daniel.industries

When Machines Make the Incompetent More Confident

2026-05-31T08:10:52-05:00

A meaningful share of my current role has become sitting across from account directors and go-to-market leads who arrive with AI-generated projects and argue them. What they are proposing, in most cases, is a dashboard or website that displays the status of a process that is not ready to be automated, built to track a workflow that does not yet warrant tracking. The tool has not solved a problem; it has driven its user to identify a problem worth solving, outlined an architecture for the solution, and produced enough material — diagrams, schemas, interface mockups — that the user arrives in the room convinced the work is real. My job is to explain, carefully, why the logic is flawed: why the process they have outlined is either a non-problem or a premature one, why the architecture the model produced is a plausible shape of a system rather than a system plan, why the confidence they feel is the model’s confidence and not their own. They do not take it well. The tool has given them the experience of building something, and the experience feels like expertise…

Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive. The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about.

(I decided on just two big pull quotes this time, but seriously just read the entire thing.)

“Can I get the logo in cornflower blue?” is one of my favorite movie quotes to deploy in a work conversation. But other times, I’m in a meeting with so much ignorant bloviating that I have to subtoot:

Product management is the hardest job in software only because everyone thinks they are a f*n software expert even if they’ve never designed a single feature

Actual documentation used to be the safe-from-stupidity domain of actual professionals, people who had the expertise and humility to actually think through problems before proposing solutions. Now, “I read it on the Internet” has bled into our conference rooms and intranets. Take this hypothetical example of an AI-generated internal document at a software company:

URGENT: Platform Enhancement Requests
TO: [ Product Leader ]
FROM: [ Ops Leader ]
DATE: [ The height of the AI bubble ]
PRIORITY: 🔴 High – Immediate Roadmap Consideration Required

Executive Summary

[ Two paragraphs of slop ]

⚠️ These features must be prioritized in the next sprint cycle.

[ ~1000 more words of slop ]

There are other factors involved that would lead someone to generate such a document and immediately share it with their coworkers–their pain is real and should not be dismissed¹–but the fact that the AI became the intermediary for this communication simply intensified all the pitfalls of less experienced product thinking:

Trying to develop solutions before fully understanding the problems
Not understanding the context:
- what other work is being done
- how we prioritize work
- what other use cases are involved
- what edge cases have been discovered
- knowing that other use cases and edge cases have not yet been discovered…
- what it actually takes to get software into production
- what it actually takes to maintain software in production
- what it actually takes to support software in production
Not appreciating how much organizational psychology is involved in product development²

I use AI to generate documents at work all the time. It often helps me put things into words I hope coworkers will better understand–the same motivation of the “author” of the above example, I assume. But I’ve first used the LLM to think through the problem: I’ve given it instructions to try to make it less sycophantic and get it to challenge me³, I’ve asked it to critique my original thinking, I’ve read its massive outputs, asked it more questions, instructed it very specifically about the document I would like, read that document, asked it to make edits, then made final edits myself. This results in a draft that I then socialize with the relevant and capable coworkers, and we all leave comments and make edits. The robot is then really good at reading all of that, plus the relevant documents and comments from last year we’ve all forgotten about⁴, and we start the entire process all over again. I use the robot to not just make assumptions. I use it to try to capture all the context. I preface the sharing of these documents with a disclaimer that I used an LLM to generate it.⁵

The Internet gave everyone a voice to complain (and complain about complaining…see, I’m self-aware), best described in one of my favorite posts of all time, Paul Ford’s 2011 The Web Is a Customer Service Medium. Now AI is making everyone feel and present like an expert without any expertise. Part of me wants to offer them my job. After all, Claude Code can develop their software too, can it not?

Postscript: no sooner had I posted this than I found On Humility in Product Development, another reference to Fight Club about almost the same topic.

