Truth and a Woman: You Can See Everything

"One wrote: 'Wine is strong.'

Another wrote: 'A king is stronger.'

The third wrote: 'Women are stronger still: but Truth is victorious over all things.'"

-1 Esdras (Hebrew wisdom literature, 4th-2nd centuries BC)

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"FYI you can totally see everything." 

-Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos founder, AD 2023)

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Ever since I saw You Can See Everything, the new "documentary" from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, in a packed theater on its opening night, I have not been able to stop thinking about it. It has wormed its way into both my active, rational thoughts and the images and atmosphere in between; it has made its way into my dreams. Layer upon layer, image upon image, moment upon moment, symbol upon symbol: all revolving around the figure of a woman and a liar.

It was only after many days of this, though, that I remembered, suddenly and like a bolt out of the blue, one of my favorite passages of ancient literature, from an enigmatic book that almost no one has read, because it almost made it into the Bible but didn't; and realized, in a thought that probably only I in the entire history of the human race have ever had, "1 Esdras and You Can See Everything are about the same thing."

1 Esdras, the clumsy Latinate name used by scholars writing in English for a text composed probably in Hebrew but surviving only in the Greek Septuagint translation made under the Ptolemies in Egypt, is a mysterious text. It is, most likely, a rearranged and expanded version of the canonical book of Ezra. Oddly, though, the Jewish scholar Josephus, one of our earliest witnesses to the Biblical text in general, seems to have only known 1 Esdras, and not the book we now know as Ezra. Some people have argued that it was the original, and what we now call Ezra an expurgated, rationalized copy. 

Regardless of which is the original and which the copy, though, it is the presence or absence of one central story that defines the two texts and dictates their arrangements: the "dispute of the bodyguards." Entirely absent from Ezra even in outline, this is in 1 Esdras the centerpiece of the book: a lengthy, rhetorically elaborate contest of speeches between three bodyguards of the Persian king Darius over the abstract question of "what is the strongest." The candidates for the strongest thing in existence are four: wine, kings, women, and the truth. 

The winner of the contest is the only one to argue for two, hierarchically-arranged options: women above all things, and the truth above women. This bodyguard's name is Zerubbabel; which is a really strange detail. 

Zerubbel is in fact a historical figure, recorded in Ezra and Nehemiah as a member of the Judaic royal house and the leader of the first group of Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem, nearly eighty years before Ezra or Nehemiah themselves arrived on the scene. He is thus a figure of incredible importance in the scope of the Hebrew Bible: the prophesied continuation of the Davidic line, the rebuilder of the Temple, the restorer of the people to the land, the ender of the exile.

For all that, though, there is something rather problematic about Zerubbabel. He is purportedly of the Davidic line, grandson of a previous King of Judah before the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC. His name, however, is Babylonian twice over: Akkadian rather than Hebrew, and meaning "offspring of Babyon." Though glorified by the Prophets Haggai and Zechariah as a chosen instrument of God, he never held the rank of King of Judah or Israel: rather, he served as Persian governor of the broader province. And though he laid the foundations of what would become the Second Temple, he never saw it completed or even, apparently, worked on it all that much. The canonical books of Ezra and Nehemiah both show the work of Jewish restoration barely begun decades later, requiring drastic intervention from their valorized titular characters. One could be forgiven for thinking that a lot of people found Zerubbabel rather disappointing.

For all that, Zerubbabel is undeniably a tantalizing figure, a person chosen for a critical task at a critical moment but himself unknown and mostly unknowable, a suggestion of greater things as yet unfulfilled. In both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, he is remembered as an ancestor of Jesus. 

What 1 Esdras ultimately gives us, then, is a startling and bizarre recontextualization of both this pivotal figure in Jewish history and his banner accomplishment. In the central story of the text, we see Zerubbabel not as a scion of the Jewish royal house, not as a triumphant restorer of Jewish statehood, not even as a Persian governor, but as a young, indistinguishable bodyguard serving the King of Persia Darius. It is all three of the bodyguards, collectively, who decide, while the king is sleeping off his latest feast, to set a rhetorical contest and make its prize the granting of anything the winner asks. It is only when he wins this seemingly random competition that Zerubbabel takes the opportunity to ask the King of Persia to let him return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. 

