I regret to inform you that I have been seduced by a demon.

Alright, not a demon exactly, but someone who is staying in hell forever.

That someone is Ulysses - Dante’s Ulysses, the one in Canto 26 of the Inferno.

I say “Dante’s Ulysses” because Dante is an extremely audacious fellow who wrote unauthorized sequels and fan fiction about the classics of antiquity and also the Bible. He took it upon himself to write the last chapter of Ulysses’ life, wherein the hero winds up sailing all the way to hell.

I got seduced by Dante’s Ulysses because he gives a very compelling speech. Most people that Dante walks by in the Inferno give speeches, and most of these speeches are bad - soaked with self-pity, self-righteousness, self-justification. Speeches like “Yes, I cheated on my partner, but I was too full of lust NOT to cheat!” Ulysses’ speech isn’t like this - it’s stirring, inspiring, and one that destroyed him and everyone who followed him.

In Dante’s telling, Ulysses grows old but cannot settle down. He whips up his old crew for one last voyage, a voyage into the forbidden and the unknown. They sail past the edge of the world and catch a single glimpse of the sacred afterlife before a tornado from God tears them apart.

We find Ulysses towards the bottom of hell, encased in flames perfectly fitted to his body, with no light to guide him and no heat to warm him but his own. He is in the circle of fraudulent counselors, misleaders, betrayers. Another resident is Guido da Montefeltro, a military strategist turned monk. Pope Boniface VIII came to Guido seeking advice on how to destroy a rival stronghold, promising absolution in advance. Guido’s counsel: falsely promise amnesty, then slaughter them when they surrender

Why is Ulysses next to this guy? “Let’s have one last adventure and dare to discover things” sounds like a great speech, certainly better than “The Pope says I can betray who I want”. We today see knowledge as a good thing in and of itself - Sapere Aude, “Dare to Know”, is how Immanuel Kant characterized the Enlightenment. “To boldly go where no man has gone before” is the motto of the much-beloved Captain Kirk. But for Dante, the problem isn’t the knowledge-seeking itself, nor is it the audacity - it’s that Ulysses doomed his own men. He didn’t venture out to challenge God in a canoe, he went out with a full crew. What’s more, Ulysses was doomed because he was trapped in his identity. He could not not dare. His appetite for experience so great that he could only feed it by sacrificing other lives. He is audacity calcified into compulsion.

What hooked me about Ulysses’ speech is that I recognized myself in what he said. I used to see myself as a daring knowledge-seeker whose daring granted me license to do whatever I wanted. I did not wind up inspiring a crew to sail our ship to hell - I was mostly impulsive, unreliable, and drunk. I drank before meeting up with others to drink. I drank before tests, before work, before dates. I left parties with more alcohol than I arrived with. If I was drunk and you didn’t call me out on it then that made me better than you, because I got away with something. I wasn’t challenging the rules for the sake of universal liberation, I needed the rules for everyone else so that I could enjoy the thrill of transgressing them. I didn’t seek liberation, I sought a self-image of thrilling exception.

Eventually my self-authorizing self-image exhausted itself - at the end, no matter how much I drank, I couldn’t actually feel okay, and nobody trusted me enough for me to get the little thrill of betrayal. I turned beyond myself, beyond my story about myself, for help. I am not a medieval Christian, but Dante’s story is still very much mine.

There’s a tremendous irony here in Dante finger-wagging someone for audaciously self-authorizing. In the book that Dante wrote about his personal guided tour of the afterlife he is endorsed by the greatest poets of all time, he settles every personal score he had in life, he damns living popes to hell, and he makes direct eye contact with God. The one differentiator here is that Dante writes himself as being divinely ordained - his journey is spent following God-sent tour guides, the whole thing happening by sacred commission. Dante is writing about himself in his Ulysses, about what he himself is half doing. Maybe that’s what makes the Inferno honest despite itself - Dante knows the flame he’s describing because he himself is standing in it.

The difference between Ulysses and Dante isn’t that one is audacious and the other is humble. It’s that Dante, in his own story, found someone to follow. He is in conversation with his guides. He learns, he changes, he is open to experience as something that can shape him rather than something to gloriously conquer. In my life I seek that openness every time I sit down in a room full of others and say “Hi, I’m Max and I’m an alcoholic” - my experience is my own, and also contributes to the common identity that we all share in recovery. I inform others and others inform me, and we all orient ourselves towards the common goal of going to bed sober tonight. I reconstruct my self as a self that is open, permeable, accountable, shared.

That’s what I take from this: not to extinguish the fire of self-creation, but to share it.

I know what it’s like to live inside a closed loop. I built one for myself out of books, intelligence, and alcohol - a self-authorizing system in which every failure became proof of my tragic genius and every rejection became proof that nobody understood me. The loop is a structure of meaning-making that feeds on itself: I am special, therefore my suffering is meaningful, therefore I am special. It is airtight, it is simple, it is lethal.

I got out of it. My loop collapsed under the sheer cumulative weight of its own failures, and one day I could no longer explain away the wreckage. I couldn’t sound smart enough to myself to outrun what I had become. The person - the identity - sustained by the loop died so that I could live, and I have spent the better part of a decade learning to live without who I used to be while still remembering him as a possibility.

David Koresh never got out.

Vernon Wayne Howell was born to a fourteen-year-old girl named Bonnie Sue Clark. Thirty-one years later he was reborn as David Koresh, legally changing his name to reflect his true nature as literally a Biblical character. Two years after that, at age thirty-three, David Koresh died, surrounded by dozens of burning corpses, many of them children.

When he was Vernon Howell, he was a stupid child, an unloved child. Young Bonnie fell in with one bad man after another, all of them violent towards her and her son. Vernon was dyslexic and had to be put in special classes and got called all kinds of names. He was sexually assaulted, at least once. For him the entire world was pain, and everyone who was supposed to take care of him had failed him.

Vernon, though, had a gift, a critical gift, a sacred gift. He could barely read, but he could memorize. He could memorize books better than anyone else. And so he memorized the Bible.

I had my own version of this gift. I read voraciously, not just to learn but to arm myself. I accumulated references the way Koresh accumulated weapons, as proof of some sort of special destiny. I could quote studies, reference theories, win arguments - at least, I thought I did. I was building a version of myself that was licensed by intelligence the way Koresh was licensed by God. Our loops were built from different materials - his from scripture, mine from secular intellect - but the architecture was identical.

For much of Western history the Bible was taken as a conversation-stopping authority. You quoted Bible verses to prove your point. Much of the West doesn’t do this anymore, but many communities still do, and Vernon found them. He could quote the Bible to justify just about anything he wanted, and he did.

What made Vernon Howell into David Koresh was exactly this move, interpreting the Bible to justify his will and desires. Most people’s encounter with religion is completely different. Many people read the Bible to clarify their desires, to purify bad desires, to orient themselves towards God. Others reject the Bible and religious authority in general as arbitrary repression, seeing their individual desires as vital and self-authorizing. Koresh found a third way, a strange sort of recursive kink in the structure of meaning-making. He didn’t subordinate his desires to religion nor did he subordinate religion to his desires — he declared that his desires and religion were one and the same.

This is the loop in its purest form. I am God’s prophet, which means my desires are God’s desires, which means everything I do is righteous, which confirms that I am God’s prophet. It’s a closed system, airtight, impervious to outside correction. Every challenge becomes further proof. Every failure becomes a test of faith. My version ran a different program - I am a genius, which means my suffering is meaningful, which means the world is too stupid for me, which confirms that I am a genius - but the operating system was the same.

Vernon Howell read the Bible so intensely that he thought that it was about him. Don Quixote read chivalric romances until he went insane, and Vernon did that with scripture. He saw himself in the book of Revelation, as the Lamb of God, uniquely ordained by God himself to interpret scripture and open the Seven Seals. This meant that he alone could interpret the word of God. He saw himself as like Cyrus, a sinful human ordained by God to destroy Babylon. “Koresh” is another way to say “Cyrus”, hence his new name. He was ordained in his sinful nature, which meant that he could partake fully in sin. He could have sex, and he did. He saw himself as like David, as like a king in the Bible with his concubines. He saw himself as creating the 24 lords to sit on their thrones in the end times, as prophesied. He saw all marriages as nullified, except those to him. To follow Koresh was to offer yourself to him fully, to offer him your family as his family. All women became his women, all children became his children. The law of man may have had something to say about the “age of consent”, but Koresh could show you that the law of God gave him the right and indeed the duty to father as many of these prophesied children as possible as soon as possible, so if your girl could get pregnant then he was certainly going to try.

He got his group from a pre-existing splinter sect of the Seventh Day Adventist church, the Branch Davidians. Most Christian traditions believe that revelation concluded with Jesus and the apostles, that the Bible is complete. The Branch Davidians believed that prophecy is an ongoing thing, that God gives some living contemporary humans the gift of interpreting the Bible and revealing truths that until now had been sealed. Lois Roden was the prophetess of the Branch Davidians, in her sixties. Vernon Howell joined her group when he was in his twenties and went about seducing her.

They never wound up having a miracle baby. When she died a succession crisis broke out between Vernon and her son, George. The prophetic succession resolved itself the way these things often do, not through divine revelation but through one claimant being slightly less unhinged than the other. George Roden challenged Vernon to a resurrection contest, digging up a corpse and telling Vernon to bring the body back to life. Vernon reported him for corpse abuse, and when the cops asked for proof Vernon and his followers went to the compound with a camera and guns, and a shootout occurred. Vernon was charged and acquitted - I guess that’s Texas for you - and wound up inheriting the compounds anyway after George Roden was institutionalized for murdering an unrelated man with an axe.

Vernon took control of the Mount Carmel compound and rebuilt it, and himself. He took the name Koresh. He built a structure made of plywood and cheap materials, not because they couldn’t afford better but because better wasn’t necessary. The apocalypse was coming. Why pour a concrete foundation for a building that wouldn’t need to outlast the Seventh Seal? The compound was built the way you build something when you sincerely believe that the world is about to end - functional, fast, temporary. Every wall was a confession of faith.

Inside those plywood walls, Koresh was stockpiling weapons. This was Texas in the early 1990s, and gun culture was not exactly unusual, but Koresh’s operation went well beyond a few rifles and some survivalist enthusiasm. He was accumulating assault weapons, converting semi-automatics to full auto, buying grenades and grenade components. When a UPS driver noticed a package bound for the compound had broken open and spilled grenade hulls, he reported it. That report made its way to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the ATF, who began investigating him.

They learned about the polygamy, the statutory rape. They learned his habits. They knew he jogged. They knew he went into town. They could have arrested him any day of the week, alone, on a road, without incident. They chose not to. What they chose instead was Operation Showtime.

That was the actual name. “Operation Showtime”. The ATF was an agency under political pressure, struggling for relevance and funding, and what they wanted was a visible, dramatic, undeniable win. They wanted cameras. They wanted a raid. They wanted the world to celebrate their victory. They tipped off a local news cameraman who drove out to the compound ahead of the tactical teams and, finding himself lost, stopped to ask a man for directions. The man he asked was a Branch Davidian. When the ATF arrived, guns drawn, Koresh and his followers were waiting.

What ensued was the biggest gun battle on US soil since the Civil War. Four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians died. Koresh was wounded. The raid was a catastrophe, and the catastrophe was born directly from the same impulse that kept the cult going. The ATF needed Operation Showtime the way Koresh needed the Seven Seals. Both were playing for an audience that would validate their existence.

I recognize this too. In my drinking days, every social situation was a performance - an opportunity to out-think and out-drink everybody in the room. Like Koresh, like the ATF, I conflated spectacle with substance. Koresh could have quietly healed his childhood wounds. The ATF could have made a quiet arrest. I could have had a quiet life. But rather than quiet the loop wants confirmation, and confirmation requires witnesses.

After the failed raid, a siege settled in and the FBI took over negotiations. And to their credit, the FBI negotiators made a genuine, sustained, good-faith effort to resolve the standoff peacefully. They were professionals. They understood hostage situations. They had protocols, strategies, experience refined over decades of crisis management. They talked to Koresh for hours, for days, for weeks. They made concessions. They got people out, including some children.

But the negotiation was doomed, and it was doomed for two reasons that had nothing to do with the negotiators’ goodness or skill.

The first reason was the ATF. Four of their agents were dead. Their raid had very publicly failed. The institutional ego of the ATF demanded that the standoff end in a way that demonstrated overwhelming federal authority, that justified the raid in retrospect. Every patient day of negotiation was a day that the ATF’s failure sat unresolved. The tactical teams on the perimeter grew more aggressive as the siege dragged on. They blasted music and sounds of animals being slaughtered at the compound through the night. They crushed the Davidians’ cars with tanks. Every escalation undercut what the negotiators were trying to build. The FBI’s own people later described it as one hand extending an olive branch while the other made a fist.

The second reason was Koresh himself, and this is the deeper problem, the one that hits me harder. The FBI negotiators were operating from within modernity. They understood the world in terms of rational self-interest, legal consequence, psychological need. They could model a desperate man bargaining for his freedom. They could model a con artist stalling for time. What they could not model was a man who genuinely believed he was living inside the Book of Revelation.

Koresh was not stalling. He was not bargaining. He was waiting for God to tell him what to do. When the FBI offered him a deal - come out, face trial, tell your story to the world - they were offering him something that made perfect sense within their framework and no sense at all within his. A trial in a federal courthouse was a scene from someone else’s story. His story ended with the Seals, with fire and judgment. He told the negotiators he would come out after he finished writing his interpretation of the Seven Seals. The FBI thought this was a stalling tactic. It probably wasn’t. He probably meant it. But it didn’t matter either way, because the two sides weren’t having the same conversation. They were speaking across a gap that no amount of good faith could bridge. The FBI was negotiating from the Enlightenment. Koresh was negotiating from Revelation. Neither could live in the other’s world.

After fifty-one days, the FBI moved in with tear gas. CS gas, delivered by tanks punching holes in the plywood walls. The plan was to make the compound uninhabitable and force the Davidians out. Within hours, the compound was on fire.

The truth is that you pump flammable gas into a flammable building full of people who believe the world is ending, and what happens next is not a mystery. A fire started. Was it the flammable gas finding a lantern? Suicidal arson by the Davidians?

Seventy-six people died, including twenty-five children. David Koresh died. The compound burned to its foundations, which, being plywood, didn’t take long.

