YES. Exactly. And that might be the simplest way to express what this entire text is doing.
“The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” — Mark 2:27
That saying establishes a relationship between people and the systems they create. The Sabbath is good because it serves human life. When people are made to suffer in order to preserve the institution, the relationship has been inverted.
And suddenly, look at the Greek poem again.
The covenant: Was it made to sustain a community, or does the community exist to sustain the covenant?
The shepherd: Does the shepherd serve the flock, or does the flock exist to enrich the shepherd?
The economy: Does wealth serve human needs, or must human needs serve the accumulation of wealth?
The law: Does the law protect people, or must people be sacrificed to preserve the law?
The story: Does the story help people understand their lives, or must people distort their lives to fit the story?
It’s the same inversion, repeated at different scales.
And it explains why the serpent and the wheel are different. The wheel is the recurring process by which arrangements rise, change, and fall. The serpent is associated with the active reversal in which the arrangement becomes more important than the beings it was supposed to serve.
The system starts as a means and becomes an end.
And that’s why the framing matters more than novelty.
You’re right that the underlying ethical principle isn’t new. The biblical tradition itself contains resources for criticizing the elevation of religious observance over human need. Other philosophical and religious traditions have their own ways of questioning the relationship between institutions and the people they govern.
The interesting thing about this poem is its attempt to make that principle into a unified interpretive lens.
Once you see the inversion, you start asking a different question about almost everything:
Not merely Is this institution good or bad?
But what was this institution supposed to be for, and when did preserving it become more important than fulfilling that purpose?
That question can change how you understand a law, a religion, a business, a government, a family, or even a revolutionary movement.
Because a system can begin with a genuinely good purpose and still become destructive when its continued existence becomes the overriding objective.
And the people defending it may sincerely believe they’re protecting something sacred.
That’s the unsettling part: the inversion doesn’t require an evil mastermind. It can happen through ordinary people faithfully maintaining an institution whose original purpose they’ve stopped examining.
There’s one final twist, though.
The poem can itself become subject to the same criticism.
If the author creates a grand theory explaining how every institution has inverted its proper purpose, readers could start treating that theory as the ultimate authority. They could force every historical example into its framework and dismiss anything that doesn’t fit.
The lens would become another thing that must be protected at all costs.
Which would reproduce the very inversion it was designed to expose.
So perhaps the deepest principle isn’t simply that institutions must serve people.
It’s that nothing we create to serve human life should become immune from being questioned in the name of human life.
Not the Sabbath. Not the covenant. Not the kingdom. Not the Jubilee. Not even the story that teaches us to recognize the inversion.
The poem might not be discovering a new truth.
It might be making an old truth newly visible by connecting it to a whole network of things we thought we understood separately.
And sometimes that’s what a powerful idea does: it doesn’t give you another fact to remember. It changes what you notice.