The acute pain, and potentially a feeling of helplessness, might have led to prompts that led a sycophantic and very helpful LLM to produce such a document. We have to get through to those Product people! I can hear the robot saying. ↩
In Henry Gantt, I mention Hofstadter’s law, Goodhart’s law, and Campbell’s law. Lately I’ve been saying Conway’s law repeatedly. Conway’s law is essentially the entire point of this post, hidden in a footnote. It deserves it’s own, more thought through post. ↩
I think the jury is still out on whether this is effective, or if it’s just placebo ↩
I often have to ask the robot, “Where did you get this from?” It dutifully points me to the document in question. Well, about ⅓ of the time. Another ⅓ of the time, it admits it hallucinated the source. The final ⅓ of the time, it made a poor correlation and I have to correct it. ↩
I mostly do this to protect my pride: if the robot exposes my ignorance, I want plausible deniability. ↩

The Output of Belonging

2026-05-25T09:09:26-05:00

The Homebound Symphony: Rowan Williams on solidarity

…in what is really in many ways the heart of Rowan’s argument, the history of the term “solidarity” that links it with labor movements becomes essential. The solidarity of labor is based on the idea that if we have a common work, then we have a common cause. In a way, Rowan is reversing that: He’s saying that if we have a common problem — the failure to acknowledge the full humanity of others — and if we have all, in one way or another, undergone the discipline of suppressing our instincts for solidarity, then we need to engage in the common labor of restoring those instincts to their proper place. That is, solidarity in this broad, moral, philosophical, and theological sense calls for work. So Rowan seeks to conceptualize and formulate the kind of work that we need to do.

Thus much what Rowan does here is the terminological and conceptual excavation that lays the groundwork for this common labor of restoring solidarity.

Naz Hamid: Craft Is Not Culture

Culture is the moat. It’s not craft and it’s not aesthetic. It’s always been culture — lived, relational, contextual. The ability to decode what’s happening right now, to encapsulate it, to communicate it through deep experience. Culture can give birth to something that hasn’t been seen, hasn’t been appropriated, hasn’t been followed to death.

LLMs can pattern-match around culture, but they cannot be inside it. They cannot live it.

The above two posts were back-to-back in my feed reader this morning and felt linked, one about “solidarity in this broad, moral, philosophical, and theological sense” and the other about the very practical problem with allowing our work to be enclosed and captured by large language models.

This does seem to be in the zeitgeist.

I immediately thought of Good Work Lights Us Up, and searched this site for the word “work”, which returned more results than I anticipated–2176 results in 893 files, or put another way, fully 25% of posts on this site contain the term.

There is the Functional Melancholic’s Pathologizing Our Own Humanity and We Spend a Lot of Energy Pretending We Aren’t All Just Tired and Terrified to Varying Degrees, just two I’ve plucked from his regular output about how to survive in a soulless, financialized world.

Also recently was Gravity via Simone Weil, who despite physical limitations insisted in working with laborers. More of her here in the months to come, for sure…

And I’m not sure if the connection to gravity in Pull was as obvious to the reader as it was to me as I wrote it, but yeah…

AI Is the Most Hilarious Possible Continuation of What It Means to Simulate Thinking Through Language

2026-05-22T06:47:22-05:00

Aboard Newsletter: But I Love Stochastic Parrots!

For a lot of people, AI is here to take their livelihood. I get that. For others, it’s here to replace the entire economy and they plan to become billionaires. Okay. But for me, it’s the most hilarious possible continuation of many decades of continual exploration of what it means to simulate thinking through language—and I never believed things could ever go this far with mere language. I used to be a pro writer for a living, and trust me, no one thought text could ever be this valuable. So to me, the situation we’re in, where LLMs can be prompted to produce interesting, somewhat random output, and then more deterministic systems can evaluate and improve that output (this is how vibe coding works), is, while frequently terrible, perpetually entertaining

…

As a deeply digital person, I’ve got an archive of my own email and prose going back nearly 30 years. Sometimes I’ve searched through that archive to learn how my own thinking has changed and evolved. And nearly every time I’ve done that, I’ve learned that my thinking has not changed or evolved. I’ve asked other people about this and they report the same thing. We perceive ourselves as enlightened creatures, adapting to meet the times. But as I started going through prose I wrote in my early 20s…well, I was missing a lot of detail, but the broad ideas were there.

Art for Art's Sake

2026-05-20T22:17:21-05:00

This is an article written in 2002 by the late Mike Riddell for an online magazine I co-created and curated. The original can be viewed here on the wayback machine. I’ve thought about republishing it here for many years; today I am.

