My new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is out now. Some of the essay below is inspired by its Chapter 8, on the changing nature of work and its social dimensions.

There is a small machine on my desk in Washington, D.C. It runs AI agents around the clock, humming quietly, sending me intermittent messages about what it is “working” on. It drafts. It summarizes. It reasons, plans, reports back. By some definitions, it works harder than I do.

But nothing it does is doing anything to it. It is not becoming anything.

I sometimes look at it and think: That machine has never worked a day in its life.

Explaining why I believe that—and why the kind of work humanity does both now and in the days ahead will determine the future of our civilization—is the purpose of this essay and of the publication it announces.

Lewis Mumford thought the machine age did not begin in a factory. “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age,” he wrote in 1934 — and the clock began in the monastery. The Benedictines rang bells to call monks to prayer at the appointed hours, and to keep the hours of worship they invented the habit of mechanical time. Then the habit escaped the cloister. The clock moved from the bell tower to the counting house, and time became money. But the first machine was built to order work around prayer.

Every age has been forced to ask its own version of the question: What is the relationship between work and the whole of life, and what kind of work should we be engaging in?

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII confronted the “new things” of industrial modernity in the encyclical Rerum Novarum. It was published at a time when technology, capital, labor, politics, and ideology had been rearranged faster than the moral imagination could grasp. Rerum Novarum tackles the great social questions related to these changes—namely, how to defend the dignity of the human person in a world newly organized by industrial capital, wage labor, and the logic of production.

By the 1930s, amid depression and mass unemployment, with the stock market having recently collapsed and the lure of communism strong, the social questions had sharpened into the “worker” question. The Catholic Worker movement, with its publication sold for a penny and its houses of hospitality, emerged as a concrete witness to the dignity of labor and the irreducible worth of the person in an economy tempted to treat workers as expendable.

By the 1980s, networked computation opened the Information Age, and the question shifted again: What happens to the human person when information becomes the dominant material of economic and cultural life? How can we prevent or inoculate ourselves from becoming commoditized? And with all of the world’s information soon at our fingertips, what is even worth paying attention to and pursuing?

Today we stand at the dawn of the Intelligence Age. AI does not merely store, transmit, or organize information. It imitates the activities we have long associated with human intelligence: writing, a particular form of reasoning, designing, composing, advising, judging, creating. And so the old question returns in its most radical form yet. Not only, “What will happen to jobs?” but: What is work for? What is the human person? What forms of intelligence, creativity, responsibility, love, and calling cannot and must not be outsourced to a machine?

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And yet this powerful new technology comes with enormous promise and possibilities for humanity: it has the potential to cure diseases (and already is), solve difficult problems in math and physics that are unlocking the mystery of the cosmos, and help humans make connections across domains of knowledge that they wouldn’t otherwise make. While there are uses where these technologies are obviously dangerous—people seeking therapeutic or spiritual advice from the machine, for example—there must be a way to navigate this world without resorting to knee-jerk reactions, fear-mongering, or a failure to grapple with real problems that AI might be able to help address.

Pro-tech and anti-tech narratives are each creating problems of their own. There is a need for serious discernment—a kind of discernment which starts, in some sense, with spiritual freedom. That means a willingness to examine our conscience and the communal discernment of the communities of which we are a part; to chart a new path forward that is not driven by various forms of ideological and economic capture, or a compromised moral imagination. I have also noticed the twin pressures of coercion and conformity creeping over into the Church, where dogmas become prudential judgments and prudential judgments become dogmas.

Grounding discussions in work—and in specific forms of human work—cuts through the abstract ways that technological advancement is so often spoken about. It’s generative to think seriously about the application of AI for a writer vs. a surgeon vs. a blacksmith; I’m not sure another panel on the nature of consciousness is helpful, or at least has diminishing returns relative to the real anxieties and practical problems human workers are facing on a daily basis. Addressing them is one of the things we will do here.

There is no doubt that a myriad of forces threaten the integrity of the human person today, and let’s be sober about them. Depersonalizing technology masquerades as something you can personalize: your AI, your feed, your profile. Political energy flows toward tribal “alignment,” sorting people into categories and types, prioritizing positions over the development of relationships. Religiosity increasingly comes in the form of content, separating word from action. The family is strained by economic conditions that make it harder for parents to manage the demands of work and home—with many opting not to start families at all. A dearth of beauty and aesthetic intentionality makes everything feel the same, driven by weak mimesis rather than the aliveness of the spirit. And artificial intelligence fragments the head, the heart, and the will—while not even getting the head part right. (Intelligence is identified with ratio, the kind of reasoning a computer is good at, rather than the human mode of knowing, which includes a connaturality, a communing with a thing. This is why sex was a way of “knowing” in the original Hebrew of Genesis: Adam knew Eve.)

We are siloed, thinned out, and fragmented, and all of the focus on “progress” is obscuring the death of the human spirit and the death of work. But we cannot afford to labor in vain any longer.

I believe the sphere of human life where all of these forces play out—and where we must focus our attention with great urgency—is work.

The discourse so far has focused on disruption to the job market, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying that 50% of white-collar entry-level jobs could be eliminated in one to five years. We don’t know if that’s true yet, and the economic stakes are real: our social fabric could be torn as wealth disparity increases. But this kind of talk, even if he’s right, is superficial. It equates work with a “job,” and it equates the coming disruption with merely economics rather than the one that is more likely: a disruption at the level of the soul.

The deeper questions are about the nature of work itself and a vision of the human person that respects the greatness of the human spirit and our lofty vocation to participate in the creative power of God as creatures made in His image and likeness. Through work, we don’t just make more; we become more.

An appropriate vision of the human person, and of human work relative to machine work, will give us a framework for evaluating technology as something that is both a tool and an environment—and it will help us ask whether that environment is fit for the human person who wants to become fully alive. As we do a better job of defining and defending a specifically human mode of work, we will clear up some of the confusion surrounding artificial intelligence: the loose, theologically-tinged language that anthropomorphizes it on one hand and flattens the human person to an interchangeable cog on the other.

Work has been and always will be a central part of what it means to be human, ever since we were given the command to cultivate the earth in the book of Genesis. Technology will never eliminate this need. I understand that there are plenty of Baconian Christians out there who see technology as possibly eliminating human suffering and even “reversing the effects of original sin”—I once heard a Silicon Valley entrepreneur cite the removal of the pains of childbirth as proof. I’m all for technology that lessens human suffering. But it will never eliminate it, and learning how to suffer well will remain something every person must be prepared to do.

Work is also a deeply spiritual activity. Ora et labora, work and prayer, was central to the Benedictine tradition because work, properly understood, can become a form of prayer. That is the only way to “pray unceasingly,” as Paul implores the early Christians. Prayer can be active. Work must be sanctified. And to be sanctified, it must be done with human excellence. One should not give to God gifts that represent shoddy labor. We give the gift of our best—to one another, and to God.

The Three Dimensions of Work

Work doesn’t have just one dimension, but at least three.1 I’ll lay out the three major ones here.

The objective dimension everyone knows: it is the output of the work, the thing you’re actually doing or making. The blacksmith makes a tool. The making of the tool is the objective dimension.

But work also has a subjective dimension, which is more foundational. The subjective dimension is what the work is doing to the worker. By engaging in his work, the blacksmith may develop bodily fitness and specific virtues such as diligence, patience, and fortitude.

Different kinds of work form persons in different ways—office work is very different from landscaping in how it shapes a human being. And not all work is equal in its ability to form persons well. We have placed such importance on the objective dimension of work—just look at the way AI is spoken about, in terms of everything it will be able to “do”—that we’ve neglected the subjective dimension almost entirely.

We must evaluate technologies by the subjective dimension too: how are they forming, or de-forming, the human person? Are they building virtues, or stripping them away? The economy is for man, not man for the economy; likewise: technology is for humanity.

We are not its servant, nor is our fundamental task to “advance” technology to the point where life becomes a technological project rather than a human and spiritual one. Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.

Third, work has a transcendent dimension. When asked why they were crafting a gargoyle on the very top of a great cathedral—so that absolutely nobody on the ground would ever see it, centuries before planes or skyscrapers—the workers replied simply: “God sees it.” And therefore they made the best gargoyle they possibly could. Work can be sanctified. Work done with excellence is a gift—not just to ourselves, but to others and even to God. The loss of the transcendent dimension of work has led to the loss of magnificent and magnanimous projects like the building of cathedrals, or whatever their modern-day equivalent is, in which we may not live long enough to see the completion of the thing we’re building.

The Opening of the Human Spirit

In 1987, Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind, arguing that modern education was leading to moral relativism and a collapse of civic virtue. But as the cost of cognition trends toward zero, is there not an opportunity to probe the most essential human questions—metaphysical and spiritual questions that everyone will have to begin asking, and in many cases already are? The closing of the American mind may very well lead to the opening of the American Spirit—and indeed, the human spirit, worldwide.

America has a particular responsibility here. As the country now clearly leading the development of the most powerful technology in history—now routinely described as “God-like”—it falls on Americans to develop spiritual lives capable of wielding this power well.

But before such world-historical concerns, it would be good to return to the most intimate parts of life.

The family is the most important unit in our society—a communion of persons, where souls are formed and where we learn the value of work. Work is meant to support the family and help it thrive; it should not prevent the formation of a family, or generate so much anxiety and disorder that it rips one apart.

The Church’s idea of a “living wage”—which all humans should be able to earn through their work—is not about people being able to earn enough money to support a specific ‘lifestyle’; in its original conception, this idea was ordered to the good of the family. It is not a living wage so that people can live out their fantasies; it is meant for the development of this most fundamental societal unit and all of the many goods that flow from it. This goal need not be achieved through wage-earning labor alone: if a technology like AI can help the family flourish by reducing tedious or soul-crushing work, it should be embraced. Again, the abundant life of the human person is the measure.

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Today, in many ways, technology is thinning out family life. People are “alone together” with heads buried in phones. The rites of passage that used to happen in the family and through work are migrating to thinner forms online: ubiquitous pornography has replaced the normal avenues of sexual discovery; “finding a tribe” happens in the digital realm before a person has developed a solid sense of who they are; and young people join a public “discourse” that asks nothing of them, curating feeds that inoculate them from the friction essential to maturity. The family has suffered as a result.

Many of the assaults on the family could be defended against—even counter-attacked—if work is re-framed as a social activity as much as an economic one, and if we evaluated its effects by what it does to human relationships, starting with the family.

Work and Beauty

Work is also the sphere in which design, aesthetics, and art are shaped. Because it forms the human person, it is the primary place—after the home—where we learn sensibilities and develop taste. Here I do not mean taste in the superficial sense of “noticing something cool before other people do”, the anti-mimetic tastemaker who starts trends or is looked to as an influencer, but taste as something ordered to reality itself: developing a taste for the true, the good, and the beautiful.

There is a deep connection between aesthetics and ethics and the quality of human life itself. Work is one of the primary places we discover it. Ask someone who has worked in poor conditions!

The data center is not ugly by accident; it is a monument to work conceived entirely in the objective dimension—pure output, no formation, no one becoming anything. The human person must work in a way that contributes to the building up and beautification of the world.

The Works of Mercy Are Work

We often separate acts of charity from work: “philanthropy,” “service,” “giving back.” And yet these acts are among the most important human works. The Christian tradition calls some of them works of mercy, physical and spiritual: burying the dead, visiting the imprisoned, feeding the hungry. If you’ve ever done one of these things, you know that it’s real work.