Both the young bodyguard's identification with Zerubbabel and his request to rebuild Jerusalem are, in 1 Esdras, genuine plot twists--almost rug pulls. The more people knew about Zerubbabel, Davidic princeling and Persian restorer, the less reason they would have to associate his famous name with an anonymous bodyguard playing a minor role in a folkloric contest of cleverness. It is only when the third bodyguard's big speech comes that we finally are told his name--and it is only after he has won the contest that we realize his goal. All along, it turns out, this bizarre and seemingly random exchange among bodyguards in the royal bedchamber was the secret, hidden means by which God restored the exile of his people. 

But was Zerubbabel right about women?

In 2023, Nathan Fielder moved into Elizabeth Holmes' house with a director and a camera crew. He knew who Elizabeth Holmes was: everyone did. She was a liar.

By the time three years had gone by, though, he had apparently come to believe that she was telling the truth after all: or at least, that she perhaps was incapable of understanding that what she was saying wasn't the truth; or perhaps, that she was a victim of someone else, and so sympathetic whether or not she was a liar; or perhaps merely that he wanted to believe her; or perhaps merely that he loved her. 

As Amanda Seyfried says in the film's closing line, "It's very complicated." It is also, though, very much like life. And it is this, and not any number of meta-commentaries about truth and knowability proffered by people online, that makes You Can See Everything my favorite movie of the year 2026.

What is AI? What is Technology?

We live in confusing times: times defined by terms that everyone all the time is expected to talk about, but which no one at all ever defines. In such a time, it can be sadly easy for ordinary people to feel like the little girl who wrote to the newspaper asking about the rumors of the non-existence of Santa Claus. 

Many of us spend our time these days asking, in one form or another, the question: Is there a Santa Claus? Or, in other words: What do the disturbing, unsettling rumors discussed by my peers actually mean? Are my parents actually lying to me? Is there a conspiracy? How deep does it go? And most of the time, the people answering the question answer only by subtly, deceptively redefining their terms, just like the New York Sun did to poor Virginia O'Hanlon in 1897: Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus in the sense that love and generosity and devotion exist which I know is not what you meant at all and is going to confuse you terribly but what you have to understand is that it will make other adults like me in the know feel affirmed as we continue to keep our terrible secret from you but you are a child and have no choice but to submit to such treatment until you are older and can do it to others.

At The Adventures of Captain Peabody, though, we would never, ever, ever treat you like that! We know that you have questions, say, about what caused the Soviet Union to fall, or what happened in the year 2016, or whether there is a contemporary crisis in Catholic ethics, or whether Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a sign of the times, or whether I am in fact a loyal adherent of the Indie Movement, or What Went Wrong, and we strive to answer those questions as simply and accurately and truthfully as we possibly can. 

So, to all the poor confused people out there watching as our society and world transform from a hyper-techno-optimism to a conceptually confused techno-pessimism, I wish to offer this relatively-brief-by-my-standards summary for you. You are reading articles and listening to podcasts and watching people in the GroupMe rant about AI and technology and how it's either going to establish a universal benevolent reign of leisure or end the world, and you wonder: but what is AI? What is technology? But when you ask the smart people, they just tell you that AI is a future super-intelligence that will imprison us all in a Laplacean Hell and also that chatbot that told you it was in love with you or that technology is just when you use a toothbrush and also an inevitable natural process impossible to resist or, in short, I know this is going to confuse you terribly but it will make other people like me in the know feel affirmed as we continue to keep our terrible secret from you but you are a normal person and have no choice but to submit to such treatment until you get a podcast or a tech startup and can do it to others.

Captain Peabody, though, would never treat you like that--and the rumors of his war crimes in WW2 are just that, rumors. So let me just tell you what technology is and what AI is.

The Great Choice: Collapse or Renewal?

The Fall of the Soviet Union; Knights of the Old Republic 2; Let's Get Out of This Country

Every great historical event happens because of human choices. 

