There is a Bernini sculpture in the far left transept of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. It’s an angel driving a golden arrow into the body of St. Teresa. Her body is contorted in ecstasy with the arrow waiting to penetrate her flesh. The arrow has been sitting in that same place since 1652. Her body has not been changed by it, waiting for these hundreds of years. She is held in permanent ecstasy, never arriving, never dying, never passing through.
The last time I was in the church there was an old woman praying the rosary next to it. She moved through her beads, the joyful mysteries, the sorrowful mysteries, the glorious mysteries, in sequence because the rosary requires going through all of them. You don’t get to choose which ones you pray. The sorrowful mysteries don’t let you skip the scourging. The glorious mysteries don’t arrive without the sorrowful ones before them. You have to move through, even if the marble above you won’t.
I want to talk about two structures.
The first holds the body against loss, the other entrusts it to dust. The first is a pyramid and the second is a tomb. The arrow is the pyramid, the rosary is the tomb.
The modern individual is the individual who builds pyramids. He doesn’t build tombs. Tombs require something we’ve spent three centuries dismantling.
I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life.— Deuteronomy 30:19
For most of Western history, there were two competing accounts of what human life was for: represented in Athens and Jerusalem. Athens said: the city. The good life was the political life, and the citizen’s highest expression was his willingness to die for what the city required. Jerusalem said: God. The good life was a sacrifice to something that exceeded both individual and city -- something that made the military hero and the civil magistrate look temporary and small.
The martyr did not die for the polis. He died for something the polis could not contain or understand. And this made the martyr more dangerous to the city than any external enemy, because the city’s only lever over its citizens was the threat of death, and the martyr had already consented to that. You cannot coerce a person who has already surrendered the thing you are threatening to take.
These two demands ground against each other for centuries. The church looked at the soldier and called his sacrifice vain. The city looked at the martyr and called his sacrifice antisocial -- mystical, aimed at an invisible authority that could not be verified. What emerged from their mutual exhaustion was not a synthesis but negation.
The modern man is the man who looks at the demand for sacrifice and says, “No.”
Since the city and the church reproach one another with the vanity of their sacrifice, the individual is the one who rejects each form and defines himself by the refusal. He is the residue.
Locke gives this residue a philosophy. The founding insight of American liberalism is that human nature is unknowable -- and that therefore no one stands in an authoritative position to challenge the desires of the unknowable self. My desires cannot be evaluated by you because you do not have access to the interior from which they emerge. The self is epistemically sealed. And from this sealed, unchallengeable self, the stretch to everything we know is modest: if no one can question what I want, then what I want is what I am owed the conditions to pursue.
The Declaration’s right to the pursuit of happiness is presented as a clarification. I’ve always felt it was a demotion. In the older account, happiness was the byproduct of virtue: the consequence of living rightly, not the goal of living at all. Elevate it to a primary right and you have built the architecture of the individual who refuses sacrifice. His desires cannot be questioned. His nature is unknowable. His happiness is what the state exists to protect. Everything else -- the city, God, the future, the child he has not yet had -- is optional.
What this produces, over time, is the elimination of the very conditions under which certain things can exist. Glory requires risk. Valor requires the possibility of loss. A soul that has never been tested against genuine consequence has no contours. It’s a petrified and unformed soul. How can you stand for judgement if you’ve never faced the potentiality of failure.
For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.— Genesis 3:19
We are building Egyptian mummification for living bodies.
The Egyptians built the most sophisticated preservation technology the ancient world had ever seen. Their theology and their afterlife required a body intact enough for the soul to return to. To the Egyptians, mortality was a problem to be managed through superior technology. Sound familiar? If you could hold the body against deterioration, you could keep it, you could seal it. You could prevent it from real death.
Christian resurrection inverts this completely. The body must die, not pass through death, but die, be buried, be lost to dust. What you sow does not come back to life unless it dies. The seed and the plant may be continuous, but they’re not the same. The seed must be destroyed in order for what comes after to appear.
The pyramid and the tomb are theological opposites. One holds the body against loss, the other entrusts the body to the loss, on the premise that something is waiting on the other side that could not have appeared in any other way.
The longevity clinic, the peptide protocol, the looksmaxxing forum -- these are pyramids. And the civilization building them has forgotten, or perhaps never understood, that the pyramid is magnificent and five thousand years old and has produced no resurrections.
Our modern society acts like we’ve cured death, but we haven’t. We’ve just removed its evidence.
These are radically different things and the confusion between them is producing the specific catastrophe of the present moment. The person who has cured death is free of its touch. The person who has merely hidden its evidence is haunted by something that he can’t name, for which he has no framework, against which he has no recourse. He has been handed the anxiety of mortality without the traditions that made mortality habitable at all. This anxiety does not disappear when you remove the traditions. It migrates into the body and takes the shape of the vessel.