We have romanticized these activities, as if people do them for the warm and fuzzy feelings they produce. But they are a form of human work that we cannot rely on machines to do for us—especially not when calculating, utilitarian approaches to profoundly human problems risk tending toward justifications for euthanasia and other assaults on life. Machines cannot judge whether life is “worth living”, and in fact the very question betrays the problem. Life is worth living. I have always been struck that Bishop Fulton Sheen titled his primetime broadcast in the 1950s “Life Is Worth Living”, because it originally seemed too basic and uncreative to me—but I’ve come to see it as the perfect title of the show. Even back then, he recognized it as the most fundamental message to share, repeatedly.

My father has dementia, as many of you know. More than once, when I’ve discussed his care with an AI, its framing drifted toward cost-benefit analysis—weighing the burden of his condition against the value of his remaining life. Never mind that he helped give me life, and raised me. Caring for him has produced nothing the machine could measure: no output, no deliverable, nothing "accomplished." But it has worked on me more than anything else in my life. It is the subjective dimension of work in its purest form—and it is precisely the form of work a machine cannot register, because a machine cannot be changed by what it does. What is the end of this utilitarian thinking? I can’t see the exact path, but I can see that it’s dark.

We must expand our conception of work to include these most human activities: one person serving another, even for no economic profit. A world in which spiritual profit is not valued cannot be sustained. In such a world, work turns inward, toward zero-sum games with no telos beyond the immediate opportunity for gain. That is not work fit for immortal souls.

The unhelpful distinction between “for-profit” and “not-for-profit” is part of the confusion. A deeper understanding of work—and of the way all of it should be profitable in some form—will help humanity exercise its gifts more creatively, without channeling everything into silos of “revenue-making” and “service.” We will come to see ourselves as building an economy of value in all its forms, in which progress is measured as much (or more) by how well we care for our most vulnerable citizens as by how many new millionaires are minted in Silicon Valley.

Human Work

My friend Andreas likes to tell the story of his unexpected encounter with a silverback gorilla on a safari in Africa. Andreas is 6’9”, a former Swiss Guard. A big dude. But the gorilla was far bigger—and it identified Andreas as the greatest threat because he was the largest member of the group. During their face-off, Andreas remembers marveling at the gorilla’s likeness to himself. The great beast eventually backed off once he knew his family was safe, but Andreas couldn’t stop thinking about him for days. At one point, he had a revelation: despite sharing so much of the same DNA, one of the key differences between him and that gorilla was that the gorilla had never worked a day in his life.

The machine on my desk shares none of my DNA, and it imitates me far more convincingly than the gorilla ever could. But the gorilla and the machine have this in common: neither works, because neither becomes.

The gorilla grows—larger, stronger, dominant—but only into what a gorilla already is. Its life is a closed circle. Human work can break the circle: it can become a participation in a life greater than our own, drawing us upward through what we do. It isn’t always. That is precisely what must be recovered.

Work that is intentional and spiritual—human work—belongs to us alone. The monks knew it every time the bell rang. That is what is at stake.

What’s Coming

The Cluny Institute will soon be launching The Human Worker, a new publication on vocation, formation, technology, and the human person. Because you already read my work here, you’ll receive it automatically; you can unsubscribe from it any time without affecting anything else. I hope you’ll stick around, because this is the most exciting development of Cluny so far, and my own writing will be oriented around this most fundamental question. You’ll be able to find much of it in The Human Worker—and we’ll be seeking others who want to contribute to the mission.

Its mission is the same one the Cluny Journal has had from day one:

The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

Thank you for reading.

Order The One and the Ninety-Nine, out now.

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Two brief notes before this week’s essay. 1) THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE, my new book about identity, social contagion, and conscience in the face of conformity, is out now. 2) I’m looking for a Chief of Staff to join me full-time—ideally based in either the Washington, DC, or West Michigan areas (or willing to relocate). The COS will be involved in everything from the full life-cycle of a new book to helping build a cultural institution from the ground up. It doubles as an apprenticeship. If you or someone you know is interested, please get in touch. Most importantly: Happy Fourth of July!

With Silicon Valley’s obsession with the word agency lately, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the example given by Rocco Buttiglione that shows the relationship between freedom and responsibility—because it helps shatter the myth of agency as something individual, originating in a subject. That is the Romantic Lie version of agency.

His story is one that I’ve lived many times: A friend asks me to go hiking in the Shenandoah Valley over the weekend. I’m torn. But my answer to him is that of any married man who isn’t completely insane: “Let me check with my wife first.”

The truth is: I do not know what I want unless I know what my wife wants. Why? Because I desire the common good—in this case, the good of my family. I also have imperfect information, and I have to consult with my family to even know what’s at stake over the weekend in many cases: the birthday parties I’m not aware of, the soccer match, the family dinner. I can’t know what I desire unless I know what they desire, because ultimately their wills and my will must achieve some basic shared orientation.

Both desire and my “agency” are deeply connected to responsibility. When they become untethered—when I’m agencymaxxing my personal freedom, as opposed to thinking of agency-in-community, or agency with responsibility—the result is not mere selfishness but also the weakening or destruction of bonds which connect me to something greater than myself.

That’s a crucial feature of agency to reflect on during this weekend as we celebrate our freedom as Americans. I believe we’ve largely lost the communal rites of passage that bind us to one another with a shared sense of responsibility.

I ask you: what is the thing that every American does that forms them in their rite of passage to becoming an American? Can you name one? I don’t mean something that can easily be performative, like the pledge of allegiance—which I think was an ineffective ritual even when it was widespread in schools during my childhood. I mean something difficult, bonding, formative, that forms civic and patriotic virtues and goes deep into the marrow. I can’t name one, and that’s a problem.

Other countries have an answer, of course: a year or two of mandatory military service. I'm not advocating for that here. But notice that it's an answer—a real one, with real sacrifice—and we don't have anything like it.

I’m talking about communal rites that bond people across party lines, across religious commitments, across niche hobbies and interests. The World Cup is not powerful enough to do that—in part because we don’t have to sacrifice anything to cheer for the USA. It feels good, it’s fun, but it’s not developing the kind of thick desire for genuine communion that helps people endure challenges with a strong sense of solidarity.

If anything, AI is accelerating the “agency as an individual power” narrative, with the future “one person billion dollar company” being an exemplar of that mentality. If that is the goal, what will we become? If I now have an Archimedean lever long enough to move the entire world (through my “agents”), where does that leave me in terms of my solidarity with other people, with my fellow Americans?

The basis of ethics is freedom—without intentionality, without choice, there is no moral valence to any action at all. Compelled love is no love at all.

That is why freedom is also the basis of an ethical economy that forms, rather than deforms, the human person.

This is Buttiglione's deeper point in the hiking story: freedom rightly understood must encompass the good of others, not just my own. And yet I do not want the common good imposed on me; I want to choose it. That requires people formed to think about others as much as—if not more than—themselves. It requires civic virtues that pull us out of ourselves in response to great goods we cannot achieve alone.

The deeper meaning of agency is love: freely choosing to love someone, or something. Because the deepest meaning of freedom is the ability to choose the good in any circumstance. And “the good” does not only mean what is good for me. There are goods that go beyond my personal good.

They must be named. They must be understood. And they must ultimately be loved.

It is my love for my family that moves me to choose what is good for them as opposed to what is merely good for myself. I have affection for them, which in Augustine’s terminology means love. It is not enough merely to “know” something; our will may still not be moved toward it. We must actually love it; we must come to feel affection for it. Affection, in other words, is the middle term between an inert and unmoved person and their “knowing”—it is the thing that moves them toward an embrace.

Therefore it’s not enough to tell people all of the reasons why they should love the United States of America, or appreciate its freedoms. We must develop ways of forming true affection.

That will require shared experiences, rites of passage, which touch people deeply and lead them to see, perhaps for the very first time, the beauty of the truth.

If you’re interested in agency, the award-winning workshop “The Foundations of Agency” is going to be available in an synchronous, self-paced format later this month. You can join the waitlist here:

https://learn.lukeburgis.com/

When I was thirty-nine, I was traveling out of state and grew concerned when my mother stopped responding to texts and calls. My aunt and uncle went to the house and discovered a nightmare that would change my life forever. They found my mother catatonic in bed, and my father puttering around as if nothing was wrong.

He thought she was taking a nap. In reality, my mother had suffered a sudden, catastrophic health decline—and my father was disappearing into the fog of undiagnosed Alzheimer’s disease.

I returned home in shock to peel back the layers of a miserable onion. My mother had been my father’s sole caregiver for more than five years, since the disease had become debilitating—but there had been signs going back more than a decade.

Her fear of confronting Alzheimer’s was too great, so she ignored it as his faculties slipped away. Then, when she needed him most, when urgent medical attention could have saved her life, he didn’t have the presence of mind to respond. By the time I arrived, it was too late. She was dead in a week.

The extent of his disease became clear only in increments. When the ambulance took my mother to the hospital, the paramedics didn’t realize that my father couldn’t be left alone for more than five minutes without risk—that he might put a metal bowl in the microwave, which by then my mother had taped shut. He would need constant care.

In The One and the Ninety-Nine, I recount the story of my arriving home on the day my mother was hospitalized to find him chain-smoking the cigarettes he had found in my mom’s purse. My dad doesn’t smoke, and neither do I. But on that day, it was so absurd—and in the moment, so oddly funny—that I asked him for a couple, since I’d heard that my mom was stable. We sat there smoking together for ten minutes, in the brief moment before we left for the hospital.

That is the particular vertigo of the only child: there is no sibling to call, no one to run things by, no one to ask whether you are seeing what you think you’re seeing. I often felt as though I were going crazy—alone, watching a very slow car crash. My parents had been so afraid of losing the life they’d built, the memories they shared, the person he had been, that they would sooner barrel blindly into catastrophe than ask for help. The few times I pleaded with them, I was met with promises to deal with it—later.

I learned everything I could about Alzheimer’s: what causes it, what it does to the people who have it, what I might do to help. I came away with more questions than answers. It is a complex, mysterious disease of the mind—the dissolution of memory and meaning even as the soul burns bright. There are treatments that, given early, can slow it and in rare cases even restore some function. But the doctors confirmed what I feared: for my father, that window had closed.

And here, in the throes of it, I found something I can only call a gift. It was too late to save my father’s mind. But there was still time to save my own.

Through his illness, and through caring for him, I felt called back to something almost primordial in myself—a deeper conscience. I needed to take better care of my health, yes. But more than that, my attention. I began to see the feeds I scrolled as their own disease of the mind: an endless timeline on which every moment blurs into every other, indistinct, nothing quite distinguishable from anything else—not so far, I realized, from what my father must experience. And I became painfully aware of how thoroughly we abandon the old, and especially the demented. We forget them. We forget them, in part, because they forget. We begin to mirror their forgetting.

But the deepest reckoning was with community. As an entrepreneur, I like the feeling of controlling my own destiny, and I had to come to grips with the fact that, with aging parents, I controlled nothing. They were adults, in fact and in law; I could not make them do what they would not do for themselves. Coercion was not the answer. But neither was abnegating my responsibility as a son. So what, practically, could I do?

The answer arrived, as these things sometimes do, on Sunday. The Mass reading was from Sirach: My child, help your father in his old age, and do not grieve him as long as he lives; even if his mind fails, be patient with him; because you have all your faculties, do not despise him. I prayed for the grace to live those words. And then I noticed something about how the trouble had surfaced in the first place.