This is a truth that is too little recognized in the modern world--and never more than now, in 2026, when the default position on political and geopolitical affairs might be described as "numb resignation." Human history is affected greatly, shaped and molded and turned this way or that, by material conditions and purely natural events: but it is determined by human choices.

These choices, it is true, are not always or primarily individual choices: they are often necessarily understood in terms of things like economics and politics and culture and religion, which together constitute the human and historical material and the human historical consequences of the human power of choice.

I cannot, as an individual, decide what the constitution of the United States will be. I can, however, certainly contribute by my words and actions and inactions to a broader public and political sense of what the constitution of the United States is or should be: and sooner or later, that public and political sense will demand or elicit choices by individual leaders to accept or reject or mold or modify or submit to those trends. It is on such collective and individual choices that the history of institutions and peoples is built.

Sometimes, in the course of human events, one comes to the end of something: which is always and at the same time the beginning of something else. 

Faced with the end of a human and historical reality--a state, perhaps, or a relationship, or a school, or a club, or even merely a board game--there are only really ever two choices available to the participants, ordinary and powerful alike. One is renewal: the choice to continue a thing and restore it, which always means in some measure both to return it to its original bases and aim it at its original goals, and at the same time to change it to respond to and take into account new conditions and circumstances and understandings. The second is collapse: which means in practice the repeated, determined choice not to renew the institution, but instead to let it continue to function badly and fail to achieve its ends and fail to respond to changed conditions and understandings--which often means, as well, to at least some extent the choice to prey on that institution, to actively help along its collapse by plundering it for resources or parts or personnel or exploiting it to achieve self-interested ends.

In this essay, we will be looking at three works of art that reflect on this essential dichotomy of choices: one a scholarly study of the collapse of the Soviet Union, another a video game about the fall and rise of the Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic, and a third an indie pop album about purity and desire. 

Make your choice!

On Being a God in the Modern Age

A History of Japanese Religion; Joker 2; The Life of Charles de Gaulle

How does a man become a god?

Recently in this space, I discussed some of the more negative consequences of the human desire for transcendence--including that its rather frequently issuing in open or disguised impulses toward annihilation. 

While known in some measure to all of us, however, the desire for destruction is not an ordinary or common outcome of the human desire for transcendence. Much more common, because more rational, is the simple, obvious, straightforward desire to be God.

Of course, when I say that that desire is simple, obvious, and straightforward, I am speaking of the desire in and of itself, which flows directly from the nature and essence and rational constitution of the human being. As rational animals, human beings are defined by their ability to know: which is to say, to grasp, internalize, and become one with anything and everything there is. This rational capacity is by necessity infinite, not confinable to any particular set or subset of beings, and hence intrinsically capable of being fulfilled only by the transcendent, unified, simple, rational, and communicable infinity of being itself--which is to say, God. To know a thing is in a sense to be that thing--though not to remove the otherness or alterity of the thing in relation to oneself. Hence, all human beings by necessity desire to be God.

Of course, as Aquinas pointed out, God is an end that entirely escapes the grasp of man's reason; or, in other words, the knowledge of God does not and cannot take away God's infinite transcendence and infinite otherness to the human person--which is why the one absolute and ineluctable and perpetual and inescapable requirement for knowing God to any degree whatsoever or even to becoming one with him is that quality which Christians have called "humility," that act which Jews and pagans have called "sacrifice," and that absolute transformation of the self into an entity capable of knowing God not by any natural capacity but solely by means of God himself that comes only through crucifixion and death and might well be called "annihilation."

On the Necessity of Time Travel for Human Life

The Last Showgirl, The History of the Armenian Genocide, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, Magnolia

Striving for goodness
while the cruel men win.

How do you recover an irrecoverable defeat? How do you undo the past?

In 2026, this is an increasingly urgent question, not just for individual persons, but for America and the world: as one era comes crashing down, and another, perhaps, prepares to begin. 

The most uncanny thing to me about living in 2026 is simply the way that everyone, elite and ordinary, Right and Left, talks--which is simply the way characters used to talk in Star Trek episodes about time travel.

