A Thoroughly Modern Animism

A student got me the book, "Is A River Alive?" and it's great.

Animism has a bad reputation, and mostly it deserves it. Historically, it mistook structure for spirits—souls in trees, intentions in storms, gods hidden in rivers. Science was right to reject that move. Pattern is not personality, and agency does not lurk behind every regularity.

But in rejecting animism wholesale, we discarded something useful along with the superstition: the intuition that certain environments act back on us in ways that feel moral, not merely mechanical. This is an attempt to recover that intuition without illusion.

Running the API

Democratic backsliding is not a switch, as if a country is either “a democracy” or “an autocracy,” and nothing meaningful happens in between. History tells a different story. What erodes first is not the form of government, but the tolerance for norm-breaking. Power tests boundaries long before it breaks constitutions.

That’s what the Autocracy Pressure Index (API) is meant to capture. Rather than going off feelings I've been running it for a few months now and refining it.

API doesn’t ask whether the United States is authoritarian. It asks how much structural pressure is being applied to democratic norms at a given moment—through institutions, information systems, security apparatuses, and incentives that reward coercive shortcuts. It’s a stress test, not a verdict.

When you back-cast this pressure biannually over the last forty years, the curve is revealing:

Autocracy Pressure Index (API)

Instead of wringing my hands about world events or falling into an echo chamber, I built a simple model called the Autocracy Pressure Index (API), because the most dangerous political changes rarely announce themselves. Democracies don’t usually collapse by coup. They deform under load.

API is a structural model, not a moral judgment and not a prediction. It doesn’t ask whether a country is authoritarian. It asks how much pressure is being applied to democratic norms at a given moment—and whether the system is operating in an elastic, plastic, or failure-prone regime.

Think of it like material science. You don’t wait for a bridge to snap before measuring stress. You measure strain, microfractures, and fatigue long before catastrophic failure.

Peace is Hard (for a prince)

Quote: 

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Optimization, Friction, and the Illusion of Freedom

Optimization erases resistance to make action smoother. That sounds benign. Even humane. But resistance is where moral reality is measured.

Friction is where values are tested, where costs are revealed, where responsibility becomes legible. Remove it, and action may become easier—but meaning becomes thinner. Choices feel effortless. Outcomes feel abstract. Power no longer feels like power; it feels like weather.

This is not liberation. It is moral weightlessness.

The First Story, Commandment, & Sin

The Epic of Gilgamesh is perhaps the oldest written literature known. And the real question it still asks today: are there limits on what a conscious being may rightfully do simply because it can?

Every civilization eventually learns this is not a theoretical question. It is an experiential one with moral force. It arrives as a collision.

Gilgamesh hits the wall with trees. Genesis hits it with water. Modernity hits it with industry, nuclear fire, artificial intelligence, and climate systems. And The Last Adam hits it with something stranger: a moral field made visible.

This isn’t coincidence. It’s recurrence.

Failure Modes of the Model

Any useful model should diagnose its own failure modes. This one (kaleidoscope) has several. And unlike many frameworks that pretend pathology exists only “out there,” this model admits its own breaking points before it ever claims authority.

Conservation of Coherence

The kaleidoscope is not the distortion. It is the detector. When the mirrors are misaligned, the world looks incoherent, scattered, self-weighted, low-resolution. When they’re tuned, the world resolves into patterns that survive retelling. Meaning is not the product of a single orientation, but the conserved signal that survives many.

Husserl and the Kaleidoscope

We were educated to think the world is a stage, not a lens. That’s the natural attitude: the assumption that perception is the thing itself. In literature, it’s the narrator who speaks before we’ve checked the footnotes. In life, it’s the quiet voice saying this is just how things are. No suspicion, no calibration, no rotation. Just inheritance. The kaleidoscope frozen in its first orientation.

Perception as Kaleidoscope

We like to think perception is simple: eyes open, light enters, brain reports the world. But cognition is more like a rotating chamber of mirrors.

Imagine a kaleidoscope—not for making pretty shapes, but for understanding your mind. This is a powerful model for describing phenomological observation of the outside world  

Writers Tune the Zeitgeist

I’ve always had a suspicion that great literature feels discovered, not designed. Not because the writer is passive, but because the age supplies the pressure and the writer supplies the coherence. The culture produces the tension, the Tuner produces the resonance.