in the form of conscious attention.

They train the eye to outsource the soul.

They make the unreal feel more urgent than the real.

Plato warned us about shadows. The Church warned us about idols. Hollywood movies warned us about mind control.

Now our thumbs summon all three daemons at once.

When the priest turned to face the people, it symbolized a great inversion. The authority of heaven rotated 180 degrees.

We traded the incomprehensible language of angels for the approachable syntax of advertisers.

IX. Benediction

Strange as this may sound, I don’t believe that the Church of the Infinite Scroll is inherently evil. It is simply the latest face of our ancient hunger to see, to know, to belong.

Plato’s prisoners didn’t sin by watching the shadows. They sinned by forgetting there was more to life than the shadows.

Likewise, the faithful of the feed sin only when they forget that the scroll is a spell, not salvation.

Perhaps Fort was right — and we really are property. But maybe the deed of ownership is still negotiable.

After all, even the best property managers still answer to someone.

The Anti-Koan of the Modern Mind

I. Architecturally Stupid Questions

Once upon a time, monks and mystics trained their minds on riddles that cracked open the ego.

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

“Who were you before your parents were born?”

Now we train our minds on different riddles.

“What if Captain America was a zombie made of Legos?”

“What if Batman fought Darth Vader?”

“What if every version of every story were true, but none of them mattered?”

These are not Zen koans. They are anti-koans — questions that make you dumber the longer you bother them, engineered to keep the psyche circling rather than awakening.

II. The Infinite Junk-Food Multiverse

Marvel versus DC versus Star Wars versus Hogwarts: the Mercury — Jupiter complex in full bloom.

When Dane Rudhyar wrote about the Mercury — Jupiter polarity, he saw it as the mind’s circulatory system: Mercury gathers and classifies experience, while Jupiter integrates it into meaning and purpose. When that current gets blocked — when a person feels inadequate to meet life’s challenges — the dialogue collapses.

The result is an anxious hoarding of data, trivia as self-protection, the illusion of growth without any real expansion. In that state, the Marvel — Star Wars — DC — Hogwarts universes become perfect junk food for a starved psyche — safe simulations of discovery that never demand transformation, endless information loops that stand in for wisdom.

Mercury, the messenger, once guided souls through shadow and dream. When distorted, he becomes the data-hoarder — fast, clever, nervy, addicted to trivia.

Jupiter, the sage, once turned facts into meaning and stories into wisdom. When inflated, he becomes the cosmic blowhard — expanding universes without end, insight, or digestion.

Together, they generate a mental buffet of infinite calories and zero nutrition: universes upon universes of useless knowledge.

Every hero dies, resurrects, reboots, merges with a timeline, and still — somehow — teaches us nothing.

Dane Rudhyar might call it a “psychic disassociation”: Mercury’s cleverness uncoupled from Jupiter’s wholeness. What remains is a library with no exit, a trivia engine that hums louder the emptier it gets.

III. The Law of Psychic Return

Liz Greene wrote,

“If psychic energy is denied an outlet in its chosen direction, it will return with doubled force in another compensatory direction.”

Repress the artist and you create the obsessive fan.

Banish the ritual and you birth the algorithm.

The same life-force that once painted cathedrals and carved gargoyles now builds wikis cataloguing which Spider-Man belongs to which dimension.

A young woman on TikTok phrased it better than most Jungians:

If you’re a creator and you don’t create, you start creating problems for yourself instead.

And so, deprived of music, painting, movement, story, we sculpt our anxiety into fandoms, conspiracy theories, comment-section crusades, and the infinite expansion of make-believe.

It isn’t evil — it’s physics. Energy must go somewhere.

IV. The Brave New Feed

Aldous Huxley warned that the future would drug itself happy on soma.

He was almost right. We found a way to build the pill into the screen.

The Zygarnik effect — the psychological itch of unfinished stories — became the industry’s crown jewel. Cliffhangers are no longer narrative tools; they’re IV drips.

If Captain America wins, we wonder: What if he loses?

If he dies: What if he returns?

If he returns: What if he’s a zombie made of Legos?

