Ugolino’s Hunger for the Future’s Flesh

In Dante’s Inferno, Count Ugolino is condemned not just for betrayal, but for the unimaginable act of consuming his own children in the tower where he starved. It’s an image meant to shock, to repulse, to clarify moral boundaries. Yet our society is doing something similar: feeding our comforts with resources stolen from generations who have no voice, no vote, and no chance to defend themselves. We are warm today because we burn tomorrow. And like Ugolino, we tell ourselves the hunger left us no choice.

We like to think we’re living through a streak of bad luck—an age of shocks, crises, and disruptions that will eventually give way to normalcy again. But the truth is harder to swallow: normal was the anomaly.

The last fifty years were a historical outlier, a brief golden age made possible by cheap energy, stable geopolitics, booming populations, and shared public narratives.

That world is ending.

Not because someone stole it from us, but because we consumed it.

We built our civilization on four pillars. All four are cracking at once. 

Literary & Scientific Convergence

After I published the last post on friction and meaning I used Google news to scan some headlines and saw an article that caught my attention on ChatGPT. Now I’m not sure if the reason this showed up is algorithmic (because I posted about this yesterday), but either way the article was a fantastic scaffold to build on what I already said.

In Matt Greene’s essay, there’s an image that captures something I’ve been trying to articulate for weeks now—something about AI, language, and the strange thinness that creeps in when friction disappears from our lives. Greene writes: “What if a lake was only its surface?” 

It’s a literary metaphor, but it’s doing the same conceptual work that thermodynamics does when it talks about gradients collapsing into equilibrium. Greene isn’t writing about physics, but the physics slides into place behind the image almost perfectly.

Meaning and Friction

We live in an age increasingly shaped by optimization. AI systems schedule our days, route our commutes, anticipate our needs, and supply answers before we fully articulate the question. Much of this feels magical—and it is. But beneath the glittering efficiency lies a deeper psychological and philosophical question:

What happens to human meaning when friction disappears?

Across disciplines—from cybernetics to psychology to anthropology—thinkers have warned that human flourishing depends on non-zero resistance. Remove too much friction, and agency collapses.

This is what I call the friction principle.

Virtues & R-S-I Moral Geometry

The six virtues of my hexagon are ancient, cross-cultural, and remarkably stable. They show up in every major moral tradition, not as isolated traits, but as structural pillars of human moral life. Each one corresponds to how we orient ourselves in the three dimensions of the moral field: Relation, Suffering, and Intention (R–S–I).

The following table lays out my "virtue hexagon" and integrates a few different labels for each virtue, then expands on how each one functions within the R-S-I moral space defined earlier.

The Coming Singularity of Meaning

When I described the geometry of personal transformation—the collapse → boundary → emergence arc—I was drawing on individual psychology. But somewhere along the way I began noticing that the same geometry applies to societies. Cultures, like people, drift, stabilize, crack, and reorganize. They too have boundaries and threshold states. And increasingly, ours feels like it is approaching one.

Technology is the most obvious accelerant, but acceleration itself is not the main issue. The deeper problem is the loss of friction—a thinning of the very resistance that once shaped character, institutions, and meaning. Friction is what forces systems to adapt. Friction creates delay, reflection, feedback, and structure. Remove too much friction and systems lose their coherence.

A wheel that cannot grip the road does not speed forward; it spins in place. AI is removing friction, and you can feel the loss of meaning it causes.

Tiny Trinity

 Every once in a while you encounter a symbol that feels older than any single religion or culture. The triquetra—also called the tiny trinity or trinity knot—is one of those shapes. It shows up everywhere: Celtic manuscripts, Norse carvings, Buddhist temple knots, Hindu yantras, medieval Christian iconography, Slavic designs. It appears in places that could not have influenced each other, separated by centuries or continents. Most people chalk this up to coincidence, or aesthetic preference, or diffusion.

 

But symbols this persistent rarely survive by accident. The triquetra endures because it expresses a natural geometry that keeps re-emerging across systems—mathematical, physical, psychological, and metaphysical. Once you look at it closely, it becomes obvious that this is not ornamentation. It’s structure. A friend of mine wears one on his neck and it fits beautifully into my geometry of morality and consciousness.

The Geometry of Myth

For thousands of years, human beings have told stories about enlightenment, revelation, resurrection, apocalypse, and transformation. These stories differ in detail but not in structure. A prophet climbs a mountain and returns changed. A seeker descends into the underworld and rises renewed. A dying god collapses into darkness and re-emerges in light. A mystic enters a void and encounters a presence. At first glance, these look like metaphors, the shared vocabulary of cultures trying to articulate experiences beyond ordinary life.

But the more I’ve worked through the geometry of mind and meaning, the more convinced I’ve become that these myths share their forms because they map onto real structures in consciousness and reality. They are patterned the way they are because we are patterned the way we are.