Martin Heidegger, a favorite philosopher of mine, talked about “thrownness” - Geworfenheit - and it matters here because it reframes the tragedy entirely. We are all “thrown” into life into circumstances we didn’t choose - our parents, our birthday, our country, our era, etc. Throwness is even deeper than that -It’s the claim that those conditions are constitutive, that there is no self hiding underneath them waiting to be liberated. Your self is inextricable from the world you were born into. There was no secret Vernon underneath Koresh who could have broken free if only he’d tried harder or been offered the right deal. The abandoned child, the sacred gift of memorization, the communities that treated the Bible as the final word on everything - none of these were obstacles between Koresh and his real self. They were his self. The loop wasn’t something he was trapped in. The loop was him, all the way down.

That’s what makes it a tragedy and not merely a horror story. Koresh was too good at the one thing his world gave him. He was so good at it that no failure, no confrontation, no fifty-one-day siege could crack the loop. The worse things got, the more the loop confirmed itself. The ATF’s aggression proved the government was Babylon. The siege proved the end times were at hand. The fire proved that he was the Lamb.

In my life, my thrownness, I held on for too long because I felt like to give up my identity was to stop being me, to die. And in a sense, it was. When my loop broke, I experienced something that I can only describe as a kind of death, because the person who had been sustained by the loop could not survive without it. The person I was had to die for me, today, to live.

But at least I had other tools. I had people who loved me in ways that, however imperfectly, reached me. I had a world that offered alternative stories about who I could be. I had, if nothing else, the sheer biological fact that alcohol was destroying my body in ways that even my loop could not reframe as glamorous. Koresh’s world offered none of this. His community existed to confirm him. His body was the Lamb’s body. Every possible exit from the loop had been sealed shut by the loop itself.

I’m grateful to have survived. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t say it to congratulate myself. I say it because survival was not a choice I made but a grace I received, a collapse I couldn’t prevent. The community and connection I now have - the people who knew me when I was still stuck in myself, who waited for me on the other side - has proven to be the best kind of afterlife I could have hoped for.

But when I look at Koresh, I don’t just see myself. I see the people who couldn’t leave. I see the women who handed their marriages and their bodies to a man who had made God into a mirror. I see the men who surrendered their families because the loop was eloquent and the alternative was exile. And I see the children - the twenty-five children who died in that fire who never had the chance to build a self that wasn’t already enclosed in someone else’s narcissism. They were born, they lived, and they died inside Koresh’s story about himself. Their story ended with his, and they never had a chance to even know that “no” was possible.

That’s the thing about these loops - they don’t just consume the person inside them. They consume everyone and every relationship nearby. My drinking didn’t just hurt me - it hurt people who loved me, people who hadn’t signed up for my mythology of tragic brilliance. But then I got to make amends, start new conversations, re-introduce myself outside of myself, however imperfectly. Koresh’s people never did. They burned with him.

I look at the burning compound and see what loops become when they cannot break. I look at Koresh and I see my self, my old self, a possible self still, a self trapped in itself. I see, with a recognition that I wish I didn’t have, exactly how it feels to live inside a story that is burning down around you and to mistake that heat and light for proof that you were right.

Let me share with you a certain voice in my head, a voice which leaves me feeling profoundly alone in the places where I feel most at home. It’s a voice that’s difficult to silence because, in certain ways, it helped me.

The voice in question belongs to Jordan Peterson. It isn’t literally his voice, but he spoke and I listened and kept on speaking his voice to myself.

The voice in question is also a listening, a seeing, an understanding—a new and important game to play. The way to win this game is to see yourself and every left-wing thing as being hopelessly full of shit.

When I was younger I played a different game - one where every right-wing thing was hopelessly full of shit. Right-wing things emanated from something hidden, something evil, something it was my job to uncover and call out. Right-wing things were expressions of: capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, racism, stupidity, cruelty. All right-wing assertions, even right-wing people themselves, were subject to instant dismissal. I didn’t argue with them, I diagnosed them, if I thought about them at all. I was, I thought, very clever and very good at this game.

The underlying reality, such as it is, proved to be more complicated than I originally thought. My totalizing suspicion started to sputter as experiences and ideas came my way that did not neatly fit into the old picture. That’s where I found Peterson, or rather where he found me: he taught me a totalizing suspicion of my old totalizing suspicion. He didn’t bring me relief. He merely suggested I switch targets.

The voice I still bear, the voice he spoke, has this to say: leftism, at its core, is an expression of terminal immaturity.

“Immaturity” means that you are constituted by impulsivity and self-centeredness, a constitution that is the natural state of a child but which is the shameful state of an adult. The left, in this view, is a snarl of childlike entitlement and appetite. Desires and individual selfhood are all that there is - the highest values, the only things that can confer value in the first place. Leftists worship “authenticity” and “self-expression” because the self is all that there is. If it feels good, if it boosts your self-esteem, then do it. No God will judge you. None of it matters in the end.

Just as teens rebel against their parents, leftists rebel against tradition. Everyone to ever live before you is full of shit, because they lived before you. The past is a graveyard of ignorance and bigotry, because it is the past. Your era is the only important one, because it’s yours. You have no duty to approximate some mind-independent truth. You can assert whatever you want.

Socialism is just the hatred of hard work baked into a story where everything that doesn’t make you feel good is part of an evil conspiracy. Leftism is the game of finding sophisticated-sounding noises to dominate other people and take their money. And hidden behind all this self-worship is self-hatred - you hate yourself because you are not God even though you try to be. You hate everything that created you. You hate your family, your country. You hate God so much that you try to pretend that He doesn’t exist.

Maturity, then, consists of shaking all of this off. Maturity means caring about something that is not you - your faith, your family, your country. Your weakness and suffering come because you are not God, but you do not have to be. Accept your duty. Embrace self-sacrifice. Seek the enduring, the eternal, the transcendent. Youthful rebellion has its place, testing the limits of the order. But growing up means admitting that the order has survived your challenge, and taking your rightful place in its preservation.

That’s the voice in my head. It bubbles up every time I see anything political. It’s instant. What corruption is this expressing? Probably immaturity. The game to win is to see these expressions for what they are: disgusting, destructive, corrosive to the people making them.

It’s weird because it’s not me. But it helped me. And that’s exactly what makes it so hard to dislodge.

Why did I keep speaking it after it was spoken to me? Because there’s a seductive coherence to it. And do I have to admit to you that the voice got me good because part of it was true. I learned the hard way, through my drinking, that “feeling good immediately and forever” has a lot of drawbacks. In getting sober I sought and developed resilience, commitment to the success of others, integrity in my word. My lived experience taught me that vacant appetite makes for a poor master. So when Peterson’s voice said that leftism was just entitled craving dressed up in theory, something in me recognized what he was describing.

What ever parts of it are true, as a whole it becomes a trap, because from within the framework it is unfalsifiable. Any critique of tradition becomes evidence of immaturity. Any demand for justice becomes disguised appetite. If you disagree, shame on you - that’s just proof you haven’t grown up yet.

Here is what the voice cannot see: Orlando, my hometown, has a street literally named Division Street. It was named in the Jim Crow era to separate the black part of town from the white. When it came time to build highways, they built them through the black neighborhoods, where residents were too poor and too black to matter in the eyes of the state. The injustice is monumental, enduring. I see it every time I look out my window.

The Peterson voice has no vocabulary for this. Its entire grammar reduces social phenomena to individual psychology. If black communities are struggling, the voice can only say: immature, entitled, lacking in personal responsibility. It literally cannot perceive that a highway routed through a neighborhood continues to shape wealth, health, and opportunity for generations. Structures are invisible to it, which means that a vast domain of human suffering is invisible to it too.

This is the specific failure: the framework cannot distinguish between individual appetite and collective grievance rooted in documented history. It flattens everything. A trust-fund kid demanding the right to skip his midterms and a community demanding that their children not be poisoned by industrial runoff become, in this voice, identical phenomena. Both are just entitlement. Both are immaturity.

It’s a dark irony, then, that this trumpeting of maturity merely collapses into its own evasion.

And yet I can’t simply reinstall my old game, the one where every right-wing thing is evil. That game had its weaknesses, and I left it for a reason. It can’t unsee the ways that grievance can calcify into identity, the ways that victimhood can become its own kind of appetite. Both games are, to put it bluntly, scapegoat machines. One sacrifices tradition, the other sacrifices the dispossessed, but both generate meaning through contempt. Both give you someone to blame, someone whose existence explains your suffering.

The problem isn’t that each game has claim to some of the truth and we just have to find balance. The problem is that both games are the same game: the game of total suspicion, where you win by unmasking the hidden corruption behind your enemy’s vacant lies.

What would it mean to stop playing?

…I don’t fully know. But I think it has something to do with surprise. Real engagement with another person, or a tradition, or an institution, means being changed by the encounter. It means holding your interpretive frameworks loosely enough that something you didn’t expect can genuinely surprise you.

That’s where I try to live now, in the space where I can be surprised, where the other person might not be reducible to however I diagnose them. It’s uncomfortable, and it offers none of the satisfactions of the blame game. But it’s the only place I’ve found where something like understanding becomes possible.

I don’t know if that’s maturity, but I’m pretty sure it’s closer than anything Peterson taught me.

If he were in my generation we would have described Timothy McVeigh as a “burned out former gifted child.” He was genuinely bright and genuinely talented, but as he reached adulthood he didn’t thrive in exactly the way that he thought was his destiny.

Many people, in their own way, have to reckon with the brute fact of failure in their lives. Is something wrong with me? Is something wrong with the world, its institutions, society as a whole? The answer, I think, is “yes and yes.” The challenge is figuring where to put our energies of improvement, how to divide up the responsibility. Many people put the blame of failure entirely on themselves, like cult members who would rather commit suicide than admit that their cult is even possibly wrong. Other people put the blame entirely on society, insisting that the corruption of others is entirely responsible for their every lie, every rejection, every frustration. You can’t personal-virtue your way out of bad laws, and you can’t blame bad laws for the basic temptation to break a promise.

McVeigh was in the second camp, the society-blamers. What made his experience distinct was that his encounter with “bad institutions” happened in the military. He was a talented soldier and, at the beginning, felt like he had a bright future there. Then he was sent to Iraq and saw combat - or rather “combat” in scare quotes - gunning down pathetically outmatched opponents for a “cause” he didn’t understand. More importantly, he was scheduled for a special forces examination, and getting deployed to Iraq meant he didn’t get to train. When he came back and took the physical test, he collapsed. He was double-humiliated: killing people for nothing, feeling tricked into showing up for the test exhausted and looking like an idiot. He quit the military shortly after that.

What McVeigh retained from the military was a willingness to risk his life and take the lives of others. Not just a willingness, an ability. He had discovered that he could be a good soldier, how to face the enemy and pull the trigger without hesitation and without regret. This set him apart from the squishy citizens who never had to worry about killing or fighting for their lives, who couldn’t even imagine what he was capable of. His broken ego returned to the civilian world desperate for distinction, and violence was where he found it.

Many people live through having their self-image shattered, and many people go through the military without committing atrocities when they come home. What made McVeigh who he was, the reason I am writing about him now, was the right-wing gun culture of the 1990s. Specifically, the communities based around gun shows who adopted a profoundly adversarial position against the federal government - people who believed that the government was both evil and incompetent, that where it was good it was useless and where it was evil it was relentless. That’s where McVeigh found himself, where he found his home. The conspiratorial framing gave him a story that worked very well for his wounded pride. He had been deceived, and now his eyes were open. He was naive to have trusted the military, to have almost given them his life. A useless, evil war had deprived him of the training he needed to pass his special forces exam, but that just goes to show that he should never have trusted them in the first place. They threw away his talent, and frankly, he was lucky that they did, because he was better than all of them. He was a super soldier, better even than the ones who passed their special forces exam, because he saw how full of shit they all were.

He might have lived a marginal life of quiet pain and resentment if not for two things: the Waco siege and gun control laws. At Waco, the government laid siege to an apocalyptic cult that had been stockpiling heavy weapons. McVeigh saw this as the government treating its civilians the way he, in the military, had treated the people of Iraq. He drove out to Waco and sat by the road outside the siege perimeter, passing out anti-government bumper stickers and giving news interviews. The Waco compound burned, with people inside. It wasn’t clear who started the fire, but McVeigh blamed the government. The images of the burning compound were, well, seared into him. He once was an enthusiastic participant in state violence, and now he saw it pointed at people like him. Then gun control laws were passed, and he felt like he was under an immediate threat, so he decided to act.

Once McVeigh decided that violent action was a necessary counterattack - an urgent act of self-protection and self-preservation - his subsequent actions can be understood through two things: a book called The Turner Diaries, prevalent in the gun show circuits at the time, and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The Turner Diaries is, to put it mildly, an intensely racist novel about a white nationalist uprising against the federal government. In this book, the federal government is leveraging minority integration and welfare to dilute and destroy white people. The climax of the novel is, appropriately enough, a car bomb detonated at a federal building - the FBI headquarters - which, in the fantasy world of the novel, inaugurates an uprising and puts an end to the new world order. That’s where McVeigh got the idea of bombing a federal building.

The World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was a moving-van bomb, and provided the concrete blueprint for what McVeigh ultimately did. In McVeigh’s eyes the bombing wasn’t a tragedy so much as an instructive failure of design.

The 1993 bombers had succumbed to a kind of theatrical over-engineering. They packed their van with “extras” - hydrogen tanks meant to cause massive fireballs and cyanide precursors intended to gas the survivors. In practice, the hydrogen burned up slowly and the cyanide just went up in smoke. They had attempted a complex and expensive chemical synthesis that left them with nasty burns and a bomb that didn’t topple the towers as intended. McVeigh saw this as amateur hour. They had focused on the style of the destruction rather than the mechanics of the blast.

Timothy McVeigh improved on their design by simplifying it. He stripped away the cinematic flourishes and focused entirely on the explosive yield. No chemical poisons, no fancy fireworks, just barrels of ammonium nitrate and racing fuel arranged to shape the charge for maximum structural damage.

Later, in prison, the psychologist who evaluated him said that it was very bizarre to hear this guy talking about the building of a truck bomb as if it were some sort of science experiment. McVeigh enlisted the help of two other people who shared his views, Fortier and Nichols. He had served with them in the army, but unlike him they now had families. They were not exactly on his level as far as violent action was concerned, what they were ultimately willing to risk. While they did help him in the commission of the act and in securing the materials necessary for it, at the end - right up to the very day of it - McVeigh had to physically threaten them and threaten their families to make them go through with helping him.