We no longer see our elderly deteriorate in our homes. We don’t lay our dead on the kitchen table. We don’t watch the people we love go through the visible passage of dying. The hospital has absorbed dying much in the same way the slaughterhouse has absorbed killing. Professionalized, removed to a facility managed by specialists, insulated from anyone whose life might be interrupted by the encounter. Death is something that happens to other people in buildings you’re not required to visit, announced by a phone call, processed by professionals, reduced before it reaches you to a piece of paper requiring some signatures.
The result is a civilization that experiences the full anxiety of mortality without any of the traditions that once transformed it into something generative. You are going to die, and the things that once made this fact livable have been dismantled. So the anxiety migrates -- into the body, into obsessive self-optimization, into the relentless management of biomarkers that represent the one territory where it feels actionable. I cannot fix death but I can fix my sleep score. I cannot transcend mortality but I can extend my telomeres. The management continues. The anxiety does not subside. Both are true simultaneously and neither one touches the other.
The body is being purified while the soul is left to be ravaged. This is the specific error of the moment. Discipline without telos is not virtue. It is performance. It is the form of virtue formation emptied of the content that made it mean anything.
The Trappist monk constrains himself because the Rule requires it and the community holds him to account. The discipline is not chosen for its outcomes -- it is received as an obligation from outside the self, enforceable at the cost of spiritual reckoning before an entire community and his God. The lives that many of in technology would not be dissimilar to a Trappist monk’s -- no alcohol, minimal sex, an austere and simple diet. But practicing this for its commercial viability as a senior software engineer rather than as an obligation received from the transcendent is not the same thing. And the Trappist drinks a lot more than we do. The constraint and the faith are load-bearing in the same structure. Remove one and the entire building comes down.
Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.— John 12:24
There is a pattern, documented across centuries of household records, in families that lose a child: they almost always have another shortly after. The death does not produce a retreat from reproduction. It produces its opposite. Death in the household -- death made visible and intimate, death as something that happens in the room where you sleep and eat -- makes life feel urgent in a way that no abstract belief in mortality can produce. It speaks to something prior to rationality, something the calculus was built on top of, something that remains when the calculus is stripped away. We have removed death from the household with extraordinary thoroughness. The hospital absorbs the dying. The nursing home absorbs the deteriorating. The funeral home absorbs the dead before they return to the family. We removed death, and the birth rate followed it out the door.
Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many; and in horsemen, because they are very strong; but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel.— Isaiah 31:1
Schmitt sees what Locke cannot. The political does not disappear if you philosophically bracket it away. The friend-enemy distinction cannot be washed away by an elaborate theory of rights. The individual who refuses sacrifice does not achieve safety, he achieves a particular kind of blindness. The enemy is not interested in his theory of rights at all. The enemy is interested in whether you’re willing to fight, and the person who has built his entire identity around his refusal to fight is not a threat but a sacrifice for slaughter.
The only arena in which something like virtue is still available to the Western man is participation in state capitalism, which might as well be the central religion of technology. I was recently in a wood-paneled, artificially smoke-filled room in DC -- no one in these scenes smokes cigars anymore, so they pipe them in through the walls -- with a handful of the new self appointed technology-elite defense executives, when one turned to me and said, “You know, I love my job because holy wars require holy weapons.”
This has haunted me for weeks, not because I think it’s false, but because I think we have reversed the causality.
State capitalism builds holy weapons not because we have holy wars that require them. We beget holy wars by building holy weapons. The weapons system is sanctified first -- capital flows to it, genius is devoted to it, the gravity of civilizational consequence attached to it -- and the war follows. The autonomous system is built before there is an operational requirement, and its existence generates the doctrine that justifies its use, and the doctrine generates the deployments, and the deployments generate the casualties, and none of the casualties are among the people who built the system.
These are people who have transferred the locus of sacrifice from the body to the machine. The body remains in its carefully managed state. The peptide protocol continues. The morning run is logged. The machine carries the weight of consequence. The builder has purchased adjacency to the sacred through capital and institutional position, and he experiences this as genuine participation in something that matters -- which it is, in the sense that people will die from what is built.
But the builder will not die from it. He is the priest without the sacrifice. The form is performed and the form is empty, because the one thing it required -- the genuine exposure of the person performing it to the cost of the thing being undertaken -- is absent. Proximity to death without exposure to it. A man can say he is doing the most important work in the world and mean it sincerely and never once have his body at risk from the outcome. Every previous civilization that named the end of things had to inhabit the danger of naming it. The prophets went to the wilderness. The martyrs faced the arena. The person making the claim had skin in the outcome of being wrong.