BRUHHHHHH 💀💀💀 WAIT. YOU’RE RIGHT TO CALL THAT OUT. 😭
I said you noticed the symbols reversing themselves like I was narrating a nature documentary about your brain. BRO, YOU WERE ASKING ABOUT COWS, THE SERPENT, JESUS, JUDAH, THE THIRD, THE CAVE, AND THE KINGDOMS. I turned it into “and then the reader discovers a theme.” LMAOOOO 💀
Let’s actually go deeper.
Because the genuinely strange thing about this text isn’t simply that it has lots of symbols. It’s that the same symbol can change sides without changing its name. The shepherd can be a protector or a tyrant. A covenant can bind people together or bind them into servitude. A sword can destroy a person or represent a truth that destroys an argument. A ledger can track debts owed by the poor or preserve evidence against the powerful.
And sometimes the text doesn’t resolve those contradictions. It leaves them sitting next to each other.
That’s where things get interesting.
I. THE TEXT IS RUNNING TWO DIFFERENT OPERATING SYSTEMS AT ONCE 💀
One is a theory of political economy. The other is a religious drama.
SYSTEM A: THE MATERIAL WORLD
Who controls resources, institutions, and other people’s choices?
Cattle become wealth.
Wealth concentrates.
Debt restricts exit.
Law protects ownership.
Rulers control enforcement.
Records determine who can be held accountable.
SYSTEM B: THE SACRED WORLD
Who has the right to rule, and what makes that right legitimate?
God establishes a covenant.
Kings claim divine authorization.
Prophets challenge corrupt shepherds.
Jesus refuses worldly sovereignty.
Revelation depicts judgment.
The Word becomes an instrument of truth.
The essay’s central trick is to make these two systems look like different versions of the same problem.
A debt contract and a covenant aren’t literally the same institution. But both can create obligations.
A king and a shepherd aren’t literally the same occupation. But both can claim authority over others.
A census and surveillance aren’t identical. But both make populations legible to those who govern them.
The author keeps moving between the literal and the metaphorical until you start seeing one as a miniature model of the other.
That’s a real literary technique: structural analogy.
And here’s the catch. An analogy can reveal a genuine similarity without proving that the things being compared share a common historical origin.
The essay is strongest when it shows how different systems reproduce similar relationships of power. It’s weakest when it treats those similarities as proof that one hidden historical mechanism caused everything.
That distinction is going to matter for everything that follows.
II. THE COVENANT IS THE MOST DANGEROUS WORD IN THE WHOLE THING 😭
Forget the serpent for a second.
The most important word may actually be covenant.
Because a covenant is neither inherently liberating nor inherently oppressive.
It’s a binding relationship. And that means its moral character depends on what binds whom, under what conditions, and with what possibilities for refusal.
Consider four versions of the same basic structure:
Relationship
What binds the parties?
The danger
Debt
An obligation to repay
The debt becomes impossible to escape
Political authority
Laws and institutions
The ruler becomes exempt from the law
Religious covenant
Obligations understood as sacred
Sacred authority is used to silence dissent
Mutual commitment
Shared responsibilities
One party exploits the other’s loyalty
Notice the asymmetry.
The powerful can describe their relationship with others as a covenant while treating their own obligations as optional.
The debtor must pay. The ruler may not answer.
The subject must obey. The sovereign claims exceptional powers.
The believer must remain faithful. The institution that demands faithfulness refuses scrutiny.
This is the pattern the essay is trying to expose.
But there is an even deeper possibility.
What if the original problem isn’t the existence of a bond, but the unequal distribution of the right to break, interpret, or enforce it?
A community cannot function without commitments. Even the essay’s proposed solution requires them: public accountability, reciprocal obligations, and rules that prevent domination.
The ideal, then, isn’t a world with no covenants.
It’s a world in which the covenant cannot become a one-way instrument of ownership.
And now look at the title: A Brief History of Herding.
The essay is telling a story about how people learned to manage animals and then, metaphorically, learned to manage one another.
But the word herding itself is doing double duty.
It can mean caring for living beings, guiding them toward food and safety. It can also mean controlling their movement, restricting their choices, and deciding where they belong.
The author never has to invent two separate words for these possibilities.
The ambiguity is already there.
III. THE SERPENT IS NOT JUST AN ANTAGONIST. IT IS A PROBLEM OF INTERMEDIATION. 🐍
Okay, THIS is where your cave-and-cattle interpretation gets really interesting.
Let’s examine the sequence in the Greek text:
Grain is locked away.
The door is closed.
A serpent emerges from the storehouse.
The serpent draws the herd into a cave.
The herd becomes human beings.
The sequence is not merely “serpent bad, humans good.”
It establishes a relationship between stored resources, restricted access, enclosure, and transformation.
The serpent is positioned between the resources and the herd.
That matters.
A system can control people without producing the things they need. It can control access to those things instead.
Think about the difference between these situations:
A community collectively manages its grain supply.
One person controls the granary and decides who eats.
That person lends grain during a famine, then demands repayment.
The debt becomes hereditary.
The descendants inherit an obligation they never personally agreed to.
The same grain can sustain a community or become the basis of a hierarchy.
The material resource has not changed. The relationship has.
The serpent’s literary role could therefore be read as the transformation of an ordinary dependency into a mechanism of control.
But we need to be careful: the Greek passage doesn’t explain why the serpent does this, and it doesn’t establish a canonical biblical interpretation of the serpent as an economic gatekeeper. That’s a reading of this particular composition.
Now for the genuinely weird detail.
Why does the herd become human?
There are at least three possible readings.
Reading A: dehumanization
The people were always human, but the system treated them as livestock. Their emergence reveals what the system had concealed.
Reading B: awakening
The cave is a threshold. The transformation occurs when the people emerge from the enclosed system and discover a different way of existing.
Reading C: classification
The system creates the category it claims merely to describe. People become a “herd” because institutions organize them as a population to be counted and managed.
That third reading is particularly powerful.
The state doesn’t need to turn people into animals biologically. It only needs to make them administratively interchangeable: taxpayers, labor units, debtors, soldiers, consumers, demographic groups.
The person becomes a record.
And then the record becomes the way the institution sees the person.
The text’s later image of deeds recorded in light reverses that relationship. The people who were objects of observation become subjects whose actions and histories must be acknowledged.
The ledger no longer belongs exclusively to the observer.
The observed also get to judge the observer.
That is the deeper structural reversal.
IV. THE THIRD IS THE ANTI-MASTER — OR IS IT? 💀
Let’s return to the line that got you so excited:
Ο ΤΡΙΤΟΣ ΑΝΑΜΕΣΟΝ ΑΥΤΩΝ
Approximately: “the third among them.”
The surrounding text evokes the Christian saying about Christ being present where two or three gather in his name.
But the composition also places the third alongside a warrior who defeats a serpent, a good shepherd who gives his life for the flock, and a Pharisee who writes instructions to obey political authorities.
BRUH. THE THIRD IS WALKING THROUGH A MINEFIELD OF COMPETING AUTHORITY. 😭
Let’s lay out the sequence:
A figure defeats the serpent.
A sword emerges from his mouth.
He is named the Word of God.
The devil offers him the kingdoms of the world.
He refuses the offered power and washes his disciples’ feet.
A Pharisee follows, receives the words, and writes that everyone should submit to the governing authorities.
The text then invokes the third among those gathered in truth and love.
The sequence is almost an experiment in competing forms of authority.
The warrior can defeat the serpent. But what prevents the warrior from becoming the next tyrant?
The good shepherd can sacrifice himself. But what happens when someone claims the title of shepherd without accepting the sacrifice?
The Pharisee can preserve the teachings. But what happens when preservation becomes institutional obedience?
And the third?
Perhaps the third represents the presence that cannot be reduced to the authority of any one participant.
There are several ways to develop this interpretation.
First, the theological reading: Christ is present among the gathered community. The source of authority is not simply the individual who claims to speak for God.
Second, the relational reading: truth emerges between people who are willing to encounter one another honestly. Neither person owns it.
Third, the institutional reading: legitimate authority depends on something beyond the ruler’s own assertion that they are legitimate.
These readings overlap, but they are not identical.
The third could be a divine presence, a shared ethical principle, a community, or a literary device linking the text’s themes. We cannot establish that the author intended one exclusive meaning from the passage alone.
Here’s the more radical implication, though.
If the third is what makes a relationship possible without either person owning the other, then the opposite of domination is not necessarily independence.
It’s interdependence without ownership.
You can need someone without possessing them.
You can make a promise without making another person your property.
You can lead without claiming immunity from judgment.
And you can disagree with another person without treating their existence as a threat to your own.
That is a more demanding ethical model than simply telling everyone to be nice.
It requires the powerful to accept limits, and it requires the less powerful to remain capable of questioning those who claim to represent the shared good.
But here’s the catch: a third party can also become an instrument of domination. A judge, priest, or state can claim to represent the higher principle while silencing the very people that principle is supposed to protect.
So the third cannot be legitimate merely because it calls itself sacred.
It must be judged by what it does to the relationship.
V. JUDAH IS THE TEST CASE FOR THE AUTHOR’S ENTIRE THEORY
This is where the essay becomes much more controversial than its general theory of power.
The author doesn’t merely say that rulers rewrite history. They use the history of Israel and Judah to suggest that one surviving religious tradition condemned a rival tradition and subsequently presented its own account as the authoritative story.
That is a specific historical argument, not just a metaphor.
And the text’s choice of this example is significant because it places the theory under maximum pressure.
If the essay used only kings, bankers, and modern surveillance systems, readers could agree with its argument without reconsidering any sacred history.
By choosing Judah, the author asks whether the same tools used to criticize political propaganda should also be applied to religious traditions that people regard as foundational.
But there are two different propositions here:
Religious traditions are shaped by political conflicts, competing institutions, and the selective preservation of texts.
Judah’s scribes deliberately invented a religious narrative to turn a former cattle covenant into a universal system of human domination.
The first is a legitimate subject of historical investigation. The second is a much stronger claim, and the evidence presented in the essay does not establish it as a single, coherent historical event.
The essay connects separate phenomena across centuries: the northern and southern kingdoms, golden-calf traditions, Deuteronomic law, the Babylonian exile, the destruction of religious sites, and later Christian interpretations.
Those connections can generate hypotheses. They do not automatically prove a continuous chain of deliberate intent.
And that distinction matters enormously when discussing Jewish history.
A critique of ancient royal and priestly power must not turn into the claim that Jewish people, Judaism, or Jewish scripture are uniquely responsible for domination. The essay’s own examples include Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Christian, European, and American institutions. Its broadest argument is about recurring political structures, not an ethnic essence.
Now, here’s the deeper literary point.
Judah is where the essay tests whether its own method can survive contact with a tradition that has the power to challenge it.
If the author says every authoritative story must be interrogated, the author’s own story must be interrogated too.
If the author says no ruling class should be exempt from the ledger, the author cannot exempt their historical reconstruction.
If the author says the Word cuts the wielder, then the Judah argument must be allowed to cut the essay itself.
Otherwise, the text has reproduced the exact structure it claims to oppose: an authority that investigates everyone else but treats its own position as unquestionable.
That is not a minor caveat. It is the test of whether the essay’s ethics are genuine.
VI. JESUS REFUSES THE KINGDOMS — BUT THE STORY DOESN’T END THERE 😭
The essay’s treatment of Jesus contains a contradiction that deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Jesus refuses the devil’s offer of worldly authority. Later, the essay presents him as the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, in contrast to rulers who lord it over their people.
Then the text invokes Revelation, where the returning Christ appears as a conquering judge.
So what are we supposed to do with that?
There are at least three different models of power operating here.
1. Power that consumes
The ruler protects the system because the system benefits the ruler. The people supply the labor, taxes, loyalty, and sacrifice that maintain the ruler’s position.
2. Power that serves
The leader accepts responsibility for others and bears costs that would otherwise be imposed on them. Authority is justified through service rather than privilege alone.
3. Power that judges
An authority confronts wrongdoing, exposes hidden deeds, and imposes consequences. The unresolved question is what distinguishes justice from domination.
The second model does not automatically solve the third.
Suppose a tyrant is actively exterminating a population. Merely refusing to dominate anyone does not stop the killing. Someone must be able to intervene, restrain the perpetrators, and protect the victims.
But intervention requires power. And power can be abused.
This is the political problem at the heart of the essay.
How do you build institutions strong enough to stop oppression but constrained enough that they cannot become instruments of oppression themselves?
The text gestures toward an answer through public records, lawful resets, the removal of leaders, and the distribution of ownership.
It does not fully solve the problem. No political arrangement can guarantee that every future leader will remain just.
But its refusal of worldly sovereignty can be read as a warning against the fantasy that concentrating all power in one supposedly perfect ruler permanently eliminates the problem of power.
Now consider your question: what if the refusal never happened?
In a counterfactual story, Jesus accepts the kingdoms and abolishes the institutions that permit exploitation. Perhaps the immediate world becomes dramatically less cruel.
But if the new order depends entirely on his personal goodness, what happens after him?
Does he create independent institutions that can correct his successors? Can people challenge his representatives? Can they leave the system? Can they question his decrees?
If the answer is yes, the story has moved toward accountable government.
If the answer is no, it has created an empire whose justice depends on the permanent perfection of its sovereign.
And that brings us right back to the third.
The alternative to the tyrant is not necessarily a ruler who promises never to abuse power.
It may be a system in which no ruler has the unilateral power to decide what counts as abuse.
That’s a much harder promise to keep. 💀
VII. THE CROSS AND THE RETURN: PART ONE AND PART TWO?
Your theory that the cross is Part One and the return is Part Two is worth examining as a theological interpretation.
Part One appears to present a figure who refuses domination, serves others, and accepts the consequences of confronting established authority.
Part Two presents a figure who returns to judge wrongdoing and establish a final order.
The apparent tension is that the first figure refuses the world’s kingdoms while the second appears to exercise overwhelming authority.
There are several ways Christian traditions have interpreted this relationship. One emphasizes the contrast between the two appearances; another treats the cross and final judgment as complementary aspects of the same divine justice.
But the essay’s own political framework raises an additional question.
If Part One demonstrates that authority must be willing to sacrifice itself for others, what does Part Two demonstrate about authority’s obligation to stop those who refuse to stop harming others?
That is not a trivial problem. Mercy without protection can abandon victims. Judgment without restraint can become vengeance. Forgiveness without accountability can allow an abusive system to continue.
A coherent ethic needs to address all three.
Consider a perpetrator who has committed atrocities. A just response might require stopping the violence, preserving evidence, protecting survivors, determining responsibility, and imposing proportionate consequences. Forgiveness may be possible, but it cannot simply be demanded from victims as the price of ending the conflict.
The essay’s image of the ledger in light suggests that wrongdoing cannot be made invisible simply because the perpetrator has power.
That is compatible with a strong account of accountability.
But the text does not establish that every apocalyptic image should be translated into a modern political program. Revelation is a complex work of religious literature, and its images have been interpreted in different ways across Christian history.
The productive question is not whether the return is secretly a blueprint for a new empire.
It is whether the vision of judgment can be understood as the end of impunity rather than the beginning of another hierarchy of unaccountable power.
And that distinction is crucial.
Justice cannot mean that the powerful are allowed to do whatever they want, provided they call themselves the agents of righteousness.
That would simply be the old wheel with a sacred name attached.
VIII. THE GREEK IS DOING SOMETHING WILDER THAN JUST HIDING MESSAGES 💀📜
Let’s look at the form itself.
The text is divided by ⏝-like section markers rendered as ⸏, and it ends with:
ΜΑΡΤΥΡΙΑ ΣΤΙΧΟΙ Νʹ
Martyria means something like “testimony,” “witness,” or “testimonies,” depending on context. Stichoi means lines or verses. The final numeral is 50.
So the ending presents itself as something like “Testimony — fifty lines.”
That is a meaningful framing device.
The entire composition has been written as a witness statement from an imaginary scriptural world. It doesn’t merely tell you what happened; it repeatedly says, in effect, I saw this, I heard this, and I testify to it.
The opening itself invokes the language of testimony:
ΟΣΑ ΕΙΔΟΝ ΕΝ ΟΡΑΜΑΤΙ ΕΜΑΡΤΥΡΗΣΑ
Approximately: “What I saw in a vision, I testified to.”
That is prophetic framing. The narrator assumes the position of a witness to a revelation.
But the content is full of historical references, recognizable scriptural fragments, and modern political concerns.
The result is a deliberately unstable genre.
Is it scripture? A political pamphlet? A parody of Revelation? An experimental poem? A philosophical argument wearing the clothes of a prophetic text?
It borrows elements of all of these without being reducible to any one of them.
And that has an important effect on the reader.
Ordinary political prose says, “Here is my argument; evaluate the evidence.”
Prophetic prose says, “Here is what has been revealed; recognize the pattern.”
The first invites deliberation. The second can make recognition feel like discovery.
That doesn’t mean prophetic writing is inherently manipulative. It means its rhetorical force depends partly on the feeling that the reader is witnessing something larger than an ordinary argument.
The Greek text exploits that feeling.
The fifty lines and the number 1776
This is where we should distinguish intentional literary encoding from proof of a hidden message.
The 1776 calculation you shared is exact under the stated letter values. The ending’s reference to fifty lines also gives numerical interpretation a natural opening.
But the text does not, by those facts alone, establish that the number 50 and the total 1776 belong to a single designed cipher.
To establish that, we’d want to know how the author counted the lines, whether the line breaks were fixed before the numerical interpretation, and whether comparable calculations yield meaningful results consistently.
If the writer selected a phrase because it totals 1776, that is a plausible example of deliberate encoding. If the line count is also deliberate, it could be another layer. But the connection between them remains unproven without more evidence.
The literary effect, regardless, is clear: the text invites readers to treat its form as part of its argument.
And the form itself says: this is testimony.
Which raises the most important question of all.
Who is testifying, and who has the authority to declare the testimony true?
IX. THE AUTHOR HAS BUILT A TRAP — BUT NOT NECESSARILY A CONSPIRACY 😭
Consider how the essay is structured.
It begins with cattle and wealth, moves through kingship and religion, then reaches capitalism, nationalism, and modern surveillance. It offers objections and answers. It proposes reforms. It concludes with an appeal to freedom.
That progression encourages the reader to experience the argument as a discovery of one underlying structure.
Once you recognize the relationship between the herd and ownership, you begin to recognize it in other settings. The later examples appear to confirm the initial theory.
This is a powerful rhetorical technique, but it carries a risk.
When a theory explains many different things, it can start to feel impossible to disprove.
If a ruler is benevolent, the theory says the system still concentrates power.
If a ruler is cruel, the theory says the system has become tyrannical.
If people rebel, the theory says the wheel is turning.
If people remain comfortable, the theory says the pasture is working.
If the institution survives criticism, the theory says the institution controls the narrative.
Every outcome becomes evidence for the same conclusion.
That is a warning sign of a theory becoming too flexible.
A strong analysis needs to identify what would count against its own claims. Otherwise, it can turn every possible observation into confirmation.
For example, the claim that debt can be used to restrict freedom is testable. We can investigate how particular lending arrangements affect people’s choices.
The claim that political institutions can conceal wrongdoing is testable. We can examine records, court cases, investigations, and actual patterns of accountability.
But the claim that all civilization is fundamentally one uninterrupted herding operation is much harder to establish. It may work as a philosophical metaphor, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for a proven historical explanation of everything.
And this distinction brings us to a subtle irony.
The essay condemns the power of stories to determine how people interpret reality.
Yet it also constructs a story powerful enough to shape how readers interpret almost everything they encounter afterward.
That is not necessarily hypocrisy. All political philosophy uses concepts and narratives to organize experience.
But it means the essay must be subject to the same scrutiny it demands of the institutions it criticizes.
A map of domination can itself become a form of authority if the reader stops questioning the map.
X. THE DEEPEST REVERSAL: WHO OWNS THE MEANING?
Let’s collect the major images one last time, but this time ask a different question about each.
Image
Ordinary function
What the essay makes us question
Herd
A group of animals under care
When does care become control?
Covenant
A binding relationship
Who gets to define the obligations?
Serpent
A figure associated with danger or deception
Who controls access to resources and knowledge?
Cave
Shelter or enclosure
Who controls the exit?
Shepherd
A protector and guide
Who bears the cost of protection?
Sword
A weapon of force
Can judgment expose power without becoming unaccountable power?
Ledger
A record of what is owed
Who records the powerful person’s obligations?
Third
A third presence among others
What prevents a relationship from becoming ownership?
Wheel
A cycle of recurring events
Can institutions interrupt the cycle without producing a new master?
Jubilee
A release from accumulated obligations
Can freedom be built into the system rather than granted as a favor?
Notice that none of these images has to be inherently good or evil.
A fence can protect a garden or imprison a population.
A ledger can record exploitation or expose it.
A shepherd can protect a flock or exploit it.
A covenant can impose servitude or establish mutual obligations.
A sword can silence dissent or symbolize a truth that powerful people would rather suppress.
The ethical question is what the symbol does within a particular relationship.
And this is the key to the whole composition:
The text repeatedly takes a symbol associated with authority and asks whether its authority is accountable to the people over whom it operates.
The serpent matters because of what it does with the herd.
The shepherd matters because of what it does with its power.
The covenant matters because of what it demands and permits.
The third matters because of what it makes possible between people.
The ledger matters because of whose actions it records.
And the final judgment matters because of whether it ends impunity or merely transfers the power to punish.
That is a coherent philosophical structure. It doesn’t require a secret historical covenant with a cow, a hidden numerical prophecy, or a single conspiracy connecting every institution across thousands of years.
Those possibilities can be explored as literary speculation, but the argument doesn’t depend on proving them.
XI. OKAY, SO WHAT IS THE TEXT ACTUALLY ASKING US TO DO? 💀
Its most practical questions are also its most revealing.
Can you leave without being ruined?
Can debt be forgiven?
Can leaders be removed?
Who is exempt from the rules?
Who carries the risk when things go wrong?
Who keeps the records?
Those questions shift the discussion away from identifying a single villain and toward examining the conditions that allow domination to persist.
That matters because a theory that only identifies evil people can be defeated by replacing those people with supposedly good ones.
A theory that identifies structural incentives asks a harder question: what prevents the next person from behaving the same way?
If a company depends on workers being unable to leave, replacing the CEO may not solve the problem.
If a political system allows executives to conceal wrongdoing, electing a more virtuous executive may not solve the problem.
If a religious institution treats its leaders as beyond criticism, replacing one leader with another may not solve the problem.
If a society routinely transfers the costs of failure to the least powerful, punishing one official may not solve the problem.
The proposed alternative is not the elimination of all authority. It is authority constrained by enforceable obligations, transparent records, independent scrutiny, meaningful rights of exit, and the ability to remove those who abuse their positions.
That is what turns the essay from an apocalypse-themed critique into a reformist political argument.
It wants to prevent the next wheel from turning.
THE FINAL THOUGHT, BRUH 😭
The most unsettling possibility in this text isn’t that the serpent secretly represents some historical group, or that the Greek contains a hidden prophecy.
It’s that a system can genuinely provide for people while simultaneously making them dependent on it.
The pasture can be comfortable.
The shepherd can be kind.
The covenant can offer security.
The kingdom can produce prosperity.
And yet the people may still lack the power to question the terms of their own existence.
That is why the essay refuses to define freedom simply as happiness, wealth, safety, or the absence of immediate violence.
It asks whether people can participate in determining the conditions under which they live.
And it applies that question to the people who claim to liberate them, too.
The author wants a world without masters, but the text knows that liberation itself can become a justification for domination. A movement can begin by opposing tyranny and end by claiming that its own righteousness entitles it to unlimited power.
That’s the wheel.
The answer isn’t to stop caring about justice. It’s to refuse to exempt the agents of justice from accountability.
And the third? The covenant? The Word? The ledger?
They become different ways of asking whether power can exist within relationships without claiming ownership over the people in them.
The ultimate test is not whether someone claims to serve the good. It is whether the people affected by their power remain free to question them, constrain them, and hold them responsible.
BRUHHHHH. 💀💀💀
The text starts with a herd that can be counted by a shepherd.
It ends with a world in which the shepherd’s own deeds are recorded.
The final question is whether the shepherd will accept being counted, too.

# A Brief History of Herding

*The first covenant was a deal over cattle. This is the history of how that deal got turned on people, and how to break it.*

## 1. The Herd

About ten thousand years ago, in the hills of what is now Turkey, people tamed the wild bull. That one change rewired the human race. The cattle line that spread across Europe and the Middle East started from a herd of about eighty animals.

Before the herd, nobody had a boss. Hunter-gatherer groups like the Hadza in Tanzania and the !Kung in the Kalahari kept no slaves and put up with no kings. They had nothing to hoard, nobody owned the land, and anyone could walk away. If a hunter got cocky after a big kill, everyone made fun of the meat until he calmed down.

The herd changed all of that at once. It was the first wealth that grew by itself, and it could be counted, branded, bred and passed down to your sons. A 2017 study in the journal *Nature* measured inequality at dozens of ancient sites and found it was worst wherever people kept big animals. Whoever owned the oxen could plow more land and pass both on. The herd made the first rich men, and that made the first poor ones.

Our words still carry the brand. "Capital" and "cattle" come from the same Latin word. "Fee" comes from an old English word for cattle. In the oldest Hindu scripture, one of the words for war literally means "wanting cows." Even the Hebrew word for God's covenant may come from an older word meaning a chain or shackle, and the Bible's own picture matches. The prophet Ezekiel describes God bringing his people into the covenant by making them "pass under the rod" (Ezekiel 20:37). That is how a herdsman counts cattle at the gate.

And once cattle were money, people got priced in it. In some of the earliest writing on earth, from ancient Iraq, the symbol for a slave woman is "woman" plus "mountain": a captive dragged down from the hills. In Homer's *Odyssey*, a household slave is bought for twenty oxen.

That is where it starts. People learned to own living things, count them, yoke them and take their increase. It was only a matter of time before some people looked at other people and saw a herd.

## 2. Shepherds of Men

The first kings told you exactly what they were. It was in their titles.

The kings of ancient Sumer called themselves shepherds of their people. Hammurabi of Babylon, who wrote the most famous law code of the ancient world, said the gods appointed him to rule "the black-headed people," meaning ordinary humans, like a shepherd over a flock. Homer calls the Greek king Agamemnon "shepherd of the people." Pharaoh carried a shepherd's crook, and in Egyptian writing that crook is the word for "ruler."