The only reason I had known anything was wrong was that I’d run into my parents’ parish priest, who told me he hadn’t seen them at Mass in some time and wondered how they were. That is what a thick community does. The parish is grounded in something that transcends politics, hobbies, consumption, content—and so it notices an absence. It comes looking.

Too many of the communities I’d belonged to over my life had been thin. They didn’t tolerate difference. They didn’t summon anyone to grow in integrity. They would not have been there in my hour of need, much less my hour of dying. They rewarded the thinnest possible forms of belonging—having the right enemy, learning the right words to humiliate him.

Such communities, which thrive online and across our increasingly artificial world, reward whatever strengthens the status and the power of the group. They turn everything into totalizing politics. Inside them, we become shape-shifters. We never learn the art of belonging well; we learn only how to belong at any cost.

It turns out my father had been schooling me on the difference all along, simply by what he refused to forget. As his mind failed, the memories that held on longest were the ones most deeply embedded in him—and every one of them was a small circle of people. His brothers from the 101st Airborne, the men he’d jumped out of planes beside. His fellow parachutists. His Teamsters. His golfing buddies. The regulars at the store he bought and worked the last fifteen years of his life. The thick associations were the last to go. Many of them he carries still. The mind discards a great deal under siege; it clings hardest to the people who knew it.

And he has kept his humor. One thing I learned quickly is that my father now engages in zero social calculus, because he is entirely unaware of what anyone thinks of him. If someone were angry with him, he wouldn’t hold it for more than a few seconds. “It’s not all bad being me,” he told me once, with a glint that suggested he knew exactly what he was saying, “…because there are a lot of things that are not worth remembering.”

There is more wisdom in that than he knows. It is so easy to fall into entanglements that warp our priorities away from what matters most and toward what matters only in the vanishing moment. Some people help us remember who we are. Others help us forget.

My father has lost the ability to tell them apart—and in losing it, he has reminded me to attend to the difference while I still can.

Because our memories, and our very sense of who we are, do not live inside our skulls alone. They live in the space between people. The first time someone said of my father that he was “no longer there,” I understood that he is very much there—because I am there. His memory is not what it was. But his existence, and his dignity, were never his to hold onto by himself.

We are more than one another’s keepers. We are one another’s seekers.

There is an old story about a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to go after the one that wandered off, and who, finding it, comes home rejoicing. I used to think the parable was about the sheep. I’ve come to think it’s about the shepherd—about what it does to a person to refuse to let someone be lost. We must go and seek what is lost. And if we look hard enough, and long enough, we will find it, and carry it home, rejoicing.

In my case, what was lost—what I keep going back for—is my father. I do it for him. I do it, now, for the daughter who arrived shortly after that catastrophic day, and for her younger sister now, so that they will grow up knowing what it looks like to be sought.

And I do it for myself, while I still have the faculties to choose.

This Father’s Day, my father will not remember that it is Father’s Day. It doesn’t matter. I will remember for both of us.

That, in the end, is the whole of it: a mind, unlike a brain, is not a solitary thing. It is something we engage in with one another, and with the world. A mind, unlike a brain, is made to dance. And we can dance even with those who no longer remember the steps.

My new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is out now. This Father’s Day essay is drawn from its theme. You can pick up a copy here.

Friends,

The book that I’ve poured myself into for the past three years—through the birth of two children!—is finally out. The One and the Ninety-Nine is about relationships, and more specifically the quest for real communion in a fractured age.

If you have not already, you can buy the book today: The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. If you’ve already bought it — thank you. Genuinely.

And one real favor: If you buy the book from an online retailer, will you pleaes leave a review? It’s the single most useful thing you can do for a book. It doesn’t have to be long — three sentences is plenty: what it’s about, what it did or didn’t do for you, who you’d hand it to. Reviews are how a book finds readers beyond the people who already know the author, and the early ones genuinely shape its direction. They matter more than most people realize — more than I’d like to admit.

Thank you.

Yours,
Luke

P.S. If you’d rather help another way — a post, a forward, a word to a friend who’d love it — that means a great deal too.

“Social contagion is the most important phenomenon of our time. The One and the Ninety-Nine is the place to go to learn about it.”
―Tyler Cowen, author of The Complacent Class

"Fascinating. A very well written and conceived book."
―Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe

“Luke Burgis shares a story of tragedy and loss, and how it led to a life of compassion and hope. The One and the Ninety-Nine is a guide to living with virtue in the hardest circumstances, and finding deep joy.”
―Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard professor and #1 New York Times bestselling author

"Luke Burgis takes his title from the Lord's parable of the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one lost sheep―and builds from this an urgent case for why, in an age that dissolves us into the crowd or subsumes us into the cruelty of the mob, an individual, unrepeatable person matters infinitely. This is a humane, learned and courageous retrieval of an essential personalism that is necessary reading for our technological age."
―Bishop Robert Barron

“Burgis shows us how to resist the siren call of false identification, which targets us every moment of every day from all our devices. Joining his own experience to the testimony of the ages, he reveals how we discover our true selves in a personal response to the call of the good and the beautiful."
―Michael Clune, author of Pan

Here are what some early readers have had to say:
“Me or we? Both. I’ve learned so much from Luke Burgis and his new book The One and the Ninety-Nine. The solid self, he says, is knowing who you are as an individual while also being connected to and shaped by your community. Amen, amen!
―Angela Duckworth, author of Grit

“A book about the problem beneath all our other problems: how to become a person capable of truth, courage, and belonging in a culture that dissolves all three. Burgis manages to be both humane and unflinchingly honest, which is not only rare, but invaluable.”
―Katherine Dee, internet culture reporter

"One of this year's most important books. [Burgis is] training people to shun conformity and resist totalitarianism. Absolute must-read!"
―Rod Dreher, author of Living in Wonder

“The One and the Ninety-Nine is nothing short of courageous. Luke Burgis has risked much in his boldness of form and content, in making it personal. In a time when the stakes could hardly be higher, this book could lead you to great rewards. Take it personally.”
―Andrew McLuhan, founder of the McLuhan Institute

"The strength of the team is the self. The strength of the self is the team. Burgis shows you how to be authentically yourself and consider the impact you're having on others so you can do your best work and build your strongest relationships.”
―Kim Scott, author Radical Candor and Radical Respect

"The One and the Ninety-Nine is an ambitious, illuminating book, wherein its insights about perception, rites of passage, and the personal character of life, are mirrored in its form―through 'probes,' interconnected 'thresholds,' and more. Most books in this genre remain at the level of head-knowledge, but Burgis achieves something more ambitious―a book of ideas that operates at the level of perception, and the heart."
―Jordan Castro, novelist

“Developing a healthy truth-seeking identity in an age of both isolation and digital saturation based on tribal identities is rapidly becoming a core issue for young people. The One and the Ninety-Nine is a guide for both individuals and parents on how to foster one through healthy relationships.”
―Michael Strong, founder of the Socratic Experience, author of The Habit of Thought and Be the Solution

“A warm, wonderful account of how to develop a healthy self―based in community―for the age of digital distraction. It combines personal reflections from key transitions with longer-term principles on how to live a satisfying life.”
―Magatte Wade, entrepreneur and author of The Heart of the Cheetah

“The One and the Ninety-Nine offers a compelling exploration of how to develop a healthier sense of self in an age of social contagion and fragmented identities. A timely and much-needed book.”
―Anne-Laure Le Cunff, neuroscientist and author of Tiny Experiments

“I never hesitate to recommend a Luke Burgis book! His wisdom is hard won, and The One and the Ninety-Nine immerses readers in the task of unpacking the complex and nuanced truths that require that we live better than we did before we read it. Because of Burgis' book, communal interdependence may return to public discourse, and the high calling of a life of virtue once again appears reachable.”
―Jessica Hooten Wilson, Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University, and author of The Scandal of Holiness

"Highly readable and entertaining... This book should be read by anyone interested in understanding one of the most fundamental dilemmas of the human predicament: how to balance individualism against sociability in our increasingly fragmented and anonymous mass societies."
―Joseph P. Forgas, DPhil, DSc. (Oxford), Scientia Professor, University of New south Wales

"The One and the Ninety-Nine pushes us to think past the idea of belonging as an end in itself."
―Mere Orthodoxy

Before you read this: If you enjoy my writing here, the best thing you could do to support my work is to pre-order a copy of The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, which comes out on Tuesday, June 16. To the extent that you’re on social media, or write your own Substack, I’d be extremely grateful if you’d consider spreading the word this week. If you’re in NYC, come join me in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a party to celebrate.

Nonfiction Will Be Disrupted

I was on a train from NYC up to Rhode Island to give a talk on Saturday when I was floored by this recent blog post from Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, one of the bestselling nonfiction authors of the past two decades. It’s titled “Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future.” He opens with this chart of his book sales over the past three years.

He tracks the trouble starting precisely around the time ChatGPT was released in late 2022. It’s a particular problem for Tim, because he writes “How To” books. But why read a book on “how to” do something when you can just ask ChatGPT, or your favorite model, and get a highly personalized version of advice, customized to your unique circumstances, that may be synthesizing the same ecosystem of ideas anyway?

In short, I buy Tim’s thesis: those kinds of books are going to be in serious trouble. Books that are overly prescriptive are going to suffer. Tim finally concludes:

“The market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind, at length, on a subject it has bled for—might just get smaller, weirder, and more interesting. I’d bet on it. In a way, we’re reverting to the earlier days of the Internet.”

This is one reason I have been anxious about the form of nonfiction itself while writing The One and the Ninety-Nine. Not just what the book says, but what kind of experience the book creates.

I have to take Tim’s idea further. Transformation doesn’t happen through content alone—that is, from merely transmitting what I know into what I've decided you should know. That, sadly, is what much of the education system of the past 125 years has been based on, ever since John Dewey published hisbod “pedagogic creed” in 1897, which turned students into gatherers rather than the hunters they are meant to become.

I believe that part of my job as an author is to turn readers into hunters. In other words, I don’t want anyone passively reading a book that I write. But that’s incredibly difficult to pull off, because we’re all habituated to the “form” of the nonfiction book, which is, as you know, a series of words on a page which these days, more often than not, come in a sequence composed of various elements: a Gladwellian story, a study, an insight, an anecdote, another study, another insight, study, study, study, insight, insight, insight, interpretation, a story, maybe some bullet points at the ends of chapters to summarize.

I appreciate those authors who have pushed against the limits of form in the nonfiction book—the forms of fiction are far more diverse—the way that Walker Percy did with his book Lost in the Cosmos, published by FSG back in 1983, two years after I was born. The book is composed of “thought experiments”, quizzes, and other things that test the reader and break them out of the mode of mere reading—to something more experiential. His quizzes looked something like this, but I’ve adapted this one to my own book:

Why is it easier to join a movement than to hold a conversation with yourself? (select only one)

A. Because movements offer pre-packaged identities and you left your interior life somewhere in middle school.
B. Because you’ve been trained to view solitude as a glitch in the system, not a necessary condition of personhood.
C. Because you can like and share a movement, but your soul doesn’t have a social media profile.
D. Because if you actually asked yourself what you want, you might realize you don’t know—and that terrifies you more than being wrong with the crowd.
E. None of the above. (But you’re still hoping someone else will tell you the right answer.)