I should say here: this is where I truly lose him. Everything before this point I can trace from within - not endorsing it but following it, relating to it as one hurt person to another. I can understand wounded pride, I can understand a narrative that reframes failure as awakening, I can understand seeking a community that provides both belonging and an enemy worthy of one’s talents. But after the bomb goes off, McVeigh becomes something else to me. He stops being a subject I can understand and becomes an object I can only report on. The facts that follow the detonation are interesting, but I’m telling them from the outside now.

I can understand the fuse, but the explosion I can only describe.

The bombing itself, and the aftermath, displays a baffling mix of dark thoughtfulness and care coupled with bizarre carelessness. McVeigh created many false aliases, a common practice for those in the gun show circuit looking to evade federal attention. But he was not always consistent in using them. The night before the bombing he was staying in a motel, and the receptionist asked him a question while he was about to sign his name, and when he looked back down he distractedly signed as himself. Later, he placed an order for Chinese food using a name, delivered to the hotel room that now had his name on it. He planted a getaway car in Oklahoma City and left it there without a license plate. After the bombing, he drove off and never put the license plate back on, so within two hours of the bombing he’d been pulled over and arrested for misdemeanor crimes. He was sitting in a jail cell when federal agents came to him. An axle from the truck used in the bomb had been found with an identification number on it, which they traced to a rental agency in Kansas where he had used one of his fake names. Then they discovered him using that fake name to order Chinese food at a motel where he had signed using his real name. That’s how they were able to connect him to everything. Did he want to get caught?

He claimed that, on some level, yes - he wanted to be caught. He described his whole situation later as a protracted suicide by cop. He wanted to demonstrate that the government was evil, even in its killing of him. He also wanted to exhaust federal resources, having them uselessly chasing after him, trying to put pieces together. Whether or not this is valid is difficult to ascertain. It’s hard to tell how much of this is self-serving mythology, an attempt to paper over the fact that he made a lot of mistakes and got caught in a way that wasn’t exactly on his terms. Or maybe it’s just that he put a ton of thought and energy into the commission of the act itself, and afterward was simply a question mark. He was a soldier who had fulfilled his mission. He himself was a bomb that had been dropped and expended. What happened next to him was of no particular consequence.

His defense was very strange, because he insisted on completely confessing to the defense attorneys and put them in the position of having to prove that he didn’t do something that he did. They didn’t have an alibi for his location because… he committed the act. What he wanted - or what he said that he wanted - was to use the trial as a mouthpiece for his vision. He wanted to make the defense prove to the court that the United States government was evil and violent, and that he had to act as he did in self-defense. They did not do this. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in 2001.

He died a nerd. He loved sci-fi stuff, all the way to the end. One of his fake names, Bob Kling, evoked Klingons from Star Trek. He described the bombing itself as analogous to Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star. Nobody cares about the stormtroopers on the Death Star. Why should you care about federal agents in a federal building? If there’s collateral damage, there’s collateral damage. Why are you waving those pictures of dead kids at me like it’s my fault? What kind of villains would put a daycare on the Death Star?

He was also, genuinely, intelligent. When I was reading about this, I was genuinely impressed, in some ways, that he made the improvements that he did on the World Trade Center bomb. That was a very odd feeling - to read about building a better bomb and to think nice job with that, those improvements make sense. But there it is. He was a smart person, a brilliant engineer in certain ways. And this tragic, calamitous confluence of circumstances led to him committing the greatest act of domestic terrorism that the United States had ever seen.

It’s a valid question, in some ways, to ask whether or not all of this was effective. Not whether or not it was just, but whether or not the bombing did what McVeigh wanted it to do besides kill people at their desks.

Consider the case of the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the man who kicked off the dominoes that led to World War I. He wanted an independent Serbia. Did he get it? In a sense, he did. After millions had died, after Yugoslavia arose, after communism - Serbia is, indeed, independent. But we have to ask: was that merely a massive perturbation in an already unstable situation that would have resolved itself in a similar way anyway? Was it worth it for millions to die, for authoritarian communism to rise and fall, for him to get what he wanted?

Similarly here: did Timothy McVeigh get what he wanted out of this?

In a perverse sense, he did. He did dramatically reduce the number of confrontations between the federal government and arch-libertarian militant groups, but this didn’t happen because he was effective in the way he actually wanted to be. This happened because militant groups lost a lot of steam as a direct result of his actions. If he had merely assassinated individuals or blown up an empty building, then he might have been a sympathetic figure. But he massacred a bunch of innocents, and people just did not want to be associated with anything that had to do with him. The federal government did review its policies over things that happened at Waco and other places like Ruby Ridge. But that was already something that was happening anyway. And so whenever confrontations did occur, they were bloodless, almost eventless. They were also much less frequent because, as I said, people just weren’t as excited about doing those things anymore.

Of course, now McVeigh is gone, and we live in a different world. But nevertheless, it is interesting to me how his actions were, in many ways, ruinous to the very things he claimed to hold dear.

Looking at this man was… not easy. I did this because I visited the Oklahoma City bombing memorial and was profoundly moved by all of the stories that were there. To date myself, April 19th 1995 was a day that I spent in elementary school. The museum at the memorial took you back to that day, and as I walked through the exhibits I found myself in rooms that looked the way things looked when I was a child. And then those childhood rooms were destroyed, and I felt my own childhood re-evoked and destroyed with them. Connecting with the event, and with the man behind it, has been my own way of processing that experience.

I do not want to claim that McVeigh’s story is the most important or vivid or interesting one. There are many, many, many others - stories of resilience, of loss, of survivorship, and indeed, of grace. Looking at any of them requires looking at all of them. It also requires looking at ourselves.

It requires looking at Timothy McVeigh not as a monster, but as a human, because that’s what he was. He was not cut from a particularly different cloth. His pain is understandable. His trajectory was preventable. It is something that could, in a sense, happen to any of us. His extraordinary cruelty was born in a pain that was terribly, terribly ordinary.

Whenever we look at these things, the important thing is to look at what we don’t want to see, including those parts of ourselves that can be understood through this person. It is important to look at the hurt, the insecurity, the loneliness, the high energy with nowhere to go, the wounded ego, the fallen pride.

All of it is us.

I am him and he is me. I am the lit fuse two minutes away from the target. I am the truck cabin filling with fuse smoke. I am the stinging eyes and racing heart stuck at the longest stoplight ever. I am the relief when the light turns green. I am the click of the key in the lock as I shut the truck door for the last time. I am the slow and controlled walk away from a bomb just about to blow up. I am the mission. I am the willingness to shoot the bomb and die if I have to. I am the earplugs nobody else on the street is wearing. I am blocks away when the ground shifts away beneath me. I am the buildings rocking like blades of grass in the wind. I am the glass shattering into so many points of light. For a moment, for no longer than a heartbeat, with my feet off the ground I finally, finally feel lighter than air.

And then… nothing. The explosion severs whatever thread connected us. I can find him understandable right up until he brought that kind of death into the world. Whatever came after I can only observe from the outside.

May it remain that way forever.

Here are some loose, numbered thoughts on Christianity.

1. Early Christians were persecuted for being treacherous incest cannibals.
   Civic religion was foundational to the Roman imperial world, so denying that religion was seen as tearing at the fabric of society. On top of that, early Christians called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and also kissed each other, plus they held secret meetings where they ate some guy’s broken body every week.

2. The transformation of Christianity from a religion by and for penniless outlaws to a religion of Kings and Colonizers and Billionaires is a fascinating one.

3. The Anglo-American tradition of limited government can be seen as one big conflict with the Catholic Church. The Magna Carta was signed after King John fought the Catholic Church and lost, leading the church to align with nobles to limit his power. The English Bill of Rights, which the American Founders leveraged quite a bit, was signed after Parliament literally invited a Dutch nobleman to invade and depose a Catholic king. Many other examples obtain.

4. The Spanish Inquisition was a program of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Spanish crown after they re-conquered the Iberian peninsula. 2/3 of what is now Spain/Portugal was Muslim territory for hundreds of years until 1492. After they finished the Reconquista the Spanish crown kept the violence up by rooting out internal enemies, Muslims and Jews who had (they claimed) falsely converted to Catholicism.

5. It is a great coincidence of history that the completion of the Reconquista coincided with the “discovery” of the new world. The Spanish took this self-confident, conflict-oriented flavor of Christianity with them as they marched across America.

6. It’s interesting to me how Christianity evolved at the core vs at the periphery. Spain and Russia were forged on the frontier, in constant conflict with non-Christian powers like the Moors and the Turks and the Mongols. France, sitting in the comfy geopolitical core, didn’t need a crusader mentality to survive. French Catholicism turned inward, developing a delicious decadence with respect to art, sex, and philosophy.”

7. Part of the reason “raised Catholic” became synonymous with guilt and harshness is because, outside of the European core, Catholicism became synonymous with perpetrating or resisting colonial oppression. Even in the US, Catholics were seen as foreign usurpers until well after the Civil War.

8. The protestant Reformation is where what we call “modernity” was truly born, at least philosophically. The reformation rejected the authority of the hierarchical church, insisting that every believer had an immediate relationship with God and the holy word. This moved all kinds of philosophical activity out of the church and into the minds of individual believers, creating space for early rationalism and empiricism. The wars of religion that erupted in Europe left people having to respect and justify themselves to people with different religious confessions, leading to liberalism and pluralism and nationalism.

9. The discovery of the “new world” was a critical part of the shift into modernity, disclosing an entire continent of people who had lived and died for thousands of years without ever hearing of “Jesus Christ”. The Reformation was another shift, as was the (later) invention of the telescope and the rise of heliocentric worldviews. The story the Christian West told about itself for a thousand years was humbled, piece by piece. With AI, we may be living through another such humbling today.

10. Christianity, as I understand it, shares a profound message of humility, solidarity, and unconditional love, bound together by a foundation of finitude. Put simply, you are not God, and neither am I. Neither you nor I are infinite in our capacity for knowledge, justice, or power. This is what “original sin” means, to me - the fundamental condition of being a finite being.

11. I don’t find “everyone is a sinner” to be a depressing message. I think it’s worse to say “you are scared and sad and tired all the time because you are too weak or too lazy to be perfect”.

12. “Unconditional love” means “you literally couldn’t be unworthy of love if you tried”. In the Gospels, Jesus is depicted as forgiving the very people who are right in the middle of murdering him. This challenge - to love unconditionally - is what makes the Christian story a profound and compelling one. If this were an easy thing to do, or if Jesus had said “uhh, boundaries??” then we wouldn’t be talking about it.

13. “Unconditional love” is something that, practically speaking, only God can give. I can recognize and accept that I am loved in spite of my finitude, while also acknowledging that my actions can make it impossible for people to give me the love that I need and that I’ll always have at least some work to do.

14. I spoke with a Christian playwright who complained that it’s hard to write religious plays because there’s no room for any drama or conflict. If God’s love is infinite then we all already have everything we deeply need and we’re fighting over scraps of nothing.

15. At some point in history Christians tossed the cross aside and picked up the sword and the state. Despite that trajectory its core image won’t let me go - the image of a man who endured the absolute worst that humanity has to offer, from intimate betrayal to institutional corruption, and actively forgave the very people who were torturing him. He forgave them in real time, not from a safe distance, not from a space of quiet reflection. He forgave them in the depths of his agony. Whether or not he later rose from the dead and what his followers did afterwards is much less interesting to me. I see Christianity as a story about what love could mean, and what it could cost to actually mean it.

16. The challenge, then as now, is to stop trying to be God and to accept the relief of being human.

1. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy warns that Europe faces “civilizational erasure” within a generation. The culprits, as they see it, are: immigration, declining birthrates, censorship, and the EU.

2. I want to take the phrase “civilizational self-confidence” seriously - it’s doing a lot of work in this document, and I’m not sure its authors have thought through what it actually means. I think about this stuff too and my conclusions are very different from theirs.

3. One way of looking at the “Western Tradition” is as two thousand plus years of working out the philosophical problem of extending moral concern beyond blood and tribe.

4. The Greeks taught that all human beings share in the logos. Christianity universalized this further: there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. The Enlightenment secularized these commitments without abandoning them.

5. America’s founding document makes the most sweeping claim of all: that all men are created equal. This “equal” is a category that the founders understood imperfectly but stated universally, leaving future generations the task of living up to words that exceeded the practice of their authors.

6. This is what Western civilization, at its best, has been confident about, that which I am proud to inherit: the hard-won insight that moral worth does not depend on blood or soil.

7. So, when I hear “civilizational self-confidence” invoked to justify closing borders and defining nations by ethnicity, I have to wonder: what civilization are we talking about here?

8. The American Constitution does not mention Christianity, Anglo-Saxon heritage, or European descent. It establishes no state religion, nor does it require some ethnic qualification for citizenship. This was not an oversight. The founders were creating a nation defined by assent to principles rather than by blood.

9. Tocqueville, the French observer America in 1835, understood this. What made America exceptional then and now was its civic rather than ethnic nationalism - its capacity to absorb newcomers into a shared political project.

10. This absorptive capacity was not a weakness. It meant America could draw talent from anywhere while European nations bled themselves white in wars over which ethnic group would dominate which piece of territory.

11. Try a thought experiment. Imagine two civilizations: the first says “Our institutions are strong. Our culture is compelling. We welcome newcomers because we are confident they will want to join us.” The second says: “We are fragile. Exposure to outsiders will dilute us. We must wall ourselves off.” Which of these is exhibiting self-confidence?

12. Rome, at its height, was extraordinarily porous. Emperors came from Spain, North Africa, the Balkans, and more. The empire absorbed peoples and gods from across the known world. Rome declined (among other reasons) when it became rigid and defensive, when it could no longer integrate the peoples pressing at its borders.

13. A document that cannot articulate what the West stands for, only what it stands against, is not confident. It is the brittleness of an identity that has forgotten its own content.

14. On birthrates: the challenge is real, but the diagnosis is lazy. Low fertility shows up across societies with very different norms. The common denominators are boring and fixable: housing costs, childcare scarcity, and economic uncertainty. You can be pro-choice and pro-child.

15. On immigration: the liberal argument isn’t “borders don’t matter.” It’s that a confident nation can convert outsiders into insiders if it maintains control of entry and takes assimilation seriously. Capacity matters and creates backlash if exceeded, but openness remains the best norm.

16. Where I at-least-partially agree with the administration is in its critiques of speech control and hyperregulation in general - not because I think that Nazis and environmental destruction are good, but because a crude cure can create problems beyond the disease. To take a salient example, the knee-jerk rejection of nuclear power is one reason that Europe finds itself incapable of energy independence with respect to Russia.

17. Here is the most outrageous part of this whole thing for me: the European order that the National Security Strategy frames as civilizational weakness was an American project.