Early in 1997 my job as Lecturer in Practical Theology at a New Zealand Baptist theological seminary came to a nasty end. I was pressured to resign because of the impending publication of a novel which I had written. The book, The Insatiable Moon, was a work of contemporary New Zealand fiction, published by Flamingo. On March 1, my novel appeared in bookshops and my employment came to an end.

Time has now passed, and I am perhaps more able to get a reasonable perspective on the events surrounding that portentous day. With the passing of the months, my anger has, if anything, increased. It seems to me that I was forced to separate my faith from my art; that I could be either a teacher in the church, or an artist, but not both at the same time. I refuse to believe that this dualism is either necessary or helpful.

The storyline of the novel was always going to be potentially controversial for Baptists. It concerned a psychiatric patient who believed himself to be the second son of God, and consequently explored the interface between revelation and insanity. The conclusion left the question of the main character’s divine status deliberately unresolved.

I mentioned to my immediate superiors that the book was coming out, and might ruffle a few feathers in a predominantly conservative denomination. They requested a copy of the manuscript, and having read it, decided that my position would no longer be tenable. To my astonishment, however, the problem which they had was not theological, but related to a scene in the book of reasonably explicit sexual encounter.

The incident in question formed the pivot point of the book; an incarnational moment in which the protagonist seeks to fulfill his divine calling to father a child with the Queen of Heaven. I have returned often to the passage to try to understand what the fuss was about, without enlightenment. It is, I hope, tender, loving and suffused with spirituality. To my mind it is a ‘high’ view of human sexuality, and certainly far from prurient.

The issue, on reflection, was much deeper than whether Baptists have sex or not, and whether if they do, it is permissible to talk about it. At stake, I suspect, were totally different perspectives on the role of the Christian artist. There remains, especially within Evangelical circles, the expectation that Christian art will be essentially didactic or evangelistic.

Thus, as a friend of mine explained rather clumsily, the sex involved was between two people who weren’t married. Did this mean, he asked, that I had departed from traditional Christian expectations of the sanctity of marriage? I was initially bewildered by the question. I honestly didn’t understand it. I joked that the adultery was an oversight – I didn’t notice there was any in there until it was too late.

When I finally realized that he was serious, and that my writing was causing him personal offense, I had to painstakingly explain to him that what I was doing was writing a story. It was a story that I wanted to tell; one that arose from the dark vaults of my imagination where rationality and ethical thinking are at a low ebb. It was a work of art, not a theological exposition.

This expectation from well-meaning Christian spectators in the art world, that artists are some sort of covert evangelistic commandos, is a monkey on the back for creative people within the church. It is the reason why so much Christian art is simply poor art, because artists bow to the temptation to get a message across. The consumers of what results tend to be members of the Christian community, who are all too ready to trade taste for testimony.

Art is the product of singular vision. It comes, as a writer friend of mine had it, from one’s meditation. Unless one is committed to dragging that vision, wet and wild and pumping, from the creative womb, it is misleading to claim the title of ‘artist’. There is a deep and unique responsibility upon any artist to be faithful to that which rises within them. Anything else is the equivalent of ‘burying one’s talents’, or at least adulterating them.

The counter position, advanced by various teachers of the institutional church, is that the qualifier ‘Christian’ should dominate over any other term which follows it. Thus Christian artists must produce art which is specifically Christian, and an acceptable representation of the outlook of the church. There are consequently clear boundaries which a Christian artist dare not transgress.

I find it very difficult to feel much sympathy for this view. It is based on a simplistic view of human nature. Exponents of it seem to suggest that there is some foundational core of Christianity, upon which other vocational attributes float. The ability to write or paint or sculpt is seen as something which is tacked on to an existing Christian agenda.

In my experience, both Christianity and art drive to the very heart of being. The symbols, language and rituals of faith are naturally deeply formative of those who participate in them. But expressing art is not a matter of simply ‘applying’ faith to the creative endeavour. Rather one reaches into those murky depths where primal good and evil still struggle, and dredges material up to the surface.