A book is a book. It has a particular form. It’s also a cultural object, meant to situate people and stimulate conversation, whether you’ve read the book or not. In fact, an important skill is learning to talk about books you’ve never read. And I don’t think the form of the book is going away anytime soon. But there is very little testing of form in books, and especially nonfiction books.

They should dislocate the reader at certain points. They should be strange. They should be a form of mystagogy—not the communication of facts or “ideas”, but an invitation to explore a mystery. They have to speak to the heart as much, if not more, than the head; they have to move people at some deep level.

AI writing may impress us, assist us, even clarify things for us. But it rarely wounds, awakens, or convicts us, because its words do not come from a life.

Many people rightfully practice the wisdom of moral repugnance when they read AI writing about personal experience, because they sense it is using “unreal words”—words that don’t ring true because they are not spoken from the depth of lived experience. That is why it feels thin. This is an encouragement to you to write the thing you might be afraid to write, to be vulnerable, and to take the kinds of risks that only an embodied human can take.

To my fellow authors, especially if you write nonfiction: I think there needs to be a revolution that goes beyond Tim’s. Nobody needs another ‘insight’ given to them by another person (everyone could stand to study some Lonergan on that point), but everyone could benefit from writing that acts like a live wire to the soul. I have skin in the game, as you know. Over the past couple of years, I tried to write a book like that. I hope I succeeded. You will have to be the judge of that.

In the meantime, I’m leaving you with the “Note to Reader” which my editor and I decided to cut from the book, but it provides some extra context behind some of the surprising decisions in the book, and some of the weird things you will encounter along the way that are meant to stir something, leave you asking questions, and ultimately to probe the author, the age, and yourself.

Note to Reader

At the beginning of each chapter and throughout this book, you’ll find probes: something that you can actively prod and poke. The idea is not to explain, but to provoke discovery.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan used the word probe to describe his way of approaching problems. “Most of my work…is like that of a safecracker,” he said. “In the beginning I don’t know what’s inside. I just set myself down in front of the problem and begin to work.” His method was not linear. “I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences—until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.” This is my preferred way of working, too.

Like the unmanned probes we send into deep space, these probes are designed to land in unfamiliar territory—and return something of value. But they don’t return self-contained packets or answers. They open us up to mystery. They make us think: There is more there. In that sense this book is meant to leave you highly unsatisfied, but hungry.

During an interview in 1970, McLuhan remarked: “The problem of private identity vs. tribal involvement has become one of the crosses of our time.” He named a tension but didn’t resolve it—a perfect probe. I’ve spent most of my life in the tension that probe indicates, and I still haven’t resolved it. But perhaps remaining in the tension is the secret inside of the safe. In this book, you will feel that tension.

At many points in my life, unexpected and unforeseeable changes compelled me to reassess my associations: social, religious, political, professional, artistic, and more. I began to ask: in what spirit am I in relationship with others? This question became more important to me as time went on. We don’t just enter into partnerships or join groups. We do so in different ways, with different levels of commitment, belief, loyalty, affinity, skepticism, resolve, or bonds. I began to see, more clearly than ever, how those relationships were shaping me—and how I might need to change in response.

I can’t understand myself without the communities I belong to—yet I am not reducible to any of them. Still, in conversation, people often ask about our affiliations first: what we do, who we know, or who we’re a fan of. And of course the weightier ones: Republican or Democratic? Catholic or Protestant? For or against the war? Pro this or anti that? Those are more than ideological questions. They connect us to others.

Gradually, a new question began to haunt me: Why is it so hard, in modern life, to join a community without losing yourself? Without being pushed toward either total identification or alienation? New technologies, outdated educational models, and the weakening of mediating institutions like religion are changing the way we fundamentally relate to one another. How, in this changing environment, can we ensure that the communities that we’re part of—whether by choice or by fate—are not life-draining, but life-giving?

Between chapters, you’ll find short vignettes from my personal story, called thresholds—because they mark key moments in my life when I crossed over from one way of belonging to another. I hope they will help you see your own story in these pages.

Pre-order The One and the Ninety-Nine. Thank you for reading.

The excerpt below is from my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion—out in less than two weeks, on June 16, from St. Martin’s Press and published here with special permission. You can pre-order a copy here.

In April 2015, my parents flew from West Michigan to Dublin to meet me for a family vacation. I’d been living in Italy since 2013, and this was only my second time seeing them since the move. I missed them, and was excited to explore a place where my dad claimed we might have some roots.

I waited to pick them up from the airport in a rented Volkswagen Passat that I was still getting used to. I was sitting behind a steering wheel on the “wrong” side of the car, navigating the opposite side of the road. I suspected the ride to our hotel would make my dad anxious. A retired truck driver, he had spent his life behind the wheel. He was never comfortable in the passenger seat.

My parents’ faces lit up as they emerged from the sliding doors of the airport, and I hugged them at the curb. As we loaded their things into the trunk, my mom surveyed the luggage, then brought her palm to her forehead and closed her eyes. “Lee, did you forget to take the bag with my laptop in it off the plane?” My dad looked defeated, as if he expected to have forgotten something. “Oh, gosh, honey, I . . .” His voice trailed off. A security officer barked at us to keep moving.

Reassuring them that everything would be okay, I parked the car in the short-term garage and went inside to see what I could do. The arrivals hall was still thinning out from their flight, and a handful of Aer Lingus crew members were making their way toward the staff exit. I had only just begun looking for the lost-baggage counter when I spotted a freckle-faced attendant doubled over in laughter with a colleague. Slung over her shoulder—like a ten-pound Dell bowling ball—was what looked unmistakably like my mom’s laptop bag. I approached her and said, “Hi, I think that bag might belong to my parents.”

“Oh, yes, here you go, love,” she said, handing it over without so much as checking an ID. “You look like your da!” She passed the bag to me and, with a quick grin, turned back to her colleague as if nothing unusual had happened.

And then we were off, on the road to the Dingle Peninsula. My dad was eerily calm as I drove down the narrow roads with a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, winding around tight bends with short stone walls on both sides. I clipped too close to one of the walls when the road suddenly constricted, yanking the wheel to keep us on course. My dad didn’t say a word. I didn’t complain, but something was different.

I’ve learned a lot about memory and perception since that day in Ireland. One of the biggest lessons is that we fail to grasp the scale of change when we’re immersed in it.

As an only child, I had a close relationship with my parents. Their yearly highlight was visiting me wherever I lived—New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Italy. I had noticed, though, that in the past couple of years the trips had started to seem like tests of endurance for them. Changes I would not have noticed if we were together every day became more pronounced when so much time passed between visits: the gentle fading of color in my mom’s cheeks, the slower rhythm of their walking, the disjointed flow of a family conversation.

Still, we had a full slate of activities scheduled for this trip. The first morning we went to see Fungie—a solitary bottlenose dolphin who had showed up in the Dingle harbor in 1983 and was still there. How or why he had separated himself from his fellow dolphins, who typically travel in pods of five to twenty, was a mystery to scientists.

As we rode the boat out, the captain told Irish jokes and got us excited to see this marine mammal. After a long wait, Fungie finally made an appearance and played around the boat for about fifteen minutes. I thought he looked tired—he was estimated to be forty to forty-five years old (for a dolphin, the equivalent of about eighty human years)—but also content, like there was nothing else he’d rather be doing. My mom seemed unimpressed, as if she would have preferred another cigarette at that moment. My dad chuckled and said, “Cool.”

Back on shore, we drank a pint of Guinness at a local pub before embarking on Slea Head Drive, a twenty-four-mile loop around the peninsula that snakes through mountain passes, farmland, and the weathered ruins of stone huts and ancient churches. We rounded a curve to find a vast expanse of blue where the ocean met the sky; in other places the cliffs pressed inward, and the high rock faces appeared ominous, looming over us through the car’s tiny sunroof.

We attempted to make a pit stop for coffee in one of the few towns along the route, but we quickly noticed that nothing—not the pub, not the one-room schoolhouse or post office, not even the church—was open.

We continued on our way. My mom, an artist, told me about her latest glassblowing project and asked if I would be home for Christmas. My dad had been quiet, staring out the window. Then, without warning, he said, “Sorry, pull over.” He pushed the words out between shallow gasps.

At the urgency in his voice, I whipped the car onto the narrow shoulder of the mountain pass. I could see the sea flashing between the rocks. My dad got out and hobbled over to a waist-high boulder separating the road from the cliff. He braced himself on it with one arm and stared into the gravel. “Give me a minute,” he said.

My mom jumped out of the car. “What are you feeling?” she asked. My dad was too ill to respond. I looked inside the car for water. Nothing. “Dad, can you talk to me?” He put up a hand to signal that he couldn’t. Then he threw up.

My mom and I made eye contact, tacitly acknowledging that we knew we needed to get my dad medical care as soon as possible. He would never ask for it or seek it out, but this seemed far more serious than an upset stomach. I googled the words heart attack but was met with a tiny pixelated icon of a T. rex and the message No internet on the screen.

I convinced my dad to get back in the car and, since there was no mobile service, raced back into the small town we had come from to look for help. Still no service, still nothing open. I began running door to door, banging the knockers on the quaint houses that lined the street. My palms were clammy and I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. My mind jumped back and forth between thinking about the urgency of the moment and how strange these tiny houses looked, like small cottages or hobbit holes. I wondered who might live in them.

I never found out. No one answered.

I needed to get to the nearest hospital, but I didn’t know where it was. I felt myself slipping into panic.

I was about twenty yards from the end of a block on the edge of town when a lone woman turned the corner onto the street, walking a dirty white sheepdog, its head as high as her chest. I jogged in her direction but approached cautiously u ntil the dog started turning circles in place, wagging its tail.

“Where is everyone?” I pleaded. “My dad needs a doctor.”

Everyone in town was at a festival back in Dingle, she told me. There was a small medical clinic there, she said, and gave me precise directions on how to find it (spotting buildings and particular trees that served as landmarks for where to turn and how to know I was going the right way). I struggled to keep these images in my head as I ran back to the car.

We made the twenty-minute trip back to Dingle. My dad gripped the door handle, looking as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t get it out. He opened and closed his free hand as if trying to get blood flowing to a dead limb. Every now and then he’d put his head out the window and let out a whistling wheeze.

My mom sat directly behind him, quiet but occasionally reaching her hand over the seatback to rub his shoulder. I was focused on driving at high speed down precarious roads while also unsettled by my dad not protesting a trip to the doctor.

The clinic building sent mixed signals. The lights were off, but the front door was open. We hurried inside, and the doctor on duty greeted us in the lobby as if she’d been expecting us. She was a young woman with piercing green eyes and an Irish accent so strong we had a hard time understanding her. But after we described what had happened, and after she checked his vital signs, I had no problem making out what would happen next. “Your dad’s oxygen levels are extremely low. I am not sure what’s wrong, but he needs to go to the hospital right away. I’m calling an ambulance.”

We learned that she was sending him to the hospital in the town of Tralee, about an hour away.

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics greeted my dad and told him where they were taking him. He nodded and seemed eager to follow their instructions. My mom and I grabbed his hands, kissed him on both cheeks, and told him that we loved him. He gave a thumbs-up before the ambulance door closed. I turned away, trying to remember the image in case it was the last time I saw him alive.

We followed him in the Passat. I couldn’t keep up with the ambulance, but I was close enough that I would glimpse it in the distance after we turned a corner onto a straight stretch of road. We said nothing, each of us processing what was happening in our own way.