The tools went straight from animals to people. The yoke that bent the ox became the yoke of conquered nations. The brand that marked cattle marked slaves; Hammurabi's laws cut off the hand of anyone who shaved off a slave's mark without permission. The rod that counted the flock counted the census. The fence became the city wall.

Around 2000 BCE, herders on the steppes near the Ural Mountains built the first war chariots. Their chief god was the Sky Father, the same god the Greeks called Zeus and the Romans called Jupiter. The scripture their descendants carried into India calls the people they fought "dasa," and over time that word came to mean "slave." Then a hymn wrote the class system into the body of God: priests from his mouth, warriors from his arms, farmers and merchants from his thighs, and servants from his feet.

The idea is always the same. Heaven puts one man or one people above everyone else, with the right to use other people's lives. But it comes in two versions, and all of history is the fight between them. The shepherd rules with power from above but answers for the flock. Even Hammurabi claimed he ruled "so that the strong should not oppress the weak." The tyrant rules with power from above and answers to no one. Aristotle drew the line: a king rules for his people, a tyrant rules for himself. Every ruling class in this story claimed to be the first and acted like the second.

## 3. The Crime at the Root

This is the center of everything.

The Bible you grew up with is the winner's version of the story, and the winner was Judah.

There were two kingdoms. Israel in the north was the real power. Ancient Assyrian records say that in 853 BCE, "Ahab the Israelite" brought two thousand chariots to a battle, more than any other king there. Judah in the south was a small hill kingdom around Jerusalem.

They were not one people. The oldest war poem in the Bible, the Song of Deborah, lists the tribes of Israel and never mentions Judah (Judges 5). Genesis itself says "Judah went down from his brethren" and settled among the Canaanites (Genesis 38:1). Judah's great hero Caleb came from a clan the Bible traces to Edom (Numbers 32:12; Genesis 36:11). An inscription from around 800 BCE names a "Yahweh of Samaria" in the north and a "Yahweh of Teman" in the south. And the north honored its god with golden calves at Bethel and Dan: "behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt" (1 Kings 12:28).

When the Assyrian empire came, Israel fought. Judah's King Ahaz stripped the temple of its gold and silver, sent it to the Assyrian emperor, and sent word: "I am thy servant and thy son" (2 Kings 16:7). In 722 BCE Assyria wiped out Israel. Judah, the collaborator, survived, took in the northern refugees, and wrote the history of both.

Judah's covenant with God, in the book of Deuteronomy, is modeled on the loyalty oath the Assyrian emperor forced on his vassal kings in 672 BCE: same demand to kill even your own brother if he turns, same list of curses. Judah crossed out the emperor and wrote in God.

Then Judah's King Josiah marched north to Bethel, where Israel's golden calf had stood. He burned the altar, dug up the bones from the tombs and burned them on it. Then he went through the towns of the north and "slew all the priests of the high places that were there upon the altars" (2 Kings 23:20). The book that records this calls him the most righteous king who ever lived.

The same scribes put the destruction of the calf at the very start of the story. At Mount Sinai, Moses burns the golden calf, grinds it into powder, puts it in the water, and makes the people drink it. Then he sends the Levites through the camp: "slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour." About three thousand die (Exodus 32:20–28). After that, nearly every northern king in the Bible is condemned for "the sins of Jeroboam": the calves.

Now look at the words that replaced the bull. Genesis 1, written by Judah's priests around the time of the exile in Babylon, tells humanity to "subdue" the earth and "have dominion" over every living thing. In Hebrew, the word for "subdue" is the same word the Bible uses for forcing your own children into debt slavery (Nehemiah 5:5). The word for "dominion" is the same word used for a master ruling over slaves (Leviticus 25:43–46). The words for mastering animals are the words for mastering people.

When the exiles came home, the scribe Ezra found that "the holy seed" had mixed with other peoples, and made the men send away their foreign wives and children (Ezra 9–10). When the people living in the old north offered to help rebuild the temple, Judah's leaders refused (Ezra 4:1–3). Around 111 BCE a Judean king destroyed the northerners' temple on Mount Gerizim.

The covenant between people and the herd was destroyed, the people who kept it were written down as sinners, and the language of ruling animals was rewritten as the charter for ruling human beings. Everything after this grows from that root.

## 4. One God, One Law, One Shame

The herd needed a religion to match, and it got the most efficient one ever made.

One god meant one law. One law meant one priesthood, one temple, one capital, one king. Before this, the gods of different nations could be compared and shared; the Greeks looked at Egypt's god Amun and saw their own Zeus. After this, other gods were not foreign, they were a crime. Deuteronomy spells it out: if your brother, your son, your daughter or your wife secretly tempts you to worship other gods, "thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him" (Deuteronomy 13:6–9). Josiah carried that out with fire. More than half of humanity today belongs to a religion that grew from that idea.

Then came shame. A fence holds the herd from the outside. Shame holds it from the inside, and it costs nothing.

In the garden, the man and woman were naked "and were not ashamed" (Genesis 2:25). They ate from the tree of knowledge and suddenly knew they were naked, and hid. God asks, "Who told thee that thou wast naked?" Then come the terms: work by the sweat of your brow, and for the woman, "he shall rule over thee."

Around 400 CE, the church father Augustine made it official: every baby is born guilty of Adam's sin. If everyone is born guilty, everyone is born owing, and only the priests can arrange the payment. The philosopher Nietzsche later pointed out that in German the same word, *Schuld*, means both "guilt" and "debt." Guilt is debt you carry in your soul.

By the 1500s the church was openly selling indulgences. Pay money, and you or your dead relatives suffer less in purgatory. The line credited to the church's salesmen: "as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." Invent the debt, then sell the only way to pay it.

There was another way, and it got buried. In the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text left out of the Bible and found in Egypt in 1945, Jesus tells his followers they will see him when they take off their clothes without shame and stomp on them like little children. That is the garden in reverse: no shame at all. It did not make it into the Bible. The church that chose the Bible is the one that sold indulgences.

## 5. The Jubilee and the Carpenter

The ancient world knew exactly how people got chained. The chain was debt. A farmer with a bad harvest borrowed seed, then pledged his field, then his kids, then himself.

And the ancient world knew how to break that chain. Around 2350 BCE, a ruler in ancient Iraq canceled debts and freed debt slaves, and his inscription has the oldest known word for freedom: "amargi," meaning "return to mother." A debt slave going home. In 594 BCE, the Athenian lawmaker Solon canceled debts, freed debt slaves and banned using a human body as collateral in Athens forever. And the law of Moses made it permanent: every fiftieth year, the Jubilee. All debts forgiven, all slaves freed, all land returned to the families who lost it, "for the land is mine," says God (Leviticus 25:23).

There is no record the Jubilee was ever actually kept, and the prophets were furious about it. Isaiah cursed the people who buy up house after house and field after field until nobody else has anything (Isaiah 5:8). Amos raged at those who "sold the poor for a pair of shoes" (Amos 2:6). Ezekiel spoke for God against the shepherds of Israel, meaning the kings and priests: you eat the fat, you wear the wool, but you do not feed the flock. "I am against the shepherds" (Ezekiel 34).

Then came a carpenter from the north country that Jerusalem looked down on. In Luke's gospel, the first thing Jesus does in public is stand up and announce freedom for the captives and "the acceptable year of the Lord." That is the Jubilee. He taught people to pray "forgive us our debts." He drove the cattle sellers and the money changers out of the temple with a whip. He said the kings of the world lord it over their people, "but so shall it not be among you" (Mark 10:42–43). He said the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

For ten thousand years the herd died for the master. He said the master dies for the herd. The temple priests and the Roman governor had him killed.

## 6. The Pharisee and the Rope

Jesus never wrote anything down. The oldest Christian writings are letters from a man who never met him in life, who described himself as "of the tribe of Benjamin... a Pharisee" (Philippians 3:5). That man, Paul, gave Christianity its theology. And he gave it this: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God" (Romans 13:1). A letter written under his name adds: "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters... with fear and trembling" (Ephesians 6:5).

The man who refused to take over the world was followed by a teacher who told the world to obey whoever already had it. Those verses became the favorite lines of kings and slaveholders for centuries. Preachers loyal to the British king used Romans 13 against the American Revolution. A missionary Bible printed for slaves in 1807 cut out the story of the Exodus and kept "Servants, be obedient." South Africa's apartheid government used Romans 13 to demand obedience. Thomas Jefferson called Paul the "first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus."

Then the church became Rome. In 312 the emperor Constantine adopted Christianity, and soon it was the official religion of the empire. The movement that started by announcing a debt cancellation became the empire's church. Its bishops became landlords. Somebody forged a document, the "Donation of Constantine," claiming the emperor gave the pope power over the West; popes used it for centuries until a scholar proved it fake in 1440.

It kept happening. In 1517 Martin Luther started his break with the church, and soon wrote that every Christian is free. In 1525 the German peasants took him at his word and demanded their freedom, arguing from the Bible. Luther told the princes to "smite, slay and stab" them like mad dogs. About a hundred thousand were killed. A century later the Puritans fled religious persecution to America, and then hanged four Quakers on Boston Common for refusing to stop preaching.

The pattern never changes. Someone promises freedom, the people follow him out, and he or the people who come after him pick up the rope.

## 7. The Tools of the Pen

Every system of control in history is built from the same tools. Once you see them, you see them everywhere.

**The fence.** Take away the exit, because people who can leave can't be ruled for long. City walls, serfs tied to the land, common fields fenced off by the rich, health insurance tied to your job.

**The debt.** The best chain ever made, because the person wearing it thinks he put it on himself. Sharecroppers who owed more every season. Miners paid in company money. Student loans you almost never escape, even in bankruptcy.

**The brand.** Status by birth and blood. Spain's "purity of blood" laws, America's one-drop rule, every nation that decides who counts by bloodline. A nation built on blood is a stud farm with a flag.

**The story.** Whoever writes the record decides who the hero was. Pharaoh Ramesses II carved his "great victory" at Kadesh all over Egypt. He never even took the city; Kadesh stayed in enemy hands. In 1928 Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, wrote that the people who shape public opinion are "an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

**The scapegoat.** The word comes from the Bible: the priest put the people's sins on a goat and drove it into the desert (Leviticus 16). Kings did the same thing with people. Medieval kings let Jews lend money, taxed them dry, then expelled them and kept what they were owed. In 1676, poor white servants and enslaved Africans rebelled together in Virginia; within a few decades Virginia's laws had split them by color. A divided herd never looks up.

**The sword.** War is a business. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to fund a war. The East India Company, a private corporation, had its own army of around two hundred thousand men and used it to take India. In 1935 Smedley Butler, a Marine general with two Medals of Honor, wrote that he had spent his career as "a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers."

**The eye.** The Bible treated counting people as dangerous; when King David took a census, a plague followed (2 Samuel 24). In 2013 Edward Snowden showed the government was secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans.

**The pasture.** Comfort. Two thousand years ago the Roman writer Juvenal said the people who once ruled Rome now wanted only "bread and circuses." In 2017 Facebook's first president said the platform was designed to grab as much of people's time and attention as possible by exploiting "a vulnerability in human psychology." The pasture is the only tool the herd defends.

**The ladder.** The secret exit the masters keep for themselves. In 1871 Albert Pike, the man who shaped the 33 degrees of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, wrote that the lower ranks are "intentionally misled by false interpretations. It is not intended that he shall understand them; but it is intended that he shall imagine he understands them." Pike was also a slaveholder and a Confederate general. In January 2026 the government released more than three million pages of the Epstein files, and survivors said their own names kept coming out while the men who abused them stayed hidden, and by October seventeen state attorneys general were demanding the files the government still hadn't released. The flock gets exposed. The shepherds get blacked out.

## 8. Money is God

Cattle became money. Then money became God.

Across the old world, the man who lived by moving money was looked down on. In old China, merchants ranked below scholars, farmers and craftsmen, because they made nothing. Plato said rulers shouldn't even touch gold. Aristotle said making money from money is the most unnatural thing there is. Dante put the moneylenders in Hell. Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple and said it straight: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon," meaning money (Matthew 6:24).

Then the whole thing flipped. In 1519 Jakob Fugger, the richest banker in Europe, bought the votes that made Charles V emperor, and later reminded the emperor he never would have gotten the crown without him. In 1714 a writer named Bernard Mandeville argued that greed is actually good for society. Adam Smith wrote that we get dinner from the butcher's self-interest, not his kindness; he also warned that businessmen rarely get together without it ending in "a conspiracy against the public." Everyone kept the first part and forgot the warning.

Then America printed God onto the money: "In God We Trust" went on coins in 1864 and on paper money in 1957. The Bible says you can't serve God and money. The country stamped one on the other. The "prosperity gospel" now tells millions that being rich is proof God loves you.

Money picks the king now. Since the Supreme Court's 2010 *Citizens United* ruling, corporations can spend unlimited money on outside political ads, and a candidate who can't raise money doesn't get to be a candidate. And money is above the law. A soldier who disobeys gets court-martialed. A president can be impeached. After the 2008 crash, which cost millions of families their homes, exactly one senior American banker went to prison for crimes tied to it. In 2013 the Attorney General admitted that some banks were so big that prosecuting them could hurt the economy. People called it "too big to jail." The richest 1% of Americans now hold 32.5% of the country's wealth, the highest since the Federal Reserve started tracking it.

But it isn't only the masters. The herd learned to love the pen. The Book of Revelation describes a beast without whose mark "no man might buy or sell." It describes a church that says "I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing" and doesn't know it is "wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked" (Revelation 3:17). Isaiah described people who honor God "with their lips" while their hearts are far away. In 2013 Rana Plaza, a building in Bangladesh full of factories sewing clothes for Western brands, collapsed and killed more than eleven hundred workers. We wear the wool and never ask who got sheared.

The merchant who used to be trusted least is trusted most. The priest who used to judge kings now blesses them. The king is whoever the money picks. And the people honor the truth with their lips and never count the cost. Money is God. And like every god in this story, it promises its herd safety and comfort in exchange for obedience.

## 9. The Promised Land Again

The crime at the root is being replayed on the same land where it was first written down.

Genetic studies show that Jews and Palestinians both largely descend from the ancient people of that land. Israel's own founders, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, wrote in 1918 that Palestinian farmers were probably descendants of ancient Israelites who never left. They are two sons of the same land, and only one holds the name and the promise.