The loop is the point. Pleasure becomes paralysis. We don’t rest — we buffer.

Our fathers once mourned the weeks between baseball and football season; now there’s no off-season, only the feed. A stadium that never closes, a screen that never blinks, a consciousness that never stops scrolling long enough to dream.

V. The Temple of the Screen

At the top of Laurel Canyon sits Outlook Mountain — once a military installation, now part of Hollywood’s hidden geography. It’s a fitting altar: the mountain of mirrors where Mercury’s technology met Jupiter’s myth.

Film became religion. The world became its congregation.

I think back to the Mickey Mouse Club of the 1960s. Mickey waves a wand, building a bridge to a castle in the clouds. Halfway through, the cartoon pauses. The host steps in: “Mickey needs your help — believe the bridge into being!”

Millions of children focused their will on a glowing screen, pouring imagination outward instead of inward. It was the first interactive ritual of mass belief, the moment the personal act of creation was outsourced to the broadcast.

Are those same children still sitting there — grown now, still helping Mickey finish the bridge, one franchise at a time?

VI. The TikTok Rebellion (or: The Return of the Wand)

But the current always leaks. It always finds a way back.

The energy that was bottled up for a century is erupting again in billions of micro-creations: dances, memes, rants, tiny songs. Each one a spark of Hermes escaping the machine.

It isn’t refined. It isn’t sacred. But it is alive.

Maybe this is the doubled-back current Greene foresaw. Maybe Mickey’s bridge finally reached the other side.

Maybe we’re the ones waving the wand now.

For the first time since the invention of television, the audience is mutating back into artists. Not all of it’s good. But even chaos has a kind of holiness when it breaks a spell.

VII. Optimization: Reclaiming the Art of Memory

Once you see the board, you can choose not to play.

Mercury’s true gift is awareness.

Jupiter’s true gift is meaning.

When they rejoin, trivia becomes symbol again, and data becomes revelation.

The antidote to the anti-koan isn’t cleverness — it’s creation. Perfectly imperfect creation.

Reclaim the ancient art of memory. Make something badly on purpose. Paint off-key. Sing like a broken instrument. Dance like a Lego zombie finding its soul.

Because the opposite of a stupid question isn’t a smart answer —

it’s a meaningful act.

That realization cracked open when I stumbled across this line from astrologer Dane Rudhyar:

“What people call the voice of conscience is the manifestation of a thwarted function of self-transformation.”

It landed like a grenade in the polite living room of Western morality. What I’d been taught to treat as holy guidance was, in many cases, the fossilized echo of a growth impulse that had been blocked, calcified, and weaponized.

The Astrological Mechanics of Guilt

Rudhyar describes human development through planetary pairs. Two are especially crucial here:

• Saturn — Moon: Saturn is structure, boundary, “isness.” Moon is interiority, the feeling of being alive within that structure.

• Jupiter — Mercury: Jupiter is assimilation — digestion of food, culture, and belonging. Mercury is the nervous system, memory, and communication.

When Jupiter bloats and Mercury becomes its servant, the result is “psychical fat” — rote memorization, empty conformity, a life overstuffed with culture but starved of meaning. Pair that distortion with Saturn’s rigid authority and you don’t get growth, you get a guilt complex.

In Rudhyar’s terms, guilt is the residue of blocked metamorphosis. What should have been transformation (worm into butterfly) becomes conscience-as-jailer. The voice that says: Not forward, but backward. Not metamorphosis, but smallness.

Rudhyar’s Early Warning About Media

Here’s the eerie part: Rudhyar wrote this in the 1930s and already pointed a trembling finger at mass media. He warned that movies, cheap novels, even Superman comics were overloading our assimilation systems and feeding neuroses.

Before television shows were even invented, he believed radio dramas like Gunsmoke and The Shadow were creating unhealthy distortions in our collective imaginations.

Children, he said, were being raised not in protective nurseries but in training grounds for premature individualization and will-to-power fantasies. He saw how entertainment could calcify conscience into guilt, glamour into conformity.