Every so often, as the road curved and straightened, the sound of the siren would slip through our open window. Its brief wail only thickened the stillness. Silent tears ran down my mom’s face.

Because my dad was eleven years older than my mom, we’d talked a few times about the possibility that my dad might not be around toward the end of her life. But it had always been theoretical—a distant, unreal thing. It was a fear that I knew my mom had, though. Because I was thinking about it on the drive, I know she was too.

My senses seemed to sharpen as we wound our way through the countryside. I saw things that had escaped my attention before. Looking out the window at the green landscape, I noticed sheep roaming in every direction. They weren’t like any sheep I had ever seen. Most had a symbol—a circle, triangle, or number—spray-painted onto their coats in bright neon colors: red, purple, green, orange, and pink. Why would anyone paint their sheep like that?

As we neared the hospital, I felt something within me shift. For years, I had pushed away doubts about my parents’ ability to remain independent, but now the truth was plain: They needed help. The many years my mom and I had spent in denial about Dad’s encroaching dementia were now over. I was stripped of the comfort of escape.

As we turned the bend and the town of Tralee finally came into view, I heard the siren blare one last time and snapped back to the present. We arrived at the hospital as the paramedics counted to three and moved my dad onto a stretcher. Neon orange stripes on the back of the ambulance doors reminded me of the sheep in the pastures. And then a nurse—broad-shouldered, forearms inked with fading lines of scripture and skulls—wheeled him to a bed and flung the privacy curtain shut in a single motion. The metal rings clattered along the rail, sealing off the bed like the final act of a play no one wanted to watch. “Someone will be right in,” he said.

In the time between getting a bed and seeing a doctor—a space punctuated by beeping machines—I had to think about something else to prevent myself from spiraling. I gravitated back to those strange-looking, spray-painted sheep. I didn’t yet know my dad’s fate, but I wondered: What happens to those sheep when their shepherd dies?

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can get your hands on the book early by pre-ordering a copy here or from your favorite bookseller. Thank you for your support.

From The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion by Luke Burgis. Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

UPCOMING EVENTS: Secure tickets for David Brooks in conversation with me in NYC June 15, the ZOE Conference in Napa this July (there are still a few spots left), and a free virtual event when The One and the Ninety-Nine comes out on June 16. I can now officially announce Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, will be at the ZOE conference speaking about the “New Aesthetics”.

What is Your A.I. Touchstone?

The question has become inescapable: What happens to the American worker when AI stops augmenting and starts replacing? To answer it well requires we ask a preceding — and likely more difficult — question: What first principles…

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Friends,

I’m sharing a list of the highlights from my upcoming book tour for The One and the Ninety-Nine, which will be published in the US and UK on June 16 by St. Martin’s Press (US) and Pan Macmillan (UK). If you’re in or near one of the following places, I’d love to meet you! There should be plenty of opportunities (and time) to hang.

I’m also hosting at least two virtual events in the coming five weeks for those who can’t make the in-person events.

Lastly, before I get to the full list of stops on the road, I’m excited to announce that Stripe Co-Founder and CEO Patrick Collison will now be joining the ZOE Conference in Napa, CA, to be in conversation with me about “New Aesthetics” for a new age, and the relationship between aesthetics and abundant life. You can check out the full ZOE line-up here—and there’s still time to scoop up a last minute ticket if you’d like to join me and roughly 150 other people who I consider some of the most thoughtful in the world for a few days of real …

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Friends: I’ll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York in conversation with David Brooks on Monday, June 15, ahead of the release of my upcoming book “The One and the Ninety-Nine” that week. If you’re in the NYC area, I would love to meet you there! Tickets are on sale now—you can grab one right here.

And now, for all the Girardians, an essay that I began writing three years ago… If you prefer audio, I recorded the whole thing for you myself (50 minutes), above. Or if you’d like to read it in a slightly more beautiful format, you can find the essay here. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Political Judas—An Essay

Today many of us have an odd feeling that we can’t put our finger on. It feels like both the best of times and the worst of times, and global events seem “cataclysmic, yet insignificant.”¹ It’s as if we’ve managed to catch not a tiger by the tail but rather a mouse.

The nature of this Muridaean battle is fundamentally religious. Nearly all contentious things today, from abortion to vaccines to foreign policy, are spoken of in latent religious terms like sacrifice, victimhood, reparation, excommunication—and public acts of repentance are common.² Politics has not replaced religion, but rather allowed itself to be the migratory destination of the holy.³ In short: politics is inherently more religious in an irreligious world.⁴

There has been a strange blurring of the lines. Religion has entered into academia; politics has entered into religion; innovation has entered into everything. Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley are communing in ways not fully understood.⁵ But we should strive to understand. The consequences of not understanding the metaphysical assumptions and commitments being formed in this new environment are grave on both a societal and personal level.

One assumption being challenged right now is human agency. With the advent of increasingly powerful forms of artificial intelligence and the narrative emphasis on systems and processes of which we are a part (political, economic, social), perhaps the debate over free speech is a cover-up for a more important conversation: free will.⁶

The tension between slavery and freedom lies at the heart of the great political and technological questions of our time, and at the heart of René Girard’s theory. To what extent is a man free to transcend the political machinations of his age? To what extent is disengaging from mimetic processes even possible? The idea or reality of agency, or free will, lies at the heart of these questions.

This essay will explore these questions in the light of Girard’s mimetic theory, but I’d like to begin in what may seem like a surprising place: the biblical story of Judas Iscariot, the apostle of Christ. He will be our lens through which we shall explore this question of agency as it relates to mimesis.

Right out of the gate, we have to grapple with the question of Judas’s freedom: the Gospels of Luke and John tell us that Judas became demonically possessed before he betrayed Christ, giving the reader the impression that his betrayal of Jesus was part of a fatalistic, cosmic plan.⁷

Was Judas at the mercy of a mimetic process that was beyond his power to escape?⁸ In the earlier part of his career, Girard presents Judas as a mere pawn:

There is no special difficulty in understanding why the Gospels treat the pseudo-conspiracy of Judas and the ecclesiastical authorities in the way that they do. This conspiracy is presented as real but powerless. Jesus is the victim of a mimetic contagion that spreads to the whole community, and there can be no question of viewing him as the victim of one particularly evil individual, or even of several. The ways in which individuals behave are never of more than secondary importance, since everything culminates in the unanimous movement that is being formed against Jesus.⁹

To say that “the ways in which individuals behave are never of more than secondary importance” is seriously to denigrate the realm of the personal—most importantly, the ability of a person to act with intentionality. In my view, the early Girard does not do justice to the role traditionally ascribed to the will, the seat of human action. He misses an opportunity to clarify the role or even the possibility of intentionality in moral acts.¹⁰

I believe the later Girard, had he revisited the Judas question, would have used the opportunity to clarify the role of agency in his theory while respecting its mystery and drama.

After all: Peter, too, betrayed Christ—but his outcome was very different.

Part I: Three Types of
Political Atheism

Freedom is intimately connected to belief. A person who does not at least believe he is free isn’t free in any meaningful sense. What one believes helps determine the realm of possibility for action. The will is not moved to do anything for which it can’t at least hope for the possibility of success.

I propose that Girard used the term political atheist to refer to a specific rejection of belief: in the state, or in a politician (or party), claiming to be divinely ordained or having a divine mandate. This claim formed the basis of the cult of Caesar Augustus at the time of Jesus. Christ desacralized it. Of course, many politicians since Augustus have been associated with a divine mandate, whether they explicitly claim it or not. The idea of “atheism” in Girard’s phrase refers, first and foremost, to a rejection of a belief in claims of sacred power in the political order.¹¹

But the rejection of a prior belief can be a dangerous and despairing thing unless it is replaced by a different belief. The political figure of Judas, I will argue, moves through two different manifestations of political atheism. In the end, he despairs without ever experiencing the third: a form of political atheism that we might even call Christian.

The first variety of political atheist is one who has retreated from the political processes completely, into the underground.¹² Nihilism is “not enough,” but it can be an understandable first response to the disillusionment that people feel when their political aspirations and hopes are dashed—when the person or thing they believed in as salvific is revealed to be fallible and temporary. This is what I’ll call the black-pilled political atheist: one who, as a response to the realization that their trust has been misplaced, adopts a fatalistic and hopeless stance toward the world.¹³

The second type of political atheist is the Machiavellian: one who sees politics principally as the struggle for power, which he, or his preferred political candidate, must win at any cost.¹⁴ The ends justify any means. The Machiavellian political atheist might emerge from the black-pilled state, or he may precede it. Judas, as we’ll see, appeared to move between the two.

The third type of political atheist, however, is the Christian who responds to a corrupt political world that demands belief in its own illusory power. The Christian political atheist situates his belief in something, or someone, that transcends worldly politics. In this way, he becomes immunized from the volatility and anxiety associated with those who have invested their belief in the power of the state to provide solutions to the most fundamental human problems.

Girard’s original use of the term came in his 1961 book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In it, he referred to the French writer Stendhal as an “atheist in politics” (athée en politique). Stendhal’s spirit of political atheism is embodied in Julien Sorel, the protagonist of his novel The Red and the Black.¹⁵

When Julien learns that his former employer has switched parties, he smiles. Girard comments on this scene: “Julien savors the ‘conversion’… as a music lover who sees a melodramatic theme re-appear under a new orchestral disguise. Most men are taken by disguises. Stendhal places a smile on Julien’s lips so that his readers will not be deceived.”¹⁶ Julien, the political atheist, sees the political machinations of his day as the superficial games that they are; when Stendhal places a smile on his lips, he is hinting that Julien sees through the mimesis. He refuses to believe in any type of deeper meaning that others might attach to a turncoat.

To the naive, every conversion—whether political or religious—is genuine. The Stendhalian revelation was his pulling back of the veil on the real dynamics of superficial change through his characters.

Monsieur de Rênal’s “false” conversion, as well as Julien’s reaction to it, is reminiscent of the biblical Judas and the illusion of his outward signs and appearances. When witnessing a woman pouring perfumed oil to anoint Christ’s feet, Judas said the politically correct thing: “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”¹⁷ In the very next sentence, he is called a thief by the Gospel writer.

But Judas is more than a thief. He is also a cynic. He would later sell Christ for one-tenth the amount of those three hundred denarii that he suggested giving to the poor. The words that he speaks with his lips, and the signs he communicates with his actions (he kissed Christ as a “sign” of his friendship, which simultaneously signaled his betrayal) are but false signals of a false conversion—of an interior disposition that has, by this point in the story, become that of the Machiavellian political atheist. Like Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s story, he does not hesitate to wrap himself in false appearances to accomplish his political aims.

Judas, however, quickly migrates from the Machiavellian to the black-pilled. And this darker type of political atheist rejects not only religious belief and belief in politics, he also ceases to believe in his own ability to act within or upon political structures. Unlike the Machiavellian political atheist who finds a way to survive within the existing structures—maybe even exploit them—the black-pilled political atheist believes that current political systems are thoroughly corrupt and unsalvageable. He believes that the only thing reasonable for a self-respecting person to do is remove oneself from participating in such a system.

The black-pilled political atheist is like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man,” who attempts to opt out of what he finds to be a repressive system.¹⁸ He constructs his own naively anti-mimetic world of autonomy only to find himself ruled by internal mediation, the rivalrous and envious desire to imitate and ultimately supplant the proximate other.¹⁹ He is like the biblical man who believes he has driven out one demon only to find seven more powerful taking over his house.²⁰ As he attempts to assert his free will, the black-pilled political atheist becomes embroiled in mimetic rivalry with—and fulfills the will of—the same authoritarian state that seeks to quiet him.