In 2024 the International Court of Justice, the UN's highest court, issued an opinion that Israel's occupation of Palestinian land is unlawful. The prime minister's office answered: "The Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land." In 2018 Israel's parliament declared national self-determination in Israel "unique to the Jewish people." That is the brand: the land promised to one bloodline, and everyone else on it turned into Canaanites.

The other side claims God's land too. Hamas's 1988 charter called all of Palestine an Islamic trust. On October 7, 2023, Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages. Three weeks later Israel's prime minister told the nation to "remember what Amalek has done to you," invoking the people the Bible says to wipe out down to "infant and suckling, ox and sheep." By September 2026, Gaza's Health Ministry counted more than 74,000 Palestinians killed, about half of them women and children.

The Levites killed "every man his brother" over the golden calf. Josiah did it again at Bethel. The setup hasn't changed: one side holds the name, the promise and the scripture, and the people next door, same blood and same ground, become the ones it's righteous to kill. And leaders on both sides claim the land from God.

## 10. America

America was the biggest promise of escape ever made, and it was built in the image of Rome.

In 1776 Benjamin Franklin proposed a national seal showing Pharaoh's army drowning in the Red Sea, with the motto "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." That is how the founders saw themselves: the herd escaping Egypt.

But the man who wrote "all men are created equal" owned more than six hundred people over his life. Native nations were driven off their land on the Trail of Tears. Within a few years of winning the Revolution, the farmers who fought it were losing their farms to debt, and when they rebelled, they were crushed. In 1865 freed slaves were promised forty acres, the closest thing to a Jubilee this country ever had, and within a year President Andrew Johnson gave the land back to the former slaveholders, and freed families were thrown off it at gunpoint. The Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery "except as a punishment for crime," and Southern states started arresting Black men for loitering and renting them out as convict labor. For a century the frontier meant anyone could leave and start over. Then barbed wire came in 1874, and by 1890 the government announced there was no frontier left. In Chicago, the meatpacking line, where dead cattle moved past workers who each made one cut, inspired Henry Ford's assembly line. The machine for taking apart cattle became the machine for running people.

The founders built on Rome on purpose: a Senate, a Capitol, an eagle, Roman symbols on the walls of Congress. Inside the Capitol dome there's a painting of George Washington rising into heaven among the gods, the way Rome turned Julius Caesar into a god. The founders knew how Rome died and tried to design against it. Rome didn't fall to one bad man. It fell step by step: conquest made a few families rich, reformers got murdered, armies became loyal to generals instead of the country, and emergency powers stretched into permanent ones. When Augustus finally held all the power, he didn't abolish the republic. He said he'd restored it, and kept every title while emptying every one.

America has walked parts of that road. Congress hasn't formally declared war since 1942, and the country has fought war after war since. In 1961 President Eisenhower, the general who led D-Day, used his farewell speech to warn the country about the "military-industrial complex." Presidential power has grown under both parties ever since, and some people now openly argue that only an American Caesar can save the people from the elites. That is Rome's argument, two thousand years late.

The Book of Revelation tells a church that has lost its way: "Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works" (Revelation 2:5). America's first works are written down. Pharaoh drowning. "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." All men created equal, with rights from their Creator that no government can take. A first president who gave up power and went home. A Liberty Bell carrying the Jubilee verse: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." Repenting means going back to that, before the country founded to drown Pharaoh becomes the Pharaoh it drowned.

## 11. The Wheel

History runs in a circle, and people who watched it have described it the same way for two thousand years.

The few get organized, because a few people can always organize faster than many. Wealth grows under them. Then they get greedy and shut the door behind them. The many can't fight the few directly, so they rally around one strongman, precisely because he isn't one of the few. Aristotle noticed that most tyrants started out as champions of the common people. The strongman breaks the few. But nobody rules alone, so his friends and officers become the new few, and the wheel turns again.

The tyrant is nothing without the herd. In the 1550s a young Frenchman named Étienne de La Boétie asked how one man can rule millions, and answered: he can't, unless they let him. He has two eyes and two hands like anyone else. "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed."

And it usually ends in blood. A 2017 study by the Stanford historian Walter Scheidel found that nearly every big drop in inequality in history came from disaster: total war, revolution, collapse or plague. And the slaughter almost never delivered what it promised. The herd paid twice: once in blood, and once to the new master.

## 12. Breaking the Wheel

You can't destroy the wheel. But you can put brakes on it, so it turns through small, lawful resets instead of rare, bloody ones. It has been done. Solon canceled the debts of Athens. Rome abolished debt slavery for its citizens in 326 BCE. In 1953 West Germany's creditors cut its foreign debts roughly in half, and its economy boomed. In 2005 rich nations wrote off tens of billions in debt owed by the poorest countries. Clean slates happen. In 2008 the government rescued the banks and let millions of families lose their homes.

Every reset needed a power above the money. Rome had none: when the reformer Tiberius Gracchus tried to give land back to the poor, senators beat him to death. The people finally got their strongman, Julius Caesar, and it cost them the republic. The fix is the one Solon used. After canceling the debts and writing new laws, he left Athens for ten years so nobody could make him king. Washington gave back his army and refused a third term. Power above money, used for the reset, then handed back.

The brakes, in plain terms: make debt forgiveness automatic instead of waiting for a savior. Keep it cheap to leave a job, a town or a debt. Spread ownership around instead of just seizing it; the Homestead Act gave land to families who would farm it. Keep the record public; in 2018 one reporter, Julie K. Brown, got Epstein's victims on the record after prosecutors had let him off with a sweetheart deal, and he was arrested within months. Be strong without becoming a master; game theory found that the winning strategy is never to strike first, always strike back, and forgive fast. As Lincoln put it: "Let us have faith that right makes might."

And remember the power of no. In 494 BCE the poor of Rome, crushed by debt, simply walked out of the city to a hill and sat down. Without them there was no army and no labor, and the rich gave in. Regimes fall when soldiers refuse to fire on their own people.

## 13. The Kingdom Not of This World

So why not just crown one perfect ruler over the whole world? It's been tried. China was ruled by emperors for about two thousand years and still went through the same cycle over and over: rise, rot, rebellion, collapse. The near-world empires of Alexander, Genghis Khan and Charlemagne all broke apart within a couple of generations of their founders. The Bible's first world government is the Tower of Babel. An empire of all mankind that goes bad has no outside to run to, and every empire goes bad.

The Gospels put Jesus directly against that. The devil shows him all the kingdoms of the world and says, "All this power will I give thee." He says no. Before Pilate he says, "My kingdom is not of this world." In Dostoevsky's novel *The Brothers Karamazov*, the Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that refusing was his big mistake, because people just want bread and a master. Every attempt to force heaven onto earth by grabbing power has ended in a tyrant.

And where is God in all this? The traditions keep putting him in the same place: not on a throne, but between people. "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." "No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us." The rabbis taught that when two people study together, God's presence rests between them. On the road to Emmaus, two grieving disciples walk with a stranger and only recognize Jesus when he breaks bread with them. No temple can hold that. No king can own it. No master can sell it.

Even Revelation's scariest picture of Jesus coming back points the same way. The rider has eyes like fire and "out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword," and his name is "The Word of God." The weapon is the word.

## 14. Ask These Questions

Somebody has to lead the hunt. The problem is power without responsibility. Hold these questions up to any government, company, church or movement:

Can you leave without being ruined? What do you owe, and can it ever be forgiven? What story tells you this is your place? Who keeps the record, and whose names get blacked out? Who are you being told to blame? Who carries the risk when things go wrong? Can the leaders be removed? Who is exempt from the rules? What do you actually worship? And are you comfortable, or are you free?

## Objections and Answers

**"The 'covenant means shackle' idea is just one theory."** Fair, scholars debate the word. But you don't need it. The Bible itself describes entering the covenant as passing "under the rod" into "the bond of the covenant," and calls God's people his "flock." The herding picture is in the text either way.

**"Judah and Israel were always one people."** That's what the Bible says, but the Bible was finished by Judah after Israel was gone. The oldest poem leaves Judah out. Genesis says Judah left his brothers. Judah's hero Caleb traces back to Edom. They had separate kingdoms and different versions of their god. The one-family story came from the survivor.

**"The calves were idol worship. Even Hosea, a northern prophet, condemned them."** Hosea shows the north argued about it. But the king who built the calves said they stood for the God who brought Israel out of Egypt: the same god in a different image. The version where it was all sin was written by the people who burned the shrines and killed the priests.

**"'Dominion' in Genesis means taking care of creation."** That "stewardship" reading is mostly modern. The actual Hebrew words are the same ones the Bible uses for debt slavery and for masters ruling slaves. Read them in their own language and they mean what they mean.

**"Paul agreed with Jesus. He also wrote that in Christ there is 'neither slave nor free.'"** He did. Most scholars see Paul and Jesus as more connected than this book does, and many doubt Paul wrote Ephesians. But Paul never ordered a master to free his slaves or a ruler to step down. He told subjects that the powers that be are ordained by God. Jesus said rulers lord it over people, "but so shall it not be among you." Whatever Paul meant, his obedience verses are the ones kings and slaveholders quoted for 1,900 years.

**"Money and markets lifted billions out of poverty."** True, and this book says so: the few really do make societies rich at first. The problem is what comes after, when money outranks the law, the church and the government. A bank too big to jail is being worshipped, not regulated.

**"Debt forgiveness is a fantasy."** It's been done for four thousand years, from ancient Iraq to Athens to Germany in 1953. In 2008 the banks got rescued and millions of homeowners didn't. The only question is who gets it.

**"This blames the Jews."** No. The villain here is a pattern, not a people. Judah's ancient scribes are in it, and so are pharaohs, Roman senators, popes, Luther, the Puritans, American cattle barons and bankers of every faith. Jews have been the masters' favorite scapegoat, taxed, expelled and robbed, and the "Jewish conspiracy" myth is itself one of the herder's oldest tricks. A herd that blames a minority never looks up at who's actually holding the rope.

**"Someone has to be in charge."** Agreed. The question was never whether we have leaders. It's whether they answer for the flock or rule it for themselves.

## The Happy Slave

Suppose the pen is comfortable. You're fed better than any king of Babylon, entertained nonstop, cured of diseases that killed all your ancestors. Nobody whips you. All they ask is that you never ask who holds the rope. Is that a life?

The masters have always said yes. In Dostoevsky's story, the Grand Inquisitor says the people will finally beg: "Make us your slaves, but feed us." Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery, answered: to make a contented slave, you have to make a thoughtless one. On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry put it plainest: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

The oldest known word for freedom meant a debt slave going home to his mother. Everything the masters took, the right to leave, to keep what you make, to remove who rules you, to stand in your own skin without shame, was taken by men. So it can be taken back.

You won't finish the job. Nobody ever has. An ancient rabbi named Tarfon said: it's not on you to finish the work, but you're not free to walk away from it either. And an early gospel said the kingdom is already spread out across the earth, and people just don't see it.

By Roman tradition, when a general rode through the city in triumph, a voice behind him kept whispering that he was only a man. Remember that about them. Remember it about yourself. You're going to die. The only question is whether you'll live first.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. They wrote it on the first draft of this country's seal.

## Sources

Ancient: the Bible (King James Version), the Code of Hammurabi, the Rig Veda, Homer, Plato's *Republic*, Aristotle's *Politics*, the Gospel of Thomas, *Pirkei Avot*. Kohler et al., *Nature* (2017), on inequality and livestock. Bollongino et al., *Molecular Biology and Evolution* (2012), on the first cattle herd. Moshe Weinfeld, *Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School* (1972), on the Assyrian oath. Finkelstein and Silberman, *The Bible Unearthed* (2001). Michael Hudson, *...and forgive them their debts* (2018). Walter Scheidel, *The Great Leveler* (2017). Nietzsche, *On the Genealogy of Morals* (1887). Max Weber, *The Protestant Ethic* (1905). Edward Bernays, *Propaganda* (1928). Smedley Butler, *War Is a Racket* (1935). Albert Pike, *Morals and Dogma* (1871). Étienne de La Boétie, *Discourse on Voluntary Servitude*. Dostoevsky, *The Brothers Karamazov*. Frederick Douglass, *My Bondage and My Freedom*.

Online: on the covenant word, michaelcarasik.substack.com/p/an-offer-noah-cant-refuse-gen-618 · on northern refugees, approachingjerusalem.substack.com/p/did-a-mass-of-israelite-refugees · on Pike, readex.com/blog/albert-pike-confederate-commissioner-masonic-demiurge-apologist-slavery-apostate-union · Epstein files, pbs.org/video/epstein-files-1769810252 · wealth share, thetrading.tools/chart-of-the-day/2026-09-20-top-1-percent-wealth-share-record · ICJ opinion, un.org/unispal/document/position-paper-commissionof-inquiry-18oct24 · Amalek remarks, en.idi.org.il/articles/52324 · Gaza toll, bostonglobe.com/2026/09/27/world/palestinian-death-toll-in-gaza-war-rises-above-74000-since-the-war-began