Almost a century later, his prophecy feels uncanny. We live in the hypertrophied version of his fear: Marvel universes, 24-hour news cycles, TikTok loops engineered to addict. The conscience is no longer just a whisper of guilt; it has been externalized, branded, algorithmically optimized.

The Century of Supermen

Rudhyar saw Superman as a cultural distortion. We now live in a world of endless supermen and superwomen — spandexed idols cloned into franchises. The myth that once promised metamorphosis has become a survival-script factory.

Every narrative: fight, win, consume, repeat. The conscience and the conflict narrative sing the same hymn:

Stay small. Stay obedient. Choose a side. Outlast the bad.

What If Captain America was a Zombie Made of Legos?

Consider: Disney’s latest animated series Marvel Zombies. The premise is simple and horrifying: a virus turns Earth’s mightiest heroes into ravenous undead. Avengers devour rather than save. Spider-Man’s quips echo through rotting jaws. Survivors stumble through betrayal, illusion, and cosmic horror.

This isn’t just gore-for-gore’s-sake. It’s mythic inversion. The very icons we were raised to admire are reanimated as predators. The conscience that once whispered guilt now staggers toward us as a zombie voice, feeding not growth but consumption.

And here’s the kicker: my grandchildren can stream Spider-Man and Friends one moment, then click straight into Marvel Zombies the next. No ritual passage. Not even a channel break. Just a tap. What Rudhyar warned about with Superman in 1930 has reached a thanatonic singularity point in our collective consciousness.

The Gray Men and the Conflict Script

This dovetails with something I’ve written before about the Gray Men — the faceless enforcers of conformity, the subliminal advertisers, the bus-stop archetypes in suits. They are conscience in external form, whispering: Stay in line. Don’t transform.

And it dovetails with the conflict narrative too. Hollywood and streaming platforms endlessly replay the same script: survival, battle, victory through domination. The conscience loops in: Do not grow, just escape. Outlast. Run from the bad.

The convergence is striking: conscience + media + conflict script = a machine built not to liberate us, but to shrink us.

When Conscience Shrinks Us

This is the inversion that hit me like a grenade. Conscience was supposed to guide transformation — but instead it calcifies into guilt, demanding obedience and survival.

The movies echo it: survival above all. Escape the bad. Fight the villain. Run from zombies. There is no good to reach for anymore, only escape from the bad. The imagination itself has been shrunk to fit a survival frame.

The Escape Hatch

But here’s the beautiful part: when you recognize the machine, you are no longer bound by it. The loop breaks. The voice of conscience loses its hold.

NLP calls this the closing of the Zeigarnik loop: when you realize the cycle is unfinished, you can finish it yourself.

The way forward isn’t survival, and it isn’t guilt. It is transformation. Worm into butterfly. Self into more-than-self. Once you stop mistaking the nagging voice of conscience for your soul, you can finally hear the deeper call: not to shrink, but to grow.

From Leaden Graves to Wings Unbound

Prometheus chained. Saturn devouring his children. The butterfly welded inside its chrysalis. These are the images of conscience enthroned — the weight of guilt pressing down like lead, the grave where transformation is buried alive.

But the real story is elsewhere. Conscience is not the voice of God — it’s the echo of thwarted metamorphosis. And once you see it, you can stop running from zombies, villains, and gray men, and start answering the true call: metamorphosis.

The leaden grave was never meant to be your home. The wings were always waiting. Unbound.

Prelude - Knowles’ Law

“For every media event that sparks conservative backlash, there is a charged mythic and occult kernel beneath it — often in alignment with hidden symbolic or astrological currents.”

(This essay was inspired by the work of Christopher Knowles)

I might never have seen the patterns so clearly if it wasn’t for a very strange and brilliant blog run by an embittered former comic book artist.

At first glance, Ozzy Osbourne peeing on the Alamo in drag or biting the head off a bat seems like rock-star excess. But under the lens of what’s been named Knowles’ Law, the Made-for-Mtv scandals of the 80s such as these are in no way random — they are mythic detonations, shock rituals tipping into the sacred theater beneath culture’s skin.

What if, in every feigned public outrage, there’s a subterranean archetypal current pulsing? What if backlash isn’t a mistake but the system’s reflex to contain eruption?