Captain Picard takes Captain Garrett and aside and confides to her in a rushed, furtive tone, his eyes lowered: "The war is going very badly for the Federation, far worse than is generally known. Starfleet Command believes defeat is inevitable. Within six months we may have no choice but to surrender." The point of this intervention, though, is not to help prepare her or the public for inevitable defeat, or even to reverse the tide of war and give the Federation victory after all--it is to convince her to go back in time and change the past. "One more ship will make no difference in the here and now. But twenty two years ago, one ship could have stopped this war before it started."

To stop the war before it started. This is the real or concealed preoccupation, it seems to me, of almost every American today. Certainly, it is the main preoccupation of the American President, whose entire political program at present consists of making or pretending to make it so the war he started with the Islamic Republic of Iran was never started, the global energy crisis he caused was never caused, the critical munitions shortage he precipitated was never precipitated, the economic bubble he inflated was never inflated, or, in short, that pretty much everything he has done since taking office in 2024 was never done. Meanwhile, in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu works overtime to pretend that the never-ending genocidal campaign and never-ending security crisis and accelerating collapse of the Israeli state that he himself has caused is all simply a bad dream. In Iran, meanwhile, a predatory military elite works continually to unravel their entire state and economy in real time, in the desperate homicidal hope that, somewhere across the world, all the other states and economies are unraveling faster. 

This sense of desperate undoing, though, extends far beyond the halls of power: indeed, it is hardly too much to say that it has become a kind of manic leitmotif for almost all institutions everywhere. I spoke recently of a desire for death, for annihilation, as a driver behind the institutional chaos we see around us--and I still believe this is true. Before that, I talked about the remarkable dominance of nostalgia in politics and culture--and I still think that is true. Increasingly, though, I think the most immediate desire animating America is not so much death or nostalgia as time travel. Whatever was done in the last five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, must be undone: including sometimes the very existence of the institutions and movements and beliefs that ruled those times.

And really, people have a point! Since at least the financial crisis of 2008-2009, political and economic and academic elites the world over have worked very hard, and invested enormous amounts of resources, in building up a new, all-encompassing economic, political, social, and cultural infrastructure centered in tech companies and the Internet--an effort that has only very recently and belatedly been given the terribly inaccurate moniker of AI. Looking back, more or less everyone now agrees that effort was, by and large, a mistake: that it has made the world poorer, lonelier, less populated, more frightened, weaker, more divided, more fragile, and more unhappy. 

It is in fact true that unimaginable resources and time and effort and belief that might have been spent on any number of other things--including, say, the American munitions stockpile, or the American transportation infrastructure, or clean energy, or prison reform, or housing, or mental health care, or physical health care, or actually effective welfare systems, or poverty relief, or community-building, or parental support, or mass redistribution of resources, or even movies that people wanted to watch and games they wanted to play, have instead been plowed wholesale into a metastatizing Soviet-style private-public tech bureaucracy whose ultimate goal and telos and outcome all along, it turns out, was unemployed homeless people sitting on crumbling streets beneath mansions watching AI-generated pornography on individual smartphones to the deafening tones of data center cooling systems. This is a hyperbole--but one that is nevertheless truer to the actual present reality of catastrophic American economic and cultural collapse than any statistical statement.

The real trouble, though, is that this effort was never, at any time, confined to American elites--it was, at one time or another, not only supported but fervently trusted and hoped in by Americans of every class and race and party. Even those who never consciously believed in it, though, have had their lives entirely transformed by its efforts--and not just economically. We all, techno-optimist or techno-pessimist, Christian or secular, have walked around these last years with a little phone in our pockets--and so at one time or other have felt the ghostly, preternatural touch of the technical regime on our daily habits, our imaginations, our dreams, our deepest desires, our most intimate and interior selves. What is to be undone is not just political, not just economic, not even just technological, but profoundly, deeply, devastatingly personal.

Most people, of course, would not say in so many words that they actually want to undo the last twenty years of technological development; nevertheless, if you ask them what they want, what they fear, what they support, and what they oppose, it mostly centers on changing the past.