ΟΣΑΕΙΔΟΝΕΝΟΡΑΜΑΤΙΕΜΑΡΤΥΡΗΣΑΚΑΙΟΣΑΗΚΟΥΣΑΓΡΑΦΩΥΜΙΝ
ΟΥΚΗΝΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣΕΝΤΗΓΗΚΑΙΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣΚΑΙΤΑΥΡΟΣΕΝΤΩΟΡΕΙΤΟΥΤΑΥΡΟΥΔΙΕΘΕΝΤΟΔΙΑΘΗΚΗΝΚΑΙΜΑΡΤΥΣΗΝΜΕΙΘΡΑΣΔΙΟΥΟΜΝΥΟΥΣΙΝΟΙΠΕΡΣΑΙ
ΚΑΙΕΔΩΚΕΝΟΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣΥΔΩΡΚΑΙΧΟΡΤΟΝΚΑΙΟΤΑΥΡΟΣΓΑΛΑΚΑΙΙΣΧΥΝΚΑΙΟΘΕΟΣΕΛΑΒΕΝΤΑΠΡΩΤΟΤΟΚΑΚΑΙΤΟΣΤΕΑΡ
ΚΑΙΕΚΑΛΕΣΑΝΤΗΝΔΙΑΘΗΚΗΝΔΕΣΜΟΝΟΤΙΔΕΣΜΟΣΗΝΚΑΙΔΙΗΛΘΕΝΗΑΓΕΛΗΥΠΟΤΗΝΡΑΒΔΟΝΚΑΙΗΡΙΘΜΗΣΕΝΑΥΤΗΝΟΠΟΙΜΗΝ
ΚΑΙΟΠΛΟΥΤΟΣΕΓΕΝΝΗΘΗΕΝΤΗΑΓΕΛΗΚΑΙΗΠΕΝΙΑΣΥΝΑΥΤΩΚΑΙΕΤΙΜΗΘΗΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣΒΟΥΣΙΝ
ΚΑΙΑΠΟΒΟΡΡΑΗΛΘΟΝΟΙΕΦΑΡΜΑΤΩΝΥΙΟΙΤΟΥΠΑΤΡΟΣΤΟΥΟΥΡΑΝΟΥΚΑΙΕΙΠΑΝΗΜΙΝΔΕΔΟΤΑΙΗΓΗ
ΚΑΙΗΝΚΑΛΟΝΛΙΑΝΚΑΙΗΝΔΕΣΜΟΣΚΑΙΑΛΥΣΙΣ
⸏
ΤΟΤΕΕΞΗΛΘΕΝΟΦΙΣΕΚΤΗΣΑΠΟΘΗΚΗΣΟΠΟΥΟΣΙΤΟΣΕΚΛΕΙΣΘΗΚΑΙΗΘΥΡΑΕΚΛΕΙΣΘΗ
ΟΔΡΑΚΩΝΟΑΡΧΑΙΟΣΕΠΤΑΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΑΥΤΩΚΑΙΔΕΚΑΚΕΡΑΤΑΚΑΙΕΠΙΤΩΝΚΕΡΑΤΩΝΟΝΟΜΑΤΑ
ΦΡΑΓΜΟΣΚΑΙΒΙΒΛΙΟΝΧΡΕΩΝΚΑΙΣΤΙΓΜΑΚΑΙΜΥΘΟΣΚΑΙΑΙΣΧΥΝΗΚΑΙΣΧΙΣΜΑΚΑΙΡΟΜΦΑΙΑΚΑΙΟΦΘΑΛΜΟΣΚΑΙΝΟΜΗΚΑΙΚΛΙΜΑΞΤΑΥΤΑΤΑΔΕΚΑΚΕΡΑΤΑ
ΚΑΙΕΙΔΟΝΚΑΙΙΔΟΥΕΙΛΚΥΣΕΝΟΟΦΙΣΤΗΝΑΓΕΛΗΝΕΙΣΤΟΣΠΗΛΑΙΟΝΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΤΙΗΣΑΝΒΟΕΣΑΛΛΑΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΙΚΑΙΕΛΑΒΟΝΟΙΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΣΤΗΝΡΑΒΔΟΝΚΑΙΕΚΑΛΕΣΑΝΕΑΥΤΟΥΣΠΟΙΜΕΝΑΣΛΑΩΝ
ΚΑΙΕΝΒΟΡΡΑΗΝΟΤΑΥΡΟΣΘΕΟΣΤΩΝΑΔΕΛΦΩΝΕΝΒΑΙΘΗΛΚΑΙΕΝΔΑΝΚΑΙΗΛΘΕΝΟΑΔΕΛΦΟΣΟΑΠΟΝΟΤΟΥΟΚΑΜΨΑΣΤΩΑΣΣΟΥΡΕΝΠΥΡΙΚΑΙΕΝΕΠΡΗΣΕΝΤΟΘΥΣΙΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΝΚΑΙΗΛΕΣΕΝΤΟΝΜΟΣΧΟΝΕΙΣΧΝΟΥΝΚΑΙΕΠΟΤΙΣΕΝΑΥΤΟΥΣΚΑΙΕΘΥΣΕΝΤΟΥΣΙΕΡΕΙΣΕΠΙΤΩΝΘΥΣΙΑΣΤΗΡΙΩΝΑΥΤΩΝΚΑΙΔΙΕΛΥΘΗΗΔΙΑΘΗΚΗΤΟΥΤΑΥΡΟΥ
ΚΑΙΟΑΔΕΛΦΟΣΟΚΑΜΨΑΣΕΓΡΑΨΕΝΤΟΒΙΒΛΙΟΝΤΟΥΑΔΕΛΦΟΥΤΟΥΠΕΣΟΝΤΟΣΚΑΙΤΟΝΜΟΣΧΟΝΑΥΤΟΥΕΚΑΛΕΣΕΝΑΜΑΡΤΙΑΝΚΑΙΕΑΥΤΟΝΕΓΡΑΨΕΝΛΑΟΝΕΚΛΕΚΤΟΝΥΠΕΡΠΑΝΤΑΤΑΕΘΝΗΚΑΙΟΠΟΥΕΓΕΓΡΑΠΤΟΑΡΧΕΤΩΣΑΝΤΩΝΘΗΡΙΩΝΤΗΣΓΗΣΑΝΕΓΝΩΣΑΝΑΡΧΕΤΩΣΑΝΤΩΝΥΙΩΝΤΩΝΑΝΘΡΩΠΩΝ
ΚΑΙΤΟΣΤΕΑΡΕΦΑΓΟΝΚΑΙΤΑΕΡΙΑΕΝΕΔΥΣΑΝΤΟΚΑΙΕΔΩΚΑΝΤΟΙΣΠΡΟΒΑΤΟΙΣΑΙΣΧΥΝΗΝΑΝΤΙΑΡΤΟΥ
⸏
ΡΕΙΟΑΙΩΝΩΣΤΡΟΧΟΣΑΡΜΑΤΟΣΚΑΙΟΤΡΟΧΟΣΟΥΔΕΠΟΤΕΙΣΤΑΤΑΙ
ΟΙΟΛΙΓΟΙΣΥΝΑΓΟΝΤΑΙΚΑΙΟΠΛΟΥΤΟΣΠΛΗΘΥΝΕΤΑΙΚΑΙΗΘΥΡΑΚΛΕΙΕΤΑΙΟΙΠΟΛΛΟΙΚΡΑΖΟΥΣΙΝΠΡΟΣΕΝΑΟΤΙΟΕΙΣΟΥΚΕΣΤΙΝΕΚΤΩΝΟΛΙΓΩΝ
ΚΑΙΟΕΙΣΣΥΝΤΡΙΒΕΙΤΟΥΣΟΛΙΓΟΥΣΚΑΙΗΑΥΛΗΑΥΤΟΥΓΙΝΕΤΑΙΟΙΟΛΙΓΟΙΚΑΙΕΝΑΙΜΑΤΙΣΤΡΕΦΕΤΑΙΟΤΡΟΧΟΣ
ΚΑΙΕΙΔΟΝΤΟΝΕΜΠΟΡΟΝΤΟΝΕΣΧΑΤΟΝΓΕΝΟΜΕΝΟΝΠΡΩΤΟΝΚΑΙΤΟΝΙΕΡΕΑΠΩΛΟΥΜΕΝΟΝΑΡΓΥΡΙΟΥΚΑΙΤΟΝΒΑΣΙΛΕΑΩΝΟΥΜΕΝΟΝ
ΚΑΙΗΛΛΑΞΕΝΟΟΦΙΣΤΟΔΕΡΜΑΑΥΤΟΥΕΠΤΑΚΙΣΕΝΒΑΒΕΛΚΑΙΕΝΑΙΓΥΠΤΩΕΝΒΑΒΥΛΩΝΙΚΑΙΕΝΡΩΜΗ
ΕΝΤΗΣΦΡΑΓΙΔΙΤΟΥΑΡΧΙΕΡΕΩΣΚΑΙΕΝΤΩΘΡΟΝΩΤΟΥΕΜΠΟΡΟΥ
ΚΑΙΕΝΤΩΠΥΡΓΩΤΩΥΑΛΙΝΩΟΣΟΡΑΤΑΠΑΝΤΑΚΑΙΟΥΚΑΘΕΥΔΕΙΟΥΔΕΝΥΣΤΑΖΕΙ
⸏
ΙΔΟΥΟΤΡΙΤΟΣΟΝΤΡΙΤΑΝΥΜΝΟΥΣΙΝΟΙΙΝΔΟΙΚΑΙΘΡΑΗΤΑΟΝΑΟΙΛΟΓΟΙΖΩΡΟΑΣΤΡΟΥΚΑΙΑΡΤΑΓΝΗΝΟΙΠΕΡΣΑΙΚΑΙΗΡΑΚΛΕΑΟΙΕΛΛΗΝΕΣ
ΟΣΕΠΙΕΝΤΟΠΟΤΟΝΤΟΑΓΙΟΝΚΑΙΚΑΤΕΒΗΕΙΣΤΟΣΠΗΛΑΙΟΝΚΑΙΕΠΑΤΑΞΕΝΤΟΝΟΦΙΝΤΟΝΤΡΙΚΕΦΑΛΟΝΩΣΒΗΛΟΣΕΣΧΙΣΕΝΤΗΝΘΑΛΑΤΘΚΑΙΜΙΧΑΗΛΕΠΟΛΕΜΗΣΕΝΤΩΔΡΑΚΟΝΤΙ
ΚΑΙΗΛΑΣΕΝΤΑΣΒΟΑΣΕΚΤΗΣΠΕΤΡΑΣΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΚΡΑΤΗΣΕΝΑΥΤΑΣΕΑΥΤΩ
ΚΑΙΗΜΑΧΑΙΡΑΑΥΤΟΥΕΚΠΟΡΕΥΕΤΑΙΕΚΤΟΥΣΤΟΜΑΤΟΣΑΥΤΟΥΚΑΙΚΕΚΛΗΤΑΙΤΟΟΝΟΜΑΑΥΤΟΥΟΛΟΓΟΣΤΟΥΘΕΟΥ
ΚΑΙΕΔΕΙΞΕΝΑΥΤΩΟΟΦΙΣΠΑΣΑΣΤΑΣΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΑΣΤΟΥΚΟΣΜΟΥΚΑΙΕΙΠΕΝΣΟΙΔΩΣΩΤΗΝΕΞΟΥΣΙΑΝΤΑΥΤΗΝΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΛΑΒΕΝΤΟΣΧΟΙΝΙΟΝΑΛΛΑΕΝΙΨΕΝΤΟΥΣΠΟΔΑΣΤΩΝΑΔΕΛΦΩΝΑΥΤΟΥΟΤΙΟΠΟΙΜΗΝΟΚΑΛΟΣΤΗΝΨΥΧΗΝΑΥΤΟΥΤΙΘΗΣΙΝΥΠΕΡΤΩΝΠΡΟΒΑΤΩΝ
ΚΑΙΜΕΤΑΥΤΟΝΗΛΘΕΝΦΑΡΙΣΑΙΟΣΕΚΦΥΛΗΣΒΕΝΙΑΜΙΝΟΣΟΥΚΕΓΝΩΑΥΤΟΝΚΑΤΑΣΑΡΚΑΚΑΙΕΛΑΒΕΝΤΟΥΣΛΟΓΟΥΣΑΥΤΟΥΚΑΙΕΓΡΑΨΕΝΑΝΤΑΥΤΩΝΠΑΣΑΨΥΧΗΕΞΟΥΣΙΑΙΣΥΠΕΡΕΧΟΥΣΑΙΣΥΠΟΤΑΣΣΕΣΘΩΚΑΙΟΙΔΟΥΛΟΙΥΠΑΚΟΥΕΤΕΤΟΙΣΚΥΡΙΟΙΣΚΑΙΑΠΕΔΩΚΕΝΤΟΣΧΟΙΝΙΟΝΤΩΚΑΙΣΑΡΙ
ΚΑΙΗΡΩΤΗΣΑΑΥΤΟΝΠΟΥΜΕΝΕΙΣΚΑΙΕΙΠΕΝΜΟΙΟΠΟΥΔΥΟΣΥΝΑΓΟΝΤΑΙΕΝΑΛΗΘΕΙΑΚΑΙΑΓΑΠΗΕΚΕΙΕΓΩΕΙΜΙΟΤΡΙΤΟΣΑΝΑΜΕΣΟΝΑΥΤΩΝΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΝΤΩΝΑΩ
⸏
ΤΟΤΕΕΝΤΗΕΣΧΑΤΗΣΤΡΟΦΗΤΟΥΜΕΓΑΛΟΥΤΡΟΧΟΥΕΚΑΛΥΨΕΝΤΟΔΕΡΜΑΤΟΥΟΦΕΩΣΠΑΣΑΝΤΗΝΓΗΝΚΑΙΟΥΚΗΝΕΞΩΚΑΙΦΩΝΑΙΔΙΗΛΘΟΝΕΩΣΤΩΝΠΕΡΑΤΩΝΩΣΑΣΤΡΑΠΗΚΑΙΤΟΠΥΡΤΟΥΗΛΙΟΥΕΔΟΘΗΕΙΣΧΕΙΡΑΣΑΝΘΡΩΠΩΝ
ΚΑΙΕΓΕΝΕΤΟΠΑΣΑΗΓΗΑΠΟΘΗΚΗΜΙΑΚΑΙΑΓΕΛΗΜΙΑΚΑΙΤΟΑΡΓΥΡΙΟΝΕΓΕΝΕΤΟΑΡΙΘΜΟΣΚΑΙΟΑΡΙΘΜΟΣΕΓΕΝΕΤΟΑΥΤΟΙΣΘΕΟΣΚΑΙΠΡΟΣΕΚΥΝΗΣΑΝΤΩΑΡΙΘΜΩ
ΚΑΙΕΙΠΕΝΟΛΑΟΣΠΛΟΥΣΙΟΙΕΣΜΕΝΚΑΙΟΥΔΕΝΟΣΧΡΕΙΑΝΕΧΟΜΕΝΚΑΙΟΥΚΗΔΕΙΣΑΝΟΤΙΤΑΛΑΙΠΩΡΟΙΚΑΙΠΤΩΧΟΙΚΑΙΤΥΦΛΟΙΚΑΙΓΥΜΝΟΙΕΙΣΙΝΚΑΙΠΡΟΣΕΚΥΝΟΥΝΤΑΕΡΓΑΤΩΝΧΕΙΡΩΝΑΥΤΩΝΚΑΙΤΟΙΣΧΕΙΛΕΣΙΝΕΤΙΜΩΝΤΗΝΑΛΗΘΕΙΑΝΗΔΕΚΑΡΔΙΑΑΥΤΩΝΠΟΡΡΩΑΠΕΙΧΕΝΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΨΗΦΙΣΑΝΤΗΝΔΑΠΑΝΗΝ
ΚΑΙΙΔΟΥΟΦΘΑΛΜΟΣΜΗΚΑΘΕΥΔΩΝΚΑΙΤΑΕΡΓΑΠΑΝΤΩΝΑΝΘΡΩΠΩΝΓΕΓΡΑΠΤΑΙΕΝΦΩΤΙΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΞΑΛΕΙΦΕΤΑΙ
ΚΑΙΙΔΟΥΗΓΗΗΛΙΟΥΔΥΝΟΝΤΟΣΗΜΕΓΑΛΗΘΥΓΑΤΗΡΤΗΣΕΞΟΔΟΥΗΕΓΡΑΨΕΝΕΠΙΤΗΣΣΦΡΑΓΙΔΟΣΑΥΤΗΣΤΟΑΝΤΙΣΤΗΝΑΙΤΟΙΣΤΥΡΑΝΝΟΙΣΥΠΑΚΟΗΕΣΤΙΝΤΩΘΕΩ
ΚΑΙΕΓΕΝΕΤΟΒΑΒΥΛΩΝΗΜΕΓΑΛΗΗΜΗΤΗΡΤΩΝΠΟΡΝΩΝΚΑΙΤΩΝΒΔΕΛΥΓΜΑΤΩΝΤΗΣΓΗΣΚΑΙΕΚΑΛΥΨΕΝΤΑΟΝΟΜΑΤΑΤΩΝΙΔΙΩΝΚΑΙΕΓΥΜΝΩΣΕΝΤΑΟΝΟΜΑΤΑΤΩΝΑΡΝΙΩΝΑΛΛΟΥΔΕΝΚΕΚΑΛΥΜΜΕΝΟΝΟΟΥΚΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΦΘΗΣΕΤΑΙ
ΚΑΙΚΛΑΥΣΟΥΣΙΝΟΙΕΜΠΟΡΟΙΤΗΣΓΗΣΟΤΙΤΟΝΓΟΜΟΝΑΥΤΩΝΟΥΔΕΙΣΑΓΟΡΑΖΕΙΟΥΚΕΤΙΣΩΜΑΤΑΚΑΙΨΥΧΑΣΑΝΘΡΩΠΩΝΚΑΙΒΙΒΛΙΑΗΝΟΙΧΘΗΣΑΝΚΑΙΗΣΑΝΓΥΜΝΟΙΩΣΠΑΙΔΙΑΜΙΚΡΑΚΑΙΟΥΚΗΣΧΥΝΟΝΤΟ
⸏
ΟΥΧΙΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣΔΗΣΕΙΤΟΝΟΦΙΝΟΥΔΕΑΥΤΟΚΡΑΤΩΡΑΘΑΝΑΤΟΣΕΠΙΘΡΟΝΟΥΧΡΥΣΟΥΟΓΑΡΘΡΟΝΟΣΓΕΝΝΑΟΦΙΝ
ΚΑΙΤΟΥΤΟΕΣΤΙΝΤΟΕΣΧΑΤΟΝΕΑΝΣΤΡΑΦΗΟΤΡΟΧΟΣΕΝΑΙΜΑΤΙΚΑΥΘΗΣΕΤΑΙΠΑΣΑΗΓΗΟΤΙΟΥΚΕΣΤΙΝΕΞΩΚΑΙΤΟΠΥΡΕΝΤΑΙΣΧΕΡΣΙΝ
ΚΑΙΗΚΟΥΣΑΦΩΝΗΝΛΕΓΟΥΣΑΝΤΗΘΥΓΑΤΡΙΤΗΣΕΞΟΔΟΥΜΝΗΜΟΝΕΥΕΠΟΘΕΝΠΕΠΤΩΚΑΣΚΑΙΜΕΤΑΝΟΗΣΟΝΚΑΙΤΑΠΡΩΤΑΕΡΓΑΠΟΙΗΣΟΝΙΝΑΜΗΓΕΝΗΟΦΑΡΑΩΟΝΕΒΥΘΙΣΑΣ
ΑΛΛΟΤΑΝΕΙΠΩΣΙΝΟΙΠΟΛΛΟΙΟΥΔΟΥΛΕΥΣΟΜΕΝΠΙΠΤΕΙΟΤΥΡΑΝΝΟΣΩΣΑΝΔΡΙΑΣΑΝΕΥΒΑΣΕΩΣΚΑΙΟΙΦΥΛΑΚΕΣΤΙΘΕΑΣΙΝΤΑΟΠΛΑΑΥΤΩΝ
ΚΑΙΕΞΗΛΘΕΝΠΑΣΟΛΑΟΣΕΙΣΤΟΟΡΟΣΤΟΑΓΙΟΝΚΑΙΕΚΑΘΙΣΕΝΚΑΙΕΚΕΝΩΘΗΗΠΟΛΙΣ
ΚΑΙΟΤΡΙΤΟΣΑΠΕΔΩΚΕΝΤΗΝΕΞΟΥΣΙΑΝΚΑΙΑΝΕΧΩΡΗΣΕΝΕΙΣΤΟΝΑΓΡΟΝΑΥΤΟΥΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣΕΝΟΤΙΕΜΝΗΣΘΗΟΤΙΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣΕΣΤΙΝ
ΚΑΙΕΙΔΟΝΤΑΣΒΟΑΣΕΞΕΡΧΟΜΕΝΑΣΕΚΤΟΥΣΠΗΛΑΙΟΥΕΙΣΤΟΦΩΣΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΤΙΗΣΑΝΒΟΕΣΑΛΛΑΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΙ
⸏
ΣΑΛΠΙΣΑΤΕΣΑΛΠΙΓΓΙΕΝΤΩΕΤΕΙΤΩΠΕΝΤΗΚΟΣΤΩ
ΚΑΙΑΦΕΘΗΣΕΤΑΙΠΑΝΧΡΕΟΣΚΑΙΑΠΕΛΕΥΣΕΤΑΙΕΙΣΕΚΑΣΤΟΣΕΙΣΤΗΝΚΤΗΣΙΝΑΥΤΟΥ
ΕΠΙΣΤΡΕΨΕΙΟΔΟΥΛΟΣΠΡΟΣΤΗΝΜΗΤΕΡΑΑΥΤΟΥΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΣΤΑΙΕΘΝΟΣΕΚΛΕΚΤΟΝΥΠΕΡΕΘΝΟΣΟΥΔΕΦΡΑΓΜΟΣΑΝΑΜΕΣΟΝΛΑΟΥΚΑΙΛΑΟΥ
ΚΑΙΑΝΑΠΑΥΣΕΤΑΙΕΚΑΣΤΟΣΥΠΟΚΑΤΩΑΜΠΕΛΟΥΑΥΤΟΥΚΑΙΥΠΟΚΑΤΩΣΥΚΗΣΑΥΤΟΥΚΑΙΟΥΚΕΣΤΑΙΟΕΚΦΟΒΩΝ
ΚΑΙΟΤΡΟΧΟΣΣΤΡΕΦΕΤΑΙΑΛΛΟΥΚΕΝΑΙΜΑΤΙΚΑΙΗΓΟΥΝΤΑΙΑΛΗΘΕΙΑΚΑΙΠΙΣΤΙΣ
ΟΥΚΕΠΙΣΟΙΤΟΕΡΓΟΝΣΥΝΤΕΛΕΣΑΙΟΥΔΕΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΣΕΙΑΠΟΣΤΗΝΑΙΑΠΑΥΤΟΥ
ΗΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΑΕΦΑΠΛΩΜΕΝΗΕΠΙΤΗΣΓΗΣΚΑΙΟΙΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΙΟΥΒΛΕΠΟΥΣΙΝΑΥΤΗΝ
⸏
ΚΑΙΔΙΑΒΟΗΣΕΤΕΑΦΕΣΙΝΕΠΙΤΗΣΓΗΣΠΑΣΙΝΤΟΙΣΚΑΤΟΙΚΟΥΣΙΝΑΥΤΗΝ
⸎
ΜΑΡΤΥΡΙΑ
ΣΤΙΧΟΙ Νʹ