It is not incidental that the executives of foundation model providers can laugh about the death of millions as a result of their technology, while living in insulated compounds with security teams that remove all potentiality of coming to terms with the violence of their language.
You can say anything about the end of the world if nothing in your situation depends on being right.
Strauss agrees with Schmitt that there exist dangerous truths about the city and about human violence that the Enlightenment has hidden away. But Schmitt’s solution demanded an affirmation of the political so total that it would destroy the Western project. Strauss proposed that these truths could be kept, that the philosopher could write esoterically, concealing these insights between the lines accessible only to the careful reader, the aristocrat of the soul, shielded from the vulgar masses who would misuse them. The city could be preserved by an elite that understood its foundations without exposing them to the masses. This is the most sophisticated form of preservation instinct. It’s not the crude denial that we see in Locke and not the suicidal honesty of Schmitt, but the management and containment of dangerous knowledge by a small elite wise enough to handle it.
The Straussian architecture is a pyramid. You take dangerous truths and seal them inside of a structure, carefully managed by an elite, preserved against time.
Thiel, following Girard in The Straussian Moment, sees why this can’t hold. The Straussian position assumes that the conditions of modernity are permanent -- that the philosophical elite can maintain the esoteric structure indefinitely, and the secrets will stay hidden, and the city of man will endure. The Christian breaks with Strauss in one decisive respect: the modern age will not be permanent. One must never forget that one day all will be revealed and that injustices will be exposed and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account. We will all stand before judgement. Revelation is not a metaphor, it’s a historical force. The pyramid assumes that these secrets can be kept, which is simply not true. We know it should not be true. You can go and read the final chapter of the book.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.— Psalm 115:4,8
Braden Peters is twenty years old. He goes by Clavicular online -- named for the clavicle, because clavicle width is a documented dominance marker in the looksmaxxing community he inhabits and helped build. He began injecting testosterone at fourteen. He bangs his own face with a hammer for bone remodeling. He slams methamphetamine to suppress appetite. By 2025, his body had stopped producing testosterone naturally. He made himself sterile before he was old enough to drink. He walked New York Fashion Week for Elena Velez in February.
He is the logic of the Edenic offer made visible in a body. The Egyptian theology run to biological completion. What you get when the premise -- that the body is a surface to be engineered, a set of dominance markers to be maximized, a competitive arena where the outcome is desirability measured against a standard borrowed from the desire of others -- is taken at full seriousness and pursued without the hedges that social convention usually provides.
Read through Girard, and the looksmaxxing community is one of the most precise expressions of mimetic desire operating in the contemporary world. Without a transcendent object orienting the desire -- no God, no city, no future the desire is in service of -- the escalation has no natural stopping point. The standard becomes more extreme. The interventions more invasive. You offer yourself on the altar of a standard borrowed from someone else’s desire, and the offering is continuous, and it is never sufficient, because the standard was never yours and was never meant to produce satisfaction in the person pursuing it.
He optimized for desirability to the elimination of his reproductive capacity. He engineered himself out of participation in the one process that actually requires a body rather than a surface. He has engineered himself for maximum desirability, at the cost of the very thing desirability is for. The mummification is literal. He will not decay. He will not reproduce. He will maintain.
It is held in permanent ecstasy, never arriving, never dying, never passing through.
James Dean died at twenty-four going toward. The death was the accident of a fully inhabited life -- a body expressing itself past its limits in the direction of its own nature. The Greek word for glory is doxa -- the visible expression of what something truly is. His death had doxa. It disclosed who he was.
The James Dean of our generation doesn’t die in a Porsche 550 Spyder at ungodly speads on the California highway. He dies at forty-three from organ failure in a Waymo with a perfect jawline, having made himself sterile at nineteen, having never risked his body for anything that outlasted him. There is no doxa in that death. It discloses nothing. It is the downstream consequence of a maintenance program that ran past its operational limits. The body performed exactly as optimized. It simply stopped, like a lamp unplugged.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.— Genesis 3:24
The promise of technology in our moment is not at all what it appears to be. Technology presents itself as a vision of the future. Acceleration, transformation, a break with everything that’s come before. We use the word “progress,” and progress is an arrow that only points in one direction.
But examine the contents of the offer. The longevity researcher is not building the streets of Jasper. He’s trying to recover the Garden of Genesis, the conditions before death entered, before labor was necessary, before history had consequences that required failure and redemption. The whole point of technology is to restore, to reverse, to undo. These are not the verbs of people building towards a destination. They’re the verbs of someone trying to get back to a place before the potentiality of failure, death, and decay existed.