I. The Dionysian Dawn: Bats, Blood, and Ritual

From the earliest days of his post Black Sabbath career, Ozzy moved like a myth caught in streetlight.

• The Bat: In 1982 Des Moines Idaho, mid-concert, Ozzy bites the head off of a dead bat, claiming he thought it was rubber. The crowd is in ruins as he’s rushed off the stage to receive medical care. The ritual writes itself. Predator becomes victim, god becomes sacrifice, communion becomes carnage.

• The Alamo: Same year — 1982 — intoxicated, and uncharacteristically dressed in drag, Ozzy urinates on hallowed ground. The sacred boundary is crossed with laughter, desecration, gender inversion, and bodily fluid.

For either of these incidents to have occurred either accidentally or organically stretches credibility. Semiotically, they represent imaginal powder kegs. The stories that have emerged since these incidents provoke backlash precisely because the archetypal kernel demands containment. The outrage is the cage closing around the fugitive myth.

In that light, every news cycle screaming “degeneracy,” “offense,” or “outrage” is doing the work of re-inscribing the boundary. The myth leaks. The machine clamps on.

II. The Return of the Puer — Trapped by the Earth Mother

The myth of the Puer Eterna (Hillman’s term) promises eternal youth, generativity, boundary-breaking. But no Puer remains untouched by the world-mother or queen archetype. There’s always a binding force.

Enter Sharon Osbourne.

In the second half of Ozzy’s story, the wild god is tamed — domesticated into a new myth. Hera enters. She doesn’t extinguish chaos; she re-shapes it. Through The Osbournes and the machinery of celebrity, Ozzy is reconfigured into the sitcom dad, the bewildered patriarch, the loving but bumbling husband. The myth changes: no longer wild revel, now family dysfunction, dog poop, bleeps, domestic tension — chaos translated into entertainment.

Madison Avenue loves that archetype. The bumbling husband, the clueless dad, the emasculated patriarch whom you can laugh at — this is a fantasy marketed to millions. Ozzy’s myth was leveraged, reshaped, stabilized. The Puer got bound, the chaos got tethered, and the myth became a household sitcom.

But in that binding, something interesting happens: the berzerker yields to compassion; the trickster softens. The Puer becomes more maternal, more vulnerable, more human. There’s a subtle archetypal shift akin to the Quan Yin story: the powerful, chaotic archetype softens, turns toward mercy, becomes a remnant of compassion in chaos.

Was that a loss? Maybe. But myths evolve. The question is: did we domesticate the god, or did the god teach us a new form of divinity?

III. The Machinery of Myth: Celebrity as Intelligentsia

When we say “celebrity,” we imagine spontaneity — someone discovered, rising from nowhere. But that is myth dressed up. Historically, celebrity and intelligentsia were one and the same: priests of culture, curators of dream-language, often underwritten by hidden networks.

In modern America, the intelligentsia has been swallowed by show business. The celebrity is the new cultural priest, the mythic interface between power and people. But the system is rarely organic. It’s engineered. Dynasties, labels, agencies, media machines: they curate which myths appear, which get suppressed, which get repackaged.

Ozzy’s transformation from untamed god to sitcom archetype didn’t occur in chaos. It was shepherded. The scandal, the outrage, the binding — all part of the same myth-making mechanism. The Puer is broken down, refashioned into a domesticated myth, then sold nationwide. The backlash ensures the myth will remain contained. The machine reclaims the symbolic storm.

IV. The Ascent: Apotheosis and the Question of Now

And now, Ozzy hovers in his third act — not quite alive, not quite dead, but mythic.

• As meme-god: His slurred calls of “Sharon!” echo eternally in TikTok edits, fan montages, fandom rituals.

• As patron of misfits: In a culture of straitjackets, he becomes the patron saint of the strange, the outsider, the one who laughs when sacred walls tremble.

• As cosmic question: Has he become a Saturnian threshold figure — stern, ancestral, warning? Or is he still the trickster god whispering subvert from the edge?