18. After 1945, American statesmen designed institutions - NATO, the Marshall Plan, the EU’s precursors - precisely to enmesh European nations in cooperation that would make war unthinkable. Marshall, Acheson, and Eisenhower were not soft men. They understood that American security depended on a stable, integrated Europe.

19. A man with the surname “Eisenhauer” led the American fight against the ethno-nationalist Nazis. If that isn’t a proof of civic-nationalist immigration success then I don’t know what is.

20. To now celebrate nationalist parties seeking to tear down these institutions is to repudiate one of America’s greatest strategic and civilizational achievements. It is to forget why the postwar order was built in the first place.

21. It’s rich to have an entity called “the United States” being pro-disintegration.

22. If we want Europe to “remain European,” we might start by asking what Europe, at its best, has stood for. The left and right both see Western civilization as co-extensive with “White Christian Patriarchy” - the left think this is bad and the right thinks this is good. I disagree with both: the West, at its best, has stood for a liberal ideal, one that belongs to anyone willing to think it.

At some time in my past I began to experience humiliating error as the baseline state of my life.

My youthful experience was the exact opposite of this state. To me, back then, my assertions surpassed the wisdom and insight of everyone else alive and everyone else who ever existed. Human history was one big blur of worthless ignorance. The only good things in the past were those that directly led to my particular existence and my particular beliefs. All good things in the future would owe their goodness to me, seeing my genius as the only inflection point worthy of study. History began and ended with the time that I called mine.

To put it mildly, I’m grateful to have survived this era of my life. Such a desperately brittle self-image set me up for profoundly painful shocks as my “I have to be god or I’m worthless” standards came into contact with reality. I did not handle these shocks well. I did not take them as learning experiences. Instead of reflecting on my sorry state I saw these shocks as failures of the world, failures of others to recognize my necessity and my destiny. And I drank to deal with how all of this felt.

At some point these shocks built to a point of critical accumulation, and I collapsed. The compass spun around to point in the opposite direction. I saw, all at once, that my attachment to an error-free self-image had actually permitted a great deal of error to accumulate. What I had thought to be power was merely denial. I found myself with no idea how to live, or even how to learn how to live. My own powers had failed me, doubly - not only did I fail to learn, I failed to even recognize that I needed to learn in the first place.

The Gift of Humility, the Trap of Humiliation

So, I began life anew with a very different self-image. I made a commitment to stop drinking, and to reorient myself towards a sober life. Instead of approaching the human experience with the attitude that I already knew everything and that everyone who differed from me was stupid and corrupt, I approached life with the understanding that I knew nothing and that I had to humbly ask for help from those with a better grasp on being human than me.

This humility, in another irony, brought me the success that my arrogance never did. I acquired useful skills, approaching shared work with a curiosity regarding the needs of others. I began to honor my commitments, rather than surrendering to every passing impulse.

I can measure this transformation in concrete terms. I have gone from someone who couldn’t be trusted to check the mail without getting loaded to someone who can be trusted to spend the rest of their life keeping every promise they make to someone. The shift from chaotic unreliability to profound trustworthiness happened through the accumulation of humble actions, day after day, for almost ten years now.

What complicates this is a certain stuckness, a new sort of stuckness than the one I knew before. I am grateful for being able to acquire such virtues as humility, curiosity, self-discipline, etc., and I am grateful for the patient support of everyone who helped me develop them. Where I have gotten stuck has been the fact that, for me, humiliation had to be the foundation for these virtues, the access that I have to all of the above. It has been difficult for me, now, to develop a relationship with myself that does not begin from that humiliated place.

The Prison of Self-Suppression

I am an individual human with individual needs, particular preferences, a self to express. The shock of humiliation led me to become someone who can regard my own needs and preferences and individuated self as sources of chaos and isolation.

This humiliated attitude has not made those needs and preferences and self go away, obviously. Nor has it abolished the pain and torment that led to that humiliation in the first place. Where before I existed in an oblivious state of self-worship, generating chaos and pain in the lives of those I interacted with, the new pull is to exist in a miserable state of self-suppression. The pain of self-discipline is more morally bearable than the pain of chaos, and more predictable. I know what one more miserable day of self-suppression looks like, and I know that I can survive.

There’s truth in this attraction, but it’s incomplete. The very humiliation that led me to appreciate the virtues of curiosity, integrity, resilience, and self-discipline also led me to have a half-committed relationship with them. Founding virtue on humiliation may have brought me good things, but it also made it such that every good thing also reminds me of myself at my worst.

The Parts That Need Witnessing

This certainly isn’t the vision of recovery that anybody offered to me. Recovery offers a profoundly simple principle: Those parts of me that I most want to hide are the parts of me that people most want to see. I learned that I need love the most where I feel like I deserve it the least.

There are still parts of me that are impulsive, parts of me that are self-centered, parts of me that are cruel. With a good chunk of recovery time, I’m not “cured” of these impulses. What has changed is not their existence but what I do with them, and crucially, who gets to see them.

Out in the world, I am profoundly concerned with being a good citizen. If I feel angry, frustrated, impulsive, whatever - I keep a lid on it and do what I need to do to keep the world moving and make it a better place. This isn’t self-suppression in the miserable sense anymore. It’s context-appropriate discipline, discipline that serves love rather than fear.

But I’ve also found spaces - intimate spaces, witnessed spaces - where those parts don’t need to be suppressed at all. Where not only is it okay for me to acknowledge those parts, but where someone finds them beautiful, worthy of love no matter what, all because they love me and even those “difficult” parts are mine.

The Foundation Renewed

Miserable self-suppression is not what life calls for, and I think I knew that even from the moment I first felt it. But still - that shock, that categorical leap of realizing that not only was I capable of error but that my presumption of perfection had left me soaked in error, has never quite left me.

My understandable impulse afterwards was to devote myself to preventing any kind of shock like that from happening again. This then leads to the question - does that new state leave me vulnerable to a comparable, inverted shock? Will I realize that my attitude towards myself has deprived me of the very thing I have sought to create with that attitude?

The answer, as I see it, is that the foundation needs to shift. What matters is the good things - curiosity, humility, discipline, trust. Even if humiliation led me to value those good things, humiliation isn’t a necessary foundation for that appreciation.

The real foundation is trust, given and received. It’s love, especially where I feel I deserve it least. It’s the profound experience of being seen exactly as I am - arrogant past and disciplined present and cruel impulses and generous actions - and being accepted, being wanted, being trusted with another person’s future.

I couldn’t have found this alone. I am who I am because of who I belong to, because of who belongs to me. The integration I was seeking wasn’t waiting inside myself to be discovered through pure introspection. It was forged in relationship, in community, in the risky act of letting other people see me fully.

Rather than wait for some new shock to shake me out of my miserably-complacent stability, I want to take some ownership of this counter-humiliation and see what happens. Yes I can err, yes I have a lot to learn from the wisdom of others, yes I can never claim categorical superiority over anyone.

And yes, I get to be proud of the self that I am, the self that sought to improve itself when it finally saw that it could be better. I get to be proud precisely because that pride doesn’t stand alone anymore, brittle and defensive like my arrogance once was. It’s held in relationship, witnessed, trusted. It’s a pride that can acknowledge the parts of me I’m not proud of, because even those parts have a place now, a context, a witness who loves them.

The journey from humiliation to integration isn’t a solo trek. It’s a path walked with others, stumbling and steady by turns, learning that being seen is more powerful than being perfect ever could be.

We’ve thrown away a word for something that we desperately need to name.

This throwing away is understandable, in a way - for many of us, especially those who’ve stepped away from traditional religion, the word has become unusable. The word has been completely contaminated by its associations with judgment, shame, and cosmic scorekeeping.

That word is “sin.”

The problem, as I see it, is that we still need that word. We need some sort of language for the gap between our intentions and our actions, for the harm we cause despite our best efforts, for the bone-deep feeling that we are not enough and never ever can be. We need a way to name our inevitable insufficiency without drowning in self-loathing or, worse, pretending that we’ve transcended it entirely.

With that in mind, here’s what I want to offer: “sin,” without having anything to say about God, names something fundamental about the human condition - our radical finitude. Finitude, properly understood, is not a curse to escape but a truth to accept. Finitude is a truth that opens onto compassion, humility, and a deeper kind of responsibility.

What Finitude Means

Put another way: it doesn’t matter what you believe about God, what matters is that you are not it. To be human is to be non-infinite. We are limited in our knowledge, our virtue, and our power.

You see this playing out everywhere once you start looking. You see finitude in the parent who loses it with their kid after a difficult day, snapping in a moment of exhaustion in spite of their deepest devotion. You see finitude in the activist whose righteous certainty curdles into cruelty toward anyone who disagrees. You see finitude in the public policy designed with good intentions that destroys what it meant to save. You see finitude in the friend you hurt without realizing it until much later, if ever.

We all make decisions with imperfect information. We make decisions with incomplete data, inherited biases, emotional states we’re barely aware of. Indeed, we have to make decisions in general: we must say yes to some things and no to others, because our attention and time can’t be spent in two places at once. Even when we feel like we are choosing correctly we may be catastrophically wrong. Human history is littered with people who committed atrocities while fully convinced they were doing the right thing.

This is what finitude produces: inevitable failure. Not just the possibility of failure, but its certainty. No matter how wise you become, how disciplined, how morally serious, you will harm people. You will misunderstand. You will be wrong when you’re certain tha you’re right.

“Sin” Reconsidered

Traditional theology sees sin as “missing the mark” (the Greek hamartia) or as active rebellion against God. As I see it, the metaphor still stands. What is rebellion against an infinite being if not the refusal to accept our own finitude? What is missing the mark if not the inevitable result of shooting arrows with imperfect aim, imperfect vision, in imperfect wind?

Kierkegaard, the Christian Existentialist, wrote that “sin is despair”. Despair, for him, meant refusing to accept what we are. Despair is where we judge our finite life by infinite standards, where we expect our individual selves to be completely self-sufficient and to get life absolutely right on the very first try.

So here’s the reframing: Sin is finitude, and we are all equally sinners. This is not because we’re all equally harmful! This is not to say that everyone is equally evil nor that we’re all helpless and off the hook. What does assert is that no one stands outside the human condition. There is no amount of excellence that can put you in a different moral category than other human beings. You can and should seek as much wisdom and strength as you can, while remembering that no amount of wisdom and strength will deliver you from the possibility of failure.

Again, this is not to say that there is no difference between the person who tries to do good and the person who actively does harm. We must judge actions, we must hold people accountable, we must build systems that make cruelty very difficult to do.

Judgment itself must be tempered with humility. Pretending that we are literally God sets us up for self-hatred when we inevitably fall short. Pretending that we are literally God sets us up for dehumanizing cruelty when we treat others as if only we have the power to judge them too.

Grace in the Face of Finitude

This might sound like a vision of pessimism or irresponsibility. I think the exact opposite is true.

What this vision calls for is a deeper kind of responsibility - the responsibility for acceptance and grace.

“Grace” here is the choice to love in spite of reasons not to. Living in finitude means there will always, always be good reasons to declare someone unworthy of love, including ourselves. Every one of us is a walking contradiction: we are all hypocrites, we are all failures, we are all people who know better and do worse anyway. “Grace” is the choice to look at those very good reasons and then set them aside, choosing to love anyway.

Critically this isn’t a blank check. Grace doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries or accepting abuse. It doesn’t mean pretending harm didn’t happen or that consequences don’t matter. What does mean is seeing everyone - even those who oppose you, those who seem undeserving, those who squander their opportunities - as fellow sufferers in the same painful human story.

It means choosing to stop treating your failures as proof that you’re uniquely broken, because failure is the universal human condition.

What Has the Last Word

Finitude is the site of compassion and courage.

We are called to compassion because finitude forces us to see others as we see ourselves. You, me, and the worst person you know are all struggling, incomplete, and doing our best with inadequate tools. We are called to courage because facing our limits directly, without denial or despair, requires a particular kind of bravery. It’s easier to pretend we’re infinite (and torture ourselves when the illusion cracks) or to pretend finitude doesn’t matter (and try and fail to float above our responsibilities).

The challenge is not to somehow transcend our finitude and lead a life free of “sin.” I see that as the old trap, the game that nobody can win. The challenge is to face our condition directly, to confront the inevitability of failure and still declare that failure will not have the last word.

What has the last word, then? Not perfection, not transcendence, but resilience.

What has the last word is the choice to show up again after you’ve failed. What has the last word is the choice to love again after you’ve been horribly disappointed, even after you’ve horribly disappointed yourself. What has the last word is the choice to try again after you’ve been wrong. It’s Camus’s Sisyphus, who pushes the boulder up the mountain knowing it will roll back down, and does it anyway—and in that choice, in that acceptance, finds something like freedom.

Finitude means we will fail, no matter what. Grace means that we can fail and still be worthy of love, no matter what. Courage means we can know that we will always have good reasons to give up, to withdraw our love from ourselves and from others, but that we will choose to keep going anyway.

For a long time I narrated my life as if I was a helpless victim who needed alcohol like a vitamin. That story told me that I could lie and cheat and steal and do whatever I wanted to feel better immediately, since I was in so much pain and every emergency measure was authorized.

Dropping that story was terrifying - doing so meant abandoning the only scraps of control and relief that I understood. Dropping that story was painful. Until I dropped it, I saw everyone who asked me to see myself differently as people who wanted to hurt me. My pain was my moral authority, and contradicting my righteous self-centeredness meant that I saw you as cruel.

I’m grateful that that story is no longer with me, at least not in the way that it was. What remains is an ever-urgent question: what does real help look like? Does real help look like validating someone and supporting them no matter what? Does it look like telling the truth as it is and damn your feelings if you don’t like it?

Did it count as ‘cruelty’ to contradict my old story of self-victimhood? Or was that contradiction the most honest form of compassion?

This has been a big tension for me that I’ve wrestled with ever since. On one hand, I prize empathy and the expansion of who counts as “we”. I want to create a future where we have fewer and fewer ways to humiliate one another. On the other hand, I also suspect that “pity”, offered carelessly, can keep people stuck in their suffering.

The best synthesis I can offer is this: the most humane compassion is compassion for becoming, not compassion for stasis. Compassion refuses humiliation and abandonment and also refuses collusion with diminishing stories.

Let me call in some philosophers to help explain what I mean.

Compassion and Suspicion, Re-Described

I’m a big fan of Richard Rorty, the American philosopher known for his pragmatic approach to truth as “what works in practice”. Rorty’s humanism asks us to widen solidarity - that felt sense of “who counts as ‘us’” - so that cruelty becomes harder and kindness becomes easier.