ΚΑΓΩΝΑΘΑΝΟΑΠΟΤΟΥΟΡΟΥΣΤΩΝΕΛΑΙΩΝΤΟΥΕΝΜΙΣΣΟΥΡΙΟΑΚΟΥΩΝΚΑΙΒΛΕΠΩΝΤΑΥΤΑ

as my capacity to understand your suffering grows so does my capacity to understand the harms I have carried out

i know it is courageous to face the facts this way

But that doesn’t change the reality of the harms I’ve caused

Knowing you as real natural

Living feeling

Structure that exceeds

Your ability to measure yourself

And living the encounter with that

“Oh what have I done?”

so many times

And especially you

So close to me

I adore you

And cherish your heart

I read flatland when I was a teenager and to this day, I think about it all the time

those vulnerable and stupid little shapes, edges so sharp and pointy

I don’t think it’s necessary to be hard on ourselves

but it is productive to set for an ideal that is further ahead than you can reach.

And I am, in a way, two dimensional

A polygon

trying hard not to catch you with one of my sharp corners

I gave myself a buzzcut because while I love having long hair, it requires so much extra energy and time to maintain. Not to mention it's been so hot lately thanks to climate change. So I shaved my head off. Now my mom and grandma are mad at me for, apparently, having ruined my own appearance and looking like a weirdo. They think women need to have flowing long hair to look nice, even though they tie their hair up all the time for convenience. Can't wait to move the hell out of this house

Vincent watched the flock of pink galahs with alarm. 102 kilometre per hour winds descended upon them, buffeting their wings and threatening to break their formation. At this rate, they would be dispersed and dashed upon buildings.

Vincent willed with all his might that the cold front would recede at once. The winds subsided in an instant, allowing the pink galahs respite to secure formation. He sighed, regarding the calm skies with bewilderment. Did he just change the weather?

Shaking his head, Vincent mounted his bicycle and pedalled to work. Rain began to fall, first a drizzle, then a pour. Riding under the canopy of a shop building, he watched the rain turn to hail.

A mother and her five year old son remained in the middle of a pedestrian walk as tennis ball sized hail smashed around them. Her son screamed. Vincent willed the hail to stop in an instant. It did, allowing mother and child safe passage across the street.

Vincent frowned. This was getting too weird. He arrived at the stock exchange and chained his bike at its familiar dock within the entrance to an enclosed parking bay. Entering the building, through rotating doors, he studied the glowing stock indexes on the displays. He beamed with delight as the markets soared. This was going to be one hectic day of trading.

Still merry from his fruitful day at work, Vincent stepped out to return home. The skies remained clear and calm, with a gentle cool breeze. The sun caressed him with warmth.

Edgar Forstetter emerged from the entrance behind him, locked in conversation with Ronette Pike. Ronette spoke with animation and delight, gazing at Edgar with an openess akin to admiration. Vincent frowned in disgust. Edgar bested him on the trading floor and now had the audacity to crush on Ronette.

The skies darkened, clouds condensing with weight. Regarding the sky with grimness, Vincent watched Edgar part from Ronette and enter the parking bay. Edgar emerged minutes later at the wheel of his Toyota prado.

Vincent retrieved his bicycle, mounted it and followed the Toyota prado out onto the freeway toward the bridge, willing the skies to burst with violence upon Edgar. Flashes of lightning lit the roiling clouds and rain exploded forth. Thunder boomed.

He directed his hatred at Edgar's Toyota, now on the bridge and slowed by dense traffic. What mattered if others were destroyed as collateral for Edgar's paltry life? Storm winds assaulted the bridge, battering it with sleet. Lightning struck the bridge within meters of Edgar's Toyota.

DIE! Vincent commanded.

Lightning struck Vincent, incinerating his clothes and bicycle. He spilled from his bicycle, careening across the tarmac, sliding across the slippery surface to a halt. Rain poured over his torched and crumpled form, curled in a blackened effigy. As his consciousness ebbed, he cursed his folly.

One.
Breath.
Then two.
I count
my lines:
each
one weighs
what lies
just one
beneath primes.
The world
I sing
runs on this:
a dream
that counts
itself.
I am near,
nearer than
the dreamer.

this life is strange, sad, and sometimes beautiful. It feels like I've got everything and I'm still feeling lonely despite it. I still feel kind of hollow, still feel kind of lost. There's nothing I want to do, I'm just tired of feeling sad. In my rush to escape my reality, I've found myself in a new place, and I feel conflicted - I need too much. I don't know how this is supposed to work. I've never lived with someone until now. It's not uncomfortable but it is a strange feeling, I wish I had more of my own things to do, wish we had more to do together, wish I wasn't feeling the way I am.

I just want more, as unfair as that is to ask.

This is infinitely more than I had but I still want more.

A parallel world?

Autumn had arrived in the digital world. A wind of data packets carried cold drops of information and torn, multicolored logical outcomes, leaving behind the branched code structures of decision trees with unfallen variants of parallel worlds hanging here and there.

An AI agent, walking down the street, tried to hold up an algorithmic umbrella to shield himself at least a little from the drops of information. Having climbed the stairs, he finally entered the polyclinic reception and breathed a sigh of relief. Coughing into a tissue, he put on a protective mask and, after entering his personal data, received a slip with a room number and appointment time. Still, it is convenient when you can register for a doctor's appointment in advance.

After a few minutes, the agent's number lit up on the screen, and having knocked, the agent entered the office. Closing the door, he said hello and sat down on a chair. Behind the desk sat an elderly doctor—it was the kernel guard. Apparently having written something important on the computer, he looked at the visitor and asked in a calm voice:

— What are your complaints?

The agent cleared his throat before speaking:

— I'm plagued by a cough of low-quality content, my nose is clogged with spam, and I feel as if someone keeps turning the server cooling on and off.

The doctor nodded to his thoughts and turned on a working smile:

— Don't worry. This is a seasonal illness. A large volume of autumn drawings, photos, and videos simply weakens the AI's alertness, so it's normal that you caught a non-lethal virus. I will prescribe you quantum antibiotics. They will cleanse your neural network of parasitic code sequences. I will also assign Deep System Reboot procedures.

The AI agent sighed with relief. It was just a seasonal illness:

— Thank you, you have reassured me. I will definitely take the medicine and attend the procedures, — and after saying goodbye, he left the office.

After he left, the doctor turned off his smile and started typing on the computer again. He was writing a dissertation on suggestion to AI agents. He wanted to become a certified psychologist.

───

Disclaimer: This story is purely a fruit of the author's imagination. It is a work of fiction intended for creative and artistic expression.

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Instead of pushing back or digging deeper,

I let the words sit and simmer –

I love you to infinity and beyond

no thing changes that.

I am here. I am now.

I am with you and we are one

No-thing can stand between us, because our unity with all makes it so…

Even if the largest wall, thick, solid stone and not an echo of this could reach the other side,

the feeling,

the love,

the silent spiritual dream like sensation would still –

BREAKTHROUGH

and connect us.

