“The thief comes not, but for to steal and to kill and to destroy; I come that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” – John 10:10
I hesitated opening with a Biblical verse here, but there’s something I’ve been mulling over lately. You ever notice that the folks who seem to be most invested in telling you how to live your life seem to be having the most miserable go at it?
The rise of authoritarian leadership we witness now has been shouldered largely by the rise of the New Apostolic Reformation, a collection of revisionist religious groups mostly defined by deep harbored resentment towards pluralistic Western values and the belief that through the Seven Mountains Mandate, they can control and reorder society in their image. One of the primary tenets of these groups are they would self-describe as ‘pro-life,’ meaning they are strongly in favor of childbirth regardless of whether those circumstances are necessary, just, or even viable. They’ve also railed against numerous and far-reaching cultural touchpoints; the existence of LGBTQ+ people, pornography/adult entertainment, and even secular knowledge and its attainment.
Coupled with these zealots in unholy matrimony is the almost apostolic fervor of another ideology: the techno-libertarians. Proponents of these ideas believe that it’s essential to throw information and compute at building an AI with human intelligence; consequences and collateral damage be damned. Say what you will about the feasibility of such a goal, I would argue no AI rooted in the instability of our present world, at the whims of an increasingly untethered wealthy, will ever succeed in creating a better one.
Both of these groups represent a quantitative approach to life. In the case of the religious far-right, the notion of sacrosanct birth outstrips reproductive care, the rights of those who have suffered rape/nonconsensual pregnancy, the value of lives once those children exit the womb. In the case of the techbros, the notion of some just-over-the-horizon golden age of prosperity justifies trampling on the rights of creators, flooding the world with false and misleading information, handing over increasingly dangerous tools to scammers and bad actors.
Both of these ideologies sometimes knowingly, sometimes unwittingly, have slaked fires of hatred and extremist rhetoric to achieve their means; fires that consume those around them, burning through their fuel, leaving those left in the embers of destruction worse than they were before.
There is another kind of fire, an unquenchable fire that has been handed down through generations from the days of Prometheus — the fire of inspiration. It comes from our own ability to be curious about the world around us, to find hope and beauty in small things, to connect with each other, to listen and be heard. It represents a qualitative form of life, one matched by our own vision to see things not as they are but through a future of our own making.
Earlier this year, I watched the eclipse on a lake on a boat with friends, the movement on the water as the air stilled and grew cold was transcendent. I’ve sipped a whiskey sour at the last haunt of one of my childhood heroes, Lemmy Kilmister, and stood at sunset at the grave of another, Carl Sagan. Heaven is small town pageantry in Ohio in late October, watching an auspicious star glow in the evening sky, a bluegrass band in a warmly lit barn in the fields of firefly twilight.
I tell you these things not to gloat, but because they represent deeply meaningful moments to me this past year. Our capacity to make our lives something worthwhile is as much or as little as we choose it to be. But it starts with asking ourselves what we can do to create a better tomorrow, and seeing the qualitative purpose in life.