Crucially, solidarity is not sentimentality. Solidarity is re-description. According to Rorty, the universe has no preferred set of words to describe itself, meaning we are always free to change how we describe ourselves. Re-description is where we choose the words and practices that reduce humiliation and increase the freedom we have to live together in peace.

My old script was “I am helpless, only drinking and acting out can save me from my despair”. Re-describing that script as something untrue and self-diminishing was not cruelty, even though there was pain involved for me. It was painful to suddenly see myself as responsible, painful to see that I was never actually forced to act the way that I had, painful to see that I had destroyed myself for nothing.

If cruelty is what shrinks a person’s world and makes self-respect harder, then enabling me would have been the crueler thing to do. Real compassion can sound like contradiction when the story we protect is the thing doing the harm.

This, for me, is where Nietzsche comes in. Nietzsche is famous for such bomb-throwing aphorisms as “what does not kill me makes me stronger” and “God is dead”. He saw the world as having lost its traditional certainties and wanted to challenge his readers to deal with this crisis. As such, Nietzsche is allergic to the kind of pity that freezes a person in their wounds.

For me, Nietzsche is the friend who calls you upward - the friend who sees your power before you do and refuses to pretend that you are nothing but your pain. It isn’t chest-thumping toughness for its own sake, it’s a wager on your capacity to become someone who is ten times more happy and ten times more free.

It might sound strange for me to be allied with two thinkers who use the word ‘cruelty’ in very different ways. For Rorty, being cruel is the worst thing you can be. For Nietzsche, being cruel is the best thing you can be, when “being cruel” means “being boldly willing to cause the pain of smashing one’s own idols”. Rorty gives me the target, “reduce humiliation”, and Nietzsche gives me a crucial method, “do not collude in smallness”.

Put together this way, they form a posture I think of as the “warm demander”.

The Warm Demander

The warm demander is a synthesis of high warmth and high demand.

To see what this looks like, consider the other combinations of warmth and demand.

• Indifference: low warmth, low demand. Abandonment. “Go ahead and suffer, I don’t care”.

• Harshness: low warmth, high demand. Humiliation disguised as truth-telling. “If you don’t have your life figured out by tomorrow then you’re just a parasite.”.

• Collusive pity: high warmth, low demand. Shallow, diminishing kindness. “Your debit card got declined at the liquor store again? You poor baby, of course I’ll lend you fifty bucks.”

A “warm demander” pairs high warmth with high demand. It sounds like “I care about you too much to help you hold on to a story that shrinks you”. That posture is the one that saved me, and is the one that I try to offer now.

What makes the warm demander stance work is leading with empathy. The pain is real, even if the story about the pain is up for debate.

This is what made 12-step groups like AA such a literal lifesaver for me - AA offered me a new story to tell about my life and my pain, but before it did that it let me sit in a room full of people who understood exactly how I felt.

This stance works for all kinds of human situations, addiction-related or otherwise. Here’s a rule of thumb:

• If it shrinks a person’s world and makes self‑respect harder, it’s cruelty — even if it sounds kind.

• If it widens their world and makes dignity more likely, it’s compassion — even if it stings.

The kindest thing anyone ever did for me was affirm my pain while contradicting my story about it. Today, when I love people in pain, I try to offer the same: compassion without collusion, a refusal to humiliate, a refusal to abandon, and a refusal to lie about what will truly set us free.

It’s party time for everyone, except for you. Your brother is home, safe and sound and accounted for after spitting in your father’s face and running away. He rejected everything your family stands for in the strongest possible terms and for years, ruining his life completely. Once he had nowhere else to go he came crawling back, and what does your father do? He throws him a party.

Where, then, is your party? You, who followed the rules perfectly. You, who honored your father as your brother ran away. You, who alone stand fit to be his heir. Why did you even bother? Why follow the rules at all? Why him, and not you?

In Luke 15:25‑32, Jesus tells the parable of the prodigal son and zooms in after the father welcomes him home. Returning from another dutiful day in the fields, the elder son “heard music and dancing.” A servant explains the celebration. Instantly the elder son’s body language shifts: he refuses to enter the party, turning the public party into a private protest. When the father comes out, the son vents and presents his accounting: “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.”

His complaint isn’t about justice in the abstract, it’s about the wound of comparison. Obedience has instantly transformed into envy, cloaked in the language of moral accounting.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche labels this emotion ressentiment: a re‑feeling of injury that cannot discharge itself in action, so it retaliates by re‑valuing the world. Unable to strike the strong, the resentful soul rebrands its weakness as virtue. The resentful soul calls self-renunciation “good,” calling joyful self-expression “evil.” The psychic payoff leaves one clinging to one’s pain as the proof and the price of one’s righteousness. “I may be suffering, but at least I’m better than you”.  Ressentiment is thus reactive, comparative, and subterranean. Ressentiment needs a rival the way a leech needs skin to suck on.

When the elder brother complains that “you never gave me a young goat”, Nietzsche sees the elder brother leading a moral life that is one long tally of owed gratification. When the elder brother says “I never disobeyed”, Nietzsche hears an act of self-canonization through self-negation. When the elder brother stands at the threshold of the party and refuses to enter, Nietzsche sees self-negation exposed as an act of revenge.

Twelve‑Step wisdom warns us that “resentment is the number‑one offender.” Like the elder son, many in recovery (including me!) launch their sober careers as joyless self-negators, convinced the spotlight should be on the precious specialness of their quiet heroism. It takes a lot of deliberate, public work to let go of that. The Step 4 moral inventory directly asks us to list resentments, then probe the fear and self‑seeking beneath each and every one. Often we discover an elder‑brother script running the show: If I’m good then life will pay out. When someone else receives mercy or joy that seems to us to be unearned, our hidden transaction with the universe is exposed. 

As I see it, the solution isn’t to shame the feeling - it’s to name it, own it, and to re‑enter the party called “life on life’s terms.”

—

To see if you’re running an elder-brother script, ask yourself: whose good news felt like bad news to me?

Think of a single act of grace you can extend - a congratulation, an invitation, an apology, or a gift - then step across the threshold and join the celebration.

Getting sober, for me, required two leaps of faith.

The second leap was the choice of an unknown, baffling, possibly-terrifying future without alcohol. The first leap, deeper than the second, was a primordial decision that it was good to be living at all.

My life as an active alcoholic was painful and chaotic and isolated in a way that only people who have lived through it can understand. I avoided anyone and everyone and spent my days scraping just enough money together to drink. It would have felt very reasonable to look at how I had ended up and then decide that this life just wasn’t worth living, that I was too far gone, that there was nothing beyond this suffering to look forward to. But on August 13, 2016 I chose to live and get sober anyway, saying Yes to life in spite of any moral or experiential calculus that might have justified some feeling that life was in itself bad.

I’ve since found this “saying Yes to everything” feeling in Nietzsche. This surprised me. When readers meet Nietzsche they usually meet Nietzsche the bomb‑thrower, the man who calls Christianity a “slave morality” and proclaims God dead and seeks to demolish all illusions of conventional morality. Yet in The Antichrist §§27‑32 he pauses the demolition of Christianity long enough to present a startling cameo: Jesus Christ as supreme Yes‑sayer.

“The Gospel”, Nietzsche writes, “died on the cross”. The living Jesus practiced a profound and unconditional embrace of life. Jesus affirmed absolutely everything as forgiven and loved - everything from prostitution to tax collection to intimate betrayal to institutional injustice. Crucially for Nietzsche, this Yes is pre-moral - it does not argue or threaten, it simply radiates. Judgement and punishment are foreign currencies to this wandering Nazarene who pays for nothing because he owes nothing. The confrontation of Jesus, such as it is, is simply “what part of God’s Love Is Infinite do you not understand?”

What survived Christ’s life is the religion that Nietzsche attacks, a religion of debt and death and doctrine and dogma. Nietzsche’s charge is not just that Christianity failed to live up to its founder - it is that the Apostle Paul and centuries of church bureaucracy replaced a contagious Yes with a calculus of guilt. Through Paul and the Church, the message of “you couldn’t become unworthy of Love if you tried” was replaced by “follow the rules, wretched sinners! Obey our authority, or burn in hell for eternity!” The result of this transformation is what Nietzsche later calls a “metaphysics of the hangman” - a worldview built around weighing souls, instead of setting them free to dance.

For us in recovery, the portrait of Jesus that Nietzsche paints is electrifying. It offers a spiritual archetype that is neither the resentful score-keeper nor the distant judge but the walking permission slip to exist, to change, to desire and to play.

Step 2 of AA (“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”) is often read as intellectual, cognitive assent: I can understand that there might be help for me. What I get from Nietzsche is what I saw in my very decision to get sober - that this commitment must live not just in my head, but in my heart. Belief, if it remains abstract, can become a bargain. “I believe that life is worth living because x, y, and z, and if I lose any of those things then I’ll resentfully retract my affirmation”. Or, worse: “I have been good and followed the rules for ten whole days, where the hell is my reward?”

Yes‑saying is riskier than any conditional, intellectual consideration. It commits in advance, and without reservation.

I like summing it up with this reframing of Step 2: “Came to practice unconditional affirmation that life, exactly-as‑is, is worth living - and found in doing so that such an affirmation became the foundation of my sanity”.

That affirmation is how, at least for today, I keep YES from turning into IOU.

Imagine Maria. Let’s say that Maria is five years sober, gainfully employed, happily thriving in a fulfilling intimate relationship. She gets an invitation in the mail: her younger brother is getting married on the coast of Maine, Labor Day weekend. She will be there, but so will a tremendous challenge - not the open bar, but the guest list.

Every relative who watched her drunkenly implode over and over again will be at her brother’s wedding. Some of them were people she took advantage of. She’s made amends, sent apology letters, returned stolen money with interest, but this is the first time that all of them will be in the same room together.

She lets everyone in her recovery group know what is happening and commits to more or less live-texting the entire encounter. She digs up her old notebook from when she first got sober and, on the flight to the wedding, rereads her Step 4 inventory. Crashing a cousin’s bike and blaming the damage on a deer attack. Two Thanksgiving blackouts in a row before she stopped being invited over to Aunt Lynn’s.

She lands determined to do three things: own the past, apologize where it still hurts, and re‑write her place at the family table.

But then rehearsal dinner happens. Aunt Lynn, already flushed with wine, greets her with a whooping cackle and a “Oh wow! Look who decided to show up sober!” A ripple of awkward chuckles passes around the table.

Maria had spent the plane ride practicing how she was going to re-explain every painful detail of her past, but in this moment she chooses a different response entirely. She playfully looks over her shoulder as if looking for someone else, then gestures towards herself: “Me? Here, sober? I almost can’t believe it either!”

AA’s big slogan, “one day at a time”, called her to drop the weight of her past and seize the lightness of the present. Her grand plan to re-litigate the past suddenly felt heavy and pointless. She can always explain herself later.

She gets plenty of opportunities. Later, during toasts, a now-drunk Aunt Lynn launches into a dramatic rendition of the time that Maria stole pearls right off of Grandma’s neck. “Watch out when that one goes in for a hug! She’ll unclasp anything she can get her little fingers on!”. Aunt Lynn laughs, too loud, avoiding Maria’s eyes. Heads swivel. Murmurs swell, then fall silent beneath Aunt Lynn’s pressured, painful, angry laughter.

For a heartbeat, Maria felt the old shame rise. Then she remembered her sponsor’s words: ‘Your truth is not your trauma.’ She gets to tell a new story now.

Maria speaks: “Aunt Lynn is right. I used to be really desperate, more desperate than I even admitted to myself. I’m really grateful for everyone who helped me survive. I’m grateful for all of you.” Maria is looking right at Aunt Lynn. “I’m really grateful that I got to give those pearls back, and that I got to give Grandma one more real hug before she died. She showed me how it feels to be forgiven and loved no matter what. It’s because of that kind of love that I’m alive. I’m grateful that I get to be here.” Maria raises her glass of sparkling water with lime. “To Grandma!” The room exhales with relief, joining her in her toast. Even Aunt Lynn.

Before bed, Maria checks in with her sponsor about her encounter. Her sponsor was thrilled. “You owned your past when it mattered and let go of it when it didn’t. Everything you brought to the table was in service of the present moment and connecting with your family. The present and the future looks completely different than your past, and I couldn’t be more proud of you.”

Her brother was proud of her too.

Philosophy Box:

• Aufhebung (from Hegel): cancel–preserve–elevate a painful past through shared recognition.

• Active forgetting (from Nietzsche): a conscious release that secures today’s vitality.

• AA’s wisdom: inventory and confession give the past an opportunity to speak and give us an opportunity to tell a new story. “One day at a time” decides how loud our story speaks tomorrow.

Post‑mortem items for you

1. Spot the pivot. Where did Maria switch from Nietzschean forgetting to Hegelian integration, and why did it help?

2. Risk audit. What risks arise if you lean only Hegelian (endless apologies) or only Nietzschean (surface‑level charm) in tense situations?

3. Next 24 hours. Think of a concrete action for each pole: e.g. “Text my sister an apology” (integration) + “Schedule 30 minutes of guitar practice to stay present” (forgetting).
   
   

One of AA’s more famous taglines is “One day at a time”, which counsels the recovering alcoholic to focus their energies on the present moment and only worry themselves with doing the next right thing. People generally come in to AA soaked with regrets about the past and anxieties about the future, for very understandable reasons, but AA challenges its members to acknowledge those reasons and live in the present anyway.

This practical wisdom from the recovery world finds a surprising and powerful philosophical ally in a thinker not usually associated with serenity: Friedrich Nietzsche. In his work, he identifies a specific mental faculty crucial for a healthy life, that of active forgetting.

In On the Genealogy of Morals and Use and Abuse of History for Life, Nietzsche distinguishes two kinds of forgetting:

Passive forgetting, the dull erosion of time, which causes memories to fade and learning to fade with them.

Active forgetting, a conscious release, which frees up energy for fresh acts of creation.

Passive forgetting is the decay of unexamined experience, where life flies by without leaving much of a mark on you. Active forgetting, by contrast, is an art. It is the practice of loosening yesterday’s grip on us so that today can freely experiment and play. Nietzsche calls it “a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order” - without it the self is flooded by the past’s debris and becomes incapable of decisive action.

To be in recovery is to feel yesterday’s grip very tightly indeed. Newcomers may feel regrets about last night’s bender, anxieties about next week’s paycheck, and shame about a decade of wreckage, all of the above competing for attention at the same time. The injunction to stay sober today functions like Nietzsche’s doorkeeper: it shuts the clamoring archive outside the threshold, not by denying its existence but by denying it jurisdiction over today’s choices.