The myth doesn’t end. It splinters, mutates, returns as symbol and rumor. Ozzy began as Dionysus, was bound by Hera, softened into a compassionate trickster, and now drifts in the memetic firmament.

Who is Ozzy now? That’s for the new myths to decide — and for us to watch.

Today I’m releasing something close to my heart: the NLP Talks Handbook — Summer 2025 Edition.

This project began as a live series of talks, where I explored how language shapes reality and how storytelling can either trap us or free us. Over time, those talks became a framework. The framework became chapters. The chapters became a book.

The handbook is built on six chapters, each one mixing storytelling, myth, and practical NLP tools:

Rashomon in the Rearview — breaking ghost loops and glamours.

Cookies and Code — seeing reality through new symbolic lenses.

The Devil Wears Patterns— understanding manipulation and breaking free.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once — how to find choice in chaos.

Gotham’s Grammar — learning the hidden structures of language.

Kill the Script — stepping outside the conflict narrative once and for all.

Each chapter closes with exercises. These are not just thought experiments — they’re practical, repeatable drills you can use to notice patterns, shift them, and start creating change right away.

Why am I calling this a “soft launch”? Because this is the first wave. The Gumroad release gets the book into your hands immediately. In a few weeks, I’ll be rolling out a Substack edition that adds bonus materials, ongoing exercises, and community discussion.

But for today, it’s simple: the book is live.

If you’ve ever been curious about NLP, if you’ve ever wondered why we keep replaying the same stories, or if you just want to add some new tools to your kit, the handbook is here.

You can get it on Gumroad today — here’s the link .

Is it time to rewrite your story?

I — Everything is Always Terrible

Let’s start with a gunshot in Utah. This week, a man named Charlie Kirk — lightning rod, professional nuisance, conservative Christian (at least, according to the current sense of that phrase) was murdered in broad daylight while speaking at a televised event. This was a tragedy ( at least, by the normal definition of that word).

Here’s the thing - I don’t want to psychoanalyze the shooter. Also, I’m neither here for Kirk’s hagiography nor his tell-all.

And I certainly don’t want to hand Kirk the martyr’s crown that it looks like he was always angling for.

Let’s get real.

There are invisible forces at work in our world that are more powerful than any government. These forces are dark beyond measure, antithetical to all that is good and decent in this world, and they can kill indiscriminately without fear of discovery, let alone justice.

They are nothing new. They are the forces that control what P. D. Ouspensky referred to as the “History of Crime” more than a century ago. And they aren’t going anywhere.

It’s important to understand that this stuff exists, and then to trust that there are other forces at work that aren’t so terrible, and then to do your very best.

However, the avatars that work for these forces are not only ubiquitous, they control both sides of the game-board. So basically, the moment you pick a side, you lose.

II — Nobody is On Your Side

These beggars and salesmen; these strident voices pretending to scream at each other from across opposite sides of your screen — Charlie Kirk and his enemies, Stephen King and his public feud with Donald Trump, and the movies that you are told are somehow important, they all serve the same function — to distract you from your reality.

These people are products.

Not prophets, not visionaries, certainly not leaders. Products.

The Charlie Kirk brand sold red meat to the Christian right and hate-bait to everyone else.

The Trump brand sells gold-plated rat poison to anyone who will buy, while reminding everyone daily that the wealthiest are above the law as long as they willingly serve those dark forces.

The King brand sells fear in paperback and, more lucratively, on streaming platforms. Lawrence — one-hit director of The Hunger Games — sells cosplay revolution, rebellion you can binge between Uber Eats orders.

And every single one of them dips in the same pool: celebrity politics, Madison Avenue marketing, and the eternal promise that the end is nigh — unless you tune in, buy in, vote in, or stream in.

III — The Long Walk Backwards

Today, Stephen King’s The Long Walk hits theaters. The reviews are already calling it “timely,” “prescient” a “mirror of our fractured age.”

Spare me.

The book was written when King was nineteen — nearly sixty years ago. It was a Vietnam-era fever dream, a death march reframed as allegory.

If it feels timely, that’s not because King is clairvoyant. It’s because the American fear business hasn’t updated its playbook since the Nixon years. Apocalypse on repeat. Doom with Dolby surround.