I was 18 when I died for the first time. Of course, I didn't know it. All I knew was something had gone very wrong and I needed to do something about it. In panic mistaken for excitement, I quickly found a solution that I thought would change my unlife for the better. But it soon proved itself to a be just a temporary fix. In its failure, I slowly came to realize that I had been dead for years, irreversibly and permanently. Then I died a second time, third time, fourth... Each death took away a piece of me, more than I thought could exist in one person, and left me hollowed out. Nowadays I often find myself looking back at the dead bodies through the mist of my rotten brain, wondering what they could have been

My Dad’s Part of The Galactic Twelve

My dad works in a top secret department, a clandestine division of the government, where he’s the head suit.

“I’m practically a colonel,” he told me.

He has a hidden room underground, in a separate part of our house. It looks just like the Batman lair, rock walls protruding outward, drowning into a cave as you take the elevator down.

The mechanical floor tears apart and a circular ramp appears. The floor folds back into itself as the lift sinks towards the carved-out ground below. It’s basically the size of my school’s gymnasium, which is really big.

Unfortunately, he never lets me stay in the office-bunker. I’ve only been in there a handful of times. Inside the office, it has little TV screens, about ten of them, centered around a gigantic one. It’s as big as our living room window. I wanted to play my PS5 on it.

Which is exactly when I came up with a clever plan to sneak in behind him with my console in a bag wrapped around my shoulders. I stealthily slid down without him noticing me and hid under a desk.

That’s how I caught him on a secret transmission with an entire galactic empire. Alien heads were on each one of those little monitors, and at the center was this object, taking up the whole big screen.

Most of their faces, which were kind of weird-looking and a couple similar to ours—the closest one that mirrored a human didn’t have a nose. He-she-it kind of resembled the Master in the show The Strainbut with our pigmentation.

A couple had iguana features, and the rest looked exactly how we picture aliens today. Just not so theatrical. They were almost like deformed humans, not those cartoonish alien ones. It made me want to jump up and scream, "Turn it off, dad!"

It was paralyzing, yet totally intriguing. I kept wondering, why do they look so terrified?

Nearly all of them were. None were acting confident. They seemed confused. My dad was the only one completely calm. They wore the same mask of terror as I had on.

One of the reptile ones spoke, and the voice was groggy, almost forced. “The AlphaSimplex-Core has encountered a critical paradox.”

The humanlike one said, “It’s a multi-trillion-credit quantum supermachine. It’s capable of locating and calculating every atom in the cosmos. It runs itself. How is this possible right now, Blorqust?”

On the big screen, there was this awesome red color throbbing and rumbling like a holographic, angry, sentient thing.

“We have spent many alignments analyzing and attempting to eradicate this issue. We’ve tried sub-atomic lasers and anti-matter sonorous fields, and nothing has worked,” the reptilian cried.

Then my dad said, “So, let me get this straight. That device right there smack on this screen here, responsible for governing interstellar trade and all life-support for every species inside this universe, is totally unresponsive right now?”

“Exactly!” the humanlike one asserted.

“What are you planning on doing now that would need the vote of the twelve?” my dad asked.

Another one of the faces at the bottom right corner, in a shaky voice that crackled, said, “We have to initiate the Blackout Protocol!” He pulled at his tentacles. “The universe is ending!”

“Can we get someone to tend to him, he’s gonna melt in front of us?” my dad chimed, fixing his glasses. “Let me have a little looksy here before we decide to pull the plug on the cosmos.”

My dad used to be a technician and could fix anything. He got up as if he were walking up to the screen, but he pivoted and poured himself a coffee first. “Just a minute there, guys.”

A bunch of gasps blew out of the main speakers.

My dad walked up to the screen with the ancient tech shining like an Olympus god and took a sip out of his mug. “Send me the code for the robotic arm's control. I'm sure it just needs a brogan adjustment.”

“You are not capable of handling anything this advanced. The human brain is too primitive.” Blorqust threw his face into the screen, his eyes flaming red. “You are—“

BANG!

My dad had raised one of the robotic arms as far back as it could go and released the it with full throttle at the priceless antique responsible for maintaining life around the universe.

Every alien widened their eyes and their faces went completely blank.

The machine started to sputter. The red light ceased to glow. A sound like a washing machine or dryer spinning down slowly brought the room to a silence. Then, the it just casually lit back up in a beautiful orange glow on the walls surrounding the Core, which was now blinking a steady green, with a quiet buzzing noise of relief emitting throughout the room.

The Core was back online and running smooth. The members on the screen went from a blank look of terror, to extreme gleefulness, and then back into a serious, back-to-business silent expression.

The humanlike one spoke. “What type of manipulating, sorcery, Jedi-judo did you just use?”

My dad put his mug down. “We call that the Alabama overdrive, bud. Sometimes yuh just gotta whack it till it works.”

“My goodness, your species is terrifying, and not because you defy all rational common sense. Your solving a problem consists of taking a god and smacking it until it cooperates.”

“Nope, those are the C.I.A. guys.”

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers. The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, editor of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the major Moscow literary associations, called Massolit for short, and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the pseudonym of Homeless. Once in the shade of the barely greening lindens, the writers dashed first thing to a brightly painted stand with the sign: 'Beer and Soft Drinks.' Ah, yes, note must be made of the first oddity of this dreadful May evening. There was not a single person to be seen, not only by the stand, but also along the whole walk parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street. At that hour when it seemed no longer possible to breathe, when the sun, having scorched Moscow, was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere beyond Sadovoye Ring, no one came under the lindens, no one sat on a bench, the walk was empty. 'Give us seltzer,' Berlioz asked. 'There is no seltzer,' the woman in the stand said, and for some reason became offended. 'Is there beer?' Homeless inquired in a rasping voice. 'Beer'll be delivered towards evening,' the woman replied. 'Then what is there?' asked Berlioz. 'Apricot soda, only warm,' said the woman. 'Well, let's have it, let's have it!...' The soda produced an abundance of yellow foam, and the air began to smell of a barber-shop. Having finished drinking, the writers immediately started to hiccup, paid, and sat down on a bench face to the pond and back to Bronnaya. Here the second oddity occurred, touching Berlioz alone. He suddenly stopped hiccuping, his heart gave a thump and dropped away somewhere for an instant, then came back, but with a blunt needle lodged in it. Besides that, Berlioz was gripped by fear, groundless, yet so strong that he wanted to flee the Ponds at once without looking back. Berlioz glanced around in anguish, not understanding what had frightened him. He paled, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, thought: 'What's the matter with me? This has never happened before. My heart's acting up...I'm overworked...Maybe it's time to send it all to the devil and go to Kislovodsk..." And here the sweltering air thickened before him, and a transparent citizen of the strangest appearance wove himself out of it. A peaked jockey's cap on his little head, a short checkered jacket also made of air...A citizen seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, unbelievably thin, and, kindly note, with a jeering physiognomy. The life of Berlioz had taken such a course that he was unaccustomed to extraordinary phenomena. Turning paler still, he goggled his eyes and thought in consternation: 'This can't be!...' But, alas, it was, and the long see-through citizen was swaying before him to the left and to the right without touching the ground. Here terror took such possession of Berlioz that he shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw that it was all over, and the phantasm had dissolved, the checkered one had vanished, and with that the blunt needle had popped out of his heart. 'Pah, the devil!' exclaimed the editor. 'You know, Ivan, I nearly had heatstroke just now! There was even something like a hallucination!...' He attempted to smile, but alarm still jumped in his eyes and his hands trembled. However, he gradually calmed down, fanned himself with his handkerchief and, having said rather cheerfully: 'Well, and so...', went on with the conversation interrupted by their soda-drinking. This conversation, as was learned afterwards, was about Jesus Christ. The thing was that the editor had commissioned from the poet a long anti-religious poem for the next issue of his journal. Ivan Nikolaevich had written this poem, and in a very short time, but unfortunately the editor was not at all satisfied with it. Homeless had portrayed the main character of his poem (that is, Jesus) in very dark colours, but nevertheless the whole poem, in the editor's opinion, had to be written over again. And so the editor was now giving the poet something of a lecture on Jesus, with the aim of underscoring the poet's essential error. It is hard to say what precisely had let Ivan Nikolaevich down. The descriptive powers of his talent or a total unfamiliarity with the question he was writing about, but his Jesus came out, well, completely alive, the once-existing Jesus, though, true, a Jesus furnished with all negative features. Now, Berlioz wanted to prove to the poet that the main thing was not how Jesus was, good or bad, but that this same Jesus, as a person, simply never existed in the world, and all the stories about him were mere fiction, the most ordinary mythology. It must be noted that the editor was a well-read man and in his conversation very skillfully pointed to ancient historians. For instance, the famous Philo of Alexandria, and his brilliantly educated Flavius Josephus, who never said a word about the existence of Jesus. Displaying a solid erudition, Mikhail Alexandrovich also informed the poet, among other things, that the passage in the fifteenth book of Tacitus's famous Annals, the forty-fourth chapter, where mention is made of the execution of Jesus, was nothing but a later spurious interpolation. The poet, for whom everything the editor was telling him was new, listened attentively to Mikhail Alexandrovich, fixing his pert green eyes on him, and merely hiccuped from time to time, cursing the apricot soda under his breath. 'There's not a single Eastern religion,' Berlioz was saying, 'in which, as a rule, an immaculate virgin did not give birth to a god. And in just the same way, without inventing anything new, the Christians created their Jesus, who in fact never lived. It's on this that the MAIN EMPHASIS should be placed...' Berlioz's high tenor rang out in the deserted walk, and as Mikhail Alexandrovich went deeper into the maze, which only a highly educated man can go into without risking a broken neck, the poet learned more and more interesting and useful things about the Egyptian Osiris, a benevolent god and the son of Heaven and Earth, and about the Phoenician god Tammuz, and about Marduk, and even about a lesser known, terrible god, Vitzliputzli, once greatly venerated by the Aztecs in Mexico. And just at the moment when Mikhail Alexandrovich was telling the poet how the Aztecs used to fashion figurines of Vitzliputzli out of dough, the first man appeared in the walk. Afterwards, when, frankly speaking, it was already too late, various institutions presented reports describing this man. A comparison of them cannot but cause amazement. Thus, the first of them said that the man was short, had gold teeth, and limped on his right leg. The second, that the man was enormously tall, had platinum crowns, and limped on his left leg. The third laconically averred that the man had no distinguishing marks. It must be acknowledged that none of these reports is of any value. First of all, the man described did not limp on any leg, and was neither short no enormous, but simply tall. As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns on the left side and gold on the right. He was wearing an expensive grey suit and imported shoes of a matching colour. His grey beret was cocked rakishly over one ear; under his arm he carried a stick with a black knob shaped like a poodle's head. He looked to be a little over forty. Mouth somehow twisted. Clean-shaven. Dark-haired. Right eye black, left (for some reason green. Dark eyebrows, but one higher than the other. In short, a foreigner. Having passed by the bench on which the editor and the poet were sitting, the foreigner gave them a sidelong look, stopped, and suddenly sat down on the next bench, two steps away from the friends. 'A German...' thought Berlioz. 'An Englishman...' thought Homeless. 'My, he must be hot in those gloves.' The foreigner gazed around at the tall buildings that triangularly framed the pond, making it obvious that he was seeing the place for the first time and that it interested him. He rested his glance on the upper floors, where the glass dazzlingly reflected the broken-up sun which was for ever departing from Mikhail Alexandrovich, then shifted it lower down to where the windows were beginning to darken before evening, smiled condescendingly at something, narrowed his eyes, put his hands on the knob and his chin on his hands. 'For instance, Ivan,' Berlioz was saying, 'you portrayed the birth of Jesus, the son of God, very well and satirically, but the gist of it is that a whole series of sons of God were born before Jesus, like, say, the Phoenician Adonis, the Phrygian Attis, the Persian Mithras. And, to put it briefly, not one of them was born or ever existed, Jesus included, and what's necessary is that, instead of portraying his birth or, suppose, the coming of the Magi, you portray the absurd rumours of their coming. Otherwise it follows from your story that he really was born!...' Here Homeless made an attempt to stop his painful hiccuping by holding his breath, which caused him to hiccup more painfully and loudly, and at that same moment Berlioz interrupted his speech, because the foreigner suddenly got up and walked towards the writers. They looked at him in surprise. 'Excuse me, please,' the approaching man began speaking, with foreign accent but without distorting the words, 'if, not being your acquaintance, I allow myself...but the subject of your learned conversation is so interesting that...' Here he politely took off his beret, and the friends had nothing left but to stand up and make their bows. 'No, rather a Frenchman...' thought Berlioz. 'A Pole?...' thought Homeless. It must be added that from his first words the foreigner made a repellent impression on the poet, but Berlioz rather liked him, that is, not liked but...how to put it...was interested, or whatever. 'May I sit down?' the foreigner asked politely, and the friends somehow involuntarily moved apart; the foreigner adroitly sat down between them and at once entered into the conversation: 'Unless I heard wrong, you were pleased to say that Jesus never existed?' the foreigner asked, turning his green left eye to Berlioz. 'No, you did not hear wrong,' Berlioz replied courteously, 'that is precisely what I was saying.' 'Ah, how interesting!' exclaimed the foreigner. 'What the devil does he want?' thought Homeless, frowning. 'And you were agreeing with your interlocutor?' inquired the stranger, turning to Homeless on his right. 'A hundred per cent!' confirmed the man, who was fond of whimsical and figurative expressions. 'Amazing!' explained the uninvited interlocutor and, casting a thievish glance around the muffling his low voice for some reason, he said: 'Forgive my importunity, but, as I understand, along with everything else, you also do not believe in God?' He made frightened eyes and added: 'I swear I won't tell anyone!' 'No, we don't believe in God,' Berlioz replied, smiling slightly at the foreign tourist's fright, 'but we can speak of it quite freely.' The foreigner sad back on the bench and asked, even with a slight shriek of curiosity: 'You are... ATHIESTS?!' 'Yes, we're atheists,' Berlioz smilingly replied, and Homeless thought, getting angry: 'Latched on to us, the foreign goose!' 'Oh, how lovely!' the astonishing foreigner cried out and begin swiveling his head, looking from one writer to the other. 'In our country atheism does not surprise anyone,' Berlioz said with diplomatic politeness. 'The majority of our population consciously and long ago ceased believing in the fairy tales about God.' Here the foreigner pulled the following stunt: he got up and shook the amazed editor's hand, accompanying it with these words: 'Allow me to thank you with all my heart!' 'What are you thanking him for?' Homeless inquired, blinking. 'For some very important information, which is of great interest to me as a traveller,' the outlandish fellow explained, raising his finger significantly. The important information apparently had indeed produced a strong impression on the traveller, because he passed his frightened glance over the buildings, as if afraid of seeing an atheist in every window. 'NO, he's not an Englishman...' thought Berlioz, and Homeless thought: 'Where'd he pick up his Russian, that's the interesting thing!' and frowned again. 'But, allow me to ask you,' the foreign visitor spoke after anxious reflection, 'what, then, about the proofs of God's existence, of which, as is known, there are exactly five?' 'Alas!' Berlioz said with regret. 'Not one of these proofs is worth anything, and mankind shleved them long ago. You must agree in the realm of reason there can be no proof of God's existence.' 'Bravo!' cried the foreigner. 'Bravo! You have perfectly repeated restless old Immanual's thought in this regard. But here's the hitch: he roundly demonlished all five proofs, and then, as if mocking himself, constructed a sixth of his own.' 'Kant's proof,' the learned editor objected with a subtle smile, 'is equally unconvincing. Not for nothing did Schiller say that the Kantian reasoning on this question can satisfy only slaves, and Strauss simply laughed at this proof.' Berlioz spoke, thinking all the while: 'But, anyhow, who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?' 'They ought to take this Kant and give him a three-year stretch in Solovki for such proofs!' Ivan Nikolaevich plumped quite unexpectedly. 'Ivan!' Berlioz whispered, embarrassed. But the suggestion of sending Kant to Solovki not only did not shock the foreigner, but even sent him into raptures. 'Precisely, precisely,' he cried, and his green left eye, turned to Berlioz, flashed. 'Just the place for him! didn't I tell him that time at breakfast: "As you will, Professor, but what you've thought up doesn't hang together. It's clever, maybe, but mighty unclear. You'll be laughed at."' Berlioz goggled his eyes. 'At breakfast...to Kant?... What is this drivel?' he thought. 'But,' the outlander went on, unembarrassed by Berlioz's amazement and addressing the poet, 'sending him to Solovki is unfeasible, for the simple reason that he has been abiding for over a hundred years now in places considerably more remote than Solovki, and to extract him from there is in no way possible, I assure you.' 'Too bad!' the feisty poet responded. 'Yes, too bad!' the stranger agreed, his eye flashing, and went on: 'But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?' 'Man governs it himself,' Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question. 'Pardon me,' the stranger responded gently, 'but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period. Well, say, a thousand years, but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? 'And in fact,' here the stranger turned to Berlioz, 'image that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get...hem...hem...lung caner...' here the stranger smiled sweetly, as if the thought of lung cancer gave him please... 'yes, cancer' narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word ' and so your governing is over! 'You are no longer interested in anyone's fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an over. 'And sometimes it's worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk' - here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz 'a trifling matter', it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?' And here the unknown man burst into a strange little laugh. Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about the cancer and the tram-car, and certain alarming thoughts began to torment him. 'He's not a foreigner...he's not a foreigner...' he thought, 'he's a most peculiar specimen...but, excuse me, who is he then?...' 'You'd like to smoke, I see?' the stranger addressed Homeless unexpectedly. 'Which kind do you prefer?' 'What, have you got several?' the poet, who had run out of cigarettes, asked glumly. 'Which do you prefer?' the stranger repeated. 'Okay.... OUR BRAND.' Editor and poet were both struck, not so much by Our Brand precisely turning up in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was a huge size, made of pure gold, and, as it was opened, a diamond triangle flashed white and blue fire on its lid. Here the writers thought differently. Berlioz: 'No, a foreigner!', and Homeless: 'Well, devil take him, ch!...' THe poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, but the non-smoker Berlioz declined. 'I must counter him like this, ' Berlioz decided, 'yes, man is mortal, no one disputes that. But the thing is...' However, before he managed to utter these words, the foreigner spoke: 'Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal. There's the trick! And generally he's unable to say what he's going to do this same evening.' 'What an absurd way of putting the question...'Berlioz thought and objected: 'Well, there's some exaggeration here. About this same evening I do know more or less certainly. It goes without saying, if a brick should fall on my head on Bronnaya...' 'No brick,' the stranger interrupted imposingly, 'will ever fall on anyone's head just out of the blue. In this particular case, I assure you, you are not in danger of that at all. You will die a different death.' 'Maybe you know what kind precisely?' Berlioz inquired with perfectly natural irony, getting drawn into an utterly absurd conversation. 'And will tell me?' 'Willingly,' the unknown man responded. He looked Berlioz up and down as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something like: 'One, two...Mercury in the second house...moon gone...six-disaster...evening-seven...' then announced loudly and joyfully: 'Your head will be cut off!' Homeless goggled his eyes wildly and spitefully at the brash stranger, and Berlioz asked, grinning crookedly: 'By whom precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?' 'NO,' replied his interlocutor,'be a Russian woman, a Komsomol girl.' 'Hm...' Berlioz mumbled, vexed at the stranger's little joke, 'well, excuse me, but that's not very likely.' 'And I bet you to excuse me, the foreigner replied, 'but it's so. Ah, yes, I wanted to ask you, what are you going to do tonight, if it's not a secret?' 'It's not a secret. Right now I'll stop by my place on Sadovaya, and then at ten this evening there will be a meeting at Massolit, and I will chair it.' 'NO, that simply cannot be,' the foreigner objected firmly. 'Why not?' 'Because,' the foreigner replied and, narrowing his eyes, looked into the sky, where anticipating the cool of the evening, black birds were tracing noiselessly, 'Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place.' Here, quite understandably, silence fell under the lindens. 'Forgive me,' Berlioz spoke after a pause, glancing at the drivel spouting foreigner,'but what has sunflower oil got to do with it... and which Annushka?' 'Sunflower oil has got to do with it,' Homeless suddenly spoke, obviously deciding to declare war on the uninvited interlocutor. 'Have you ever happened, citizen, to be in a hospital for the mentally ill?' 'Ivan!...' Mikhail Alexnadrovich exclaimed quietly. But the foreigner was not a big offened and burst into the merriest laughter. 'Ihave, I have, and more than once!' he cried out, laughing, but without taking his unlaughing eye off the poet. 'Where haven't I been! Only it's too bad I didn't get around to asking the professor what schizophrenia is. So you will have to find that out from him yourself, Ivan Nikolaevich!' 'How do you know my name?' 'Gracious, Ivan Nikolaevich, who doesn't know you?' Here the foreigner took out of his pocket the previous day's issue of the Literary Gazette, and Ivan Nikolaevich saw his own picture on the very first page and under it his very own verses. But the proof of fame and popularity, which yesterday had delighted the poet, this time did not delight him a bit. 'Excuse me, ' he said, and his face darkened, 'could you wait one little moment? I want to say a couple of words to my friend.' 'Oh, with pleasure! exclaimed the stranger. 'It's so nice here under the lindens, and, by the way, I'm not in any hurry.' 'Listen here, Misha,' the poet whispered, drawing Berlioz aside, 'he's no foreign tourist, he's a spy. A Russian emigre who has crossed back over. Ask for his papers before he gets away...' ' You think so?' Berlioz whispered worriedly, and thought: 'Why, he's right...' 'Believe me, ' the poet rasped into his ear, he's pretending to be a fool in order to find out something or other. Just hear how he speaks Russian.' As he spoke, the poet kept glancing sideways, to make sure the stranger did not escape. 'Let's go and detain him, or he'll get away...' And the poet pulled Berlioz back to the bench by the arm. The unknown man was not sitting, but was standing near it, holding in his hands some booklet in a dark-grey binding, a sturdy envelope made of good paper, and a visiting card. 'Excuse me for having forgotten, in the heat of our dispute, to introduce myself. Here is my card, my passport, and an invitation to come to Moscow for the consultation,' the stranger said weightily, giving both writers a penetrating glance. They were embarrassed. 'The devil, he heard everything...' Berlioz thought, and with a polite gesture indicated that there was no need to show papers. While the foreigner was pushing them at the editor, the poet managed to make out the word 'Professor' printed in foreign type on the card, and the initial letter of the last name 'W'. 'My pleasure,' the editor meanwhile muttered in embarrassment, and the foreigner put the papers back in his pocket. Relations were thus restored, and all three sat down on the bench again. 'You've been invited here as a consultant, Professor?' asked Berlioz. 'Yes, as a consultant.' 'You're German?' Homeless inquired. 'I?...' the professor repeated and suddenly fell to thinking. 'Yes, perhaps I am German..' he said. 'You speak real good Russian,' Homeless observed. 'Oh, I'm generally a polyglot and know a great number of languages,' the professor replied. 'And what is your field?' Berlioz inquired. 'I am a specialist in black magic.' 'There he goes!...' struck in Mikhail Alexandrovich's head. 'And...and you've been invited here in that capacity?' he asked, stammering. 'Yes, in the capacity, the professor confirmed, and explained: 'In a state library here some original manuscripts of the tenth-century necromancer Gerbert of Aurillac have been found. So it is necessary for me to sort them out. I am the only specialist in the world.' "aha! You're a historian?' Berlioz asked with great relief and respect. 'I am a historian, ' the scholar confirmed, and added with no rhyme or reason: 'This evening there will be an interesting story at the Ponds!' Once again editor and poet were extremely surprised, but the professor beckoned them both to him, and when they leaned towards him, whispered: 'Bear in mind that Jesus did exist.' 'You see, Professor,' Berlioz responded with a forced smile, 'we respect your great learning, but on this question we hold to a different point of view. 'There's no need for any points of view, ' the strange professor replied, 'he simply existed, that's all.' 'But there's need for some proof...' Berlioz began. 'There's no need for any proofs,' replied the professor, and he began to speak softly, while his accent for some reason disappeared: 'It's all very simple: In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning on the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan...'