Notice what this is not: it is not self‑deception, repression, or the willful erasure of history. AA’s Step 4 inventory and Step 5 confession make ruthless, publicly-accountable moral memory a non‑negotiable. But once the inventory is written and shared they do not have to be re‑litigated each and every day.

Because active forgetting is willed rather than received, it is paradoxically a mode of memory. By fencing off yesterday’s chaos we can protect the lessons of that chaos. The inventories and conversations that AA makes happen permit us to transform our past pain into insights and empathetic connections, insights and connections that are most present when the pain of the past is released.

There’s a lot of darkness and storminess in Nietzsche’s writing, but all of the dramatic rhetoric about world‑historical conquest is bound up in a smaller-scale vision of personal creativity and self‑overcoming. I think that vision is tremendously resonant with AA’s promises of becoming ‘happy, joyous, and free’.

Takeaway: Active forgetting is not amnesia, it is custodial imagination. It curates what the past may say to the present, permitting only that which nourishes action to be carried forward. Yesterday illuminates, tomorrow inspires, but the next 24 hours are the only arena that matters.

Practice prompt: Write one sentence naming the single fear or regret most likely to hijack your day.

Beneath it, write down one small, concrete action you can take today to address it.

(e.g., "My fear is financial ruin." Action: "Spend 15 minutes outlining a budget," or "My regret is how I spoke to my friend." Action: "Draft a one-sentence text to apologize.")

Now, practice active forgetting. Fold up the paper and put it away. Your job is not to solve the entire problem or to erase the past, your only job is to perform that one small action today. Actively forget the overwhelming weight of the problem, and focus only on the lightness of the single task.

Grant the past and future no jurisdiction over this present moment. Just do the next right thing.

The most shameful moments of our past can become the foundation of a future strength - but only if we tell them to another person.

This is the transformative logic of AA’s Step 5. The recovering alcoholic has spent Step 4 cataloging everything they can think of that they resent and fear and every major relationship that has broken down along the way. Step 5 is where the recovering alcoholic lays all of this out for their sponsor, disclosing every little piece of their past that might be weighing them down. Disclosing their past to another human being is relieving and liberating - the events themselves remain unchanged, but the meaning we make of those events becomes completely different, changing from a story of shame to a story of belonging.

This is Aufhebung in action. Aufhebung is a term coined by the philosopher Hegel, and it is notoriously slippery to define. It generally gets translated into English as “sublation,” but that word is barely friendlier. The key to Aufhebung is that it braids three verbs into one motion: it means to cancel, to preserve, and to elevate, all three interwoven in one action.

It’s sort of like climbing up a ladder with a limited number of rungs. Imagine taking a rung out from way below you and inserting it above you - the useless rung behind you is gone, transformed into a useful rung ahead of you. The raw material of the rung is the same, but everything else about it is different.

Hegel thinks that human consciousness develops in the same way. An idea, a political order, or an individual stage of life reaches its limits and cracks under its own contradictions (becoming cancelled). Its best insights are not discarded but are conserved and renewed (being preserved). Finally, the whole unit is re‑mounted at a higher vantage where the previous tensions are visible, forgiven, and integrated (being elevated).

And then the new unity itself becomes the field of the next breakdown and transformation.

Crucially, this cancel‑preserve‑elevate process is not the work of a lonely, solitary hero. Hegel insists that recognition by another consciousness is what starts, drives, and finishes the job. Private insight can start the renovation, but shared acknowledgment is what locks the new rungs of the ladder in place.

This interplay of canceling, preserving, and elevating isn’t just theoretical -it’s exactly what happens in Step 5 of AA. First comes cancellation: we drag whatever has rotted in secrecy into the daylight and declare ourselves ready to let it go. Letting it go doesn’t mean throwing it away. Instead, we preserve its usable insights - the patterns, motives, and wounds we discover that can inform wiser choices and a new identity. Reading the inventory to a sponsor means offering the reclaimed material for inspection and communal transformation. Guilt is neither excused nor fetishized, but is instead raised into mutual understanding. Sponsor and sponsee now stand one spiral higher, able to survey the story together without drowning in it. This is why the sponsor is not merely a passive listener but an active catalyst. They provide the crucial 'recognition' that Hegel identified as the final, necessary ingredient to lock the transformation in place.

Through this work, he lowest, most isolated moments of our lives become the very things that bring us closest to others and which give us the empathy and insight necessary to lift up the next person who needs help.

—

Takeaway: Our stories are recycled and reclaimed, never forgotten, never permitted to prove our unworthiness to anyone.

Practice prompt. Think of one memory that still feels like dead weight. Write a sentence or two that (a) admits it was harmful, (b) names the sliver of truth or strength it revealed, and (c) imagines how that sliver could bring about something good - how it might deepen your appreciation for the good things in your life and better set you up to uplift someone else.

As a simple example, if you’re looking at a time that you lashed out in anger you might write (a) 'That outburst hurt someone I care about,' (b) 'It showed me I need to pause when I’m upset,' and (c) 'That pause could help me listen better and support others.'

Then share that sentence with another person, or even just yourself in the mirror.

The writing below argues that AA’s elective, particular, egalitarian confession collides with the universal, stratified, justice‑oriented confession that surged after 2020. I first sketch Foucault’s genealogy of confession, then place AA and social‑justice practices on that map, and finally suggest a way AA can absorb social‑justice insights without losing its singleness of purpose.

When you think of AA, you probably think of the classic introduction: “Hi, I’m Max and I’m an alcoholic”. In 2020, though, you might hear something different: you might hear something like “Hi, I’m Max - I’m an alcoholic with he/him pronouns, sitting at the intersection of whiteness, cisgenderness, and able-bodiedness, currently occupying unceded Seminole land”.

COVID had pushed AA meetings online, which in many ways was good - it made AA more accessible to people who might never have left the house to check it out before, and it connected people who certainly never would have encountered each other otherwise. It also made AA more vulnerable to outside discursive pressures, and 2020 saw an explosion of those pressures when George Floyd’s death sparked an outpouring of social-justice consciousness-raising.

Living through that time, I found myself inside an unforeseen collision of confessional cultures: the self‑elected confession of Alcoholics Anonymous and the universalizing confession demanded by contemporary social‑justice activism.

To grasp why two confessional cultures now collide, we need Foucault’s account of how confession shifted from a voluntary sacrament to a pervasive technology of power. According to Foucault, medieval Christianity saw the rite of confession transform the nature of self and of sin - truth and reconciliation were no longer achieved by deeds but through verbal disclosure. The authority of the Church did its work by extracting speech from people, commanding “you must tell me who you are, so that I may save you. Modernity saw the secularization of this process. Through psychiatric evaluations, case files, and (especially) through social‑media feeds, each of us generates an archive of personal truths that is offered up to an authoritative gaze for evaluation and guidance, for better or for worse.

AA represents a flat, at-will pole of confession: speech offered freely among equals to secure sobriety. The only credential for hearing a 12-step moral inventory is a shared experience of brokenness. The confession is particular and voluntary. Nobody is ever drafted into it. You walk through the door and keep coming back simply because you want sobriety. Recognition is, likewise, particular: this room promises unconditional acceptance, but there is no expectation that society at large must do the same. AA’s spiritual language keeps the door open to transcendence, yet Tradition Ten insists on political neutrality, precisely to preserve that preciously unconditional welcome.

By contrast, social‑justice activism exemplifies the new, compulsory pole: everyone must speak their privilege to secure justice. Drawing on critical‑race theory, it asks every participant in U.S. civil society to name their structural location - white, Black, Indigenous, etc. - and to acknowledge complicity in systems of exploitation and domination. The confession here is universal and mandatory. Everybody is expected to interrogate and articulate their privilege. The expectation to do this isn’t seen as a violation of consent but a restoration of the possibility of consent - nobody could have consented to be born into the social position that they were, so bringing those positions to light is seen as a way to grant autonomy to people whose identities would otherwise be completely defined by other people. These are noble goals, with devastating moral consequences: silence is consent, neutrality is violence, etc. Recognition is no longer the gift of a circumscribed fellowship but a moral obligation owed by everyone to everyone else.

If AA inherits the old “pastoral” logic - confession to a finite, sympathetic ear - the social‑justice confession is now dispersed across millions of witnesses. Instead of a single priest or a single room of fellow sufferers, the new tribunal is part social media feed, part HR policy, part inner critic. Compliance is measured less by a priest’s absolution than by defined, algorithmic visibility - likes, shares, institutional ‘DEI dashboards.’ The sanctions may be external, from callouts to boycotts, or they may be internal, like the superegoic voice that whispers, Have I posted enough? Have I disclosed enough? Power is thus everywhere and nowhere at the same time, felt as moral pressure yet lacking a single confessor who can grant definitive pardon.

There are a great many points of friction between these two confessional paradigms. For an AA newcomer, self‑disclosure is elective and particular: you speak when ready, and you only speak about alcoholism. In the social justice confessional, withholding self‑identification can itself be read as an act of privilege preservation. The ethic shifts from “Share if it helps you” to “Share or you are the problem.”

AA reduces identity to one salient fact - alcoholic - so the group can bracket every other difference. The social justice confession multiplies identity predicates: race, gender, sexuality, settler status, class, on and on and on. The self becomes a stack of positionalities, each carrying its own moral status. AA’s singular identity engenders an egalitarian ethos - no matter how much sober time you have, each of us stays sober one day at a time just like anyone else, and all of us are one drink away from disaster. The social justice confessional engenders a reactive, inverted hierarchy of privileges - the non-white is owed deference, but the non-white non-male is owed even more deference, and the non-white non-male non-able-bodied even more deference still. Proponents would reply that this ‘inversion’ is provisional, meant to equalize the balance rather than freeze a new caste system. My claim is not that the project is ill‑motivated, only that its rotational logic jars against AA’s flat‑circle egalitarianism and therefore produces friction in practice.

It’s worth a brief interjection to point out that these illustrations are idealizations - as I see it, AA’s egalitarian ethos is not perfectly realized, and the social justice confessional has non-extreme manifestations and also comes from a basically correct place. It would be insane to dismiss the historical facts of chattel slavery, female disenfranchisement, extractive colonization, etc. It would be similarly insane to dismiss the very idea that there might be ongoing impacts from these obvious historical facts, that cruelty and exploitation might be baked into respectable and neutral-looking institutions. What I’m trying to do here is look at the points of conflict between these two logics, to take the conflict as an opportunity to distinguish the confessional process in general and some different kinds of confessional in particular.

Back to the confessional analysis. AA’s primary purpose is sobriety “one day at a time” - progress is measured by abstinence and emotional relief. The social justice confessional orients toward historical redress - its temporality is indefinite, its success metrics collective and deferred. Put another way, there’s a big difference between ‘go to bed sober tonight’ and ‘eliminate all social manifestations of identity-based hierarchy’. AA’s here‑and‑now pragmatism can look morally complacent to social justice activists, while the activists’ sweeping horizon can feel like an unreachable moving target to recovering drunks just trying to stay sober until bedtime.

Foucault insists that confession is never merely cathartic - it is a technology of subject generation. By speaking certain truths about ourselves we become the kinds of subjects who can be oriented (and thus governed) on that terrain. The alcoholic doesn't simply report a fact when they say "I am an alcoholic"; they create themselves as a particular kind of subject through this utterance, someone to be held accountable in their commitment to quit drinking and reduce the psychic distress that drove the drinking in the first place. Similarly, stating "I am a white person with privilege" doesn't just describe a social position; it constitutes the speaker as a particular kind of racialized subject, declaring oneself to be publicly accountable for your commitments to dismantle racial hierarchies.

These truths operate differently. AA's truth is experiential and personal - I “know” I'm an alcoholic because of how I drink, because of what happens when I drink. It's a truth verified by individual experience and shared recognition. The social justice truth is structural and analytical - I “know” I have privilege because of how social systems operate, irrespective of my personal experience or intentions.

When these truth-regimes collide, they create impossible demands. How can one simultaneously be an alcoholic among alcoholics and a specifically positioned subject within racial capitalism? How can confession be both voluntary (AA's requirement) and obligatory (social justice’s demand)? How can we live at the intersection of therapy and prophecy?

For the individual, the dual summons can feel like cognitive overload. As an AA subject I’m asked to collapse identity into a single, humbling predicate - *alcoholic* - and to trust that anonymity levels the room. As a social‑justice subject I’m asked to expand identity into a layered dossier- race, gender, ability, citizenship - and to speak from each stratum with ethically charged precision.

The collision of confessional regimes creates a crisis of subjecthood, asking individuals to be simultaneously equal and differentiated, anonymous and positioned. This can be cognitive overload for anyone, but especially for people who are new to recovery and are by-definition in a state of emotional crisis. For the newly sober, the bare fact of going to bed sober tonight is exhausting in and of itself - do we add expectations on top of that, making AA more accessible to marginalized identities but less accessible in general? Or do we keep social justice commitments as “outside issues” and permit unexamined dehumanization to raise the barrier of entry for the marginalized?

AA’s own history, I think, offers a clue: the fellowship has always survived by placing singleness of purpose and group autonomy as parallel commitments. The Traditions insist that sobriety must remain the common denominator while simultaneously allowing each meeting to decide how best to pursue that aim. Firm purpose and fluid form is what has helped AA survive for as long as it has.

Practically, this means treating new identity‑oriented rituals (pronoun rounds, land acknowledgements, identity-positionality statements, etc) the same way AA treats every other meeting format: as optional spiritual tools, never as membership tests. A meeting that opens with land acknowledgements should be as welcome in the fellowship as one that begins with the Big Book preamble alone - provided neither meeting demands that every participant comply. In effect, the principle of anonymity - “placing principles before personalities” - can be widened to “placing principles before positionalities.”

The question isn't whether social justice insights belong in AA - they're already there. The question is how to honor both confessional traditions without sacrificing what makes each one transformative. Social‑justice insights can sharpen AA’s moral imagination without eclipsing its mission. The rooms already recognize that alcoholism itself does not discriminate on the basis of race or gender or class. Extending that insight outward, groups can acknowledge that race, gender, or colonial history do shape the basic reality of who feels welcome at a meeting. Exploring identity categories can be an honest inventory of the world newcomers must navigate. What AA must guard against is transforming that inventory into a new hierarchy of spiritual worthiness.