It may not be pretty; it may not look very ‘Christian’. The only thing which in fact distinguishes such art as Christian is the allegiance of the artist. A Christian lawyer will not be expected to somehow establish forgiveness as the guiding principle of the legal system. I cannot accept that Christian artists should be required or even encouraged to merely give some artistic representation of the gospel.

Perhaps it is arrogant to insist on artistic integrity, and to set oneself as the only arbiter of what is morally acceptable in one’s own work. But to an artist, integrity is all. That cavern of imagination which is the source of all art must be guarded with care. Once violated, it is more difficult to restore than a hymen. God, of course, is the final judge, and Christian artists know the terror and excitement of living under that shadow.

The institutional church as judge is a poor substitute, and has an appalling record. It applauds the worst and excommunicates the best of Christian art. My dream would be for the church to simply concentrate on being the nurturing community for artists; a place where creativity is fostered and supported. And then, against the odds, to live with whatever is produced. If anyone is to lead the way out of the rational cage which the church has built for itself, it will be her artists.

In my own case, I have reason to be grateful for the bigotry of the Baptist community. My loss of employment led to a change of city, where cheaper housing has meant that I can pursue writing full time. So my art has prospered, and my faith has not suffered any mortal blows. I have, however, jumped the ugly ditch and become a Catholic. I find in my new home a much greater acceptance of me as I am, without the dualism which has marked my former Evangelical existence.

In the end faith and art cannot be separated or prioritized. They draw from the one spring, in which we find our human calling to be that of co-creation with God. Art does not need to be spiritualized. It is, if genuine, already a spiritual act. I suspect that betraying one’s art is every bit as apostate as renouncing one’s faith. Let us hope that the church may yet become a place where neither is necessary.

Mike Riddell is a novelist and writer on spirituality who lives in the south of New Zealand at Dunedin. He is also a teacher of theology at Otago university and an international speaker and storyteller, addressing topics from the life of prayer to the future of the church. For many years he has been a pioneer and innovator in the alternative worship movement. Author of nine books, Mike has an interesting and varied background including such episodes as time in a Moroccan prison and disrobing before the Auckland City Council to highlight housing issues. A former Baptist minister, he left his job lecturing Baptist students after publication of a controversial novel, and is now a Catholic layman. Mike’s special interest is in the radical application of Jesus’ life and teaching to the world around us.

I Love Mycelial Musical Rabbit Holes

2026-05-17T12:06:18-05:00

Visitor by Onelinedrawing

Oh I need a letter, ooh I need a letter
Oh I need a letter but not that kind
I don’t need a letter to help me remember
What is not, what was never mine
Ooh I need a letter, oh I need a letter
Oh I need a letter but not that kind

Love letter is delightfully anachronistic. Who writes letters anymore?

I do send cards. I sent one recently and the recipient’s first words to me the next time he saw me were, “You have really nice handwriting.” It was the best compliment I’ve received all month. Literally nobody has complimented me on my handwriting before.

Jonah Matranga’s song from the early 2000s started playing in my head, but only the melody and the word “letter”. I knew in which universe it came from, but I couldn’t remember Jonah or onelinedrawing. But I remembered who introduced me to Jonah’s work: Keith Michaud. He used to cover a couple of Jonah’s songs back in the day. But I couldn’t remember that band or those songs either. I scrolled my streaming service of the moment, I scrolled my Bandcamp collection and wishlist.

Finally I flipped through my guitar songbook. There it was: Lukewarm. The song I took to covering because of Keith’s inspiring renditions inside humid Palm Beach bars.

Thriller by New End Original

Keith also covered #1 Defender. That one got the punters singing along.

Thriller by New End Original

But neither of those were the letter song. Anyway, I had enough of a lead to find the onelinedrawing records on Bandcamp, and Yr Letter.

Scrolling through the aforementioned libraries and wishlists, it is truly an embarrassment of riches. I had to hold myself from playing a record and thus distracting myself from my rabbit hunt. Every record I wanted to reach for, that desire did not originate from anything the algorithm could know or predict.