Judas took the original black pill. He moved from political belief (most likely in Christ as a political liberator) to Machiavellian disbelief (he struck a deal with the state, which he would come to regret) to black-pilled and nihilistic-representing the complete loss of faith, not only in a single political leader or in the state, but even of all hope in the future. As we know, the political evolution of Judas led to his disillusionment, despair, and death.²¹

Now we can turn to the Christian political atheist. Does such a man even exist? And if so, what might he be like?

First, let’s look at some biblical perspectives about the relationship of God to human political affairs. Going back much further than the incarnation of Christ, there is a long biblical tradition that speaks of God looking at human political affairs with amusement, even disdain. In Psalm 2: “The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers band together,” while “The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.”²² In the first book of Samuel, God gives Israel a king after their rejection of him, but Israel is warned about the mimetic conflict that will follow, and the folly that will result.²³

In contrast to the “worldly prudence” that political actors try to convince the populace they possess, we can read in Christ’s selection of Judas as an apostle an otherworldly orientation. He chose a man that he knew would ultimately betray him to be one of his most intimate collaborators and friends. It is difficult to conceive of a normal politician ever doing this, even if he had some form of supernatural knowledge. Such a politician would be terrified at the thought of a potential traitor in his inner circle.

On the worldly political plane, events unfold in unpredictable ways so long as humans are agents. Because nobody has the power to stamp out human agency entirely (as much as the state may try), we live in a world where the possibility of sin and even betrayal must be permitted. If it were not, we would be attempting to eliminate freedom itself.

To deny the possibility of betrayal (and therefore Judas) is to deny the unique character of the Christian revelation and its apocalyptic dimension. Judas must be allowed to emerge. Attempts to restrain him, stamp him out, or pretend that he does not exist will be the marks of an Antichrist—because the Antichrist, unlike Christ, does not have the power to overcome betrayal, sin, and death.²⁴ The Antichrist can only engage in a cheap mimicry of salvation; he must try to hide or muffle any kind of weakness or scandal. The Antichrist cannot tolerate agency.

In the world of inevitability that Antichrist attempts to construct, there is simply no space for change. There is no room for conversion. Everything follows a predictable pattern. That’s because conversion is dangerous to any leader who isn’t himself converted. Conversion represents a weakening of his own power.²⁵

Part II: The Satanic Principle
and the Girardian Moment

“As human history continues, this satanic mechanism will be subverted more and more.”

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 2001

Conversion subverts the satanic mechanism. Both Peter and Judas betrayed Christ, but only Peter seems free to change after realizing what he has done. What happened to Peter that didn’t happen to Judas? In the mimetic process, is there a moment in time pregnant with the possibility for change, after which change becomes more difficult?

We may imagine the liminal space between betrayal and conversion. For Peter, the cock crowing three times was the moment of accusation from which he could have fled but to which he instead responded with tears of repentance (he “went outside and wept bitterly,” the Gospel writer Luke tells us).²⁶ For Judas, his liminal moment is when he throws the thirty pieces of silver at the Pharisees’ feet. Their mockery and rejection of him is their accusation.

But unlike Peter, Judas does not respond with tears. Instead, he flees from that terrifying space in which there is time to choose how to respond to the revelation of one’s own villainy.

We may consider the possibility of a “Girardian Moment”—the final moment at which a person still has the freedom to act in such a way that accelerates destructive mimesis or in a way that counteracts it, traveling in a different vector to it.²⁷

Girardian Moment

The moment after which the opportunity to make a fundamental choice has passed, and resisting mimetic contagion becomes far more difficult.

This opens up the debate on the question of free will—a debate that, despite modern tendencies, is to be understood as a theological and not scientific category. I am going to engage the question of free will from the theological perspective and avoid the scientific debates—rooted in a materialist outlook that denies any spirit and, therefore, freedom—about whether free will is, in fact, “a thing.” I am axiomatically presuming free will is a thing; contrary to those who say “Free will is not a thing,” it is very much one—indeed it lies at the foundation of the moral life.

Here I am drawing on an older tradition that has a broader and more expansive understanding of human reason. This tradition sees reason as verifying the truth of things by allowing the world to reveal itself, whereby reason receives and responds to the world as it shows itself. Freedom, then, is integrated with reason as a response to reality in its whole. Freedom and reason need each other. Freedom, then, is won or lost based on how a person responds to past experiences and the choices he makes in response to them.²⁸

In this older (Catholic) tradition, grace and the human will must cooperate. It is the encounter of two freedoms: God’s and man’s. The human subject must willingly accept the gift of grace, and the gift can never be imposed without this cooperation.²⁹ Genuine Christian conversion, while often depicted as an unstoppable process that happens to a person, requires freedom to become complete: an intentional turning away from evil things and inordinate attachments by turning toward the good. That process does not happen all at once; the turning is gradual and often comes with a steep learning curve.

Even in the realm of evil, human freedom must be involved. Just as grace requires human cooperation, so does evil. Theological reflection going back to Augustine’s demonology in De civitate Dei (and long before that, to the trials of Saint Anthony in the desert) depicts demonic forces as unable to possess a person without some prior assent by the one who would become possessed. In other words, the demons cannot possess solely by force. They require an invitation.

This perspective from demonology gives us a new way to think about mimetic power: at a certain point, after a person has given up enough of his freedom and invited these forces in, he loses much, even all, of his remaining power to resist.³⁰ There is some tipping point, some Girardian moment, after which a fundamental choice is no longer possible or is, at the very least, extraordinarily difficult.

But there must be freedom involved. If there is no possibility of freedom in the face of a mimetic mediator, then any culpability for morally evil acts would effectively be destroyed—and we would enter the nihilistic milieu of our own day in which technology companies are seen to possess the power to “control” the entire population.³¹ But even if you do believe that, I ask: is not there a Girardian moment when that was not, or would not be, the case? Have we already passed it?

Girard referred to destructive mimetic powers as satanic and demonic on numerous occasions, but I believe his lack of theological clarity or precision can cause confusion.

In some sense, it seems that Girard demythologized Satan and rendered the structural nature of human self-destruction more intelligible through mimetic theory—but at what cost? Yes, Girard’s demythologizing saves us from the intellectual gymnastics required to accept the imagery of Satan given to us by Dante and Milton. We need only conceive of Satan as a violent mimetic process and not as a red, horned creature with a pitchfork. Yet, the demythologizing tendencies in mimetic theory can easily go too far. Satan is not an all-powerful puppeteer taking advantage of unsuspecting humans; at the same time, Satan is not just a name given for the personification of mimetic violence.³²

If Satan is merely a mimetic process, then the scapegoat mechanism becomes an impersonal “force” through which people may commit violence or self-destruct. This makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to identify or disambiguate any particular person’s moral act or culpability—even the person who cast the first stone (”the demon made me do it!”).³³ The role of human agency is eclipsed, or at least greatly diminished, and Girard’s theory would then represent an entryway into either historicism or determinism rather than being a theory that grapples seriously with the reality of the will.³⁴

Girard’s warning to us about the dynamics of crowds is correct: looking at the person who casts the first stone will often mislead us, because we can tend to lose sight of the larger dynamics at work in a crowd. But Satan is not a “structure”—Satan is an agent who requires willing cooperators. (And if all he needs to do is find the weakest person in a crowd, then his job is easy.)

Satan’s attempt to bring us under his control may be better understood with the distinction between possession and oppression. Alan Jacobs writes:

Those possessed by demons—or to use the language I here prefer, those who have been absorbed into the demonic realm—lack volition. They feature in a behaviorist puppet show. The more fortunate, though perhaps also the more miserable, are the merely oppressed: The demonic acts on them from without, they feel its force but are capable of resisting it; or perhaps only of desiring to resist it.³⁵

Here Jacobs distinguishes between a person with the capacity to resist, and a person who has already lost that capacity—as a drug addict loses the capacity to say “no” to the next offer of the drug.

Let’s now return to the Satanic principle, but in the context of a crowd. The first-century religious leader Apollonius of Tyana is said to have led a crowd in a stoning of a blind beggar in an amphitheater in Ephesus to rid the community of a disease. In this story, told by Philostratus, Apollonius is the personification of a demonic agent. He did not throw the first stone at the blind beggar; rather, he persuaded some patsy to throw it for him. He misled others with lies.

This allowed him to effect the change he promised to the crowd, but his power was completely reliant on the degree to which the crowd believed him. There was some level of consent to the violent power of the stoning ritual. Apollonius was an agent, and he found a willing agent in the crowd; at a certain point, the mimetic process entered into and surpassed the Girardian moment I have referred to above.

The epistemic transformation that occurred as this mimetic process took hold was symbolized in the transformation of the blind beggar into a demon with fiery eyes.³⁶ Mimesis changes perception. It affects belief. That is why to be a Christian political atheist means, at some level, to reject belief in the sacred power of cheap mimetic processes in which appearances mask substance.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, in his essay “The Dangers of Quietism” from 1935, saw this tendency of formal power to misrepresent its intent and cloak itself in benevolent motives:

In truth, even if Hitler were to burn all the neo-pagan books; even if he were to condemn Rosenberg, Bergmann, and Gebhardt to the same fate as Roehm [whom Hitler had executed]; even if he were to forbid all direct attacks on the Church; even if he were not merely to ratify favorable concordats, but also abide by them—even then, as long as it refused to dissolve and liquidate itself completely, National Socialism would remain every bit as much the Antichrist against which we must fight relentlessly.³⁷

Von Hildebrand is arguing that the demonic never appears as demonic. Rather, it will always appear under the form of the “good.” Because “Satan has fallen from the sky like lightning” (a passage from the Gospel of Luke, and the title of one of Girard’s books), the scapegoat mechanism must take on new forms—it must be a shape-shifter, indeed must never appear to be scapegoating, to be effective.³⁸ Likewise, the Antichrist will not come announcing himself—and neither will his collaborators. Like the political atheist Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s novel, the Christian political atheist must be able to see beneath appearances.

People who stand in the face of the mimetic process, even while immersed in the environment in which it is brewing, show us that there may indeed be an anti-mimetic option.³⁹ Von Hildebrand, who at one point became Hitler’s number-one intellectual enemy, is an example. While living in the midst of a culture that was swiftly (and mimetically) being seduced by Hitler, he had the courage to resist and speak out at great personal risk to himself and his family. But first he was able to see past the appearances, underneath the mimetic machinations, and grasp the essence of Nazism.

While Girard most often used the term “anti-mimetic” in a disparaging way—to point out the naive postmodern response to mimesis, in which “everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch”⁴⁰—he did refer to anti-mimetic acts, such as forgiveness and mercy. These acts can transcend the logic of destructive mimesis. They have the power to stop and even reverse destructive mimetic processes.