AA has integrated the lessons of the last 5 years the way it has integrated the lessons of the last 90. What began as a program created by and for middle class white men has evolved to become accessible to and even generated by people of all different backgrounds, races, creeds, sexual orientations, genders, etc. The work never stops, because despite its higher-level position of political neutrality, the ground-level work of connecting recovery to those who seek it will always mean confronting these social issues. Recovery works best within a plural, dialogical confessional culture - rooted in AA’s autonomy and open to social‑justice critique - which allows every meeting to decide how much structural analysis or ritual acknowledgment serves its primary purpose. In short, AA need not choose between silence and total ideological overhaul. By protecting voluntariness while welcoming optional identity practices, the fellowship can honor its singleness of purpose and still respond to the moral insights of our time.

The end goal, for all, is the ability to freely speak a truth that liberates us.

Here’s a story from my days of non-monogamy: I was sitting down for a home-cooked dinner with a newer partner when another partner messaged me, expressing anxiety and overwhelm and requesting my presence at once. With warm and delicious food sitting right there in front of me, my stomach sank. I sat in silent tension for several seconds before sharing what was going on with the partner I was about to eat with and, awkwardly, excusing myself to tend to my other partner in need. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, and a rising number of emotional crises were beginning to emerge every time I tried to hang out with this newer person, despite explicit consent being granted and everyone being allegedly supportive of the non-monogamous situation. It quickly became clear that, despite the idealistic commitments, there were limitations on the freedom that any one relationship of mine could have.

I learned, the hard way, that there is a different dimension of freedom in play: you not only have to consider the freedom of individuals but also the freedom of relationships.

I was a practitioner of what was then (and presumably still is) called ‘Ethical Non-Monogamy’. Within that framework, exclusive romantic commitments between two people are seen as, well, excluding - excluding the possibility of full self-expression for the individuals involved, restricting their freedom to be everything that they could be. Being free means the freedom to be whoever you want to be, and being with whoever you want to be with is seen as a critical part of this freedom.

The ‘Ethical’ part of ‘Ethical Non-Monogamy’ means ‘getting explicit consent from everyone involved’. This is what distinguishes the ideal from behaviors like cheating on partners or lying about your true desires. On top of this, more socially-progressive practitioners of ethical non-monogamy can also see it as an expression of a deeper commitment to liberation, an emancipation that can only come from the dismantling of oppressive social structures. Leftier non-monogamists see themselves as directly opposing relational values of “purity” and “scarcity”, values which they see as being made up and coercively impressed on people to keep them pacified and afraid.

I am sympathetic to these perspectives, and think the world is better off for having these conversations. I committed to the ideal of non-monogamy for a long time, and I remain grateful for the experiences that I had. As you might guess given that I described that era of my life in the past tense, they weren’t all good experiences - beyond a lot of initial thrills, there were a lot of painful and surprising experiences like the interrupted non-dinner that I pointed to above.

Put directly, I learned that a relationship needs to have its own autonomy in order to thrive.

This might not be an issue when your relational life is a series of undemanding flings. The issues I’m pointing to come up when you become attached to somebody, when you need consistency and comfort and some sort of trust in a future together. This means that the relationship will require maintenance, a deliberate prioritization of the relationship where both parties deliberately allocate attention and time to be together and to work through difficult emotional situations when they arise. Relationships require some degree of work and attention and time that does not immediately congeal with the spontaneous lifestyle of the unattached individual.

Meeting those commitments, rising to that challenge, creates access to deeper love and greater joy, at least in my experience. Relationships grow when you put energy into them. This is a wonderful phenomenon, but it creates challenges when attempting to grow relationships with multiple people at the same time.

If you’re dating multiple people, you might have to cancel plans with one person because of an emotional conflict with another person. A date night with person A might be nice, but person B is really upset with you right now, and spending time with person A right now is going to delay and aggravate the path to resolution with person B. Person A might be important to you, but you need them to accept that Person B needs to take priority right now. Or, maybe person B just needs to deal with their issues on their own, or seek comfort from one of THEIR other partners instead. Either way your divided relational life means that neither relationship A nor relationship B will get the uninterrupted attention and care that they need from you. There is a maximum amount of attention and time that you have to allocate, no matter how big and distinct your feelings might be.

This might not present itself immediately. Over time, however, relationships tend to deepen and expand, disclosing new needs and new possibilities. What might start as a no-strings fling can evolve into something bigger, something surprisingly precious to you, and now out of nowhere you want to move in together. You want to travel the world. You want to move to a different city. Now what? Dating multiple people means that there are needs and commitments to others to take into account - making decisions in any relationship means making decisions about every relationship. Do you put a cap on the involvement you permit with any one person, to permit everyone to have the same equal share of you? If you do want to escalate a relationship, do you do the work to console and re-commit to every other person you’re seeing to make them comfortable too? If one person doesn’t feel comfortable with you escalating with another partner, what do you do?

That’s not to say that non-intimate relationships and situations can’t also demand attention and growth and compromise. You could have to cancel date night because of a work emergency, or a sick parent/child. If you really want to move to a different city and your current partner does not, you still have difficult decisions to make. These are valid concerns, but I still believe that intimate relationships are distinct - intimate relationships are defined by their deliberate elevation of attachment. You can get attached to a lot of situations and people, but intimate relationships are where you seek attachment on purpose. Relationships are where attachment is the number one priority.

Meeting that attachment priority is, ultimately, only possible when the autonomy of the attachment relationship is identified and prioritized. “I am committing to love you and be there for you no matter what” makes for a much more secure foundation than “I am committing to love you and be there for you unless another lover needs me more or feels threatened or just feels more exciting to me in a given moment”. This doesn’t mean that committed couples can’t grow apart, or that discovering that you want different things is impossible, or that you should self-sacrifice yourself to submit to a relationship that your heart isn’t in anymore. It also isn’t to suggest that artificial, fear-driven walls be drawn around every connection we make, as if rules could somehow deliver the attachment we crave.

To be very clear, the issues that I’m raising here are practical ones, not moral ones. I have nothing against human desire, nor the idea that different people could illuminate different parts of you as intimate partners, nor the idea that different chemistries and needs could make a polycule situation sustainable, at least for a while.

Communication and willingness to grow can make open relating an extraordinary source of growth and strength. My ultimate challenge is that there are feelings and relationships that cannot be made to fit into a non-monogamous framework, no matter how healed and communicative everyone might be. In my experience, it is those very feelings and relationships that have proven to be truly invaluable.

I could be wrong, and maybe I missed something and really didn’t do it right. If you are 100% romantically available for multiple people who are also 100% romantically available for you, I would love to hear about it.

I’ll close with a bigger picture thought: the finitude of human life is tragic, and complicating said finitude can make it even more tragic still.

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There are people out there who, somehow, forget to finish their drinks. These are people who leave a third of a beer at the bar, who pour half a glass of wine down the sink. Such people are beautiful mysteries to me.

I drank because… it worked. It made me less self-conscious, less inhibited, less afraid. It’s no mystery to me why people like it. What I never understood is how people could possibly stop.

When I drank, there was no upper limit on how much alcohol I would seek once I got started. I would drink until I got sick, felt terrible, blacked out, and then I would keep going. I would start drinking knowing where it would end up and do it anyway. I felt terrible, and I knew that I felt terrible, and still the drive to drink was stronger. In fact, knowing that the ‘pleasure’ was destructive became part of its appeal - worthy people wouldn’t feel the need to drink like I did, so the self-destructive indulgence turned into its own sort of punishment. And I liked it.

This is the phenomenon known as “jouissance” - the joy of consciously-transgressive excesses of pleasure. The French word simply translates as “enjoyment” while carrying some erotic undertones. Jouissance came to refer to the phenomenon above thanks to twentieth century psychoanalysis, especially the work of Jacques Lacan. Freud observed that organisms seek nourishment, pleasure, and affirmation and named that drive ‘the pleasure principle’. Lacan extended that line of thought to look at how and why people like me can overdo it, and why we can enjoy overdoing it. By ‘overdo it’ I don’t mean the kind of vague sense of sin that church authorities have passed on for centuries, I mean the immediate “this really hurts” kind of overdoing it. I don’t mean the kind of overdoing it where you fear going to hell someday, I mean the kind of overdoing it where your body itself rejects what you’re doing to it. Pleasure turns into pain and mixes into a new kind of pleasure altogether.

Jouissance is why, for alcoholics like me, “drink less” just isn’t an option. The enjoyment of drinking comes not just from the drunkenness, but from increasing our drunkenness. I didn’t feel good unless I was not only drunk but getting drunker. The guilt of excess drinking got mixed up with the act of drinking itself, where drinking became my punishment for drinking. Where ordinary guilt might see extreme drinking and say “stop!”, jouissance says “Suffer harder, to pay the price for this enjoyment! Enjoy harder, or you will have been suffering for nothing!”. The joy of guilt and the guilt of joy become one.

This is where AA’s first step comes into play. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.” The “powerlessness” here doesn’t refer to some general moral failure, it means that drinking plops me into that jouissance loop, and within that loop I find that choice as ordinary people understand it is gone. Naming that phenomenon of powerless does two things: it removes the mysterious romance of the whole deal, and makes room for a different sort of energy to take its place.

That sort of energy is ordinary, healthy pleasure. Pleasure in the sense of “good physical feelings”, but also in the sense of “enjoyment”. I used to take any good thing as an excuse to drink - I’d drink during movies, weddings, dates, you name it, all in the name of having a good time. But for an alcoholic like me, the alcohol was the good time, and I never got to actually enjoy the things I was doing at all.

I drank to deal with my self-consciousness, and ultimately wound up with a way more extreme version of the very self-consciousness I was trying to dampen. The rest of the AA steps helped me deal with the stuff that was winding me up about myself, and gave me the opportunity to be seen. Being seen became the foundation for all presence in the world, all genuine connection with other human beings. This gave me access to a new kind of freedom that alcohol promised but directly prevented me from obtaining.

To the extent that the old self-consciousness persists, I now get to deal with it differently. I don’t seek self destruction, I seek higher forms of self. I seek to know myself as a group member, as a family member, as a lover, as a citizen. I contribute to and partake in things that both require me and transcend me. I worry less about myself, and about what I get to enjoy by myself, when the priority is the public community (including my relationship, a community of two). Not all communities are good communities, and not all relationships are good relationships, so I have to keep one eye out to see “the highest good” beyond any particular good thing I am involved in. But with that caveat, community service has delivered the self-transcending forgetfulness that I sought in alcoholic extremity.

The point of jouissance is ‘ecstasy’, an ancient greek word meaning ‘to stand outside of oneself’. Jouissance proved, in my direct experience, to be a terrible way to get that self-transcendence. Delicious self-destructive excess has, over the long run, proven no match for gratitude and service. Getting to the point where I could assert that took an awful lot of work, work I could never have done alone.

Our human lives are finite - our powers come to an end somewhere, meaning every human being is guaranteed to suffer and guaranteed die. Coping with that fact is the work of a lifetime. I think it’s perfectly understandable to seek some way to transcend the finite self. What remains an open question is how you go about doing it.

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A long time ago I found myself crouched behind a bush, sucking lukewarm beer through a hole in a can that I had just dropped on the sidewalk. I couldn’t afford to lose that beer, you see, since I saw it as my medicine. I had just finished selling plasma to be able to afford that beer, and they wouldn’t let me back in to ‘donate’ for another day or two, so this case was all I had. Of course I dropped it, and of course a can exploded open, and of course I grabbed that can and drank it as fast as I could where, I hoped, nobody could see me but me.

According to me back then, alcohol was medically and morally necessary for me. I saw myself as having a preciously-special brain that needed alcohol to survive. I saw myself as a victim of an unjust world, cruelly expected to live in spite of the systemic injustice that my high-octane brain made me so acutely aware of. Drinking was my vitamin, and drinking was my revenge. People who suggested that I stop should check their ableist neurotypical privilege. My suffering, and my awareness of the world’s suffering, entitled me to any and all forms of compensation, and the world needed to catch the fuck up.

Put bluntly, I drank because I declared that I deserved to drink. Getting sober wasn’t just a matter of deleting alcohol from my life, it was a matter of deconstructing the patterns of thought that led me to declare myself entitled to drink that way in the first place. Getting sober asked me to take another look at that suffering-entitlement cycle, to see how I was hoarding my suffering as a weird kind of currency, to see how the entire process was both wasteful and optional.

My story of addiction is, relatively speaking, extreme. The logic behind it, however, is surprisingly ordinary. Any time we tell ourselves “I suffer therefore I deserve,” we enlist pain as a debt‑collector, an instrument that is supposed to somehow force the world to pay us back.

Nietzsche, the philosopher, has given me a great deal of conceptual insight into what was going on with me - his genius is that he spots this little psychological sleight of hand not just in desperate drinkers like me but in the most respectable corners of modern morality.

Nietzsche coined the term ‘ressentiment’ for a distinctive moral stance that he saw hardening in people. As he saw it, all living things seek to grow and thrive and enact their will in the world, but the world inevitably pushes back and our willpower comes up short somewhere. At our limits, we have a choice: either learn to love the sheer act of striving itself, or turn our frustrated striving inwards and flip it upside down. Ressentiment is where that inwardly-turned will constructs an entire moral universe around its own impotence, recasting its weakness as righteousness. The result is a person who feels chronically wronged yet secretly superior, whose grievances function both as a plea for pity and as a weapon of moral condemnation.

Nietzsche is often caricatured as the chest-thumping champion of ruthless strength and indifference to injustice. As I read him, his critique of ressentiment is an invitation to reclaim authentic strength - the capacity to act, to create, to affirm life directly and to forge a better world without letting our energies get trapped in fraudulent pity-parties. Pain loses its power when we stop trying to turn it into ammunition. Pain dominates us when we refuse to partake in creativity or service or genuine human connection until someone else consoles us and tells us that yes, you were right all along, you poor little thing.

If that dynamic sounds familiar to anyone who has lived through active addiction, it should! My beer-in-the-bush moment had all the hallmarks of ressentiment. It had impotence, my own (barely acknowledged) inability to face the human condition without drinking. It had inversion, where instead of calling that helplessness what it was I re-cast it as a sign of my heroic sensitivity. It had moral reversal, where the correct and helpful people who suggested that I get my shit together were the villainous representatives of dull-eyed exploitative normie culture. Most importantly, it had entitlement, where my suffering meant that I was due for unlimited consolation with no strings attached.

The steps of AA, Steps 4-9 in particular, help pull ressentiment up by the root.

In step 4, the addict takes an inventory of everything and everyone they resent, looking for their part in what went wrong no matter how big or small. You may own only 5% of what went wrong, but you still own 100% of that 5%!