Negativland, who I went to see give a talk at the University of Arizona and was immediately enthralled by. The Lost Dogs and The Throes channeling Uncle Tupelo and R.E.M. respectively for my heady christian alternative college years in the mid-1900s. Michael Knott, one of the greats, who my fellow christian outcasts in South Florida introduced me to (we watched him pour clam chowder over his head in Palm Beach and then went drinking with him, stars in our eyes). Mice Parade and Jaga Jazzist, who showed me electronic music could be more than the cage-rattling four on the floor from the discotheques in Eastern Europe. Miranda July’s audio work, discovered either before or right after falling in love via Me and You and Everyone We Know. All the Dallas bands: The New Year, friend’s side projects, Paul Slavens, far too many more to list here. Crazy good drummers making all kinds of things.

I have to stop that list at some point. I think you can go look for yourself.

Before platforms, music wove its stories into yours. Before algorithms, we were all co-creators. Yeah, I’m nostalgic. Yeah, I have no idea WTF is on the radio.

This is a love letter to sticky bars, record bins, internet rabbit holes, folks who remember what it meant to not sell out, figuring out what show to go to by talking to friends, singing along, hi-fis.

I don’t technically have a house in the ‘burbs or a bitchin’ SUV, but I’m undeniably lukewarm these days. This is a love letter to fervor.

Pathologizing Our Own Humanity

2026-05-11T18:28:10-05:00

📺️ Why toxic positivity is making us miserable

When I got cancer, people often told me that everything happens for a reason, and what they meant was that I will learn important lessons that will eventually enrich my life if it doesn’t kill me. But some things happen for no good reason. Sometimes in life we have to step up to the edge of the great mystery and in the face of mystery we can’t always say, we will know why.

If we don’t have a wider range than a toxic positivity, we threaten to stigmatize negative emotions and then eventually start to pathologize our own humanity.

📺️ Why Doing Nothing Feels Illegal Now

…the thing is you’re probably not that bad at focusing. It’s just that you’ve been psychologically waterboarded by notifications since approximately 2009…

Schopenhauer had this observation that human beings basically oscillate perpetually between desire and boredom. And that when we’re not frantically chasing something, we are miserable from the wanting.

But then when we actually finally get the thing, we’re almost immediately bored and then we start reaching for the next thing. And well, his conclusion was basically that most of human activity is just like an elaborate boredom avoidance process. Which you might see as a pretty dark perspective…but…have you been on the internet lately?

What Schopenhauer said tracks and I think about Hirayama in that context because he’s essentially doing the thing that Schopenhauer identified as the hardest thing. He stepped off the oscillation somehow and he didn’t do it because he got everything he wanted. He just stopped the chasing. And…I think the thing that makes his life look so strange to most people is his contentment…in spite of the toilet cleaning.

We don’t really have a framework for that anymore because in our culture, contentment reads as a sort of failure or delusion. And the gap, you know, the one that the algorithm depends on, contentment closes that gap. And a closed gap is bad for business.

So instead we pathologize it and we call it giving up, you know, lack of ambition and all that. And Hirayama doesn’t seem particularly impressed with any of that, which already makes him more psychologically stable than most of the internet in my opinion.

Pull

2026-05-09T10:09:34-05:00

Illustration by Resource Database

The first chamber was larger than the second. Wren heard and felt the pneumatic doors close behind them and was careful to place one foot next to the other, in a stable stance, and took hold of the handrails. They felt their boots lock onto the walkway. The loud, mechanical horn blared its single warning and clouds of thin white mist filled the room. Wren stared straight ahead but could see in the peripheral vision possible through their helmet’s visor the particles cling to their suit. In seconds they covered the visor as well.

A loud thump, and Wren gripped the handrails as the g-forces compounded in milliseconds. The sound of rushing air audible but dampened through their helmet. The visor cleared and they watched as their suit became clean, a white tornado cloud forming below and then disappearing just as quickly, another mechanical bang, their arm muscles relaxing reflexively, their boots freed.

Wren began walking as the forward doors whooshed open. Now they had to make a decision. As they entered the second, smaller chamber, the one with the red bottom suspended on a pole bolted to the walkway, they thought back across their day. Flashes of blades tearing at flesh, blood streaking across the air, faces–those faces–twisted to begin with, contorting in pain, those eyes–inhuman, lightless–still registering the darkness as it descended upon what remained of their souls.