Christ modeled one of these acts in his reversal of the stoning of the adulterous woman.⁴¹ The idea of an anti-mimetic act makes sense only if we rescue it from the horizontal plane of action—from internal mediation—and think of a genuine anti-mimetic act as a free response to a vertical dimension where there is an external mediator of a higher order. The horizontal plane could be thought of as “centripetal,” always turning back on itself and always eventually destructive. The vertical plane is the place where true transcendence may be found—not the false, deviated transcendence that Girard often refers to the scapegoat mechanism as effecting.⁴²

Christianity claims there is indeed a transcendent dimension that extends to us the possibility of being lifted out of mimetic slavery and into the higher logic of charity.⁴³ The Christian idea of agency is deeply bound up with the idea of cooperation: a non-rivalrous cooperation with grace, the opening and response of the will to a receptive, interdependent state of being.⁴⁴ Agency is paradoxically tied to the ability to receive that which is good; it is not merely the ability to give or to do. Real freedom, in other words, requires communion.⁴⁵ The truly anti-mimetic act requires freedom from the mimetic process; mere contrarianism does not. The anti-mimetic act is at once a rejection of the worldly mimesis exemplified by politics and the simultaneous acceptance of heavenly mimesis exemplified by the self-sacrificing love of Christ.

Part III: From Judas to Peter:
Conversion and Innovation

We now return to Girard’s early treatment of Judas to see if we can find some additional insight into the possibility of conversion. He writes:

The jealousy of Judas is ultimately at one with the political attitude of Pilate and the naïve snobbery of Peter, who betrays his master because he is ashamed of his provincial accent in the court of the High Priest. On the surface, motives appear to be individual, and conduct appears to fall into different patterns. But everything comes back in the end to the effect of mimesis, which works its power on everyone without exception.⁴⁶

It is typical of the early Girard for him to say that “everything comes back in the end to the effect of mimesis” (emphasis mine). Is he saying that people willingly succumb to the seductive power of mimesis, or something else?

Girard does admit that there is a crucial difference between Judas and Peter: “The only difference between Judas and Peter resides, not in the betrayal, but in Judas’s inability to come back to Jesus.”⁴⁷ He does not explain the source of this inability, though. Was it demonic possession?

What led to one man’s conversion and another’s despair?

I am proposing here that Judas and Peter had different progressions in their relationship to politics, and thus to Christ. They had different “Girardian Moments” because each man had a different disposition after his betrayal. And this is not an insignificant detail.

By the time the critical moment of potential conversion was available to each, one seemed unable to respond to the grace of conversion, while the other does respond. It is not so much that one had agency and the other did not, but rather that both made a decisive choice at a certain point, a choice which determined how they would relate to the whole of reality. One man (Peter) was open to the grace of conversion. The other refused to cooperate.

But perhaps the respective abilities of each man to respond were affected by the prior political choices they had made, which entailed metaphysical commitments to the whole of reality. There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there are plenty of black-pilled political atheists in Washington.

Mimesis cannot be fully understood in a snapshot, like a balance sheet, but as a process—especially when that process involves conversion, the process of true metanoia in which a person reverses course. The darkly mimetic forces can have a greater or lesser pull on us depending on the state we’re in when we encounter them, but the process is never too late so long as we’re still alive. The Good Thief on the cross next to Christ is evidence of that.

Peter shows the difference between Judas’s betrayal and his own when he gives his threefold profession of love in the post-Resurrection account of the risen Christ, standing on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Christ has cooked a fish breakfast for a group of the apostles before taking Peter aside for questioning. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks Peter, three times, to which Peter responds with an affirmative “yes, Lord.”⁴⁸ Peter made a choice. But even prior to this encounter on the shore, Peter had already made a choice.

A death had to occur in Peter to allow him to make this profession of love in the first place, which Judas was incapable of doing. Both men died, but only one man changed.

Girard expresses this difference in his analysis of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in the concluding chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, in which he distinguishes between the antithetical deaths of two major characters: “one death which is an extinction of the spirit and one death which is spirit; Stavrogin’s death is only death, Stepan’s death is life.”⁴⁹ Judas’s death is only death; Peter’s death is life.⁵⁰

Part IV: Resurrection
from the Field

In his threefold acclamation of love, Peter acknowledged his guilt and trusted in the one he knew would forgive him. Judas’s despair, on the other hand, saw no reversal. He remained one of the two nihilistic varieties of political atheist to the end. He rejected the lies of the world, but there was no corresponding acceptance on the other side of that rejection. At the very moment when he may have been closest to conversion, he closed himself off to it.

The movement from political belief to political atheism to belief in a transcendent order depends, in large part, on a single primordial belief: belief in one’s own agency, or belief that there is a point at which mimesis may be withstood and even subverted. If this spiritual freedom is denied, a central promise of Christianity must also be denied.

We should look for this freedom even in the Passion narrative. If we do not, we ascribe excessive power to Satan, and to the scapegoat mechanism—a power they do not possess. I do not mean to say the power isn’t real. Jesus’s statements about Satan as a “ruler of this world” demonstrate even a relativized sense of power. (If it’s not real power, then what has Jesus destroyed?) Death has a power—it is the ultimate weapon of the kingdom of Satan. Power is the expression of agency. But it is spiritual agency, freedom in relationship to God, that breaks the mimetic stronghold and power over this world.

If we naively accept the premise of Satan’s power, or if we believe in the absolute inevitability of mimetic violence (as opposed to its relative inevitability), we miss the central point of the Christian revelation: that the best Satan can do is ape God under false appearances.⁵¹

It is true that the political forces that led to Christ’s death have been revealed to be contagious, mimetic violence—a revelation that posits Judas as one traitor among many. But one’s personal disposition in the face of mimesis matters. In the murder of Christ, all are guilty—but the wide variety of individual responses within that universal “all” refutes fatalistic misreadings and reaffirms the role of freedom within the events of the Passion.

This brings us to a central problem: how, then, are we to live in a society of potential Judases?

In nearly everyone’s view, Judas is dangerous—he’s a threat. But he is more than that. He is an agent, not merely a pawn. And unless this false understanding is corrected, we should expect to see more attempts to snuff out agency—and with it, the possibility of conversion.

Near the end of his life, Girard stated at a conference that “Politics can no longer save us.” Politics no longer possesses the sacred power that it once did. It cannot magically produce cathartic social solutions as it once did. And so man must resist the temptation to turn everything into a political matter. Doing so results in various forms of political atheism, often resulting in nihilism, which plagued Judas, and which continue to plague people who fail to grasp the transcendent dimension, or collapse it into the immanent.

The French mystic Charles Péguy lamented that “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”⁵² Every movement begins as a spiritual or mystical force and is subsequently incarnated in concrete action. Péguy continued with a warning: “The interest, the question, the essential is that in each order, in each system, the mysticism not be devoured by the politics to which it gave birth.”⁵³

Public life and politics become sterile without mysticism. I believe the Christian political atheist must become, and must remain, a mystic. It’s the remaining, as we have seen in the case of Judas, that is the hard part.

In some cases, the believer must have the “salt water of doubt,” of nihilism, washed into his mouth before he comes to the realization that nihilism is not enough.⁵⁴ But that nihilism must lead to a greater belief.

Hope is the answer to the worst accusations that can be made about a man because it allows him to know that his future will be different than his past or his present. The example of Peter shows that remaining a mystic does not mean that one will never descend into paltry politics or never participate in mimetic violence. No, remaining a mystic means maintaining a commitment to the continual conversion through which a man is able to be a mystic even after he realizes that he is Judas.

Notes

1. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 138. ↩

2. “Cancel Culture,” while I dislike the term, may be the most obvious example. ↩

3. See William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2011). ↩

4. It’s also instructive to look at the use of theological words in technology. See Antonio Spadaro, SJ, Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the Internet, trans. Maria Way (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). ↩

5. See Luke Burgis, “The Three City Problem of Modern Life,” Wired, August 2022. ↩

6. The Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey raised this point in a 2024 conversation at an Oslo Freedom Forum interview. He stated: “I think the free-speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will. And we feel it right now because we are being programmed.” ↩

7. The Apocryphal Arabic Gospel of the Infancy says that Satan possessed Judas even from his birth. Cf. Montague Rhodes James, ed. & trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 80–83. ↩

8. There is a sense of inevitability about any mimetic process that has been put into motion and accelerates past a certain point. The ninth and tenth stones thrown in a ritual stoning are one example. We can rightfully ask, as some have, whether Christ’s prevention (and mimetic reversal) of the stoning of the adulterous woman was something natural—did he merely say the right words to redirect the violent energy of the crowds?—or supernatural. It is fair to ask whether Christ worked a miracle, and whether it was thus grace that broke in and changed the trajectory of normal human affairs. Christ’s intervention in the stoning of the adulterous woman is not classically considered one of his “signs” or “miracles.” ↩

9. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 247. ↩

10. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo wrote extensively about free will, the latter in his refutation of Manichaeism and in his writings against Pelagius. The early Jesuits were challenged in their teaching on free will by the Jansenists, who denied that a human’s free response to grace was required. Likewise the so-called De Auxiliis controversy of the late sixteenth century saw a fierce debate between Jesuits and Dominicans on the subject. Eventually Jansenism was condemned, but both Jesuits, who followed Luis de Molina in emphasizing divine-human synergy, and Dominicans, who followed Domingo Bañez in emphasizing divine providence, received papal approbation. ↩

11. The claims can relate to a specific ruler or political candidate, or to the political order itself. ↩

12. René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, trans. James G. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012). ↩

13. The term “Black Pilled” seems to have originated in the “incel” community, a mostly online group of men who consider themselves unattractive to women and unable to change their position or their fate. I use it here in a more general way to refer to the disillusioned state of a person who loses any belief in their own agency and believes that they are stuck inside of a system they can’t change. ↩

14. For an excellent treatment on Machiavelli in dialogue with Dante, see James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John Day, 1943). ↩

15. Published in 1830, this novel ostensibly treats the issue of monarchism versus liberalism during the Bourbon Restoration following the French Revolution. ↩

16. Girard, Deceit, 132. ↩

17. See John 12:4–6. ↩

18. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994). ↩

19. Girard uses “internal mediation” in contrast to “external mediation.” An internal mediator of desire is within the subject’s world; an external mediator is outside of the subject’s immediate world. ↩

20. “Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and dwell there; and the final plight of that man is worse than the first.” (Matthew 12:45). ↩

21. The movement doesn’t necessarily flow in the same order for everyone. ↩

22. Psalm 2:2, 4. ↩

23. “But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us…” 1 Samuel 8. Another text that is relevant here is Augustine of Hippo’s City of God. ↩

24. Scripture seems to indicate the possibility of multiple Antichrists (e.g., 1 John 2:18), not just one as is held in the popular imagination, including structures that could be Antichristic. ↩

25. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” John 3:30. ↩

26. Luke 22:62. ↩

27. The person of Franz Jägerstätter comes to mind as a real-life example: he was a lone Austrian peasant who refused to take the soldiers’ oath of allegiance to Hitler, ultimately being executed for insubordination. The recent film A Hidden Life (2019) dramatizes his story. ↩

28. From the classical point of view, drug addiction would be classed as a habitus (hexis), that is, a mode of existence, built up over repeated stimulus and action, that one “has” or “bears” like clothing. Once adopted, a habitus can be changed, but it is quite difficult, requiring more than mental resolve and willpower. See Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice (Westmont: IVP Academic, 2011). ↩

29. “The Council of Trent declared that the free will of man, moved and excited by God, can by its consent cooperate with God…” See Michael Maher, “Free Will,” in Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), catholic.com/encyclopedia/free-will. ↩

30. It is that the definitive choice—the sin against the Holy Spirit—has finally happened. Macbeth’s dream of being in the middle of a river is a powerful image: it is just as easy to go forward as it is to go back. This is what the Germans call “Grundentscheidung”: the fundamental choice out of which all other actions lie. ↩