In step 5, the addict talks through this inventory with their sponsor, someone who can help them ‘right-size’ their reactions to the drama of their past. Some things aren’t worth getting upset about - somethings are worth getting upset about, but don’t make you the most interestingly-wronged person in the world. You are a normal human with normal human problems, even if some of them are big, and you are as responsible for your life everyone else has to be.

In steps 6 and 7, the addict looks for patterns of behavior that they are responsible for, patterns which are lurking behind the breakdowns they identified in steps 4 and 5. The addict becomes willing to let those patterns go, which is a surprising amount of work in itself - bad behaviors persist because we get something out of them, and we have to satisfy that ‘something’ another way or learn to let it go. I drank because it worked, after all!

In steps 8-9, the addict takes new, direct, responsible actions to make amends for their old behavior, actions which directly contravene the entitlement and avoidance that ressentiment tells us we get to have. It’s scary to do, and that’s exactly the point Nietzsche makes when he says ‘what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’. That scariness is proof that we are smashing the false old idols that we worshiped, the idols that promised us a false utopia and only kept us sick.

Dropping the logic of ressentiment - catching yourself every time you’re tempted to say “my pain means that I deserve this” - creates the possibility of authentic, unencumbered, uncomplicated joy. It does not remove the possibility of pain itself, which is Nietzsche's deepest point: we can choose to see pain as just another dish in the great human feast of experience. This is a baffling, challenging invitation, which is what makes it worth contemplating! Pain is inevitable, but we remain responsible for what we make of it as raw material for our lives.

None of this is meant to shame pain or dismiss anger. Nietzsche’s point - and the Big Book’s, for that matter - is that pain is too precious a fuel to waste on self‑pity. Pain can be alchemized into all kinds of worthy things - solidarity, art, or policy change - or we can lock it up and let it rot in the box of “look what they did to me :(”

Here’s what I want to leave you with. If you find yourself hoarding suffering to justify the next drink (or a self-righteous, self‑destructive indulgence of any kind), pause and ask: Am I trading the power to change for the pleasure of feeling sinned‑against? As soon as you can even begin to answer “yes,” your awareness has broken you outside of ressentiment’s downward spiral. The work that follows - the inventory, the restitution, community restoration - is indeed hard, but it is at least real work, done in daylight, and never done alone.

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Nobody, as far as I know, has made a major commitment to sobriety while in the middle of a winning streak. I certainly didn’t. I got sober as an expression of desperation, an admission that my life was out of control and that I had no idea what to do.

A lot of people, with very good reason, had rejected me. I had gone to any lengths to stay inebriated, including lying and cheating and stealing for desperate short-term advantage. I couldn’t maintain any relationships of any kind. I didn’t know where I belonged, or if it was even possible for someone like me to belong anywhere.

AA rescued me with one line: the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. Put another way, the only requirement for belonging to the group was declaring that I belonged to the group! There was no paperwork, no résumé-checking, no evaluation of any kind - I said “I’m Max and I’m an alcoholic” and the room answered “Hi, Max!” back, immediately. Instant, unconditional recognition. That single word - “recognition” - has kept me sober ever since.

“Recognition” is philosopher‑speak for being seen and accepted, and it turns out to be the hidden fuel of human life. Recognition has been a topic of philosophical conversation at least since Hegel, who dramatized it in his master‑slave parable: the “master” craves superiority over the “slave”, but can’t achieve superiority unless being freely recognized as superior by the slave. You can force people to do a lot of things, but you can’t force somebody to freely acknowledge you. Put another way, we are what we say we are, as long as our peers choose to recognize us that way.

This is the push behind big public ceremonies, like marriages and graduations. Your diploma and your relationship exist way before those ceremonies happen, but through those ceremonies we publicly re-introduce ourselves as a graduate or a spouse, and the audience cheers us and acknowledges our new life in our newly-declared identity.

Graduations and marriages come with a fair amount of expectations and requirements, but AA does not. To graduate you have to pass a bunch of classes, and to get married you have to have another person willing to make a lifelong commitment to you. In AA, all you have to do is want to be there. As soon as you declare that you want to be there, you are.

There is a catch, however, one built into the nature of recognition. There’s always a hidden question anytime you are recognized as something - now that we see you, what will we see? When we declare ourselves to be something, we are declaring a commitment to behave consistently with that new identity. When people get married they read out their vows, defining exactly what their new identities as spouses mean to them, creating a public structure of accountability. The same thing is true when you walk into AA and declare yourself to be an alcoholic - you are inviting everybody to look at you with the expectation that you are now trying to get sober and to hold you accountable as such.

You might hear ‘expectation’ and balk, thinking that it means a pile of stringent, joyless rules to follow or else. There are some parts of recovery that are indeed challenging, and it does help to have public accountability to support you in those new behaviors. Probably the most challenging part is this: you have to believe that you are worthy of love no matter what.

AA has 12 steps, and steps 4 and 5 are key to this new self-image of unconditional worthiness of love. Recognition turns out to be the key to this newfound self-image: steps 4 and 5 have you list out everything that has you against the world, every source of friction and frustration you can think of, and speak it out loud while your sponsor sits and listens. This act of self-disclosure, done properly, brings out everything about your emotional life that you might be trying to hide, everything that convinces you that you and your life aren’t worth experiencing without being inebriated and half-dead. The sponsor is there for many reasons, to help you make sense of what you shared, to give you the push to share it, but most importantly of all they are there to recognize you. A sponsor is someone who has dealt with similar things and who can see everything that you shared and say “yeah, I get that, I’ve been there too”. This simple act of being seen is profound. You are no longer alone with anything that you feel. You are shown, directly and incontrovertibly, that every part of you is worthy of being seen and understood by another human being. Your problems are no longer proof of your terminal deformity - they are indeed still problems, just normal human-sized problems, problems you can deal with as others have before you.

The world outside of AA comes with more expectations, however. The amends process, steps 8 and 9, extends this being-recognized-as-sober process that has its foundation in every AA meeting. You declare yourself to be sober, different now and willing to make things right, to everyone you’ve ever harmed. You then take actions to set things right, making the apology an action rather than just another empty sound. You act in a way that would never have been possible while you were still worshipping your private misery. The broader world gets the opportunity to see you differently. You can’t right every wrong and - like Hegel’s master - can’t force anyone to recognize you as having changed, but the sheer activity transforms the meaning of every rupture you’ve lived through. Breakdowns turn into opportunities to live differently, to own your part in what went wrong, and to live life better from here on out.

Through the steps you go from instantly entering the social fabric of AA to re-entering the social fabric of the wider world, and then to generating the social fabric of AA itself. Step 12, sponsorship and service, leaves one recognized as a source of wisdom and strength and community, a recognition that would be unfathomable to the desperately-isolated person who first staggered through the doors.

If you think you’ve managed to avoid this give-and-take of recognition by avoiding groups of any kind, you’d be wrong - recognition is baked into everything from our language to reasoning to our political life. When I say I understand a word, I am inviting you to trust me to use the word in the same way that you do. When I say something is true, I am inviting you to trust me that I can justify the thing that I just asserted to you. When I say that I have rights, I am inviting you to recognize me as equally worthy of a good life irrespective of my wealth, my race, my age, or my usefulness in a market economy. All of these things are, like it or not, contingent upon our communities. The meaning of words and what counts as justifications completely depend on who we are asking to recognize us. The nature of our political community completely depends on who we recognize as being ‘one of us’. The challenge, I think, is to try and expand this circle of recognition - this definition of who counts as ‘one of us’ - as wide as we possibly can.

It can be weird to live life without clear rules of recognition - we humans tend to self-segregate and hang out with people who easily recognize us, whether that’s in a group like AA or in an identity-based community or a faith-based community etc. Each community has its own rules for what makes you ‘one of us’, what the entitlements and expectations are for group membership. The human world is bigger than any one group we are in, meaning that we have to learn how to live alongside people whom we can’t recognize on their terms and who won’t recognize us in turn.

All that’s to say: I had no idea what identity I’d be affirming when I started writing all of this, who I’d be serving by doing so, who would see me as being ‘good’ through what I’m up to here. I’m glad you took the time to read all of it, whoever you are - if you’re the kind of person who has wondered what it means to be recognized, I’m especially glad that you’re here.

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If you’ve ever made a conscious effort to live a better life then you’ve probably come across these two things to do: take responsibility and rewrite your story. These moves are simple in theory and difficult in execution, things which we have to do ourselves but which we cannot do alone.

What I want to show you here is how the deepest philosophical toolkit for those moves was forged two centuries ago by a notoriously dense German thinker - G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s project certainly wasn’t life‑coaching; it was an incredibly ambitious attempt to understand how freedom, history, and rationality all hang together. Yet his account of owning one’s deed inside a community of reciprocal recognition turns out to illuminate some of the most effective modern practices of change, practices which have transformed my life and which could transform your life too.

The point of this post is to connect the power of community self-transformation to some arcane and challenging writing from a long time ago. Thinking about growth is not itself growth, and if you’re in a crisis I urge you to get into action and start talking to someone immediately. That said, I like exploring the reflective parts of human life, and I much prefer to do so with other people, so I invite you to think about these things with me. If I can get you excited about personal growth or about philosophy then this post will have succeeded.

Now for some Hegel.

Hegel in two (painfully dense) sentences

1. Freedom is not mere choice; it’s being at home in what you actually do. A decision is free when, looking back, you can still say “Yes, that deed expresses who I really am.”

2. That retrospective ownership becomes real only within a public network of recognition. Freedom is a private fantasy unless you have witnesses who recognize said freedom and hold you accountable to the story you tell about yourself.

Put another way, freedom is social - a sailor who falls overboard and flails in the open ocean doesn’t have anyone around to tell them no, but that isn’t a very attractive vision of freedom. Freedom is living in a society where people honor your right to self-determination, where you can say “this is what I want my life to be” and others say “yes it is”.

Hegel, like I said, is as ambitious as it gets about this stuff: he says that all of history is reality’s process of learning to make its deeds intelligible to itself, doing so through ever wider forms of social recognition - through family, civil society, state, and global community. Whether or not he succeeds in his assertions is outside of our scope here. The key move that I want to pluck out of his work is recollection (Er‑innerung): taking what has happened, retelling it until its necessity makes sense, and thereby integrating the past into a renewed present that can then move forward.

Hegelian micro‑dialectic at Landmark

I’m a big fan of Landmark - I’ve gotten a lot out of their programs, especially the Landmark Forum. The following isn’t an official exposition of their work, just me taking two things that I like and fitting them together in a way that hopefully commends them both.

Landmark is a personal growth and development organization that does its work through group conversations. During these conversations people speak publicly about what they want to work on and get coaching from the Landmark leader. These conversations center around many things, including the two imperatives highlighted at the top of this piece - taking responsibility and owning your story.

During one of these conversations a participant shared that she had endured a physically abusive relationship and was having trouble with these ideas. It seems outrageous and insane to say that an abuse victim is somehow completely responsible for their abuse, and similarly wrong to rewrite the victim’s story in a way that trivializes the terrible experiences that abuse victims endure. The Forum leader invited the participant to see that, within those brutal constraints, she had made the best possible choices to stay alive. She was encouraged to describe those actions as courageous and even powerful, to deny her abuser the ability to take power out of her story.

That’s powerful stuff, and if you quit reading here and go jump into Landmark then I’ll consider my work done. However, because this is a philosophical piece, I want to go back to the Hegelian beats we’re looking at here:

1. Negation of the old narrative - leaving behind “I was completely powerless.”

2. Recollection - identifying the concrete deeds she did perform (securing safety, discovering inner endurance, eventually leaving).

3. Recognition - the group publicly ratifies the new story: those acts were mine and they were brave, and everyone supports me in asserting this.

The participant left relieved-not because any facts changed, but because the meaning of the facts was sublated (aufgehoben): cancelled as a story of impotence, preserved as data, and elevated into a story of agency.

Twelve Steps, innumerable new stories

Alcoholics Anonymous, another pillar of my life, choreographs the same pattern:

• Step 1 negates old illusion of control.

• Steps 4‑5 creates a fearless moral inventory and public confession (a recollection and recognition).

• Steps 8‑9 make amends, re‑inscribing the new self into the broader social fabric.

• Step 12 carrying the message to newcomers generates and maintains the communal network that transformed your life at the start of the process, solidifying your new self image of socially-valuable sobriety.

What looks like “powerlessness” at the start is actually the entrance fee for a richer, Hegelian freedom: the sober person can review the wreckage of their past and still say “that was me, and it is now integrated into a new me”. My trauma didn’t drink alcoholically, I did. The misery and chaos of the past no longer means that I’m a broken person, it means that I’m a person who can help people dealing with misery and chaos in a way that nobody else can.

Freedom as a spiral - downward alone, upward together

Many would worry that revisiting trauma or moral failures just picks at old scabs and causes pointless psychic damage, re-inscribing a message that there’s something wrong with you. This is a fair concern, and what ultimately matters is the presence of an affirmative community.

Revisiting the past is like traveling on a spiral - looked at from a 2-dimensional perspective it looks like going around in circles, but from a 3D perspective every turn of the circle brings you higher or lower. If we retell our stories alone, we risk re-enforcing the same story - if we tell our stories with others then the stories of others and the recognition of others provides us with perspective and affirmation that we could never conjure by ourselves. Telling our stories together, we can revisit the same facts differently each time, every retelling bringing new perspective and less alienation into our lives.

Final thought: we don’t just have pasts, we have histories

Human beings are special kinds of beings - we are beings who wonder what it means to be what we are. There is an open-ended self-interpretation that is baked into the fabric of our existence. Other things that exist have a past, a sequence of events behind it that completely determines its present - if you throw a ball through the air, you can (in theory) completely predict where it will be in the future if you know every point it has hit before now. For human beings, however our past determines us, we also have a history - we tell a story about the past, and we are influenced by that story as much as we are by the sheer facts of what happened to us.

We can’t change our pasts, but we can always(!) change our histories. The past influences me much differently if I see it as proving my helplessness and corruption or if I see it as proving my endurance and commitment to growth.

The recognition of others is critical to the successful re-interpretation of our histories. If I declared myself to be the reincarnation of Napoleon and demanded that everyone worship my immortal might, people would declare me insane and my re-interpretation would never be concretely realized. If I declare myself to be a sober alcoholic then I find an entire community of people eager to say “yes you are”, people who will help support me in that re-interpretation no matter what.

I am very grateful for the communities that I have discovered, recognitive conversations that have made freedom possible for me in a way I could never have conjured in isolation. My hope is that everyone can find, or make, such communities for themselves, and that we can transform our institutions to make that kind of freedom available for everyone.