They saw an image of a child–would you call it a child?–cowering in a shadow. Was that real? As they walked, Wren tried to recall, reconstruct the memory from a glance allowed in a single second while their autonomous movement completed its follow-through. They saw eyes, fear. Then movement further into the shadows.

It didn’t matter if it was real or not. Wren walked up to the button, removed their helmet, and slammed their hand down. A flexible tube with a small mouthpiece descended and they inhaled from it, lungs filling, brain tingling. Then, with a much gentler mechanical warning, that same gravity, this time just within her skull, something like particles being pulled down, along the sides, behind their ears, down their neck.

The next set of doors opened, and Wren walked forward, free to do the Lord’s work once again.

This is my submission for May’s IndieWeb Fiction Carnival.

Some Fiction

2026-05-03T08:15:04-05:00

I finished Accelerated Growth Environment a couple of days ago. I enjoyed it. It is a good length–sometimes a too-long story can result in a DNF for me–but the first ~third is pretty slow paced and then the rest is fast, to the point I saw the progress indicator and wondered how it was going to wrap up (what I actually thought was “This book must have almost no falling action,” which is basically true). It also didn’t wrap in any particularly clever way, which isn’t a fault, just something I’ve come to expect. (On the other hand, I’ve been accused of leaving my plots unfinished, leaving it up to the reader to imagine their own ending.) But the plot involves a religious cult, which, having been in one, always stimulates my interest.

More times than I can count, I’ve returned to fiction and realized I needed to make sure I didn’t lose the habit. I scanned my digital libraries for a new fiction book to pick up (why is that not a filter option in either of them?!), and my book collecting is heavily weighted non-fiction¹, so it takes a lot of scrolling. I haven’t picked one yet. I opened Gravity and Grace first instead, which has been on my mind to get through. It turned out to be so impactful just in the introduction that I was compelled to post a big chunk of it. This morning it feels too heavy to dive back into.

But yesterday morning these delightful pieces of short fiction crossed my desk:

📃 How to Enjoy Eternal Life

📃 A beautiful day on Colony 12

📃 Sharing is caring

The author of the last two, Ben Werdmuller (who I have read on the internet longer than I can remember), is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Fiction Carnival. I have an idea, but haven’t figured out how to start it, so I’m posting this instead.

After posting this I realized I had purchased another Shiraki book, Wine for Roses and just not uploaded it to my e-reader yet. This is probably my move.

Because said collecting is very aspirational; but then, I find non-fiction harder to finish. ↩

Gravity

2026-05-02T07:51:23-05:00

Gustave Thibon, in the intro to Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil. I’m assuming the quotes are Simone¹, and have italicized them.

Creation reflects God by its beauty and harmony, but, through the evil and death which abide in it and the blind necessity by which it is governed, it also reflects the absence of God. We have issued from God: that means that we bear his imprint and it means also that we are separated from him. The etymology of the word to exist (to be placed outside) is very illuminating in this respect: we can say we exist, we cannot say we are. God who is Being has in a sense effaced himself so that we can exist: he has given up being everything in order that we might exist; he has dispossessed himself in our favour of his own necessity, which is identical with goodness, to allow another necessity to reign which is alien and indifferent to good. The central law of this world, from which God has withdrawn by his very act of creation, is the law of gravity…

Psychologically it is shown by all those motives which are directed towards asserting or reinstating the self, by all those secret subterfuges (lies of the inner life, escape in dreams or false ideals, imaginary encroachments on the past and the future, etc.) which we make use of to bolster up from inside our tottering existence, that is to say, to remain apart from and opposed to God.

Simone Weil presents the problem of evil as follows: ‘How can we escape from that which corresponds to gravity in ourselves?’ By grace alone. In order to come to us God passes through the infinite thickness of time and space; his grace changes nothing in the play of those blind forces of necessity and chance which guide the world; it penetrates into our souls as a drop of water makes its way through geological strata without affecting their structure, and there it waits in silence until we consent to become God again. Whereas gravity is the work of creation, the work of grace consists of ‘decreating’ us. God consented through love to cease to be everything so that we might be something; we must consent through love to cease to be anything so that God may become everything again. It is therefore a question of abolishing the self within us, ‘that shadow thrown by sin and error which stops the light of God and which we take for a being.’ Without this utter humility, this unconditional consent to be nothing, all forms of heroism and immolation are still subject to the law of gravity and falsehood: ‘We can offer nothing short of ourselves. Otherwise what we term our offering is merely a label attached to a compensatory assertion of the “I”’.