31. Whether the power to resist those demonic forces, or to resist evil, is natural or supernatural is beyond the scope of this paper. ↩

32. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (United States: United States Catholic Conference, Inc.—Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), paragraph 395. ↩

33. Demons are classically conceived as immaterial intelligences that primarily work in the realm of thought. A recent Athonite monk compared these thoughts to airplanes circling over an airport: we must take care when considering which planes we will allow to land. ↩

34. Marshall McLuhan, too, was accused of technological determinism for his theory that the “medium is the message,” but this understanding of his work neglects the strong role that agency still played in his understanding of human society. ↩

35. Alan Jacobs, “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology,” The New Atlantis, Spring 2022, thenewatlantis.com. ↩

36. Girard refers to this transformation in his work I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001), in the chapter “The Horrible Miracle of Apollonius of Tyana.” ↩

37. Dietrich von Hildebrand, “The Danger of Quietism,” in My Battle Against Hitler, trans. & ed. John Henry Crosby and John F. Crosby (New York: Image, 2014), 290. March 10, 1935. ↩

38. Luke 10:18, and the inspiration behind one of Girard’s greatest works, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. ↩

39. By anti-mimetic, I don’t mean free from mimesis. As I explain in my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021), I am referring to the possibility of responding to the call of deviated transcendence with real transcendence. ↩

40. Girard, Deceit, 100. ↩

41. John 8:3–11. ↩

42. Girard, Deceit, 61. “Deviated transcendency is a caricature of vertical transcendency. There is not one element of this distorted mysticism which does not have its luminous counterpart in Christian truth.” ↩

43. In Christian terms, agape. ↩

44. See Augustine’s discussion of true sacrifice in Book 10 of the City of God. ↩

45. Cf. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Funeral Homily for Msgr. Luigi Giussani,” Communio 31 (Fall 2004): 685–687, communio-icr.com. ↩

46. Girard, Things Hidden, 247. ↩

47. Girard, Things Hidden, 247. ↩

48. John 21:15. Christ uses the Greek word agape for “love” in his questioning. ↩

49. Girard, Deceit, 291. ↩

50. “Unless a grain of wheat falls and dies it cannot bear much fruit, but if it dies, it bears fruit a hundredfold.” (John 12:24). ↩

51. Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of the relative inevitability of mimetic violence. The Christian Gospel, however, in cooperation and an openness to grace, reveals the power of mimetic violence as relative in the grand scheme, and fundamentally destroyed in the end. The Resurrection both reveals and demonstrates this. ↩

52. “Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.” ↩

53. Cited in Robert Royal, “Everything Begins in Mysticism,” The Catholic Thing, January 23, 2023, thecatholicthing.org. ↩

54. A phrase used by Joseph Ratzinger in his Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010). ↩

Friends:

When I heard the words of Pontius Pilate on Good Friday—”What is truth?”—I couldn’t help but thinking that, while his question remains as important as ever—an equally important and interconnected question is: “What is life?” They help answer one another.

They seem almost so basic as to be not worth tackling—so fundamental that they are like hyperproblems which, because they surround us—and because we live them every second— sometimes seem impossible, overwhelming, to confront. So we try not to think too hard about them. That’s a mistake.

I invite you to dive in deeply with me this summer. The ZOË Conference, which I’m hosting with my colleagues at The Cluny Institute this summer in Napa, CA (July 26-28), will dive deeper into the question of life than any other gathering this year. A fitting year, it seems—the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding—to ask, very simply, what kind of life is possible here?

…

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An excerpt from —her foreword to the new book, Be Not Conformed: René Girard at the Intersection of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, edited by Luke Burgis, published earlier this month by CUA Press. The edited volume contains 16 original essays on Girard’s work.

Get the Book

Foreword: A Good Contagion

Before he became an acknowledged Silicon Valley guru, before he became the fourth wise man in a Nativity crèche, René Girard lived quietly and inconspicuously on a far-flung corner of campus, on the aptly named Frenchman’s Road. I was fortunate to know René before he was a legend, before he was featured in The New York Review of Books, before he was the subject of a documentary film called Things Hidden, before everybody who was anybody knew him, had read him, or had at least read about him and could quote him or pretend to quote him. My personal encounter with him would prove to be one of the more f…

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The idea of the ‘hive mind,’ the latest iteration of what used to be called groupthink, has become newly salient over the past decade. It has generated countless memes, along with new epithets for people who don’t seem to think for themselves: the rise of people being called ‘NPCs,’ for instance, non-player characters in video games who control none of the action and show up on the screen in programmed patterns.

The cocktail of media and technology has made the world far more mimetic. We are now so saturated in mimesis that the saturation itself has become the joke — like the 1984 Pepsi commercial that ushered in the age of mimetic irony.

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In recent years, I’ve noticed a huge increase in the use of the word energy to describe how people feel. This person had good energy about them. The event had amazing energy. People join a movement because it seems to have energy. All of those are relatively straight-forward. I love live music, and that’s largely because I love the energy in the crowd—an energy that doesn’t come through my home speakers. But one area where I have heard the word over and over, to the extent that it has caught my attention, is that ideas have energy.

Oddly, though, the ideas that seem to have the most energy are the ones that seem most dangerous. Not Christian Orthodoxy, but heterodoxy—or at least if not obviously heterodox, ideas pushing the boundaries, operating slightly outside of the Overton Window (witness the energy surrounding Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures, for instance). Notice the energy around Nick Fuentes and what used to be fringe political movements. Energy is now in edginess. Or the en…

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Almost two and a half years after the NOVITĀTE conference in D.C. (which celebrated René Girard’s 100th birthday), the book that I promised would emerge from that gathering is finally about to be published. There is much more on the book below—including a detailed table of contents of the 17 original essays that make it up, as well as a bonus preview of the Introduction.

I’m also excited to announce that we are going to be bringing back the spirit of NOVITĀTE with a special session dedicated to Girard and A.I. at the upcoming Zoe conference in Napa this summer, where you can expect to see a lot of the same faces from the 2023 conference—and a lot of new ones.

But before I get to the book: For the next 7 days, the second cohort of the Foundations of Agency workshop is open this spring at a cost of $495.

This is not simply a course that takes you on a survey of the philosophical, psychological, and theological foundations of the concept of agency—it will put you in a small cohort of 4-5 …

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It’s not hard to find your tribe. The real challenge today is not losing yourself within one.

For the past three years, I’ve been researching and writing the most important and personal thing that I have ever published: THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, out from St. Martin’s Press on June 16, 2026.

For those who know me or have followed my work, please consider stopping now to click this link and pre-order. For the rest: let me tell you why I believe this book is worth the investment—and why I think it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Some Backstory

In 2021, when my mother unexpectedly died, I became the primary caregiver for my father, who was battling advanced Alzheimer’s disease—only a few months after my book Wanting was published, and just weeks after I was newly married. That experience forced both …

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Friends,

First, some big personal news: the reason I haven’t been as active here lately as I was hoping is that our second daughter was born a little earlier than expected (shortly after Christmas), and nothing has brought me more joy than having two baby girls, one on each shoulder, grabbing each other’s faces and mine—but it’s also been a period of major adjustment and pure exhaustion.

Within 48 hours of my daughter being born, I received a round of last-minute edits on my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine (publishing contracts and schedules are unforgiving!)—so when I was up from 2-4 a.m. putting my toddler back to sleep, I was making edits on the manuscript before I went back to bed rather than writing here.

All that is to say: thank you for your patience with me. Life is rich, even when it’s exhausting—and probably especially when it’s exhausting.

I’ll have much more to say on the book here in the next few months. It’s the most important (and personal) …

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Last chance for discounted Cluny Conference (“Life Abundant in an Artificial Age”) tickets—15% off good through the end of year with coupon code ‘antimimetic’. Full-time position now open: Manager, Social Media and Community.

Moths evolved to navigate by celestial light. Artificial light hijacks that instinct—and they spiral. Technology introduced changes into the environment that they can’t adapt to fast enough.

While none of us like being compared to moths, it’s hard not to see our current predicament as somewhat similar. We’re not adapting fast enough—morally, spiritually, intellectually, physically—to the bright, artificial light that is Artificial Intelligence.

The Internet ushered in the Information Age, in which people quickly became exposed to an abundan…

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Before we get to this week’s essay, two important notes:

1) Tickets to the ZOE Conference in July—where Silicon Valley will come face to face with Athens and Jerusalem, and —are available at a discount, until the end of the year. Apply coupon code ‘antimimetic’ before Jan. 1 at checkout. You’ll be invited onto our conference app to get to know others, set-up meetings, and chat beginning in April.

2) I’m hiring a Director of Operations & Strategy for The Cluny Project in Washington, DC. It’s an in-person job only. We will pay up to $100k with generous benefits for an experienced candidate. Filling this position is my top priority. Applications can be found here. (Other open roles, including Director of Communications, can be found here, but our timeline is longer on filling them.)

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Dear Readers:

I was up until midnight last night (yes, on Thanksgiving) turning around copy-editing queries and fact-checks for my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. Some of the fact-checks were painful, like the time I remembered going back to my basement apartment in Astoria, Queens, on the N train, and feeling a certain way as it “rumbled over the Queensboro bridge” (“The N train doesn’t go over the Queensboro bridge,” my lifelong New Yorker fact-checker reminded me bluntly).

I’ve poured both my mind and my heart into this one, and I hope you enjoy it when it hits shelves next year: June 16, 2026. I’ll be publishing a lot more here related to its central themes in the coming months. Until then, some news:

I’m Hiring!

I’m hiring for several different positions. The one I am expediting, though, and the one with the broadest reach—because the position can be totally remote, and it’s part-time—is Content Strategist. It’s a position that requires: 1) being intimately familiar with …

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In August, I sat down with one of my favorite thinkers, the economist , in my hometown of Grand Rapids, MI. The last time Tyler had been to Grand Rapids was 1982—the year after I was born. So I was greatly amused to hear his commentary on how the city had changed since his last visit, while I was still in a bassinet.

We made our way to an intimate concert venue with outstanding acoustics, where a jazz band played for our gathering of about 100 people during our Cluny Encounter, which I like to describe as mash-ups between unlikely collaborators around a topic that is not too well-grooved, where we can carve fresh snow and challenge assumptions at the intersection of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. The topic that we sat down to discuss on this day in August: The development of talent networks and the role of apprenticeship in a changing world.

Tyler and Daniel Gross wrote an excellent book on talent, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, which helped frame our discussion and has influenced the way I think about talent and conduct interviews. But I’m particularly interested in talent development for another reason: I see the Cluny Project as building a talent network of its own—a different kind of talent that will continue to emerge and become more important the further we get into the 21st century, as the cost of cognition trends toward zero.

Tyler and I talked Luca vs. LeBron (L.A. Lakers) talent dynamics, why certain Midwest towns once produced so much business talent, why Cowen thinks religious thinkers will be the most important thinkers of the coming decades, and much, much more. I hope you enjoy it!

Note: we had this conversation in a dark, jazz-club like setting with pretty terrible lighting. The Cluny team ended up having a lot of video and audio issues in post-production, which delayed our ability to publish this video for an embarrassingly long time. Please excuse the lack of quality in audio/video. Lessons were learned for when we do this in the future… You should still be able to fully watch/listen to the conversation with minimal distraction, though, as we put in a lot of work to get into a version that is serviceable these past couple of months. Thanks.

My best,
Luke