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 energy in tech: it is gravitating toward things that seem powerful and dangerous, like autonomous weapons systems and defense tech, and not necessarily to the more unsexy things like, say, a cure for Alzheimer’s. War is much more energizing to the young.
I don’t deny the notion that it has always been like this to some extent. History is filled with those who have pushed boundaries and sought the most energizing pathways forward. Nietzsche gave us all a philosophy and language to describe the impulse, and the world has never been quite the same. Once we stepped back and did the meta-analysis of attraction, then attraction itself became corrupted. We may begin to think that if we want something that seems pedestrian—I don’t know, like a family with children and a messy household—that we are somehow not wanting powerfully enough.
All of this has to do with the most fundamental topic of what is life—which is, as many of you know, the very theme of the annual Cluny Conference that I am hosting in Napa this July (tickets still available!). And one of the most fascinating distinctions of “what life is” is between bios and zoë, a distinction which itself is the subject of debate. One of the leading thinkers who has made this distinction central to his philosophy is the Italian Giorgio Agamben, for whom zoë represents “base” life—the simple fact of being alive. It is life that has not yet taken form. It is bare, vulnerable, stripped of everything that would give it real vitality, like political form and particular structures like participation in communities. These things turn it into bios and give life vitality—or we may even say a kind of energy. It becomes meaningful.
Agamben’s masterstroke is his argument that modern politics increasingly collapses the distinction between zoë and bios while pretending to maintain it. Sovereign power decides who is a bios (a life that matters) and who is reduced to zoë (bare existence, a life that doesn’t matter). The person reduced to this form of zoë becomes a homo sacer, in Agamben’s language: a person who can be killed, because they lie outside of the system, but a person who is still recognized as having a base form of biological life.
For Agamben, the concentration camp represented modernity’s distinction between bios and zoë: pure death without—at least in the minds of those committing the murders—the character of sacrifice.
Using Agamben's framework, we can begin to see why debates like abortion are so intractable. The disagreement is not only moral but ontological. It turns on whether the life in the womb is understood as bios—a life with form and meaning—or as mere zoē, biological existence without that form, or as something that has not yet crossed the threshold into either category and thus is not a life at all. Most people have never articulated their position in these terms, but their intuitions already presuppose one of these views. The conflict, then, is not just about rights or policy, but about what counts as a life at all.
I hope the difference is becoming clear, because now I’m going to turn it on its head. We’re going to get back to energy—but first, the inversion.
A Different Kind of zoë
Agamben equates bios with life that has form—a life that is part of a city or state, for example. It acquires a new kind of vitality—we might even say energy—from this participation.
What turned this basic distinction on its head were the Christian gospels, especially the Gospel of John, in which Jesus uses the word zoë to refer to a specific kind of new life:
“I came that they may have life (zoē), and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life (zoē).” (John 14:6)
“I am the resurrection and the life (zoē); whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” (John 11:25)
“Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life (zoē aiōnios*). He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” (John 5:24)
“I am the bread of life (zoē); whoever comes to me shall not hunger.” (John 6:35)
Here zoë refers to a higher form of life that transcends city or state and is not dependent on them. It is a more abundant form of life in Christ that is within anyone’s reach, regardless of the circumstances or political forms of life that they find themselves in.
Agamben exposes the fragility of political dignity. The Gospel asserts the indestructibility of personal dignity.
The Gospels almost completely flip the earlier hierarchy: zoē becomes the highest form of life, because it means participation in the divine life. It is capable of eternity. Bios is not.
In Christianity, “form of life” began to take on new shapes that did not inherently have political character: for instance, the form of chastity (even celibacy), poverty, and obedience, as in the monastic traditions—something which, interestingly, the post-secular Agamben turned to in fascination in his later work. The very concept of “abundance” could now be conceived of in different terms than the merely material.
This doesn’t mean that there is no relationship between bios and zoē in the spiritual life; it does mean that bios is now oriented to zoē, though, and these new forms and structures should only be sought to the extent that they make this zoē more accessible, and attractive.
Jean Danielou began to describe this relationship in his classic Prayer as a Political Problem, originally published in 1965. In it, he describes the structure of politics like a lever that can either open or close people off to transcendent realities to varying degrees. He wasn’t just talking about the number of times an NFL football player says “First of all, all thanks to God” before he makes his post-game comments, or any of these performative or mimetic things which are hard to draw any serious correlation from. I think he was, at root, writing about the ways in which our environments direct our energy and ambition.
It’s incredibly hard to change the shape of desire for a single person, and it’s even harder for an entire company or community or nation. But one thing I’ve learned, having been helping people and organizations do this for the past 5 years, is that there is a singularly strong connection between energy—the things that make people feel truly alive—and desire. To ignore that connection would be to Platonize desire in some sense, to abstract it from its bodily form. Desire is something intimately bound up with the body. Not just sexual desire, but all desire.
That is why I believe that in the next decade, with the ascendency of disincarnate AI, the body will become paradoxically more important to those who truly understand. Enfleshed and ensouled desire will have primacy over the artificial desires of machines, if we could call those desires at all. (I don’t.)
Which brings me back to the fundamental question of what is energizing people right now. One thread that is undeniable is the desire to transcend all systems, or to overturn them, to become solo entrepreneurs and build billion dollar companies, to exist outside of any boundaries—in essence, to live the life of Agamben’s homo sacer, a life of zoē. But this new thirst for zoē is also Christ haunted, tinged with the Christianity it can’t escape, because it promises a form of salvation. My OpenClaw AI, set up here in my attic office, will save me from the coming economic disruption. It’s titillating to think of all the things we’ll do together, me and my Claw.
But this is clearly a kind of luxury desire—the kind of desire I have because I can afford to have it, and because my pursuing that desire doesn’t immediately affect anyone else negatively. It might take some time away from my family in the short-term, but most people won’t notice or have any idea of how I am directing my time and energy until, in some cases, years later. A great tragedy of our society is that any of us could be chasing thin, ephemeral desires for years without anyone stopping us or making us question ourselves.
We go searching the world over, in René Girard’s words, searching for the thing we want, believing that it must lie beneath the only rock on earth that is too heavy for us to lift. But the truth is not a rock, nor something that can live under a rock, nor something that is reducible to a “fact” or “object” that we will ever find.
We are living in a moment in which people are chasing energy as if it were life itself.
But energy is cheap. It can be manufactured, amplified, engineered. Entire industries now exist to produce it—political movements, media ecosystems, even technologies that promise to make us feel more alive while quietly detaching us from the conditions that make life possible.
This is why the most “energizing” ideas today so often feel dangerous. They are. Not always because of what they propose, but because of what they train us to seek: intensity without depth, stimulation without form, freedom without relation. A kind of life that looks, in the end, very much like Agamben’s zoē—exposed, unprotected, and endlessly manipulable.
The Gospel offers a different vision. It does not deny energy, but it refuses to confuse it with life. The life it speaks of—zoē—is not the life that burns hottest, but the life that cannot be extinguished. It does not depend on the system, or the crowd, or the next idea that feels electric.
And that is why it is so easy to overlook. Because in a world addicted to energy, real life often appears, at first glance, almost quiet.