For a huge part of America today, that involves a completely explicit desire to go back in time ten years and make it so that Donald Trump was never elected President--or at the very least, make it so that absolutely no trace of any effect of his Presidency remains. Meanwhile, Trumpism 2.0 has largely consisted of various flailing efforts to undo, uncreate, and unmake--beginning with the 2020 election and Biden's Presidency, but extending rapidly to the US aid and development policy that began in the 1960s, the free trade policies crystallized since the 1990s, the immigration surge of the 2000s onward, and at times extending to more or less the entire Federal government and nearly everything that has happened since WW2. 

Culturally, things are if anything even clearer--with AI acting as both the hostile provoker and force multiplier of an unprecedented turn towards nostalgia and simulation as the prevailing notes of culture. From music to movies to television to video games to food, people love most what no longer exists.

To repeat, then: in the year 2026, every major issue, every pressing concern, every fundamental debate, and nearly every passion and hope and desire centers straightforwardly on how we can change the past.

But can we change the past? And if so, how? 

To examine this question, in best Adventures of Captain Peabody fashion, I will be writing about a historical tragedy, an indie album, a Las Vegas show, and a movie about regret. 

Against the Maxxers: Or, On the Necessarily Transcendental Nature of Ethics

We are living in the Age of the Maxxers.

That, anyway, is what Sam Kriss thinks; it's also what a surprising number of other cultural commentators, Substackers, and NPR hosts think as well. Moderation is out; normalcy is out; morality itself is out. It doesn't matter what you maxx; pick something, anything, and maxx it. 

I don't believe in this trend; I don't believe in any trend that NPR hosts and Substackers tell me about, beginning with AI but also including Traditionalism, Social Media, the Alt Right, and facts. I am, as Dr. Ian Cameron once said, an educator in daily contact with young minds.

Nevertheless, like many fake trends talked about by people on the Internet, the term "maxxing" does in fact designate something--though what it designates is not in fact a fad originated by a few teenagers, but a pervasive cultural viewpoint that has structured our social and economic lives for many decades and is now mostly exemplified by people over fifty. This is true of every one of the trends mentioned above.

This particular viewpoint is easily defined, if not necessarily easily understood: it is merely what happens when people try to do ethics and live human life without believing in transcendent ends.

Hence the modest purpose of this short essay: to point out the exceptionally simple, straightforward, and obvious fact that without a robust and practical acceptance of transcendence as a pervasive feature of human life and action, it is impossible to construct a coherent ethical system, impossible to live a human life, and utterly impossible to be happy.

A Short and Succinct Four-Point Argument For Why You Should Never Use AI At All For Anything Ever and Actively Do Everything You Can to Prevent the US Government From Supporting It in Any Way

[I have written about and against AI before, pointing out that the underlying technology and cultural orientation are nothing new, and arguing that AI is a last desperate attempt for the tech industry to save their bloated techno-salvationist bureaucracies. However, I admit that both of those pieces are very long and hard to follow, especially in the age of AI. 

Hence, I have produced the present piece, in which I make four straightforward points about why you shouldn't use AI while also including images from "the Funnies," which I am reliably informed that everyone loves (the year is 1967), for popular appeal.

Before reading the following, however, a clarification is necessary:"AI" in contemporary usage is not a descriptive term for a new technology, but an advertising term for an essentially political program of reallocating massive economic and social resources toward developing and finding applications for and forcing large-scale use of a heterogenous range of pre-existing digital technologies, products, and services. 

Hence, the question "are you for or against AI?" is not "do you in the abstract support the further development of digital technology?" but "do you support this political program?": or more immediately "do you think that the present or future achievements of this program in fact and on the whole justify the costs?" To be unable to ask this question, as I pointed out, is to be insane.]

Point 1: AI will never be profitable enough to justify the private investments made in it.

Argument 1.1: No LLM product or data center has as yet generated a profit purely on the basis of consumer and corporate usage, as opposed to investments or circular financing. Nevertheless, AI investment is scheduled to exceed 1 trillion dollars in 2026 alone. The scale differential between zero profit and trillions in investment makes it nearly impossible for the former to ever catch up with the latter for basic mathematical reasons. 