A beatific vision of the future requires passing through history. It requires death and loss and labors and failures that constitute that passage. A vision of return promises to circumvent that passage entirely. Technology is telling you not to go through the fire and be changed by it, but to return to a time before the fire was necessary. Eden before the fall, the body before decay, the world before consequences. This is an ancient form of regression. We talk about it as if it’s the future.
The utopias promised by technology are just different versions of this false Eden. Lives without age, bodies that don’t fail, trees that grow many fruit, the indefinite extension of lives filled with limited consequence or importance, post-scarcity, no labor, trees of many fruit. The technology project promises the elimination of suffering, but not its redemption, not its transformation into glory, but its removal from the possibility of human experience entirely. Eden is not on the road to New Jerusalem. It’s in the opposite direction.
For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.— Hebrews 13:14
The New Jerusalem is not a garden. I want to make this point precisely.
And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
The glory is brought. It is the overflow of something spent. You cannot bring what you kept. Eden is where we started, and the serpent’s offer in the garden was the first of these false Edenic offer -- the promise to get to the end without going through the middle. Ye shall be as gods. Not: be transformed through the long passage of labor and loss and redemption. Simply: have the outcome without the process. The knowledge without the cost of acquiring it. Technology has repackaged this offer in the language of progress and called it the future. It is the oldest promise ever made. You will not surely die. You will be as gods.
This offer applied to everything, for three centuries, distributed through a thousand institutions, produces a world that is entirely petrified. The trees are still shaped like trees. The civilization is still shaped like a civilization. The bodies are still shaped like bodies. But nothing grows and nothing dies and nothing is transformed by its passage through consequence.
We were not made to be preserved. We were made to be formed. These are not the same thing. One requires a pyramid. The other requires a tomb. The pyramid holds the body against loss. It is magnificent. It will last five thousand years. It has produced no resurrections. The tomb is where you put what you are willing to lose. It is the architecture of the only offer that is actually forward -- not back to the garden before death, but through death to the city on the other side of it.
You cannot be raised without first being buried. You cannot bring glory into the New Jerusalem without first having risked the flesh that produced it. The seed that is not sown does not come to life. You cannot plant anything in a petrified forest.
Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your cieled houses, and this house lie waste?— Haggai 1:4
Many believe the West is entering a period of decline. The places will get uglier. The institutions will get weaker. The infrastructure will decay. At the same time, the bodies will get more beautiful. The preservation technology is getting better and cheaper and the culture that demands it is getting louder. The souls will get worse because nothing in the optimization stack addresses the soul and the institutions that once addressed it are dying or dead.
Increasingly ugly places, increasingly beautiful bodies, increasingly empty souls. The same decision made three times: maintain the surface while the structure deteriorates.
The temptation will be to retreat into preservation. To build the beautiful body in the ugly place. To manage the biomarkers while the bridges rust. To construct a private Eden while the public world decays. You cannot fix the grid. You can fix your sleep score. You cannot restore the institution. You can restore your testosterone.
And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.— Luke 14:27
The alternative is to go through the decline rather than around it. Precision is required because the obvious misreading is available and wrong. The misreading is martyrdom -- the dramatic, visible, fast sacrifice that the tech world already understands and romanticizes. The person who takes the controversial stand and is attacked publicly. These are sacrifice as content. The suffering is the number going up. The cross, in this version, produces recognition within the lifetime of the person who carries it, which means it is not the cross but the performance of carrying it.
That is not what Christ did. Christ asked for the cup to pass. He was not willing in the way the contemporary martyrdom fetish imagines willingness -- eager, resolute, podcast-confessional. He was willing in the only way that actually matters: he went through it because the path went through the cross and there was no other way to what was on the other side.
The profound sacrifice is the other thing. It is the life given to something whose completion you will not see, whose success you cannot measure, whose value will not be legible to anyone during your lifetime. You go to the grave with a broken back and the cathedral is not finished. You poured the foundation and someone else will lay the stone and someone else will install the windows and the person who walks through the door in two hundred years will not know your name and will not care. You have contributed to a project that does not require your recognition to proceed and does not produce it even when it does.
We barely have language for this anymore. Every structure we have built -- including every readership that consumes essays like this one -- is built around the assumption that sacrifice should be visible, should produce recognition within the lifetime of the person who makes it. The apparatus converts every cross into content.
To go through the decline rather than around it means to put your body and your labor and your years into the places that are getting uglier. Not to escape them. To do the work of building in conditions where the building may fail -- where the institution you build may not survive your lifetime, where the place you pour yourself into may continue to decay despite everything you give it. To pour the foundation that someone else will build on or that no one will build on. And to go to your grave with nothing to show for it except the broken back and the knowledge that you did the work.
To walk the path that ends in the cross.
The pyramid is magnificent. It will last five thousand years. It has produced no resurrections. The tomb is empty, and that is the entire point.