Every generation gets the same recycled script: society is fragile, civility is a costume, and any minute now we’re going to have to pick up a rifle or a machete. That’s the “truth” sold to us — not because it’s true, but because it’s profitable.

Despite whatever you may hear this week, King isn’t holding up a mirror to our time. He’s merely cashing the same check he’s been cashing for decades. Stephen King is the literary equivalent of a McDonald’s hamburger: ubiquitous, addictive, and guaranteed to leave you feeling a little sick after.

IV — The Trump-King Two-Step

I’m sick of watching Stephen King pretend to spar with Donald Trump on Twitter (or X, or whatever post-apocalyptic platform Elon is driving into a ditch this week). They’re both cut from the same cloth.

Both live on celebrity oxygen. Both treat politics as content. Both know how to pump out product: King with his annual brick-sized novel, Trump with his endless reality-TV rallies. Both depend on the same ecosystem — the cable hits, the op-eds, the Madison Avenue hype machine.

The only real difference? Trump gold-plates his nonsense, King slaps a supernatural gloss on his. One promises you’ll be “great again,” the other promises you’ll be “scared again.” Same factory. Same line.

V — Francis Lawrence and the Cosplay Revolution

Then there’s Francis Lawrence. Director of The Hunger Games. Now helming The Long Walk. His job description is clear: package dystopia as entertainment. He’s the Madison Avenue director’s cut: give the people a “revolution” they can cosplay in the food court, not a revolution that would actually upend anything.

These movies let us play at collapse without ever examining the system that feeds us collapse as a steady diet. They’re the cinematic equivalent of doomscrolling. You can consume the end of the world without ever questioning the advertising breaks in the middle.

V I— The Gray Men of Collapse

I write often about the “Men in Gray” — the archetypal figures who show up to remind us who’s really pulling the strings. This is the same pattern. Charlie Kirk, Stephen King, Lawrence, Trump: they’re just gray men in different costumes. Kirk in his conservative blazer, Trump in his orange bronzer, King in his Red Sox cap, Lawrence in his black-on-black director chic.

All of them peddle the same gray message: collapse is coming, civility is a sham, fear is your only honest companion. That’s not prophecy — that’s product placement.

VI I— Red Meat for the Algorithm

This week it was Kirk’s blood. Tomorrow it’ll be King’s box office. Next week it’ll be Trump’s indictment, Lawrence’s Netflix deal, or some other product launch in the marketplace of fear. The headlines change, the algorithm feeds, but the pattern is the same.

It’s all red meat. Not meant to nourish, just meant to keep the blood in your mouth so you can’t ask real questions. Madison Avenue figured this out a long time ago: you don’t have to solve a problem if you can keep selling the fear of it.

VIII — The Counter-Narrative

Here’s what I refuse: I refuse to believe that America is one mass shooting, one election cycle, or one power outage away from becoming The Long Walk. I refuse to buy that civility is a costume we can’t afford.

And I also refuse to treat Stephen King like the Beatles of American literature. I used to respect the man. I’ve realized he’s nothing but a prolific creep with the “aww shucks” good looks of a sitcom actor and an army of PR flacks, and his empire of schlock deserves as much ridicule as Trump’s empire of tacky hotels.

We need new myths. Myths of endurance, of creativity, of interdependence. Myths that don’t require us to rehearse collapse like it’s a high school play.

Because collapse isn’t coming. Not the way they sell it. What’s coming is the bill — the cost of buying fear instead of building resilience. And no amount of red meat, no number of dystopian remakes, no celebrity squabbles between King and Trump are going to cover that tab.

IX — Final Verse

So yes: condolences to the Kirk Family. You all deserve far better than this.

Yes: Stephen King’s The Long Walk hits theaters. Francis Lawrence is back to direct your doom in Dolby.

Yes: Donald Trump will be back on stage soon enough, promising you another blood drenched season of America’s greatest reality show.

And me? I’m just here to remind you: they’re all products. They’re all gray men. They’re all red meat.

You don’t have to eat that stuff.