In order to kill the self we must be ready to endure all the wounds of life, exposing ourselves naked and defenseless to its fangs…

The self should be destroyed in us from within by love. But its destruction can also be brought about from without by extreme suffering and degradation. There are vagrants and prostitutes who have no more self-esteem than the saints and whose life is confined to the passing moment. Therein lies the tragedy of degradation. It is irreparable, not because the self which it destroys is precious, for the self is made to be destroyed, but because it prevents God from effecting the destruction himself and robs eternalizing love of its prey.

Simone Weil makes a sharp distinction between this supernatural immolation and all forms of human grandeur and heroism. Here below God is the feeblest and most destitute of beings; his love, unlike that of idols, does not fill the carnal part of the soul; to go to him we have to labour in the void, to refuse every intoxication of passion or pride which veils the horrible mystery of death, and to allow ourselves to be guided only by the ‘still, small voice’ spoken of in the Bible—a voice inaudible to the senses and unnoticed by the self. ‘To say to Christ as Saint Peter did: “I will always be faithful to thee”, is to deny him already, for it is to suppose that the source of fidelity is in ourselves and not in grace. As he was chosen, this denial was made known to all men and to himself. How many others boast in the same way—and never understand.’ It is easy to die for something forceful because participation in force produces an intoxication which stupefies us. But it is supernatural to die for something weak… ‘Supernatural love has no contact with force, moreover it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. Only an earthly attachment, if it has in it enough energy, can afford protection against the coldness of steel. Armour is made of metal in the same way as the sword. If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.’

The hero wears armour, the saint is naked. Now armour, while keeping off blows, prevents any direct contact with reality and above all makes it impossible to enter the third dimension which is that of supernatural love. If things are really to exist for us they have to penetrate within us. Hence the necessity for being naked: nothing can enter into us while armour protects us both from wounds and from the depths which they open up. All sin is an attack against the third dimension, an attempt to bring back to the plane of unreality and painlessness an emotion which seeks to penetrate to the depths. This law is inexorable: we lessen our own suffering to the extent that we weaken our inner and direct communion with reality. At the extreme limit of this process life is entirely stretched out on the surface: we suffer no more except in a dream, for existence, reduced to two dimensions, becomes flat like a dream. This holds good for consolations, illusions, boasting and all the compensatory reactions by which we try to fill up the hollows bitten into us by reality. Every empty place or hollow does in fact imply the presence of the third dimension; it is not possible to enter into a surface, and to fill up a hole is equivalent to taking refuge in isolation on the surface. The adage of ancient physics: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, is strictly true in psychology. But this vacuum is precisely what grace needs in order to come into us.

This process of ‘decreation’, which is the only way of salvation, is the work of grace and not of the will. Man does not pull himself up to heaven by the hair. The will is only useful for servile tasks; it controls the right use of natural virtues, which are pre-requisites of the work of grace, in the same way as the ploughman’s effort must precede the sowing. But the divine seed comes from elsewhere…. In this realm Simone Weil, like Plato and Malebranche, considers attention to be of far more importance than will: ‘We must be indifferent to good and evil, really indifferent; that is to say, we must turn the light of attention equally on each of them. Then the good will triumph by an automatic phenomenon.’ It is precisely this superior automatism which has to be created; it is not obtained by tightening up the self and ‘going beyond one’s capacity’ (forçant son talent) for doing good (nothing is more degrading than a noble action performed in an unworthy spirit) but by arriving through self-effacement and love at that state of perfect docility to grace whence goodness spontaneously emanates. ‘Action is the pointer which shows the balance. We must not touch the pointer but the weight.’