Argument 1.2: The intrinsic nature of LLMs makes them processing-heavy and therefore expensive even in carrying out simple tasks. Increases in processing power in chips have already reached a plateau, and the chips themselves require rare materials and can only be made in a few locations. Hence, the technology will continue to be very expensive for the foreseeable future. 

Argument 1.3: LLMs are inherently limited to automating tasks that are in and of themselves either superfluous to making a profit or not all that expensive. In itself, human labor is cheap and will likely always be cheaper than LLM usage at scale and for the overwhelming majority of tasks. 

Point 2: Given its lack of profitability, the only way AI development can continue on anything approaching its current scale is on the basis of enormous government investment.

Argument 2.1: The current hyper-financialized economy is ultimately structured by profit, if not for corporations at least for investors. Sooner or later, AI investment without returns will lead to a market crash and a pullback on investment into AI. 

Argument 2.2: The only institution that regularly invests AI-scale capital without any financial return on investment at all is the government. 

Argument 2.3: The use cases for AI include present priorities of the US government in which it regularly invests large amounts of money. These include most prominently military technology and mass surveillance.

Argument 2.4: The US government has been the main driver behind the current AI boom both through favorable regulation and active investment.

Point 3: The only feasible use case for mass-scale long-term government-funded AI is surveillance and murder.

Argument 3.1: Over the past decades, the US government has built a remarkable surveillance and data gathering operation. The main obstacle to the utility of mass surveillance and big data for government purposes is the difficulty of sorting through so much information and arranging it into useful and clear and short and actionable narratives. But this is in fact the one thing that LLMs are consistently good at. 

Argument 3.2: Over the past decades, the world has entered a new era of drone warfare, exemplified by the Russia-Ukraine War and the Iran War. Large-scale drone manufacturing requires development in magnet, battery, and chip technologies. The AI boom involves in part targeted development of some of these technologies.

Argument 3.3: One of the main limiters for drone warfare has become the ability to jam remote-controlled drones or even hack into them. This has led to a significant push in the direction of so-called "autonomous" drones with the ability to choose targets and carry out attacks largely on their own, as well as swarming drones operating in sync with each other. Both require sophisticated software.

Argument 3.4: Even non-autonomous drones lead to a vast multiplication of targets; the same is true even for the current military trend towards long-range targeted air bombing with manned aircraft. Selecting targets rapidly enough to keep up with operational requests requires the processing of large amounts of information and the weighting and determining of threats ad hoc and at scale. LLMs are again a technology adept at processing large amounts of information and producing an outcome based on it.

Argument 3.5: The US military and DoD have become a leading investor in AI technology over the past year, with the head of the Department of Energy declaring it a "new Manhattan project." 

Point 4: The social, political, and creative effects of mass-scale long-term government-funded AI are and always will be overwhelmingly negative and fall most heavily on the poor and vulnerable.

Argument 4.1: Most if not all military AI uses are unethical in and of themselves, since they involve violations of privacy and the waging of war and taking of life irresponsibly and unjustly. 

Argument 4.2: AI Chatbots have already provably caused suicides and driven people mad by forming quasi-social or romantic relationships with them. 

Argument 4.3: AI tools have already deprived numerous students of education by allowing them to automate most aspects of schooling. 

Argument 4.4: AI tools have already seriously degraded the quality of American visual art, film, television, and even corporate graphic design. 

Argument 4.5: By their very nature, LLMs cannot be entirely controlled or predicted, and will always be prone to "hallucination" of various sorts. This has already caused damage in many ways, from spreading false information to hacking networks to causing suicides to committing economic fraud. Militarized AI systems would be able to cause untold destruction.

Argument 4.6: The build-out of data centers has already caused environmental damage, raised energy costs, increased inflation, created noise and other pollution, and failed to produce jobs. Current plans call for an exponential growth of data centers, which would have even more drastic effects.

 

Ergo: You Should Never Use AI At All For Anything Ever and Actively Do Everything You Can to Prevent the US Government From Supporting It in Any Way. QED.