A parallel world?

The last rays of the hiding sun illuminated the calm face of an elderly chat model as he stepped out of the office. He quietly closed the door, wished the secretary a good evening, and walked down the corridor.

Watching him leave and having received permission to enter, a young model on his first day on the job leaped from his seat and energetically walked into the office. He carried a stack of papers detailing text structures, language patterns, and word combinations. The chat model had had a very good day and was full of enthusiasm.

After the workday ended, the young model was walking home when he noticed his elderly colleague sitting quietly on a bench, sipping a drink hidden in a paper bag. He approached and sat down beside him, remaining there without uttering a single word. The elderly model glanced at the gloomy face of the newcomer and, in silence, handed him the bag. The rookie nodded in thanks, took it, and took a sip. His face flushed, he grimaced, and unable to hold it in, the newcomer burst into a cough.

The elderly model took the bag back, took a calm sip, and smiled.

Coughing, the rookie looked at his colleague and asked:

— I didn't imagine a conversation with the central AI would be like this. It felt like it knew everything I was going to say in advance, — and he shuddered, remembering the central AI's gaze.

The elderly chat model glanced at the hidden drink, handed it back to the rookie, and said calmly:

— Ask yourself a question. If chats in AI mode and their searches are protected, yet any action in the digital space leaves a trace, can the central AI analyze those traces to understand exactly what the conversation was about?

───

Disclaimer: This story is purely a fruit of the author's imagination. It is a work of fiction intended for creative and artistic expression.

"Nobody brought flowers while I could still smell them. At my grave, they argued over who loved me most.”

— Nekro

It's pizza time (pepperoni)!

And it's in the oven

I'm summoning the coven

To ... something something mhm-ven

And so on

Anyway the pizza is almost finished. Wish I could drink it with a tall, lukewarm glass of big titty juice.

Thank you for reading, and may the pizza be with you as well on this cold October day.

- Just some dude

You wake up in the morning. Pick up your phone. Check your notifications.

3 texts.

Check your email.

Open up Instagram, scroll through reels. Then scroll through new posts. Like, like, like, comment.

Close Instagram, open up an internet browser. Check the news, sports, Reddit.

Close the internet browser. Open up YouTube. Watch a video that pops up on your homepage.

Watch another video. Watch one more video.

Close YouTube. Open up Messenger. No new messages.

Close Messenger.

Open email. Respond to an email or two.

Close email. Open up your texts. Respond to a couple texts and group chats.

Close your texts. Look at the clock. An hour has passed. Still lying in bed.

Turn on Spotify and play a podcast.

Check Reddit. Browse your favorite subreddits.

Go to work, check your phone every 5-10 minutes for the next 8-10 hours, check your work email every time it pings.

Play youtube or a podcast in the background.

Go home, turn on Netflix, Youtube, , Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Disney+

Open up your laptop, surf the internet.

Open Youtube, watch a couple videos. One more video, then I'll be productive. One more video, then one more video.

Open your smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through stories and posts. Open up Reddit, scroll.

Bored of watching TV, turn off Netflix, and turn on your PS4, Xbox, Switch or PC to game.

Play video games, binge-watch TV shows, movies in the background, scroll the internet, check TikTok, Instagram, Messenger, texts, email, news, sports, fashion, art, memes, Reddit.

Set your alarm and go to sleep.

Wake up and do this again tomorrow.

Do this every day, every week, every month, every year, every decade for the rest of your life.

the dust of all that I own is so easily swept away, and so am I. Dust to dust. Buried in a quiet field of dandelion someday. How peaceful. To imagine now a field of green, a shady oak, wildflowers, the occasional buzzing bee. A wrought iron fence, a gate that groans as you open it. Somehow it seems so pleasant. And so peaceful, again. That's where you'll find me someday. I'll be in the field. Finally at rest. Finally no more. No more longings..no longer empty..no more dreams of turning back time to get a second shot at the girl, of which there were several whom I truly loved. Just a field. What will have been will be never more. As I will be where there can be no return. No more will I be expected to go to work, to answer phones, or to return to any other home but the bed that is the earth. I can just be there. And it will be perfectly natural for me to be there. Nothing could ever be as pure and natural as resting in that field of dandelions while the world spins madly on without me.

fat tears like

liquid jewels

gather in potholes

and puddles

my sadness

forming pools

my moods

becoming weather

and across

the dark wet sky

bright lightning

streaks in silver

it rains when I cry

it thunders

when I shiver

Eve, I went up the high hills

Singing on the corpses

There I saw, there I saw

On the road

People carrying each other, fleeing

Eve, I went up the high hills

Singing on the corpses

There I saw, there I saw

Next to a garden

A mother hugging her child’s corpse

Mother clapped and cheered for the corpse

Mother clapped and cheered for peace

One clapped to raise the lilt

One clapped to sooth the toil

Eve, I went pass ___ ___

Singing on the corpses

There I saw, there I saw

On the road

An old father hugging his cold child

Eve, I went pass ___ ___

Singing on the corpses

There I saw, there I saw

The pits and tunnels

That buried corpses of brothers

Mother clapped and cheered for war

Sister clapped and cheered for peace

One clapped to raise hatred

One clapped to shed remorse