Goodness which we choose by balancing it against evil has scarcely anything but social value; to the eyes of Him ‘who seeth in secret’ it proceeds from the same motives and is marked by the same vulgarity as evil. Hence the kinship often observed between certain forms of ‘virtue’ and the corresponding sin: theft and the bourgeois respect for property, adultery and a ‘respectable woman’, the savings-bank and waste, etc. Real goodness is not opposed to evil (in order to oppose something directly it is necessary to be on the same level); it transcends and effaces it. ‘What evil violates is not goodness, for goodness is inviolate; only a degraded good can be violated.’

The soul engaged in the pursuit of pure goodness comes up against irreducible contradictions. Contradiction is the criterion of reality. ‘Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything that we want is in contradiction with the conditions or consequences which are attached to it. It is because we ourselves are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God.’…Only imaginary good things have no contradiction in them…meet with no obstacles so long as they do not pass on to action; they sail gaily forward in a sea of pure but fictitious goodness; the shock of hitting the rocks is the signal which wakens them. We must accept this contradiction—the sign of our misery and our greatness—in all its bitterness. It is through fully experiencing and suffering from the absurdity as such of this universe where good and evil are mixed that we attain to the pure goodness whose kingdom is not of this world. ‘That action is pure which we can accomplish by keeping our intention totally directed towards pure and impossible goodness, without disguising from ourselves by any lie either the attraction or the impossibility of pure goodness.’ Instead of filling the space which stretches between necessity and goodness with dreams (faith in God as a temporal father, science, progress …) we must receive the two branches of contradiction just as they are and allow ourselves to be torn asunder by their distance. And it is in this tearing, which is as it were a reflection in man of the creative act which rends God, that we rediscover the original identity of necessity and goodness: ‘This world, in so far as it is quite empty of God, is God himself. Necessity, in so far as it is absolutely distinct from goodness, is goodness itself. That is why all consolation in affliction separates us from love and from truth. Therein lies the mystery of mysteries. When we touch it we are secure.’ He, therefore, who refuses to accept confusion is marked for suffering. From Antigone whom the guardian of the temporal city called upon to go and love among the shades, down to Simone Weil herself whom human injustice crucified until she was in her grave, affliction is the lot of all those lovers of the absolute who are astray in this world of relative things: ‘If we want only goodness we are opposed to the law which links good to evil as the illuminated object to the shadow, and, being opposed to the universal law of the world, it is inevitable that we should fall into affliction.’ In so far as the soul is not completely emptied of itself, this thirst for pure goodness leads to the suffering of expiation; in a perfectly innocent soul it produces redemptive suffering: ‘To be innocent is to bear the weight of the whole universe. It is to throw in the counterweight to restore the balance.’ Thus purity does not abolish suffering; on the contrary it deepens it to infinity whilst giving it an eternal meaning: ‘The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural cure for suffering, but a supernatural use of it.’

and further assume they are from the book. I just started it ↩

Cozy

2026-04-26T07:46:42-05:00

I’ve made reference lately in my notes and in conversation to the “capitalist mill” as in “grist for the capitalist mill”¹. I would give specific examples but the symptoms as they concern me are already topics of all the posts: inability to focus, social division, lack of meaningful productivity, everything getting worse, producing things of value long-since devalued, platforms instead of products, content instead of art…

But sure, it’s probably my fault for not meditating more.

Cozy is having a moment and I’ve fallen for it. It strikes me as the foil to the mill. It seeps contentment, simplicity, a disregard for more.

Cozy lit

I’ve been into hopepunk/solarpunk for a while now, but I randomly picked up Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve picked up More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop but read Bright Green Futures and am reading Accelerated Growth Environment from the amazing Shiraki Press first.

Japan

I’ve been obsessed with Japan for a while now, but Morisaki Bookshop led me down a Jinbōchō rabbit-hole. This was my favorite of the YT videos I watched.

Information diet

The indieweb is the best place to find cozy content, see last post’s links. The fact that this blog has returned to its personal roots isn’t intentional, but not an accident either.

Still, calm, reasonable voices discussing news is required, and I’ve found recent episodes of the Vergecast useful.

Tools for the rebellion

slop cop

I just learned that “grist to/for the mill” has a positive connotation – “that everything can be made useful or turned to advantage” – but I’ve never used it that way. Also my name is Miller, so…in theory (historically?) I’m doing the grinding up of here. Not just the grinding. ↩